Welcome to the only official site for People Like Us and Vicki Bennett
CCCitations, part of our Citation City project, will screen at Craig Baldwin‘s amazing Other Cinema at ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco on Saturday 3rd October 2015.
More details on their site: http://othercinema.com
CCCitations: https://peoplelikeus.org/2015/cccitations/
On Saturday 26 September 2015, Citation City will be performed by People Like Us as part of the Walter Benjamin Now Symposium – a daylong event at Whitechapel Gallery paying homage to Walter Benjamin who died 75 years ago on this day. The performance will be at 4.40pm.
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/walter-benjamin-now/
http://www.versobooks.com/events/1163-walter-benjamin-now
PEOPLE LIKE US PRESENT an evening of film:
CONCERT OF COLLAGE : CITATION CITY
and selected short collage/cut up films curated by Vicki Bennett
at WATERSHED CINEMA 3, BRISTOL
18 September 2015
21:45 – 23:45
£5 / £4.50 CONC.
2hr
Tickets: http://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/6803/concert-of-collage/
Join us for the performance of Citation City – a time-travelling voyage through one city, assembled from hundreds of movie clips and inspired by the wanderings of Walter Benjamin.
People Like Us’ ‘Citation City’ sources, collage and edits 300 major feature films where content is either filmed or set in London – creating a story within a story, of the film world, living its life, through extraordinary times of change, to see what happens when these multiple narratives are combined… what will the story tell us that one story alone could never tell?
https://peoplelikeus.org/citationcity
Prior to this performance we will be screening a series of clips using the art of collage selected by People Like Us, from filmmakers including Bryce Kretschmann and John Oswald.
CCCitations is an offshoot of Citation City, an audiovisual performance by People Like Us.
Four artists, Jon Leidecker, Jason Willett, Gwilly Edmondez and Andrew Sharpley were given source material from Vicki Bennett’s Citation City a/v project and asked to make new work, interpreting the footage in a unique way.
Soundtrack: Gwilly Edmondez 00:01
Soundtrack: Jason Willett 02:47
Soundtrack: Jon Leidecker 05:23
Film: Vicki Bennett
Film and Video: Andrew Sharpley – using source material given by Vicki Bennett
About Citation City
Citation City sources, collage and edits 300 major feature films where content is either filmed or set in London – creating a story within a story, of the film world, living its life, through extraordinary times of change, to see what happens when these multiple narratives are combined… what will the story tell us that one story alone could never tell?
Inspired by The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, this audiovisual work is created from 1000s of clippings of text and visual media, collaged using a system of “convolutes”, collated around subjects of key motifs, historical figures, social types, cultural objects from the time. By gathering and assembling such groups of similar yet unrelated, he revealed a hidden, magical encyclopaedia of affinities, a massive and labyrinthine architecture of a collective dream city. On reading Benjamin, his approach to editing astonished Vicki Bennett, and the similarity of their creative processes of cutting and collating extensive lists of subject matter by context.
In the live performance a series of story lines (convolutes) sit side by side with a soundtrack sourced both from the movie content, as well as new sample compositions thematically related to the visual content.
The result is a sweeping panorama of London, a London as represented through cinema – not the real city at all, but one that exists in the collective imagination of moviegoers throughout the decades. Filmmaker Magazine
Did a radio interview earlier this week on stress.fm in Lisbon
http://stress.fm/post/115943376554/people-like-us
talking about WFMU, Ubuweb, Walter Benjamin, Citation City, the internet and being stupid (oh, and the c with a circle word)
We have added a new live date to the list for Citation City – at SMUP in Parede (near Lisbon), Portugal on 17 April 2015. Here’s a radio interview we did this week with Lisbon’s stress.fm http://stress.fm/post/115943376554/people-like-us
We have a new print available for sale – it was recently created while making the a/v performance Citation City, collaging movie content of a segue from a scene of hands at a typewriter cutting across to the playing of a piano. We have sized it as such that it will fit into an IKEA frame which you can buy yourself (IKEA: RIBBA 23cmx23cm). We are selling at an affordable price (see below in US dollars), postage INCLUDED.
SOLD OUT
We’ve just made a “teaching pack” to accompany Citation City. This is written in inverted commas because we don’t claim any formal knowledge when it comes to teaching, but it is good to share information about the creative process. What we have done is make a document explaining the process of making this work. The pdf is intended as a companion to the audiovisual work, giving examples of the process one might undertake to create new work when sourcing from a large media database. This particular example relates to moving image and musical composition, but the methods can translate to other platforms that use composition, directing, editing, creative narratives and story telling.
Citation City education/teaching pack
PDF download: citation city teaching pack
CITATION CITY UK Premieres at Flatpack Film Festival in Birmingham.
http://flatpackfestival.org.uk/event/citation-city/
28 March 11-12.30am: Arcades walk with Esther Leslie (city centre)
28 March 3-4.45pm: Citation City UK Premiere + Esther Leslie talk (Flatpack Palais at the Bond, Digbeth)
Tickets £8.00 | £6.00
Venue Flatpack Palais @ The Bond, 180-182 Fazeley St. , Birmingham, B5 5SE
+ Google Map Website: http://www.thebondco.net/
A time-travelling voyage through one city, assembled from hundreds of movie clips and inspired by the wanderings of Walter Benjamin.A patchwork of over 300 features either filmed or set in London, Citation City combines multiple narratives to create the story of one city in a period of enormous change. Pieced together by audiovisual artist Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us), this beguiling, labyrinthine work takes its cue from Benjamin’s Arcades Project, an ambitious attempt to map out Paris in fragments which was cut short by the author’s death in 1940.
Continue reading “Citation City UK Premiere at Flatpack Film Festival”
Here is the finished promo trailer for our audiovisual performance Citation City. This is ONLY available as a live performance, it will not go online so do check for live dates at the url below.
More info, press release and press photos/media at
https://peoplelikeus.org/citationcity
We are very pleased to have an extensive interview with Filmmaker Magazine about Citation City and our creative process.
http://filmmakermagazine.com/88942-transmediale-2015-vicki-bennett-and-citation-city/ 
The a/v performance “Citation City” that we have been working on for the past 10 months is now finished! It will premiere at transmediale, Berlin https://peoplelikeus.org/citationcity
CITATION CITY World Premiere, transmediale Berlin
Thursday 29 January from 9pm
Performance at Auditorium, HKW
Part of a double bill with a live network data performance “Pirate Cinema” by Nicolas Maigret and Brendan Howell.
Tickets: http://www.transmediale.de/content/the-pirate-cinema-and-citation-city
Background on Citation City at https://peoplelikeus.org/citationcity
