Playing Biennially: Experimenta Playground

Experimenta Playground, an international biennial exhibition of media art, marks Experimentas 21-year commitment to innovation in both production and in promoting and exhibiting new media art throughout Australia and abroad. With artworks that engage with the creative possibilities emerging from a dynamic interaction between the moving image, art and new technologies, each artist in the exhibition creatively expands the definition of play, performance and ritual. Here the revelation of technology and spatial features create new ways of appreciating the construction of fantasy. Participating artists include : June Bum Park, Guillaume Reymond, Shu Lea Cheang, Hiraki Sawa and Tomoyuki Washio, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey and Jesse Stevens, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, Philip Worthington, Gavin Sade, Priscilla Bracks and Matthew Dwyer, Stelarc, Marina Abramovic, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Eugenio Ampudia and Robert Hughes.

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Snap Freeze

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New Deities

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Daniel Crooks

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Look Into My Eyes: Behind the Screens with ACMI

This article looks at the current state of screen culture in Australia, focusing on the program architecture of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in particular. For screen culture in Australia, the market-driven economy has provided a great number of challenges in the kind of content it can exhibit and the ways in which it can be exhibited in a sustainable and meaningful way. For ACMI one of the key points is in providing the discussion platform by which screen artists or even mathematicians, writers and psychologists can participate it is through this approach, applying the filmic principles and content concepts to broader social issues and discussions that the greatest power amongst audiences arrises.

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Eternal Beautiful Now

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Tracey Clement

Screen Deep

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Unlock the Gates: New and Unprecedented Tools for More People

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The Space of Presence: Leigh Hobba

This article examines Australian video and performance artist Leigh Hobbas recent retrospective The Space of Presence at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition presented a precise slice of Hobbas electronic oeuvre including twelve works which highlight the materiality and texture of video as a medium. Together they convey a sense of awe, a pre-verbal ambiguity, recontextualising Hobbas recurrent and connected themes. This article also raises issues of space, infrastructure and technical facilities when considering the ways in which new media art is to be viewed.

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New Media at the Venice Biennale and Documenta 12

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Jasmin Stephens

BEAP 07: A Meditation

This examination of the 2007 Biennale of Electronic Art Perth (BEAP), lead Marshall to an ultimate abandonment of its underlying theme of stillness, instead choosing to look at the profusion of Australian and international art on offer. This article details key works by artists Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, Bill Viola, Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, Orlan, George Khut, Hannah Matthews, Boris Ledagsen and Natascha Stellmach and Ulf Langheinrich.

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Memoirs of a Videophile: Video Cannibalism, A Personal View

In this article David Broker looks selectively at the brief history and development of video art, a trying medium voluntarily lost to him around 1985. Broker uses three examples of the video grande- Francesco Vezzolis Comizi di Non Amore, Emmanuelle Antilles Angels Camp and a work by Miguel Calderon featured in the 2004 Sao Paulo Biennale. Each work exists in its own way as a continuum upon which the trajectory of the technologies they have absorbed is not only clear but also fundamental to the work. As Broker declares the video revival has in itself been a spectacle, with digital video driving its acolytes to ever-greater heights of excess.

David Broker

Hatched

Hatched 07 Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 20 April - 24 June 2007

Nyanda Smith

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