Sue K & the Nanolab gang have announced their collaboration in presenting the Australian International Experimental Film Festival http://www.aieff.org.

Put this one in your diaries! Festival dates Melbourne, 30th April, 1st-2nd May, 2010. Submissions mid Dec 2009 to 15th Febuary 2010.

So we contacted Andrew Frost (best known as the guy from The Art Life) to see if he would like to publish his paper online here at the TLC. I think you'll agree it's a provocative account of video art reaching back to the 1980s, and ending with a set of predictions for the future which, well, see what you think of his predictions... - Lucas

-PS - here is a PDF version of this paper if you'd prefer to print it out, a bit more readable to those with square eyes from watching too much video art...]

[And just so you know who's talking to you in this article, here's a portrait of Andrew pinched from his Facebook profile...]

- – - “Now To the Future” by Andrew Frost – - -

Video is everywhere. On line, in portable mobile technology, in the ever-present plasma-LCD display of signal, in the melding of television and cinema.

Convergence and proliferation are the truisms of 2008.

The sheer visibility of video is unremarkable, mundane in a way, yet the experience of the screen has worked its way into every aspect of electronic media and underwrites our fascination with the capture of moving image within the shifting frames of the thing we call – video.

To talk about the future of video, and the subset activity called video art, is to inevitably talk about its past. Video art has been in a perpetual state of emergence, securing access to the technology to make it happen, searching for ways to find an audience and thinking about how the moment of now is an echo of the past and prelude to the future.

My task today is to talk about some of the aspects of contemporary video art practice and make some bold predictions for the future.

One of the constants of the culture of video art has been an embrace of its seeming impermanence, an acknowledgement that its history is provisional.

Since video art is about a critical engagement with a shifting set of available technologies, there has been an acute awareness that the practice of making video is at the mercy of market forces. There is the always present probability that in ten or five years time the technology that was used to make a video project will be defunct – the life of a video can be snuffed out as a decision is made in some far off South East Asian boardroom to switch production from ¾ Inch U-Matic to VHS to Hi8 to disc to Digital. One need only think of the difficulties of staging any sort of historical overview exhibition of video art, tracking down examples, finding machines to play the work, transferring to the newer screening formats, to realise the life span of many is limited.

In that sense, video isn’t just in a permanent state of emergence; it’s exists under a constant threat of disappearance.

Video art as is enraptured by technology, defined as a practice of making and as an act of viewing. The hold of it is undeniable. Pick up the catalogue of Video Logic and read through the name checks of ancient devices – the Sony Portapack, The Fairlight CVI et al – and consider the way video as an idea persists beyond the existence of the technology that achieves it.

The catalogue of The First Australian Video Festival held in 1986 is an important document in the history of video art in Australia. Bernice Murphy’s Towards a History of Australian Video and Stephen Jones’s Some Notes On The Early History of the Independent Video Scene In Australia are essential texts, describing video’s evolution from an emergent technology in the hands of select technicians and academics to a medium that had become by 1986 accessible to a range of makers – from artists and documentarians to music video and drama producers.

The Festival and its catalogue was the establishment of a base camp for the future exploration of video. The mid-1980s had witnessed the release into the semi-pro market of portable colour video cameras and VHS editing suites that marked a significant shift in the availability of video making technology. Along with the already established public access centres this new, cheaper technology was a portent of the oncoming future – the later emergence of those now forgotten formats, but also the advent of home computer based editing, then later the ability to burn CD ROMs and DVDs, and then the ability to distribute and post work on the web.

One of the most illuminating essays in the First Australian Video Festival catalogue is for me a short piece by Annemarie Chandler with the title – Where Do We Go? Given the unenviable task of trying to predict the future of video, Chandler reiterated the history of video up to that point – from Video Access Centres to video everywhere. Chandler wrote:

In the ‘80s we allow video cameras and screens with their sophisticated ancillary computer equipment to penetrate our working spaces, to wallpaper our entertainment environments and to survey our activities, to “look in” close-up if necessary on all our transactions. In the 80s we have given permission for the equipment to be everywhere and anywhere, we have granted ‘it’ access into every area…

Chandler then went on to describe the technology that was creating this Big Brother-esque world:

“The communication policy of the 80s is that the old familiar furniture, the ‘box’ in the corner of the living room which had sitting there quietly since the mid 1950s, has been allowed to create a hybrid of allies – our video recorders, cameras, discos, Super Stations, surveillance equipment, Big Screens, Teletext, Satellites, et all. “Video has been let out of the lounge room and allowed to roam freely over the landscape.

“The liberation of the video signal is complete.”

So that was it – 1986 was Video Year Zero, not just as a category for creative production, but as a dissimulated mind-state permeating the electromagnetic force fields of Planet Earth.

Chandler’s prediction was that video – so long the preserve of specialists and technicians- was being disseminated into consumer electronics. Although the name checks of 80s technology now sound like exhibits in a museum, the notion that video was about to seep from its frame was prescient.

Reading the 1986 catalogue is to be reminded that the culture of video art in this country has always been one of an assumed outsider status – a media art that paradoxically embraces the newest, sexiest technology yet craving a critical relationship to the means of production. The problem with this position has been that as proliferation has increased, the ability to assume difference is diminished. If video is everywhere, what exactly is video different to? And what is it outside of?

Over the last year and a half I have been working on a book on contemporary Australian video art, an alphabetically ordered survey of current practice. For the purposes of the book, it became necessary to create a definition of video art since the use of the term is loose and imprecise, often used to simply denote anything that involves a screen. The definition of video art became for me any work that used video technology but did not involve interaction for an audience beyond looking, or perhaps walking around a space while looking.

To select artists I scoured video art exhibitions and catalogues, journal and magazine articles, web sites and festival show reels. Recommendations came from friends, art school lecturers, artists and galleries. I ended up with a final list of about 60 practitioners from a list of over 100.
Looking at the current practice of video this way was fascinating. It is simply staggering how much video art is out there.

And certain patterns emerged. The majority of new video work is being produced is by younger artists, and very few of them would fit the category of what was once called a “video artist” – the person whose main practice is engaged solely with the making of video art.
The three main strains of current practice appear to be performance video, video installation and single screen works. And the overwhelming majority of these works, despite the manner in which they are seen – be they single screen or multiple screen installations – are narrative-based – either through the deployment of a simple notion of duration or the use of conventional cinematic language.

The influence of artists such as Matthew Barney, Mariko Mori, Bruce Nauman, David Shrigley, Christian Marclay and Craig Baldwin are particularly notable, and to a lesser degree, the influence artists such as Philip Brophy or Tracey Moffatt can be discerned.

For those of you involved in the teaching of video, or in its study, or exhibition, this state of play is probably already apparent, but it was nonetheless fascinating to look at this broad spread of activity through an admittedly imprecise sampling methodology.

One of the aspects of this sampling that I hadn’t anticipated was the appearance of a generational attitude change towards video and its practices. Proliferation of technology has undoubtedly put the ability to make video into more hands than ever before, but with it has come an accepting attitude that appears to not put a huge importance in the practice of making video – it is simply one of many choices. Where video art was once a career step towards obscurity and a lifetime of outsider grumbling, it is now simply mainstream and unremarkable.

The question of video art’s future is not so much about where the technology will take us – although that is undoubtedly important aspect – but more a question about how the institutional attitudes of video art culture are reacting to this change.

I was bemused to read Jacqueline Millner’s assessment of the work of Soda_Jerk in the Video Logic catalogue. Millner characterised the Jerk’s sample heavy practice as being akin to “to a fan’s tribute that revels in the game of celebrity spotting and the technical possibilities of digital age manipulation” than a critically engaged, ironically discursive relationship with appropriated source material. Millner cites the video work of Tracey Moffatt as an example for this ironic engagement.

Such a notion I think is emblematic of an audience that needs its commentary euthanized and laid out, unable to recognise a critical relationship with the medium when it sees it. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the work of Soda_Jerk and their contemporaries is indeed partly fan fiction, celebratory, energised by popular culture and able to deploy new narratives that seems so confusing.

The work of Soda_Jerk’s is a good example of a new generation of thinking about video, promiscuously open to the possibilities of a collision between practice and theory, and one that speaks of the future of video – a practice with one foot in pop culture entertainment, the other in academic plurality.
Of the 100 or so artists and their work I viewed for my book, it was startling to note just how many of them – perhaps 50 percent – were either represented by commercial galleries, or had exhibited in them in group shows, or were involved with artist run gallery exhibitions. Whereas in 1986 a video festival was a welcome if rare opportunity to see contemporary work, the landscape of exhibition has changed profoundly over the last two decades.

I recall the mid-1980s as a time when the technology to make video existed but the chance to show it was rare. Only a handful of commercial galleries had in-house facilities to show work. The recent Performing for the Camera exhibition at Firstdraft is an example of how even modest art run spaces can engage with video practice on a significant scale. The show featured the work of more than a dozen artists and each artist’s video was screened either by projector on to a wall or on a flat screen monitor, one monitor for each piece, creating a room full of video. As anyone who regularly visits exhibitions in these sorts of galleries can attest, the technology to screen video has never been more available.

With the increased visibility of showing video in gallery exhibitions has come a new economic viability. The ability to edition DVDs has created a market and with commercial representation has come media coverage ignorant of the history of the medium but hooked by the notion of newness. One cog turns the next in a relationship of mutual satisfaction. Where artists wanting to make video could have once perhaps hoped for employment in a college or university, now commercially successful artists can enjoy all the lifestyle privileges of the independently wealthy – international travel and exhibition, sales in Euros and US dollars.

It could be argued that this commercialisation of video art has reduced what was once a more pure, speculative and critically engaged practice into a mere commodity, something to be traded and speculated upon, fuelled by decorative works uncritically recycling the tropes of Hollywood cinema.

The incorporation of video into the art market was perhaps inevitable. The market is always looking for something to sell and anything with an aura of newness sells well – it’s the iPhone phenomena. But I think that this broadening of the practice and its commercial availability is actually a sign of maturity in the culture of video. If the commercial can co-exist with the fringe, then the only real question is whether artists can have a meaningful return for their efforts, not just as the makers, but as the distributors.

One last observation before we turn to the task of prognostication.

To look at the history of video art in Australia is to discover that the question of distribution has been a vexing one. Twenty two years ago television enjoyed a monopoly in the distribution of electronic imagery, and much of the debate and discussion was concerned with access. One reads the constant complaints of those forced into the role of media punditry, speculating on possible methods of distribution, alternative avenues into television broadcast, either by inveigling themselves into already extant models or perhaps by creating doppelganger alternatives to be funded by compliant government arts bodies. With the advent of the commercial video rental market at the end of the 80s it seemed for a moment that a viable alternative had emerged – perhaps video artists making tape could get in on it – but the scales of production, unit cost and access to commercial distribution meant that artists productions were priced out of the hands of the public and into the collections of a few libraries, museum and art college collections.

The most profound difference about our now is the web. Distribution of video art over the web, as a nexus for the archiving and sharing of historical works, as a tool for the establishment of on-line communities is still very much a potential that is yet to be fully exploited. And it with this in mind we step into the next thing.

So now, to the future.

If the technology of video isn’t constant, then there will be no allegiance to medium specificity. An image will be an image.

Video art will be an idea about visual data born into a world of almost instant and limitless distribution.

Video will embrace the possibility of a valueless commodity and seek out the most direct route to the viewer via iTunes, YouTube and all future iterations of user-generated content interface. Copyright is for wimps – so it will feel ok to give it away.

Video art will defend itself against the predations of the market. The market places false value on the commodity of the image. Money creates art stars, fame devalues ideas in favour of visibility, and visibility creates inoculated pervasiveness. This will be a popular tattoo.

The creation of video art will not be about providing content to content providers. There is nothing more ignominious than experiencing a work of art on a mobile phone.

The knowledge of the history of video art will not be necessary to make a video. But it will probably help.

Artists will demand re-education camps.

Creative Commons will be recognised as a waste of time since no one really wants to a make a work of art appropriated from elements so worthless an owner doesn’t care who uses it.

It will be understood that there is ultimately no qualitative difference between viewing a work on the screen of a PSP or looking at an 80 centimetre flat screen LCD television set. When you’re looking at video, it will be impossible to see the screen.

Video art will be unable defend itself against the predations of the market since the market is impossible to resist. Money creates taste and taste in turn creates connoisseurship, which in turn creates collections.

Video art will be the physical manifestation of data limited by proprietary software and usage agreements, restricted by internationally agreed distribution zones.

Creative Commons will be recognised as a vital strategy in the freeing up of restrictive and outmoded copyright laws. It will become an endlessly expanding grassroots movement that will liberate the end user from receptive vessel to active agent.

The technological nuances of video art will be recognised. Old and antique technology will be preserved while the relentless reinvention of already extant technology will be discouraged by fines and prison terms.

Building a history of video art will pay dividends to those who host it.

The film is directed by Stefan Römer traces out the debates that allowed the intellectual art movement of conceptual art to emerge in the 1960s, and which has subsequently led to the most relevant questions in contemporary art.
As Mark’s e-mail today said, it features some of the most interesting and dynamic artists and art theorists alive today, presenting a diversity of voices to show conceptual art as a socio-historical development of various movements; that it has no one valid definition. Yet there are several ideas that are framed throughout the documentary; the fiction and ideal of art as political engagement; the history of art as a history of struggles around strategies of representation, and, in making a film about conceptual art, the trope of reflexivity that produces a study on the documentary as a genre in itself.

Artists:
Vito Acconci, Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden), Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Hartmut Bitomsky, Mel Bochner, Gregg Bordowitz, Klaus vom Bruch, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Luis Camnitzer, Jan Dibbets, Mark Dion, Sam Durant, Valie EXPORT, Stano Filko, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Renée Green, Shilpa Gupta, Hans Haacke, Július Koller, Joseph Kosuth, Sonia Khurana, David Lamelas, Sol LeWitt, Thomas Locher, Marcel Odenbach, Yoko Ono, John Miller, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Peter Weibel, Lawrence Weiner, Stephen Willats, Heimo Zobernig

Curators/Theorists:
Alexander Alberro, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, Charles Harrison (Art & Language), Geeta Kapoor, Geert Lovink, Seth Siegelaub, Gregor Stemmrich.

The above photo shows Louise Curham from the TLC making a cracking point at the plenary discussion session at the end of the Disappearing Video Conference. To her right are Lyndal Jones, Andrew Frost, Stephen Jones and Danni Zuvela.

It was a really interesting day. Here’s my round-up of a few random thoughts:

Stephen Jones is a walking encyclopedia. The man cannot be contained within a 1/2 hour presentation. Next time he needs to be given an hour, with a secret half hour snuck in at the end which he doesn’t know about, to contain his rich and fruity overspill.

Danni Zuvela gave a fantastic talk about “forgetting” as an Aussie characteristic that goes waaaay back. So it’s no surprise that our avant-garde ephemeral art histories blow away. They’ve got nothing to plant themselves into.

Jon Conomos. Man, this guy is great. He told an anecdote about listening to a lecture by Buckminster Fuller, back in the 1960s(?). Apparently, Fuller’s talk was like an incredible collage of references, quotes and images, rambling in all directions for 3 hours. It blew Conomos’ mind. Likewise, Conomos seems to have borrowed this strategy of bricolage-as-lecture format, and I was awash with the pleasure of his tales. When you carry so much memory in your body, it seems almost impossible to say anything without it being a quote. Didn’t Umberto Eco say something like that?

Andrew Frost gave a provocative forecast for what video art will look like in the future. Very futuristic. You know, screens scrunched up like handkerchiefs in your pocket, and micro-chips embedded in brains and all that. Probably will come true though. I hope he posts his paper online.

For me, Louise Curham’s talk was a highlight, and I’m not just saying that because she is my good colleague here at the TLC. She managed to bridge the fields of video art and archiving, the materiality of the medium and its cultural significance. She spoke the with energy and vigour of someone to whom this stuff really matters, as a film making artist and professional archivist.

I’m trying to get hold of the audio for Louise’s talk from the MCA to post online here – hopefully soon.

Oh, and the Disappearing Video screening was great too. I sat across the aisle from Albie Thoms and David Perry…that was something of an honour for this young whippersnapper. My faves were Peter Kennedy’s Idea Demonstrations – they were very medium-specific – interacting with the ghosting effects of 1970s cathode ray tubes. Of course, CRTs don’t ghost like that anymore. What sense does this work have now? How could it meaningfully be migrated to newer forms of presentation?

And also I loved “Built in Ghosts Inside Television” (I think that was the one) it was a cut-n-paste from TV and advertising, as taped from live to air telly in the early 1980s. It was striking because it was all about the mainstream fear of television, that “social scourge”. Almost 20 years later, it’s parody-effect seems almost unnecessary – television is no longer the big boogy-man – it’s been replaced by the internet…
-Lucas

It’s rare enough to see a serious exhibition of video art in an Aussie art museum. But accompanying the MCA’s Video Logic show, there is a super rare screening of historical Australian video works. I’ve cut and pasted the screening program below (it’s also available here as a printable pdf).

Also if you scroll down further, I’ve pasted details about the DISAPPEARING VIDEO CONFERENCE, at which the TLC’s Louise Curham will be speaking about preservation and conservation strategies for this most unstable of media.

Louise recently contributed a chapter on audio-visual preservation to the 3rd edition of Keeping Archives.

See you at these events! -Lucas
— — –

DISAPPEARING VIDEO Program
AUSTRALIAN VIDEO ART: SOME KEY WORKS
Thursday 23 Octotober, 6.30 – 8.00pm, Circular Quay Terrace, level 6

David Perry Mad mesh 1968, 4 min
Peter Kennedy Idea Demonstrations # 4 1971, 2 min
Peter Kennedy Idea Demonstrations # 7 1971, 2 min
David Perry Interior with Views 1976, 5 min
Stephen Jones (music by Warren Burt and performance by Eva Karczag) Eva 1978, 3 min excerpt
Warren Burt Nocturnal B 1978, 3 min excerpt
Tsk tsk tsk (Philip Brophy, Maria Kozic, et al) Asphixiation 1979, 4 min
Stephen Jones SPK 1979, 4 min
Eva Schramm & Gary Willis Strategies for Goodbye 1982, 3 min excerpt
Built in Ghosts Inside Television 1983, 5 min
Peter Callas Night’s High Noon: An Anti-Terrain 1988, 8 min
Jill Scott Continental Drift 1993, 12 min
John Gillies & The Sydney Front Techno/Dumb/Show 1991, 5 min excerpt
Severed Heads Big Car Retread 1991, 7 min
Elena Popa Robot Cycle 1992, 3 min
Ross Harley & Maria Fernanda Cardoso Cardoso Flea Circus 1995, 8 min
Linda Wallace Love Hotel 2000, 7 min
Michael Glasheen Teleological Telecast from Spaceship Earth: On Board with Buckminster Fuller 1970, 28 min excerpt

Presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in association with the College of Fine Arts and d/Lux/Media/Arts, with assistance from the Australian Research Council
Circular Quay West
Sydney Australia
02 9245 2400
www.mca.com.au

- – -

DISAPPEARING VIDEO Program
CONFERENCE
Friday 24 Octotober, 10.00am – 5.00pm, Circular Quay Terrace, level 6
10.00 – 10.30am Registration in Circular Quay Foyer on level 1
Morning tea refreshments in Circular Quay Terrace on level 6

10.30 – 10.45am Welcome and introduction by facilitators John Gillies and Ross Harley

10.45 – 11.15am Stephen Jones The Disassembly of Video Art
The methods and intentions of video art in its early period have largely been subsumed by
the narrative. This talk seeks to remind us of the broader intentions.

11.15 – 11.45am Danni Zuvela Forgetting and Remembering: Australian Experimental Video
Related to the physical loss of works whose material existence is bound to inherently unstable media formats—and equally concerning—is the disappearance from public memory of Australian work from ‘the foreign country of the past’. With discussion of ‘forgetting’ or the evaporation of the immaterial, Zuvela will canvass strategies to inoculate against such disappearances, and suggest ways to bring about a more active remembering of Australia’s rich creative history.

11.45am – 12.15pm John Conomos Between Celluloid, Plasma and Neon
As an artist, theorist and critic, Conomos engages with the ongoing intertextual adventure of seeking new horizons of image, sound, performance and text. From this perspective he shall discuss the historical context of Australian cinema, video and media art.

12.15 – 12.30pm Questions from audience

12.30 – 2.00pm Lunch break (not provided)

2.00 – 2.15pm Introduction to afternoon topics by facilitators John Gillies and Ross Harley

2.15 – 2.45pm Lousie Curham Media Art Archaeology: Making Good Archives and the Problems of
Re-presentation
In a discussion about how we make good archives for video art, Curham proposes an emphasis on context. Thinking through the role of the material form of the work, there is discussion about which properties of the original matter. What and where is the video artwork and what is the role of the original maker? How will we meaningfully pass these artworks on to future generations? How faithful do these need to be? These considerations will touch on practices in existing time based art archives and will think about what Australian archives of media art might look like.

2.45 – 3.15pm Lyndal Jones Propositions for an Uncertain future
Thoughts on technology / video / art / sustainable practice, the ephemeral object and the art system.

3.15 – 3.45pm Exhibition viewing of Video Logic, level 4 galleries

3.45 – 4.15pm Andrew Frost Now to the Future
Video art has achieved an unprecedented level of visibility over the past 5 years with new opportunities for artists and the public to engage with what was once a marginal practice in contemporary art. But what does the future hold for video art? Has the outsider finally joined the mainstream? Or will the recalcitrant medium cling to outmoded methods of production and distribution in an effort to maintain critical purity? And what of the evil art market, the web and iTunes?

4.15 – 5.00pm Panel discussion and questions from audience

5.00pm Close
Presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in association with the College of Fine Arts and d/Lux/Media/Arts, with assistance from the Australian Research Council
Circular Quay West
Sydney Australia
02 9245 2400
www.mca.com.au

Speaker Biographies:

John Conomos is a media artist, critic, and theorist who extensively exhibits locally and internationally. His art practice traverses a variety of art forms and deals with autobiography, identity, memory, post-colonialism, and the “in-between” links between cinema, literature, and the visual arts. Conomos is a prolific contributor to art, film and media journals and forums. In 2000 he was awarded a New Media Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. His essays on cinema, video art and new media were recently published as Mutant Media (2008), and with Brad Buckley he co-edited the anthology Republics of Ideas (2001) and the forthcoming Rethinking the Contemporary Art School, to be published September 2009. Conomos is an exhibiting artist in the MCA exhibition Video Logic, 2008.

Louise Curham is at the forefront of Australian moving image art. Well known for curating innovative expanded cinema events in non-traditional exhibition spaces, Curham is highly regarded in the experimental film world for her work using “obsolete media”. She is involved with Teaching and Learning Cinema, a filmmakers and film lovers group with a focus on re-presenting moving image works from previous generations in events that encourage discussion and break down the passivity of looking at images. Alongside Curham’s practice is her work as an audiovisual archivist, a field in which she has worked since 2002.

Andrew Frost is a writer, art critic and journalist. He is the co-founder and editor of The Art Life and writes and presents television programs on contemporary art for ABC1. He is the author of the forthcoming Burn to Disc: Contemporary Australian Video Art, to be published in 2009.

John Gillies is an artist working with film, sound, installation and video, and often in collaboration with performers from a variety of disciplines. Gillies’ screen work has been shown in festivals such as Videobrasil, Ars Electronica and the London, Sydney and Melbourne film festivals. He is an exhibiting artist in Video Logic at the MCA.

Ross Harley is an artist, writer, curator and educator in the field of new media and popular culture. His work crosses the bounds of cinema, music, art, design, architecture and media art practice. From 1986-91 Harley edited the influential art theory journal Art + Text. In 1992 he was the director of the influential International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA. Harley has edited a number of anthologies and conducts diverse research projects extending the electronic media art practice and theory.

Lyndal Jones has a long history of working with new media, video and performance art in Australia. Jones has produced an extensive body of work since the early 1980s, and is known for creating long-term projects which initially focused on performance then video installation. Throughout, her works have addressed the power of the experiential and the development of interactivity. Jones represented Australia at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and has shown her work at numerous galleries throughout Australia and overseas.

Dr. Stephen Jones is an Australian video artist of long standing and independent curator of electronic art. For many years (1983-92) he was the video-maker for the electronic music band Severed Heads. He is an experienced video editor and electronic engineer having developed equipment ranging from analogue video synthesisers to DVD synchronisers, and currently builds interactive installation devices for artists. He also provides conservation and preservation services in the electronic and video arts. Jones has recently completed a book on the history of the first generation of the electronic arts in Australia.

Dr. Danni Zuvela’s interest in experimental moving image encompasses research, teaching, writing, curation and the odd bit of practice (in both senses of the word!). As an academic, she has conducted extensive research into avant-garde film and video art, which she continues to foist on readers of various journal articles and books, and unsuspecting screen studies students. Zuvela is a member of OtherFilm, an artist collective dedicated to the production, distribution and exhibition of avant-garde, experimental, and artists film, video and music. Zuvela
co-curates the OtherFilm Festival, a 4-day festival of expanded, participatory and performative film and music.

Reel Rescues at the State Library of Queensland

Reel Rescues is an exhibition of home movies, silent films and original newsreels, acting as a time capsule of Queensland life from the 1920s through to the 1970s in moving image form. The show is co-curated by OtherFilm’s Sally Golding (along with Bryony Nainby) and features Golding’s conservation work, with detailed studies of beautifully deteriorated film frames. Reel Rescues also features contemporary film works dealing the broader notion of ‘the archive’ by artists Jim Knox and Kerry Laitala, and a new sound piece ‘Sonic Projection’ by OtherFilm’s Joel Stern.

Reel Rescues, SLQ Gallery, Level 2, until Dec 2nd 2007. Free Entry.
http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/whats-on/exhibit/cur

passing along this info!

Programme at the AGNSW for all fans of experimental cinema
Saturday 16 June 2pm
Saturday 23 June 12noon
Saturday 7 July 12noon
Saturday 21 July 2pm
Domain Theatre, Lower Level 3

This series focuses on the enduring traditions and lasting influence of experimental and avant-garde filmmaking. This is so-called formalist cinema, using film in ways that are comparable to the aims of modern painting and sculpture, foregrounding the medium itself, emphasising the film strip, the frame, montage, projection, and even the chemical and technological processes. The rejection or subversion of Hollywood-type storytelling generates works with a loose or non-linear narrative, making unexpected dislocations of time and space, permitting personal explorations and poetic or ironic juxtaposition. Taken together, these journeys of colour and sound demonstrate the sheer dynamism of experimental cinema over the past 85 years.

the programme:

Saturday 16 June
Expansive Cinema 2: Visual music

Emulating and augmenting specific musical compositions, the films in this collection are a meditation on musical form, seeking a graphic, cinematic equivalent.

2pm

Opus 1
Dir: Walter Ruttman 1921 Germany
7 min. 16mm b&w (tinted) silent (with musical accompaniment)
Considered the first abstract, animated film ever to be shown publicly, the Opus series led to Ruttman’s association with Walt Disney and work on the groundbreaking animation Fantasia in the late 1930s.

Colour flight
Dir: Len Lye 1938 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm colour sound
Made as an airline commercial, celebrated filmmaker Len Lye painted image patterns directly onto the celluloid film strip for this abstract interpretation of the popular tune ‘Honolulu Blues’.

Polka graph
Dir: Mary Ellen Bute 1952 USA
5 min. 16mm colour sound
Making her first film in 1934, Mary Ellen Bute spent much of her pioneering career making short, abstract films. Using a laboratory oscilloscope, this animation refracts electronic patterns through colour filters in counterpoint to Shostakovich’s polka from The Age of Gold.

Charlemagne 2: Piltzer
Dir: Pip Chodorov 2002 France
22 min. 16mm colour sound
Pip Chodorov shot raw Super 8 footage at an opening at the Gerald Piltzer Gallery in Paris, where the pianist, Charlemagne Palestine, was performing. His completed work is at once a diary, a document of the concert, a lyrical flicker and a graphic representation of music.

Swinging the Lambeth Walk
Dir: Len Lye 1939 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm colour sound
Direct painting on film is combined with the use of the optical printer and colour mattes in another of Lye’s abstract animations synchronised to music.

Light play
Dir: Dirk de Bruyn 1984 Australia
7 min. 16mm colour sound
Created by scratching, drawing and painting directly onto the film strip, Light play is an abstract flow of light, colour and patterns synchronised to music by Michael Luck.

(10 min. intermission)

3pm

Thirty-two short films about Glenn Gould
Dir: François Girard 1993
93 min. colour 35mm Rated G
Celebrated pianist Glenn Gould had all the hallmarks of genius – perfectionism, exceptional talent and tenacity. His legendary status resulted from his reshaping of classical musical texts (principally the works of Bach) with an electrifying combination of technical mastery and creative daring. In Thirty-two short films about Glenn Gould, director François Girard makes a playful and eccentric homage using a myriad of experimental and documentary film techniques to imagine Gould’s curious and often troubled inner universe.

Saturday 23 June
Expansive Cinema 3: Alchemy

These works can be viewed as vehicles for exploring the material properties of the film strip. Many visual effects have been created through the ‘alchemy’ of direct manipulation: scratching, drawing, painting and hand-colouring onto clear or opaque film, ’shadowcasting’ onto raw film stock, or deliberately degrading existing images. Some filmmakers have used unusual processing and exposure techniques (radical use of chemicals, home processing and forced processing) to create unique effects.

12noon

Dog Star Man
Dir: Stan Brakhage 1961-64 USA
78 min. 16mm colour silent
Complete version of the much-revered but rarely seen film by prolific director and key figure of American experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage. Often regarded as his masterpiece, this intensely mythic work, structured around a spiritual quest, was made in five parts over a four year period. Freely dispensing with story and representational imagery, the silent film explores nature and creation through a mosaic of stunning, swirling, abstract imagery applied directly to the film strip.

(25 min. intermission)

1.45pm

Particles in space
Dir: Len Lye 1979 USA
4 min. 16mm b&w sound
Len Lye’s American films developed his pioneering techniques in stunning new directions. Concerned with the energy of free movement, this work is synchronised to African drumming.

Colour cry
Dir: Len Lye 1952 USA
4 min. 16mm colour sound
Lye’s innovative ‘direct’ film is inspired by Man Ray’s ’shadowcast’ experiments in which film stock is exposed without the use of the camera, patterns being created by placing stencils and coloured gels over the unexposed film.

Faint echoes
Dir: Paul Winkler 1988 Australia
17 min. 16mm colour & b&w sound
Newsreel footage from the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin is ‘re-worked’ using radical techniques including piercing the film strip with nails and burning it with a soldering iron. A powerful emotional response to images of Hitler by filmmaker Paul Winkler.

Rote movie
Dir: Dirk de Bruyn 1994 Australia
11 min. 16mm colour sound
Dirk de Bruyn’s experimental road movie depicts the emotional landscape of a traveller as he contemplates his loneliness and the incoherence of his life. His state of mind is evoked by increasingly fragmented images – direct-on-film animation collage, rotoscoped animation and reworked photographic images.

Black trip
Dir: Aldo Tambellini 1966 USA
4 min. 16mm b&w sound
A bombardment of black and white images – some etched by hand, others by controlled light sources. A film ’sculpted’ by Aldo Tambellini without the use of a camera.

Free radicals
Dir: Len Lye 1979 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm b&w sound

Free radicals is the companion to Particles in space. A kinetic dance of white lines and angles meticulously scratched onto black and white film and synchronised to field recordings of drumming performed by the Bagirmi tribe of Africa.

(10 min. intermission)

2.45pm

Happy together
Dir: Wong Kar-Wai 1997
96 min. 35mm colour Rated MA15+
Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung
Cantonese with English subtitles
Follows the volatile romance between two gay Chinese expatriates living in Buenos Aires. Wong Kar-Wai’s elliptical exploration of crazy love, loneliness and dislocation is simultaneously delirious, intimate and hyperkinetic. Features the expressionistic, stylised brilliance of Christopher Doyle’s cinematography, employing radical film processing techniques to provide the high-key colours, grain and visual textures which are pivotal to the films emotional ambience.

Saturday 7 July
Expansive Cinema 4: Portraits, poems, places

These cinematic portraits explore notions of identity, personality and place, encountering reality via experimental film techniques.

12noon

Portrait of Ga
Dir: Margaret Tait 1952 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm colour sound
An affectionate portrait filmed in Orkney of Scottish filmmaker, Margaret Tait’s grandmother.

Shoppingtown
Dir: David Caesar 1987 Australia
8 min. 16mm colour sound
Filmmaker David Caesar reveals the humanity of customers and workers in a large suburban shopping mall by encouraging his subjects to confront the film camera directly.

Chewing gum girl
Dir: John Smith 1976
United Kingdom
12 min. 16mm b&w sound
A nondescript street scene shot on a grey day in Hackney appears to be controlled by voice-over instructions from an unseen film director.

Passionless moments
Dir: Jane Campion 1984 Australia
13 min. 16mm b&w sound
Jane Campion’s celebrated early short film is a collection of cinematic portraits, giving a quirky slant to everyday human experiences.

The drift back
Dir: Margaret Tait 1957 Great Britain
11 min. 16mm b&w sound
Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait documents a farming family returning to the island of Wyre in the Orkneys after relocating for some years due to economic difficulties.

Mexico
Dir: Mike Hoolboom & Steve Sanguedolce 1992 Canada
35 min. 16mm colour sound
A poetic essay that sets out to understand the travel bug. The voice-over offers the viewer an air-tight experience of a Third World holiday, while images of an archaeological museum, a bullfight and an auto factory establish the related contexts of tourism and Free Trade.

(20 min. intermission)

1.45pm

Tokyo-ga
Dir: Wim Wenders 1985
91 min. 16mm colour
A poetic portrait of Tokyo and a melancholy homage to the Japanese filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63). Using a loose, diary format, Wenders explores the Japanese city most affected by the impact of postwar Western values, searching for traces of the lost world so affectionately observed in Ozu’s feature films. Includes interview with Ozu’s regular cameraman, Yuhara Atsuta.

Saturday 21 July
Expansive Cinema 5: Found footage

Since the 1930s, found film footage has been sourced as raw material by experimental filmmakers. The imagery of archival film can have a spellbinding effect on the viewer. Relishing this quality, filmmakers have ransacked documentaries, newsreels and instructional films. Evoking nostalgia, stimulating memory, deconstructing cinematic language or establishing the aesthetic textures and registers of reality, this raw material is used to forge new meanings and associations.

2pm

At the Academy
Dir: Guy Sherwin 1974 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm b&w sound
Playing on the repetitive mechanical nature of a countdown leader (known as an Academy leader), Guy Sherwin obsessively reprints to create a fascinating and hypnotic effect. The image of the leader gradually builds up in layers, slightly out of phase and generating a wild variety of rhythms and patterns.

Midnight party
Dir: Joseph Cornell USA 1947
4 min. 16mm b&w Silent

Cotillion
Dir: Joseph Cornell USA 1947
8 min. 16mm b&w Silent
Indebted to basic Surrealist principles, artist Joseph Cornell created some of the first films constructed from found footage. Midnight party and Cotillion form part of his Children’s Trilogy – fantasy worlds created from early, silent cinema footage scavenged from the shops of 1930s Manhattan. The films are purely associative, following Cornell’s poetic instincts and cutting freely and intuitively from one subject to another.

Valse triste
Dir: Bruce Conner 1974 USA
5 min. 16mm colour/sepia sound
A young boy dreams of farm life, school scenes, railroad trains, cars. The found source material depicts Kansas in the 1940s and Conner’s assemblage suggests highlights of the boy’s imagined life.

Time out for sport
Dir: Paul Winkler 1996 Australia
17 min. 16mm colour sound
A short piece of found footage is optically reworked as text versus image versus spoken narration. The story of a famous golf player becomes ‘curiouser and curiouser’.

Mongoloid
Dir: Bruce Conner 1978 USA
4 min. 16mm b&w sound
A parody of American life composed of hilarious instructional diagrams, old television commercials, and found footage to the sound track of ‘Mongoloid’ by the American punk-rock group DEVO. Conner was among the first to use pop music for short experimental films, which are now considered to be precursors of the music video genre.

Removed
Dir: Naomi Uman USA 1999
7 min. 16mm colour sound
Using ‘found’ sections of an old porn film, nail polish remover, bleach and a magnifying glass, filmmaker Naomi Uman has physically erased the image of the woman from a standard pornographic scenario. In her hilarious deconstructed version, only the leering men (who now respond to a pulsating white space on the film strip) and the original dialogue track remain.

A movie
Dir: Bruce Conner 1958 USA
12 min. 16mm b&w sound
One of Bruce Conner’s most powerful films is a montage of found materials, including newsreels and old western movies. The humorous juxtapositions and associations slowly build to horror.

(15 min. intermission)

3.15pm

The thin blue line
Dir: Errol Morris 1988
103 min. 35mm colour Rated PG
Errol Morris’ groundbreaking film is an investigation into the conviction of a young drifter, Randall Adams, for murder in Texas in the 1970s. At once a documentary, a drama, an interrogation and a poetic reverie, Morris uses a mix of filmed interviews, staged reconstructions and iconic imagery (guns, clocks, empty streets and newspaper headlines) to explore the nature of memory and the shortcomings of the legal system. Shot specifically for this production, but styled to provide the ambience of archival or found footage, the iconic imagery provides a powerful metaphor for the disturbing revelations uncovered by Morris’ 30 month investigation.