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1 - 8 of 8
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(2005)Creative Work (non-textual)The interdisciplinary field of art-science research is marked by a range of multi-media methods. Australian artists such as the Tissue Culture and Art Project have contributed to this field. Much of this research takes a scientifically informed approach but concentrates upon the ethical issues in contemporary science such as cloning and stem cell research. Michele Barker and Anna Munster use practice-based research to contribute to the ethical debate about the environmental consequences of scientists reverse engineering extinct species. ‘The Two of Us’ is a site-specific installation that comprises a digital animation of an imaginary two-headed Thylacine and actual footage of the last Thylacine alive in captivity. In 1999 the Australian Museum embarked on research to clone a living Thylacine. This installation responds to the ethical problems that arise in relation to cloning. It demonstrates that the art-science field can be a contributor to public debate about the ethical implications of contemporary science. The Butterfly Effect was a curated show for the Australian Museum, umbrella of the Sydney Festival of the Arts 2005, in its first large-scale exhibition involving artists responding to its displays. It was reviewed John McDonald in The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February 2005. It is cited in the peer-reviewed journal article: M. Goldberg, ‘The Butterfly Effect: The Natural History Museum, Visual Art, and the Suspension of Disbelief’; International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, Volume 1, Issue 1: 1-10.
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(2007)Creative Work (non-textual)Contemporary digital media art investigates intersections between art and science, often by recontextualising visualisation technologies from the medical and life sciences. These images can hold meaning that is aesthetic and ambiguous beyond their diagnostic use. Although this research has shown the significance of visualisation technologies’ aesthetics, it has failed to show how this aesthetic is embedded in a history of science-art intersections in other media such as photography. The 3-channel audio-visual installation Struck by Michele Barker and Anna Munster addresses the question of how current medical imaging aesthetics are related to the aesthetics of early medical photography. It achieves this by a comparative study of early institutional photography and drawings of the human body and face from the nineteenth century with contemporary Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans. In drawing this comparison, it makes a major contribution to the discipline of creative digital media practice by showing that art and science have a long history of aesthetic intersection with respect to medical visualisation. Struck was awarded an acquisitive cash prize of $8,000 in 2006 by the National Digital Art Award in the ‘dynamic’ category. It was included in an international group show at Eyebeam Gallery in New York in 2005. It toured in the International Digital Art Exhibition showing at the Beijing Film Academy, China. In 2007, it was selected for exhibition at Level 2 Contemporary Art Projects, Art Gallery of New South Wales as one of only 5 solo shows exhibited per year out of a wide field of national and international submissions.
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(2002)Creative Work (non-textual)The life sciences frequently borrow from the language of digital information in order to present a normative vision of the healthy body. Interestingly, this transfer of metaphors from one discipline to another is reciprocal. Just as genetics tends to explain itself through digital metaphors, so too have biological images become widely deployed in digital culture. In particular the early 1990s saw the emergence of a digital arts culture – including practices ranging from interactivity to artificial life – that relied heavily on this rhetorical strategy in order to argue a platform for infinite growth and potential. The interactive CD-ROM Præternatural by Michele Barker offers an alternative interactive art practice to that dominated by the rhetoric of growth and choice. Through a critical genealogy of monstrosity, the work explores the complex and often contradictory metaphor of code, both in relation to the corporeal and the digital, all the while appearing to offer the interacting user choice. In developing a framework that highlights the limits to choice and to control that exist in both the life sciences and the domain of digital technologies it has opened up debate around the problems of metaphors across these disciplines. Præternatural was funded by the Australian Film Commission. The significance of the work is attested to by its inclusion in the international exhibition Aller Anfang at the Austrian Museum of Ethnography, Austria. The work has additionally been written about in Artlink and shown in D>Art.01: Australia's premier inter/national showcase of experimental film, video, animation, cd-rom, sound and internet art.
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(2004)Creative Work (non-textual)The film convention of the biographical motion picture – the biopic – is a dramatic exploration of the lives of actual people living or dead. In recent decades this form has been the focus of experimentation for filmmakers engaged in testing the limits of historical storytelling. While the conventions of the historical fiction film have expanded and diversified, particularly in their pictorial style, contemporaneous developments in life-writing and unreliable narration in fiction have rarely been explored in film. The film I, Eugenia by Gabrielle Finnane explores the narrative possibilities of the biographical film genre through an experimental exploration of a contentious and marginal figure in Australian history – the cross-dresser Eugenia Falleni. The film’s visual style: hot sunlight, deep interior colours and the childlike stubbornness of the characters form a ritual mask for the film's droll reflections on the enigma of being oneself. Narrated by a deceased Falleni, the ironic voiceover and hieratic imagery – tableaux staged in provincial Sydney's deserted spaces – suggest historical dream-image, rather than historical reconstruction. The film combines an awareness of the unreliability of the narrator with a sense of the inaccessibility of the past. The screening history of I Eugenia demonstrates its significance and value: in 1998 the film received the Dendy Award for Best Australian Short Film, General Category, at the Sydney Film Festival; 1999 it was one of only four short films selected from international competition to screen with 24 feature films in the Seattle Women In Cinema Film Festival; it has been competitively selected for screening in 16 international film festivals.
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(2004)Creative Work (non-textual)In the era of globalization, the urban landscape has been labelled as ‘placeless’ and tending toward uniformity. At the same time, filmmakers and photographers have scrutinized public spaces, highlighting the ephemeral traffic of the postmodern city and its tendency to create non-places, zones of constant passage and displaced referentiality. This research asks how located photography of the urban landscape can transform these notions of non-place. Bruce Dick and James Love From Rita is a series of C-type colour prints. The photographs were taken over a five month period in the Philippines, Manila and the surrounding provinces. The title was inspired by the flaunted names of Filipino taxis and jeepneys. The photographs are of people absorbed in their various activities liminal places in streets, towns and shops. The series examines the fabric of urban interstices. The result is a surprising conjunction of human intimacy and alienation demonstrating that the local and intimate constitute part of the uniformity of global cities. The work’s value is attested to by the sponsorship of the following organisations: the Philippines-Australia Studies Network, Latrobe University, Melbourne and Green Papaya Art Projects in cooperation with the Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University and the Australian Embassy.
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(2004)Creative Work (non-textual)The documentation of performance pieces that become works within themselves, are often referred to as performance based video and sound installation. This work acknowledges a history of traditional theatre and performance art, collapsing both and recreating an experimental video piece. A single performer speaking directly to the camera and walking through city streets and underground walkways at night forms the basis of John Gillies’ video project The Mary Stuart Tapes. Exploring ways to articulate Australia’s colonial fabric the work is a monologue based on Friedrich Schiller’s late 18th century tragedy Maria Stuart, now unfolding within a contemporary Sydney streetscape. The reworking of this classic text originally set in Renaissance England highlights Australia’s inheritance of the British idea of state. The significance of the work The Mary Stuart Tapes is demonstrated by its inclusion in the solo touring show John Gillies: Video Work 1982-2001 exhibited at Performance Space, Sydney, NSW and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, QLD. An abridged version of the work is available on the Australian Video Art Archive, a collection of seminal works by prominent Australia Video artists. The work has been written about in Art Monthly, Realtime Arts, Video Ground.
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(2005)Creative Work (non-textual)Stop frame animation is a process whereby, rather than shooting continuously, the film camera stops after each frame is captured. The process differs from cell animation in that the camera is freed from the animation stand and can be located on a tripod and thus able to move in a 3D space, changing the nature of animation. Additionally, with the introduction of digital still cameras it has become possible to produce stop frame animations at a greatly reduced cost and ease. John Hughes’s film The Wind Calls Your Name employs a variety of stop frame animation techniques that investigate the potential offered by digital technologies. Combining traditional animation techniques with digital compositing processes enabled a framework in which to explore a unique sense of isolation resulting from the construction of industrial infrastructures within remote country locations. New techniques for series animation and capturing frame sequences were developed in order to highlight the sense of resignation of a particular community battling with toxic pollution and a profound sense of dislocation. This research has led to new methods of animation that facilitate unique modalities for experimental narrative film structure. The significance of work is demonstrated by its inclusion in the D>Art.04 Experimental Screen, Sydney International Film Festival, Dendy Opera Quays and Sydney Opera House, NSW. The work was noted as a highlight of the festival by K. Galasch in Realtime. The work has also been screened in TrainInk: Video Works #3 at the Fig Tree Theatre, NSW and Gallery Alley, Bulgaria and the exhibition (Going) Out There, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, NSW. The film won the Experimentation in Film Award at the 2008 Sydney Underground Film Festival, NSW.
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(2003)Creative Work (non-textual)Much new media research and practice contributes to a reflexive study about the role of its technologies in the production of supermodernity and mobility. International artists such as Jordan Crandell, and Ursula Biemen have used network technologies, digital video and image surveillance systems to research the technologies’ role in producing environments such as border control areas and migration zones. However, attention has been focused upon the exclusionary nature of these zones. Ross Harley’s research investigates the airport as a unique zone of supermodernity; one which combines exclusionary deployments of security-based technological systems with the everyday population movement. Aviopolis analyses the interrelations between networks of information and networks of human mobility, demonstrating how airports become zones for coordinating these relationships. It visually traces the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ networks (technical infrastructure, code and information flows) at play in the organisation of aircraft, ground crews, tarmac markings and terminal design that comprise ‘the airport’. The video comprises a moving image ‘essay’ that demonstrates the links between the circulation of information via secure networks, the zoning of space between ‘crew’ and ‘passenger’ and the use of visual design to code such flows and spaces. The work has been exhibited at international symposia and exhibition venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. It has been cited by significant figures in the field of Mobility Studies, including John Urry’s (Head of the Centre for Mobilities Research Lancaster) Routledge books Mobiliites (2007) and Aeromobilities (2008).