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Abstract
The Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s continues to provide contemporary artists with a methodology. Artists such as Yoko Ono set specific tasks providing strict temporal limits for performing or making films. Whatever content or material could be captured within these limits was allowable as long as the limits of the task were maintained. Contemporary artists draw upon this tradition and hybridise it with other film conventions such as documentary. These methods and the resulting forms of visual research allow a rigorous capture and documenting of the ephemeral nature of everyday life.
World Wild Life Documentary – Life in a Day is a contribution to the ongoing 30-year research project of Bonita Ely that connects inhabited landscape and wild nature to change and the ephemeral. In this video, two sets of similarly timed footage (15 seconds of footage shot every 30 minutes) were edited together but their content was drawn from two days of imagery, one static camera capturing nature, and one moving camera that filmed the various events and locations of Ely throughout her day. The video innovates documentary conventions by juxtaposing divergent content from nature and human life and brings documentary techniques into a convergence with Conceptual Art methods. ¬
The significance of this work is evidenced by its inclusion the exhibition Cleveland Street projects, Performance Space, Sydney; it has also been shown in exhibitions at Bellas Gallery, Brisbane and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.