What is Tempography

Jul 30, 2010 Inspiration

The conceptual video art project named Tempography was founded at the end of 2003 in London, by Swiss artist Anthony Bannwart, previously known as Hontoban, and artist Magnus Aronson from Sweden.
Acknowledging the qualities of a minimalist form of silent moving images, Anthony Bannwart & Magnus Aronson identified a concept supporting these silent short poetic moving images, captured, observed, and ultimately defined in guidelines. Among technical aspects such as the steadiness of the camera, the absence of narrative, effects, or inner editing, it also states that the key to understanding Tempography is: Without the movement or the change in composition, there would be no need for the duration. It is minimalist video art – constrained, observational, documentary. A Tempograph is defined by its brevity and the inner quality of the movement framed by the cinema-eye, in reference to Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, often directing to a certain way of looking at the everyday surrounding, and re-discovering details, small movements, or minimal changes.

Tempographs

Tempographs – the moving images related to this art project – can be described as brief visual impacts creating an atmosphere, an image of thought, rather than telling a story.The pieces are moving images, and consequently cinematic in essence.

The nature of the project led Anthony Bannwart and Magnus Aronson to build the Tempotheque, exploring this collection of shots framed by a duration up to thirty seconds.

Codes were then assigned to the Tempographs, such as T3.HON.02.26, to relate each of them with its author (HON=Anthony Bannwart), time of capture (02), and duration of the shot in seconds (26).

Alongside their own footages, Anthony Bannwart & Magnus Aronson also contemplated multiple fascinating Tempographs pre-existing in films made by referential film directors, but for legal and conceptual reasons they have not been included in the Tempotheque.
In 2004, Anthony Bannwart and Magnus Aronson intervened with their Tempographic videos on multiple screens built in more than 200 double-deck buses simultaneously rolling in London and in Birmingham on a 24/7 basis from the 29th March until the 18th June 2004.
This intervention in “urban public spaces on wheels” saw Tempography offered freely to the attention of their targeted audience, the commuters, eventually having little time for galleries and video exhibition, and having to watch CCTV images, information, or commercials on such urban screens. However brief the encounter between Tempographs and the commuters was, it proved to give a lasting impact.

Anthony Bannwart and Magnus Aronson opened in 2005 the project for submissions and soon received participation from UK, Europe, and USA forming in 2006 a community art project exhibited in Stockholm both by the cultural institution ZITA and by the Kleerup Gallery. In 2008, the project is hosted by the Gallery Factory in Seoul-Republic of Korea, accompanied by a symposium/workshop. In Seoul, Kyung Roh Bannwart (appointed curator of this show and participating artist) together with Gallery Factory, they worked towards further public screenings in the Korean capital in order to emphasize on directions written at its debut, in particular bridging the community of Tempographers to this commuter’s audience. In Seoul, after the symposium, the project received new participations from Korean active and potential video artists.

After a brief introduction in Hanoi in 2008, Tempography is programmed in 2009 at the Goethe-Institut Hanoi, with an open submission programm and a workshop to invite participation from Vietnam based active and potential video artists.

The video art project TEMPOGRAPHY by Anthony Bannwart and Magnus Aronson is, for Intellectual Property values, under care of a patent attorney since 2004, Mr Jean Gresset of Gresset & Laesser Neuchatel, Switzerland, approved by the Office Européen des Brevets.

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