GX Jupitter-Larsen

condition (DVD/cover): NM / NM

Ten short videos from 1983 to 2006, compiled to a Region 1 / NTSC DVD in 2008 by Troniks as a survey of the film and video work GX Jupitter-Larsen had been making alongside (and increasingly alongside his sound practice as The Haters) for three decades. Jupitter-Larsen, born 2 March 1959, has operated out of Los Angeles since the early Eighties; his first use of the camera was a 1979 piece in which he smashed several videos by hitting them with the video camera itself.

The DVD collects the most narratively developed of his works. Skiers stopping on a slope to build an empty hole in the snow. Nomadic bikers debating the polywave (Jupitter-Larsen's self-coined measurement for self-contradictory movement). A spy lead through a sequence of mysterious notes. Lesbian vampires who run a garlic farm. A visitation that gives a professor the inspiration to invent a life-transforming gadget. Most soundtracks are derived from what Jupitter-Larsen calls "amplified erosion," which is exactly what it sounds like.

The work is tied together by what the artist calls his "lexicon of personalised ideals of measurement": the polywave, the xylowave (distance between something and nothing), the romawave (distance required for something to be forgotten), the mingwave (distance between thought and language). A DVD that functions as philosophy, performance documentation, and cinema of decay, all at once, and one of the essential items in Jupitter-Larsen's catalogue outside the core Haters audio discography.