Miha Vipotnik (1954) graduated in painting in 1976 and in 1979 completed his postgraduate studies in video and television at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In the 70's and 80's, he created numerous artistic videos, intros and animations, directed art-related programs and has pioneered the experimental usage of video technology for the public television RTV Slovenia. From 1987 to 1991, he studied MFA, Film and Live Action at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. Together with Marie Claude Vogrič, he was a co-founder and the Director of an international biennial video festival VIDEO CD in Ljubljana (1983-1987), during which a significant number of Slovene and international video art works were created with the state-of-the-art technical equipment in impromptu studios. From 1987 till 1991, he received a Fulbright stipend for his master's studies of Film and Live Action at the California Institute of the Arts in L.A. During this period he established the XYZX Production, through which he collaborated with TV stations and film studios across the globe. In 1994, he began managing the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Annex and with Elayne Zalis, he co-created the concept for digitization of their significant video collection in order to make it available online. This collaboration also resulted in numerous art installations and video art projects produced for international artists. LBMA Video Annex priceless collection of video art is now part of The Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute's Art Video Archives. Since 2002, Vipotnik lectured through video art workshops in Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Croatia and Slovenia. In 2014, he started working as a visiting professor of film and video at the Department of Digital Media, Cinema and Television at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts of USEK University in Lebanon and at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts ALBA in Beirut, where he teaches creative expression and art-related interdisciplinary studies. Vipotnik is primarily a painter, whose images and stories materialize in a form of movies and video art. From very early on, he used video as his main medium of expression - either through a single-channel video or as a constitutive part of his multimedia and interdisciplinary projects and art installations. Electronic media experimenting and the actual performative process are among key features of his artistic praxis, through which he explores the impact of such image transformations within his narratives. His artistic language includes elements of performance with an emphasis on the significance of timing and the gradual unfolding of enigmatic personal stories into a palimpsest of images, inscriptions and speech.
Production: KUP, RTV Slovenija, 2001
The work was made in 2001 and 2002 marking the centennial of Giuseppe Verdi's death. The power of destiny is an experimental and polemic story about the making of a film intertwined with music by the Italian giant of classical music Verdi and his contempo...
Production: RTV Slovenija, 2000
A non-narrative documentary video work captures scenes of nature and people placed in it. The moving visual poetics of the nature is followed by an orchestral work of seven pieces called Gazelles by Lucijan Marija Škerjanec and by narrations of sev...
Production: Aanima, 1997
Intro for a TV show Trikk screened on of the Slovene TV stations was expanded to a music video for a song by Kut: Gas by the author. The colour scheme of the intro is lively. It was shot on a blue screen and edited with Chroma key technique, the movement...
Production: Aanima, 1997
Music video was shot for the song Fantasy (Fantazija) by Kut Gas. Scenes were shot on blue screen, the movement of the musicians is synchronized with the rhythm of the music. The video was made on a basis of opening credits for a TV show Zero Mass - Th...
Production: 1992
Eight is based on the story from the novel Moment of Silence by Tomislav Longinović (Burning Books: San Francisco, 1990) that addresses the question of disintegration of Yugoslavia, search for identity, personal experience of history and the meaning "los...
Production: CalArts, 1989
Artistic documentation of the shooting of a video film by George Kuchar: sequences of incidental shots from the backstage, edited directly in the camera. (Source: Videodokument)
Production: CalArts, Los Angeles, 1988/1996
A short dramatic story in the form of an interview with the sculptor Eric Orr about his life and work in the sixties and seventies contucted by the musician Jim Rohing. The interviewer bombards his subject with questions, almost simulating a police invest...
Production: CalArts, 1988
The mechanical measurement of time presented by a non-functioning clock is the background for the circling of the camera, and thus for the measuring of time. Noises of hammering and of editing procedures are heard in the background. The circling of the ca...
Production: CalArts, 1988
A video sketch of the performer Dee McMillan and her project Log On poetically discusses the undeniable human freedom of creation. An insignificant sound from the background triggers a flow of associations and changes the course of editing. The banality o...
Production: TDS Magenta, Cankarjev dom & RTV Ljubljana , 1987
Author's video document on the theatrical play of the same name by the Theatre Sestre Scipion Nasice, staged at Cankarjev Dom in Ljubljana in 1986. It was based on the Slovene mythological narrative of the Christianization period and at the same time in t...
Production: M.A.X. M.A.X., 1986
Auto-Vision was TV program produced by Miha Vipotnik as director and Marijan Osole–Max as editor in M.A.X. M.A.X. (Brut)studio for RTV Ljubljana (in frame of Integrali series). It was announced as »the only program about artistic videos by vid...