Vostok, Faretheewell tells the story of Yukitomo, a Japanese designer who arrives in Berlin as a tourist. He receives an unexpected phone call from a Korean film production company, asking him to design a 3D computer model for a space ship called the “Vostok” which will appear in a science-fiction movie. Our hero spends the film roaming Berlin, apparently with no direction or purpose. As he wanders about, he photographs materials and surfaces as inspiration for his own design. His efforts to create a science-fiction space ship become an expedition into Berlin’s past, as he encounters buildings that have served all kinds of functions in different eras under a variety of rulers. By using outdated super 8 film techniques, Graydon paradoxically achieves a timeless quality, lending his film – rather like the aspiring space ship – a utopian flavour.
Andy Graydon (b. 1971, Maui, Hawaii) currently is based in Cambridge, MA and Berlin, is an artist whose work explores the interstitial spaces between sound and video. His recordings and layered performances, which integrate diverse field recordings with electro-acoustic compositions, unhinge known sonic territories and open up environments that allow listeners to experience natural or found sound in new ways. Graydon claims a variety of influences including musique concrète, minimalist and environmental art, cinema auteurs, and the constellation of artists and musicians he works with today. His recent works have increasingly approached what the artist describes as a “science fiction ecology”, in which he engages with the speculative future state of a given environment, often in flux or crisis. – Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome
Andy Graydon’s web site: www.andygraydon.net