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.18
  Tony Allard
From Here to LA
  USA 2000
videotape – 30:00 min
 
Tony Allard's latest video is, in his own words, a "post-human western in progress". In an associative way, the collage-like tape follows the Gold Rush of the semi-fictitious Tony La Bone, who travels from his Kansas home town to the 'glitzy' life in Southern California. Everything takes place in 1999 – the year dominated by the Y2K mania. Tony is a director on his way to becoming part of the Hollywood fantasy world, just as he begins to realize that a new type of Gold Rush is in progress: the Internet rage. Tony is supported on his journey by The Prophet of @, who teaches him the ways of the virtual and pseudo-virtual world of the Internet, television, cinema, radio and printed media. For poor Tony, the threat of the Y2K bug is just a sign of the apocalyptic nature of the new western frontier: the WWW (or Wild Wild West). He obviously finds it difficult to cope with this new matrix . The world he knows has been engulfed by this new media in a confusing way and as a result, it has become alienated from itself. Tony finds all this rather depressing. He experiences the new world confronting him as a chaotic maelstrom wrecking everything in its path like a whirling tornado. As everyone knows, a tornado has a frightening calm at its centre, an emptiness that is perhaps more threatening than the devastation caused by the whirlwind. It is probably this threat that has led Cowboy Tony, through this tape, to think hard about what's going on beyond the tried-and-trusted world of video art.

– Willem van Weelden
Camera, sound: Tony Allard, Kristine Diekman
Music: Tony Allard, Dwight Frizzel

Tony Allard, 1957, Topeka (USA)
Lives and works in San Diego (USA)

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