Artballistics Editorial // We are more than Photography

We are about process, art, critique. Critique is needed to create better. We are about video as well as stills, about canvas as well as technique. We hold each other to a higher standard, while we seek to appeal to not only a few. The focus of Artballistics is the ‘worthwhile’, the opposite of thumbing, as it were. Just like sex, art and creation get better and more immersive the more you focus on it.

I have asked some people to participate that bewildered tell me they are not photographers. It was never the intention of AB to be exclusionist in that way, which Eskild Krogh’s contributions show. You have to think of AB as a reaction to ‘the new old world’. We were entering an age of science, arts and reason when it, quite literally, blew up in our faces because we forgot to educate the broad masses - oh, and oops, did not eliminate poverty.

We have entered an age of stupidity and greed instead - the age of the CEO, corporate shells and a system that only sees you as a consumer. To combat that we need charm, art, humor, satire, wit and guile. We need to eliminate the noise and focus.

New stuff includes 2 new blogs coming up and stuff from Rubenstein and Sabine.

Eskild Krogh // The Weave that Binds the World & Nebula

Text by Zaar Riisberg

I have known Eskild for quite a few years now - his sense of light and being is extreme in one so young - and he has been that way ever since I met him. I have seen him furious, but also seen him never taking it out on people. He has a rare passion that you can fuel - Imagine throwing Kafka, Dostojevski and Nietzsche at someone, and see them eat it up and ask for another portion. Backing the truck up, it all started with me showing him Albert Camus' The Stranger and telling him I wanted to do a film on it. Like me, he soon fell for Mersault.

Eskild is a filmmaker and storyteller with a talent for mixing new impulses with old school storytelling. His portrait of a young kid's sense of what a mother should be in Noumenon - tackles a hard theme in a low budget film with amazing cinematography - that is basically Eskild Krogh at the core: water from a rock.

These two videos confirm that postulate. If Nebula does not have you by the balls, you are either female or blind. It is one of those rarest of things, where you do not know what the fuck you are looking at, but you do not care, because it takes your mind on a journey across the universe to a place where time does not exist, a place that tenderly taunts you by dangling all the answers in front of you -everything you possibly could want to know- but packaged in such a way that only your heart and soul can know what they cannot formulate. Your frontal lopes left in the dark.

Ron Rubenstein // Ron On or Roll On

Text by Zaar Riisberg

I tend to think about Ron's stuff like I do Werner Herzog films - it's never boring. So when I get a mail from him that says 'for AB', and I discover it's a video clip. Shit, I don't know - do I open this? I did. I suspect this falls in the category of 'now art'. Some will go what the fuck, but others will get it. I get it. I cannot explain it, but I get it. And so, I laughed and shook my head, in fact, I nearly pissed myself, because this is gold.

In a sense this is life and what it is all about represented in less than 5 secs. I know one thing that makes an artist. a gift for the unsaid - just leave it hanging. Like Ron just did. Leaving people hanging is normally rude. Here, not so much.