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1 - 10 of 17
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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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(2005)Creative Work (non-textual)The conventional photographic genre of the nude as a compliant and passive female body dominated photography for more than 150 years. In the latter part of the twentieth-century new advances in science, biomedical and related technologies combined with new critical discourse around the image allowed for the possibility of re-invention and re-imagining the body as a photographic representation. This research recognizes the nude as a site for contested meaning, social transaction and cultural engagement in photographic practices. The self-portrait Woman and chaise longue by Debra Phillips addresses the multiple and changing meanings depending on context and perspective generated by the imitation of an image carrying specific historical information. In doing so, the image is in part an act of playful homage to the seductive presence of the female subject while it also engages with the medium of photography as a bearer of histories—‘official’ or public as well as private and idiosyncratic. This work was completed as a component for the series One thing leads to another, which was funded by an Australia Council New Work Grant $20,000 (awarded 2002) and was exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2006). Its significance is attested by its selection for the Citigroup Private Bank Australian Photographic Prize (2005) held at the AGNSW, Sydney. One thing leads to another also provided the basis for an invitational public lecture presentation at the 44th Society for Photographic Education Conference, Miami, USA in 2007.
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(2003)Creative Work (non-textual)New electronic and digital technologies enlarge both the realm of the visible and the means by which it is represented and in doing so bring into question the long-held belief of photography’s indexical relationship to the Real. This research examines the disjuncture between technologically mediated representations of land and the photograph as a direct description of a referent in the world. The Untitled diptychs by Debra Phillips address questions of how changing technological imaging methods impact on the way we view the world by the use of Landsat images overlaid with Australian flora and other natural and artificial materials. In so doing they emphasise the fluid relationship between the representation of digital data, how we see, and how we interpret photographic information. The significance of this research is that it positions satellite imagery of the earth from space with other materials to create new photographic images that question both the processes and methods of taking photographs while at the same time questioning the use of photographs as source material for the production of visual art works. Its value is indicated by the following: inclusion of three diptychs in Points of View: Australian Photography 1985–95, which was held at Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2005; support for Landsat imagery provided by the Australian Landsat Station, Division of National Mapping, Department of Resources and Energy; and inclusion of works in the collections of Polaroid Australia, Polaroid International, Boston, USA and AGNSW.
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(2007)Creative Work (non-textual)New electronic and digital technologies are providing innovative platforms and contexts for contemporary photo-based visual arts practices and their relationship to society while, concurrently, critical discourse suggests a dilution of the social agency of images in the world at large. This research examines the extent to which the meaning of photographic content can operate on multiple levels by questioning how we perceive, encounter and reflect upon the world around us through an examination of the historical, social, political and aesthetic operations of photographic images. The photographic series Trees near Amiens, Trees near Fricourt, and Barrière de la Villette by Debra Phillips address the material, technological, ontological and epistemological parameters of the photographic medium and the extent to which these parameters can be communicated through the presentation of different photographic subjects that have been individually framed and installed across a gallery wall as a suite. Presented as a set of relational image components, the works encourage an alternative viewpoint to the single photograph as a primary form or means to convey isolated content. The works were produced during an AGNSW residency in the Moya Dyring studio at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (awarded 2005) and were completed as initial research for an Australia Council New Work Grant $20,000 (awarded 2006). The significance of the works is attested by their inclusion in the major group exhibition Perfect for every Occasion, Heide Musuem of Modern Art, Melbourne (2007). The work is also included in the chapter Debra Phillips in Twelve Australian Photo Artists (Piper Press, Sydney, 2009).
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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.