Meryll Hardt

P002 → Shorts.

A Second Life

Documentary (26’)
2017.

Comissioned by artgame Demos 1# cur. Isabelle Arvers (Marseille).

In order to document Second life : the original 'second world', where bots and real people aren't so easy to distinguish, Meryll Hardt created an avatar with a minimal level of customisation, a surrogate and a camera, capturing the decaying landscapes. Caught up in a melancholy walk, her liminal actions and wanderings echoes the pittoresque and desolate low FPS beauty of the virtual obsolete. An original soundtrack of metaverse soundscapes gradually fades away to give way to lofi ambient electronic music.

This documentary, whose genre is machinima (a film made in a video game), questions Internet culture and the uncanny, the clumsiness of its oldies. Meryll Hardt, a performer accustomed to performing in urban spaces and architectures, chooses here to desembody for the first time in order to perform through a virtual self in a computerised world.

UNE VIE RADIEUSE

Doc-fiction experimental (18’)
France, 2013.
1:66 - Color - NB
FR / ENG SUB
Production : Le Fresnoy Studio des arts contemporains (Tourcoing).

1952, The Radiant City of Marseille receives its first occupants, eighty civil servants and compensated from war, coming from the four corners of France. Some are led by the promise of Le Corbusier’s ideals. Upon arrival, a couple experiments the location, facilities, and space allotted to them. They each respond to the new habitat. Its uniqueness, its details. The body questions the utopia. New Eden born under the reconstruction, The radiant city floats on the after-war As nothing happened. On board, settled cold, loneliness and sterility.

Award : Under35 at Invideo Milano 2014.
Nomination : Cannes Cinéfondation, Cannes film festival 2014.
https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/une-vie-radieuse/

TRAILER /

Yeah I’m still Searchin’

Documentary (36')
DV Pal 4/3
+ Book (19,5x13,5) 12 pages
Non commercial use only / limited edition
Ecole de Recherche Graphique
Bruxelles 2011

Yeah I'm still searchin' is based on In Search of the Miraculous, the last work by the Dutch and American artist Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared while attempting to cross the Atlantic in 1975. A search for the metaphysics that led the artist to his loss, In Search of the Miraculous is a performative work divided into three acts:

Part I. A walk in L.A. between dusk and dawn, from the hills to the sea, documented by a series of photographs taken by his wife Mary Sue. Two sets of black and white prints on which the artist wrote the lyrics to a popular song called 'Searchin', performed by the band The Costers. Part I included an exhibition at the Claire Coppley Gallery where Bas Jan Ader gave a performance with a choir of his students singing A life on the ocean wave.
Part II. The crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in a single boat.
Part III.Aa night walk in Amsterdam, echoing the first walk in the streets of Los Angeles.

Inspired by the photograph below of Bas Jan's walk in L.A., Meryll Hardt decided to perform part III of the aborted performance herself. Appearing as a melancholy mermaid on the beach at Osteend, she travelled to Amsterdam to carry out the solitary walk from dusk to dawn, from the Quartier Rouge to the docks, where she met local artists in an open-air art space, and along the way encountered an abandoned boat that echoed Bas Jan's journey.

In search of the miraculous, part I, Bas Jan Ader, photographer : Mary Sue Ader. Claire Coppley Galery, L.A, 1975. USA.

Seule

Experimental, (7’)
Bruxelles, Le Pacifique, 2010.

Alone in an empty house, a young women questions female loneliness by duplicating herself to play various undefined characters, caught between creative freedom and limited expectations of traditional gendered adulthood in a master-servant model.

The objects used in the video were present in the house at the time of filming (cards, guitar, children's games). The house filmed is that of a shared flat for young graphic designers from the Le Pacifique collective (now a label and radio station). During this three-day mini-residency, MH set herself the task of improvising as much as possible with what was on the spot.
The video was shown in 2012/2013 at the Casablanca Video Art Biennial and the Centrale Electrique (Brussels) as part of the art competition.