Tempography

The conceptual video art project named Tempography was founded at the end of 2003 in London, by Swiss artist Anthony Mirko Bannwart, also known as Hontoban, and Magnus Aronson a scenarist-composer-filmmaker from Sweden.

Aknowledging the qualities of a minimalist form of moving images, Bannwart & Aronson identified a concept supporting these silent short poetic moving images, captured, observed, and ultimately defined in written guidelines. Among technical aspects such as the steadiness of the camera, the absence of narrative, effects, or inner editing, it also states that the key to understanding Tempography is: Without the movement or the change in composition, there would be no need for the duration. It is minimalist video art - constrained, observational, documentary. A Tempograph is defined by its brevity and the inner quality of the movement framed by the camera eye, often directing to a certain way of looking at the everyday surrounding, and re-discovering details, small movements, or minimal changes.

Tempographs, the moving images related to this art project, can be described as brief visual impacts creating an atmosphere, an image of thought, rather than telling a story. The pieces are moving images, and consequently cinematic in essence.

The nature of the project led Anthony Bannwart and Magnus Aronson to build the Tempotheque, exploring this collection of shots framed by a duration up to thirty seconds.

Codes were then assigned to the Tempographs, such as T3.HON.02.26, to relate each of them with its author (HON), time of capture (02), and duration of the shot in seconds (26).

Alongside their own footages, Bannwart & Aronson also contemplated multiple fascinating Tempographs pre-existing in films made by referential film directors, but for legal and conceptual reasons they have not been included in the Tempotheque.

In 2004, Anthony Bannwart - Hontoban and Magnus Aronson intervened with their Tempographic videos on multiple screens built in 204 double-deck buses simultaneously rolling in London and in Birmingham on a 24/7 basis from the 29th March until the 18th June 2004.

This intervention in "urban public spaces on wheels" saw Tempography offered freely to the attention of their targeted audience, the commuters, usually having little time for galleries and video exhibition, and having to watch CCTV images, information, or commercials on such urban screens. However brief the encounter between Tempographs and the commuters was, it proved to give a lasting impact.

They opened in 2005 the project for submissions and soon received participation fro UK, Europe, and USA forming in 2006 a comuunity art project exhibited in Stockholm both by the cultural institution Zita and by the Jonas Kleerup Gallery. In 2008, the project is hosted by the Korean Gallery Factory in Seoul, accompanied by a symposium and looking for public screenings in the Korean capital in order to emphasize on directions written at its debut, in particular bridgign the community of Tempographers to tis commuter's audience.

The video art project TEMPOGRAPHY by Anthony Mirko Bannwart and Magnus Aronson is, for Intellectual Property values, under care of a patent attorney since 2004, Mr Jean Gresset of Gresset & Laesser Neuchatel, Switzerland, approved by the Office Européen des Brevets.

The use of Tempography idea, such as the video art project stipulates is unauthorized unless an agreement with Bannwart & Aronson has been reached. Words associated with and protected along this project are:Tempography, Tempographic, Tempograph, Tempographs, and the Tempotheque.