Northwest Film Forum

Ways of Something is a contemporary remake of John Berger’s BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing (1972). The project consists of one-minute videos by over 114 network-based artists who commonly work with 3D rendering, GIFs, film remix, webcam performances, and websites to describe the cacophonous conditions of artmaking after the Internet.

 

Curated and compiled by Lorna Mills, this remake is based on a four-part series of thirty-minute films created by art theorist John Berger and produced by Mike Dibb. In the original films, voice-of-God narration over iconic European paintings offer a careful dissection of traditional “fine art” media and the way society has come to understand them as art. This current project invited artists to respond to what Berger called “learned assumptions” about art in dialogue with the camera and the screen in its reproduction.

 

It is, in effect, art about art about television about the internet.

 

Featuring formal, figural and kitsch practices to videomaking, Ways of Something consists of aesthetically diverse interpretations of Berger’s ideas on looking at art after the introduction of digital media. Ultimately, it turns the highbrow nature of documentary film into a wondrous and disjointed series of alternative outlooks on how artists understand art today.