Databases: Recombinant Interactives

Ann Finegan looks at the world of interactive media arts, in particular database content interactivity. One example Finegan uses in her discussion is Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewskis Seeker, winner of an Award for Distinction for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica 2007. Seeker belongs to an emergent genre of database works which draw from the broader media, putting the viewer into the web of connections through which the forces of politics and economics determine the fate of peoples and of persons. Other artists discussed are Josh On, Lev Manovich, Linda Dement, Troy Innocent, Doll Yoko (aka Francesca da Rimini aka Gash Girl), Stephen Honegger, Rachel Baker, John Tonkin and Barbara Campbell. Finegan proclaims that at present the future of interactives is weighed in a choice between the seductive action of computer gaming as sites for artistic intervention, and data-mapping with its deep and active connections in realworld events.

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Lynette Walworth

Lynette Wallworth is driven by a passion to explore the natural world, to capture human stories, to explore the past and evoke memory and experience. As a media artist, she strives and succeeds to achieve an emotional and powerful connection between her images and her viewer.

Julianne Pierce

Daniel Crooks

Daniel Crooks is a digital media artist interested in distorting what is familiar to us and offering it back as a study in how we experience time and place. His digital manipulation of everyday materials and landscapes such as trains, trams and the passages of pedestrians across public spaces transform the work into a vibrant palette of colours and textures. Crooks is an artist who creates moving images that engage the viewer beyond and beneath the surface of the screen.

Julianne Pierce

Anne and Gordon Samstag, Museum of Art

This article previews the new Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, opened on 11 October 2007, which is discussed as a significant addition to art exhibition spaces in Adelaide in terms of scale, capacity and technology. This museum, designed by multi-award winning Melbourne architect John Wardle, is a public space in which artwork, in its selection, hanging, and experience, cannot ignore the active engagement of visitors. The Samstag Museum of Art plays a part in extending the role of museums into new categories of cultural industries, and the complicated relations between leisure, knowledge and libidinal economies.

Stephen Loo

Phoenix Halle: Model for a Media Centre

The privately funded centre of the PHOENIX Halle, which grew out of a small media arts organization called HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein), stands alone in a derelict steel mill in Dortmund, Germany. Established in 1996 by German curators Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ, HMKV is dedicated to curatorial research and practice in the media arts field. HMKV and PHOENIX Halle are fundamentally exploring how artists create meaning and interpret the rapid states of change in our contemporary post-industrial society. Julianne Pierce briefly examines the work of HMKV and the PHOENIX Halle during her travels in Germany.

Julianne Pierce

More Video Art Please

Brendan Lee

Black Box/White Cube: Cinema in the Gallery

Historically, the relation between art institutions and film has been fraught with every imaginable problem and inequality. How to truly bring cinema and art into dialogue, to create real interpenetrations and hybrid forms that move well beyond the ephemeral fireworks of yesteryears between-images? Martin proposes that the gallery needs to take its filmic pedagogy outside its lecture rooms and onto the gallery and film works need to be fully valued in themselves by curators, audiences and the entire, increasingly dominant promotional machine attached to our major galleries for their history, their value, their power and (yes) their art.

Adrian Martin

A Constructed World

Increase Your Uncertainty A Constructed World Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2 June - 26 July 2007

Dylan Rainforth

Crossing Over: Digital Media at the Adelaide Film Festival 2007

The Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) is an event that has always had an eye on technological innovation and evolution and it is a tenet of AFF to celebrate screen culture in all its genres and formats. This years AFF was the host of a suite of symposiums, exhibitions, thinktanks, and screenings that spotlight the popularity and possibilities of content outside the linear feature film. This article details three of these events in particular Crossover, the Broadcast Summit and one focused on machinima. The evidence of AFFs Digital Media strategy, focusing on seminars that invite audience interaction and discussion, means that Adelaide audiences will be part of this exciting artistic and technological discussion.

Sandy Cameron

Eternal Beautiful Now

Eternal Beautiful Now Curator: Tania Doropoulos Sherman Galleries, Sydney 10 - 26 May 2007

Tracey Clement

Ms & Mr

Heavy Sentimental Ms & Mr Kaliman Gallery, Sydney 1 - 30 June 2007

Joanna Mendelssohn

OzAsia Festival: Adelaide Festival Centre 2007

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Taipei 101: Video at the National Palace Museum

Discovering the Other National Palace Museum, Taipei, July 7 to August 19, 2007

Merilyn Fairskye briefly discusses her journey to Taipei where she took part in an exhibition of video installations Discovering the Other, the first ever contemporary art exhibition to be held at the National Palace Museum. Curator Gertjan Zuilhofs discription of this exhibition can be seen as a metaphor for his world view shadows, spirits and ghosts seemed to be everywhere, while at the same time the works engaged with the world of people and place, and the precarious struggle to maintain individual and cultural identities. Featured artists included: Deborah Stratman, Ella Raidel and Lin Hongjohn, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Merilyn Fairskye.

Merilyn Fairskye

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