{"id":6426,"date":"2015-10-07T07:00:03","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T07:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.saic.edu\/cate\/?p=6426"},"modified":"2025-01-09T22:24:25","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T04:24:25","slug":"on-louis-henderson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/2015\/10\/07\/on-louis-henderson\/","title":{"rendered":"On Louis Henderson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow English filmmaker Louis Henderson<\/a> will join us for his first Chicago appearance! \u00a0\u00a0Video Data Bank<\/a>‘s\u00a0Lindsay Bosch blogs about Henderson’s references to the Internet and computing in his complex meditations on neo-colonalism and contemporary Ghana.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Louis<\/a>
Louis Henderson, still from All that is Solid (2014). Courtesy of the artist and the Video Data Bank.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most of video art I watch, I watch on my laptop.\u00a0 I dream of\u00a0creating a perfect screening space\u2014uninterrupted hours, big screen, dark\u00a0room\u2014but can\u00a0never fully realize it\u00a0in the rush of the day.\u00a0 Of course, when I\u00a0watch on my computer screen, the Internet is in the background,\u00a0pulling me in and intruding on the images.\u00a0 Messages pop-up, emails ding and news\u00a0alerts assert themselves, pushing against my screening experience. The thump and\u00a0whir of the world is always there, behind the screen, dragging me away. I feel guilty\u00a0about this, knowing that my full attention is required, believing that I should be cut\u00a0off from the world to view correctly.<\/p>\n

When I first began watching\u00a0Lettres du Voyant<\/em>\u00a0(2013) by Louis Henderson I was (as always) on my computer… \u00a0As this complex work unfolded, I allowed\u00a0myself to give in to the pull of the technological. (Ok\u00a0Google: Where is Agblogbloshie<\/a>?). The artist\u2019s documentary-fiction about contemporary Ghana invites a continued search for information,\u00a0welcoming Internet deep dives into the beautiful and the strange\u00a0practices it\u00a0introduces. Henderson thrives in the grey area between fiction\u00a0and non-fiction, calling forth (but not satiating) our desire for information on his\u00a0subject.<\/p>\n

\"Louis<\/a>
Louis Henderson, still from Lettres du Voyant (2013). Courtesy of the artist and the Video Data Bank.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI can move over and beyond national boundaries\u2026Through the sub ocean Ethernet\u00a0cables\u2026 I haunt the technological\u201d recounts\u00a0Voyant\u2019s<\/em> nameless narrator. Henderson\u2019s practitioners of Sakawa\u00a0Internet scams resist neo-colonial power by reaching out through their digital\u00a0connections. While viewing Voyant,<\/em>\u00a0I paused it to\u00a0reach\u00a0back through the same digital portals to learn about this new subject.\u00a0(Ok Google: What is is\u00a0Sakawa?) Henderson himself has discussed how his process of discovery begins\u00a0online: \u201cMy location scouting always begins on the internet, with Google\u00a0images and Google maps.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are all together, then, in these sub ocean connective cables: viewer, filmmaker,\u00a0and subject each moving toward each other. The recurring digital images of golden\u00a0tunnels, mines of gold and mines of information, connect scenes to each other, and\u00a0make this metaphor material. Henderson\u2019s work in Lettres du Voyant<\/em> and the\u00a0desktop-documentary All that is Sold<\/em> (2014) both introduce careful ethics and poetic\u00a0beauty into the documentation of a complex, post-colonial African history. The\u00a0artist\u2019s digital alchemy allows for the fact that, most often, it is through the\u00a0technological that we encounter the world, and that it encounters us.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to\u00a0work to make ourselves visionaries,\u201d notes Voyant\u2019s<\/em> narrator. Henderson allows himself (and his viewers) to give in to that \u201cthump and\u00a0whir\u201d of the digital, to reach beyond and through the screen itself to confront the\u00a0\u201crubble of history\u201d where we find it. Throughout his practice, Henderson\u00a0demonstrates new ways to use our mediated tools to dive deeply toward the\u00a0fascinating, the complex, and the foreign. We need to be connected to the world,\u00a0not cut off, in order to view his work correctly.<\/p>\n

\"Louis<\/a>
Louis Henderson, still from All that is Solid (2014). Courtesy of the artist and the Video Data Bank.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Lindsay Bosch is the Development and Marketing Manager at the Video Data Bank<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago<\/a> (SAIC) in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, the Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB Collection includes the work of more than 550 artists and 6,000 video art titles.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow English filmmaker Louis Henderson will join us for his first Chicago appearance! \u00a0\u00a0Video Data Bank‘s\u00a0Lindsay Bosch blogs about Henderson’s references to the Internet and computing in his complex meditations on neo-colonalism and contemporary Ghana.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of video art I watch, I watch on my laptop.\u00a0 I dream of\u00a0creating a perfect screening space\u2014uninterrupted hours, big […]<\/p>\n

Read More… from On Louis Henderson<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":6427,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[52,872,206,369,381,623],"class_list":["post-6426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-20","tag-africa","tag-essays","tag-europe","tag-lindsay-bosch","tag-louis-henderson","tag-video-data-bank"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/205"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6426"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9889,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6426\/revisions\/9889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}