Diekman Video

Distribution:
Videographe, Canada
Video Out, Canada
The Kitchen Center, USA
Lux, London
kdiekman@csusm.edu

	M for Mommy, 11:00, 2009 Distribution: Diekman What are these insurmountable, unquenchable, vast needs we assign to the child, towards which the mother responds with fear, frustration, anxiety and rage? By identifying with child, we sometimes blame the mother. Is it only within the realm of another different fantasy that I can pull my mother out of her maternal agitation and let her rest in my mind and heart? Link to Mother On Trial Project
Quicktime RealPlayer
	Sub_Ob, 14:00, 2003 Distribution: Diekman/Allard/MadDog Productions The simple fact of failing eyesight as a result of aging throws the two characters into a symbiotic relationship which complicates the possibility of objective representation. The dialogue takes place in amongst various mundane questions such as, “Where are my glasses?”, “Did you see it?”, “I am not sure.”, “What did you see?”, “Can you read this for me?”. The symbiotic relationship evolves or devolves as a result of failures in language to clarify observation and failures of eyesight to clearly identify objects in the field of vision. Commissioned by MadDog.
Quicktime
	Gathering Voices in the Theater of Attraction, 12:00, 2006 "Sharing in the trickery of the automaton is merely another way to define ourselves as human…. " (Jean- Claude Beaune, "The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century") This experimental video combines popular media culture and the rules of Bunraku puppet movement to represent and examine the public perception of the institution of motherhood and infanticide in the U.S. Character animations re-enact borrowed and altered dialogues from internet chat rooms related to infanticide. These chat spaces are “theaters of attraction”, sites for fantasies of retribution and punishment, and the “puppets” or animations become mechanisms for moral introspection and social determination. Notions of identity and agency become destabilized through the embodied contradictions between the real and the represented body in public electronic space. These figurative simulations employ attraction and illusion to disrupt the normal modes of spectator identification and cinematic realism, suspending the viewer between belief and disbelief, desire and repulsion, truth and image. They also allow the viewer to indulge in what is forbidden and unspeakable; ghosts, monsters, death, loss of boundaries, and magic.
Quicktime excerpt 1 except 2 excerpt 3
Quicktime	Corn, Kitten, Sox and Knot, 8:45, 1998 Distribution: Diekman "Corn, Kitten, Sox and Knot" is a series of short quicktime videos combined with stories about childhood sex, the Cold War, death and the father. The artist struggles to perform point-of-view through written and spoken text, image and sound. It has been screened at London Electronic Arts, The World Wide Video Festival, Den Haag, Electromediasope, Nelson Atkins Museum, among other places.
Quicktime RealPlayer	Corpse and Mirror, 25:00, 1996 Distribution: Videographe, Canada; Video Out, Canada; The Kitchen, USA; Lux, London, England Corpse and Mirror questions the ability of rational language to adequately describe and control extreme mental states. Based on a monologue by Tony Allard, the tape moves non-sequentially through seven memories of Allard's childhood experience with his father's manic/depression and institutionalization in a state hospital. Central to the tape is the use of poetic language--a strategy to convey the shifting unconscious through image, sound, and text--to delightfully unbalance our sense of the real. "In Corpse and Mirror, a grown son recalls his deceased father's bout with madness. His memories are constantly tripped up by the inability of language to express extreme emotional states."- Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archives. London Electronic Arts Touring Program, European Media Arts Festival, Lincoln Center, Pacific Film Artchives, amongst others.
Quicktime RealPlayer	Drift to Dust, 10:45, 1994 Distribution: Videographe, Canada; Video Out, Canada; The Kitchen, USA Drift to Dust is inspired by a text by John Berger in which he discusses home as a nomadic concept, a place where the vertical and horizontal meet (the tent pole and the ground plane), central yet constantly shifting. This idea of a shifting center is expressed through language, image, sound and text. The 14th Annual Women in the Director's Chair Festival, Chicago; The 1995 Charlotte Film and Video Festival, Mint Museum; The 22nd Athens Internationl Film and Video Festival; The 12th World Wide Festival, The Netherlands; Kemper Musem of Art, Kansas City, Lincoln Center, amongst other places.
Additional Tapes:	Male Mating Call of Manhattan, 1993, 19:00 Go to Sleep You Little Horses, 1992, 8:00 Tellus Mater, 1002, 8:00 Death Valley, 1992, with Edwin Torres Our Glee, Their Grief, 1001, :30 Super Ocho, 1990, 7:00 All the Bridges of the Burroughs, 9:00 Loose Pages, 1991, 5:00, with Alison Knowles Circular Vision, 1988, 3:00 Tell Me Again, Roundly, 1985, 7:00 Yawgoog Scout Reservation, 1985, 16:00 The Garden and the Wilderness, 1983. 10:00