
Directing
Karel Doing (1965, Canberra, Australia) is an independent artist, filmmaker and researcher. His interest in experimental film and expanded cinema is reframed within a critical approach toward modernity and post-modernity, in search of new meanings of the real and the material. Through the study of (phyto)chemical process, the recording of oral history and the (re)use of cinematic heritage he explores alternative knowledge systems. In many of his works the rhythmical, painterly and performative qualities of the analogue film medium are foregrounded.

Film portrait of dutch director Karel Doing

A Patriot of These Woods is a film inspired by the novel The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. Calvino’s book tells the adventure of a boy who climbs up a tree to spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom. He dives into the vegetal world, undertaking his own journey into the trees around him using his body as a metaphorical soldier who defends the trees and plants that grow around him. An otherwise concealed world opens up revealing the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants. A hybrid creature emerges, partially plant, partially human, their bodies merged, their thoughts processes entangled. These woods respect no borders.
The 'four eyes' are playing with musical toys and the ABC of cinema. The music has references to western traditional music that is usually ignored, like the music you used to produce as a child when biking with a piece of cardboard in the rearwheel, or whizzing with the help of a fast turning button on a string. The images refer to different filmgenres stripped from their storylines, lost in a rhythmical evolving universe. A video-system is used to project films and music on the screen; sound and vision are playing together. Analogue and digital techniques are combined.

"In Vivo" is an assemblage of found footage. Doing doesn't provide much in the way of conventional context as to how these varied sources interrelate or how they should be read. But in editing them together at all, he asserts a radical subjectivity, an authorial presence that is autobiographical even when the images themselves are clearly borrowed from another vault. Doing positions himself, and the histories through which he has lived, within a much vaster narrative, implied through the other-realm textures of analogue footage as much as the actual content of his archival excerpts.

In modern warfare massmurder is just another number in the papers. The count-down for the next war already started. A film and an installation made as protest against the first gulf-war.

A couple of years ago I have discovered new possibilities for the creation of images on film-emulsion by using the internal chemistry of plants. This technique is a combination of photograms and chemigrams and because of the lack of an accurate term I have named this method 'phytogram'. I have worked with this idea in my back garden, using available plants and weeds. Dandelions turned out yield particularly good results. This short film is entirely dedicated to the power and beauty of this humble plant.

Abstract lightplay that slowly reveals it's secrets. The film consists of three layers: animation of streetlights, filmstrip treated with bleach and a performance shot with long shutter speeds. The electronic music by Joost Rekveld is based on radio-signals.

'Getijden' consists of 8 parts, a carousel of images and sounds revolving in a mysterious parallel world, and filled with different emotions and states-of-mind; longing, passion, liberation, drive, dedication, realisation, transformation and reflection. The making of this film was like weaving a Persian carpet. Spread out over a period of two years I lived with this project, the filming was done in different seasons on carefully chosen locations and days. The complete crew and cast consisted of two people, a performance in itself. The eight different parts are shot on a variety of film emulsions, each with a specific characteristic. The raw material is digitally mastered and manipulated. The film has a peculiar structure, no beginning-middle-end but, eight parts that form a cycle. A short film, an endless film. (Karel Doing)

A PERFECT STORM is a landscape film or, more precisely, a landscape imprinted on the film's emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve.

"In Vivo" is an assemblage of found footage. Doing doesn't provide much in the way of conventional context as to how these varied sources interrelate or how they should be read. But in editing them together at all, he asserts a radical subjectivity, an authorial presence that is autobiographical even when the images themselves are clearly borrowed from another vault. Doing positions himself, and the histories through which he has lived, within a much vaster narrative, implied through the other-realm textures of analogue footage as much as the actual content of his archival excerpts.

"In Vivo" is an assemblage of found footage. Doing doesn't provide much in the way of conventional context as to how these varied sources interrelate or how they should be read. But in editing them together at all, he asserts a radical subjectivity, an authorial presence that is autobiographical even when the images themselves are clearly borrowed from another vault. Doing positions himself, and the histories through which he has lived, within a much vaster narrative, implied through the other-realm textures of analogue footage as much as the actual content of his archival excerpts.

This personal film is made up of landscape photos from the archive of the director's father, through which he returns to his life while exploring the material possibilities for creating "landscapes": the film itself is exposed to the effects of yeast, salt, leaves and seaweed. By reacting with the film emulsion, each foreign element creates a new and different image quality, while the noise on the soundtrack underscores the fragility of incomplete memories.
