Screen Deep

Published 01 September 2007

A Detour Off the Art-Path

Whilst in Europe this year, Julianne Pierce made a detour and visited the small city of Wolfsburg in central north Germany where she visited the privately run contemporary art museum Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. A delightful discovery was made in the retrospective exhibition of Douglas Gordon, an artist who works with the time-based foundation of cinema and transforms it into stripped back experience of time and motion. He is interested in the epic nature of cinema  the big screen, the close-up, the majestic soundtrack  but is concerned more with an extended experience of time and memory. Viewing several works together projected large in a darkened monolithic space brought Gordons fusing of cinema and visual arts into a mesmeric articulation of his vision and practice.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

Entering the Screen

New interactive screen spaces of the web, games and virtual worlds act as portals allowing us to become a part of the media image rather than just watching it. No longer content to just watch the action, were creating our own online identities and becoming our own screen heroes acting out our own virtual adventures. This article focuses on the new virtual world of Second Life and discusses the idea of avatar (virtual pictorial) identities via the works of a selection of new media artists: Neal Stephenson, Eva and Franco Mattes, Emil Goh, Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis, Adam Nash, Christopher Dodd, Kyal TripodiGazira Babeli and Pierre Proske.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

More Video Art Please

Published 01 September 2007

New Media at the Venice Biennale and Documenta 12

Jasmin Stephens presents a personal recollection of this years Venice Biennale and documenta 12. As Stephens states, Venice reflected the worldwide trend of artists reappraising iconic moments from Conceptual Art from the early seventies and in so doing taking up the low-tech equipment associated with them. Artists here discussed are Aernout Milk, Willie Doherty, Paolo Canevari, Sophie Whettnall, Shaun Gladwell, Yang Zhenzhong, Emily PrinceSusan Norrie, Joshua Mosley and Tabaimo, Nedko Solakov, Mario Garcia, Felix Gmelin, Steve McQueen, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ines Doujak, Lili Dujourie, Zofia Kulik, John McCracken, Harun Farocki and Artur Zmijewski.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

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.

Published 01 September 2007

Unlock the Gates: New and Unprecedented Tools for More People

Published 01 September 2007