Running men: The precarious, paranoid body in screen culture

This paper discusses my video installation Running Men as an example of how an artist’s appropriative engagements with screen images of the perilous body can reflect the technological zeitgeist of the last hundred years but also create a space of meditative and mediated reflection in Slavoj Žižek’s “endlessness” of the present-future. In this artwork, iconic male characters from Hollywood films are recontextualised to create infinitely looping scenes of running; trapping the characters in a kind of Nietchzen eternal recurrence that suspends them between impending violence and uncertain futures. Stemming primarily from my investigation into anxiety as a shared social experience, one perhaps primed by the increasing intensity of visual culture in the 21st century, these digitally reconfigured bodies become avatars or surrogates for myself, and for the viewer. Through selective editing, these emblematic figures are caught in a space of relentless confusion and paranoia – they run with, and from anxiety. They are never caught by any unseen pursuers, but are equally unable to catch up to any unseen goal. These figures map an historical trajectory of violence and masculinity as it has been projected through various iterations of screen culture Simultaneously, as celebrities, they are also fictions of the media sphere, both real and ethereal, they are impossible to grasp but paradoxically are objects of identification and emulation. In this duality, the work also references cinema’s tangled conflation of character and celebrity identity. This discussion will address the two distinct but connected sites and activities of body/image engagement. Firstly, the artistic process and conceptual ramifications of this activity, and secondly in the artwork’s potential as an installation to provide an opportunity for the viewer (like the artist) to reflect on the constructed-ness and complicated power structures at play in the representation of a gendered body.

The digital-bricoleur: Contemporary screen-based visual art practices

This paper describes a practice-led methodology that combines contemporary art theory and processes, as well as concepts of fan studies to construct a space for the critical and creative exploration of screen culture. The research promotes new possibilities for purposeful creative engagements with the screen, framed through the lens of what I term the digital-bricoleur. This performative, link-making approach documents the complicit tendencies that arise out of my affective relationship with screen culture, mapping out a cultural terrain in which I can creatively and critically ‘play’. The creative exploitation of this improvisational and aleatory activity then forms the creative research outputs. It appropriates and reconfigures content from screen culture, creating digital video installations aimed at engendering new experiences and critical interpretations of screen culture.

Turtle Twilight

“Turtle Twilight” is a two-screen video installation. Paragraphs of text adapted from a travel blog type across the left-hand screen. A computer-generated image of a tropical sunset is slowly animated on the right-hand screen. The two screens are accompanied by an atmospheric stock music track. This work examines how we construct, represent and deploy ‘nature’ in our contemporary lives. It mixes cinematic codes with image, text and sound gleaned from online sources. By extending on Nicolas Bourriad’s understanding of ‘postproduction’ and the creative and critical strategies of ‘editing’, it questions the relationship between contemporary screen culture, nature, desire and contemplation.

On-line film distribution : Its history and global complexion

‘Nobody knows anything’, said William Goldman of studio filmmaking. The rule is ever more apt as we survey the radical changes that digital distribution, along with the digitisation of production and exhibition, is wreaking on global film circulation. Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line helps to make sense of what has happened in the short but turbulent history of on-line distribution. It provides a realistic assessment of the genuine and not-so-promising methods that have been tried to address the disruptions that moving from ‘analogue dollars’ to ‘digital cents’ has provoked in the film industry. Paying close attention to how the Majors have dealt with the challenges – often unsuccessfully – it focuses as much attention on innovations and practices outside the mainstream. Throughout, it is alive to, and showcases, important entrepreneurial innovations such as Mubi, Jaman, Withoutabox and IMDb. Written by leading academic commentators that have followed the fortunes of world cinema closely and passionately, as well as experienced hands close to the fluctuating fortunes of the industry, Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line is an indispensable guide to great changes in film and its audiences.

Bang

In this video, a male voice performs a script combining stories sourced from an anonymous confessions website. On screen, imagery of fireworks repeats into increasingly kaleidoscopic patterns. This work engages with the relationship between screen culture and contemporary subjectivity. It contrasts private confessions with the public spectacle of fireworks to question the ways screen cultures are informing constructions of subjectivity. By extending on some of Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas around ‘postproduction’ and the creative and critical strategies of ‘editing’, it offers a speculative understanding of the contemporary tension between public and private.

Brisbane : creative city, cinema city?

Brisbane stands at the cross roads of many major economic, social and cultural opportunities as it positions itself as a cosmopolitan, globally networked metropolis of the twenty-first century. In order to link and leverage the existing screen industries infrastructure into Brisbane’s creative city’s plans, the paper argues for a re-think of the existing policy frameworks that support Australian screen culture and the national screen industries. Instead of remaining premised on a separation of these two activities the paper argues for a greater recognition of the overlaps occurring in both production and consumption of screen content. By acknowledging the impact new media technologies and social behaviours and the way they are re-shaping media consumption and media production practices, film and media policy could be better positioned to complement the emerging creative city policy frameworks that are being fostered in a city like Brisbane. The paper argues that reconsideration of the culture/industry separation that characterizes contemporary policy settings underpinning Australian media and screen production assistance would not only assist in identifying crucial synergies within a creative city policy it would also invigorate policy settings for the screen industries and enable them to connect more efficiently to a shifting film and media production and consumption landscape.

The art of being a fan : complicity and criticality in contemporary art and fandom

This practice-led research project aims to use contemporary art processes and concepts of fandom to construct a space for the critical and creative exploration of the relationship between them. Much of the discourse addressing the intersection of these spaces over the last three decades tends to treat art and fan studies as separate areas of critical and theoretical research. There has also been very little consideration of the critical interface that art practice and fandom share in their engagement with one another – or how the artist as fan might creatively exploit this relationship. Approaching these issues through a practice-led methodology that combines studio based explorations and traditional modes of research, the project aims to demonstrate how my 'fannish' engagements with popular culture can generate new responses to, and understandings of, the relationship between fandom, affect and visual art. The research acts as a performative and creative investigation of fandom as I document the complicit tendencies that arise out of my affective relationship with pop cultural artefacts. It does this through appropriating and reconfiguring content from film, television and print media, to create digital video installations aimed at engendering new experiences and critical interpretations of screen culture. This approach promotes new possibilities for creative engagements with art and popular culture, and these are framed through the lens of what I term the digital-bricoleur. The research will be primarily contextualised by examining other artists' practices as well as selected theoretical frameworks that traverse my investigative terrain. The key artists that are discussed include Douglas Gordon, Candice Brietz, Pierre Huyghe, Paul Pfieffer, and Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. The theoretical developments of the project are drawn from a pluralistic range of ideas ranging from Johanna Drucker's discussion of critical complicity in contemporary art, Matt Hills' discussion of subjectivity in fandom and academia, Nicolas Bourriaud's discussion of Postproduction art practices, and Jacques Rancière's ideas about aesthetics and politics. The methodology and artworks developed over the course of this project will also demonstrate how digital-bricolage leads to new understandings of the relationships between contemporary art and entertainment. The research aims to exploit these apparently contradictory positions to generate a productive site for rethinking the relationship between the creative and critical possibilities of art and fandom. The outcomes of the research consists of a body of artworks – 75% – that demonstrate new contributions to knowledge, and an exegetical component – 25% – that acts to reflect on, analyse and critically contextualise the practice-led findings.

Australia’s film industry owes a debt to Gough Whitlam

Filmmakers and audiences – indeed Australian arts and screen culture more broadly – owe a deep debt of gratitude to Gough Whitlam and the government he led. Although the foundations had been laid by Whitlam’s predecessors John Gorton and Billy McMahon, the Australian film revival of the 1970s only really took shape after Whitlam became Prime Minister in 1972...

2014 GO423 Symposium

The Game On program and the Game On Symposium supports sector building and sustainability of the local game making industry through strengthening community networks and fostering recognition of our local game making industry. The Game On Symposium – GO423 is a two-day festival focused on Queensland practitioners and community – from leaders in the field to emerging professionals and students (High School and tertiary level). With a program of presentations, debates, discussions, and exhibition around interactive screen culture and practice, GO423 promotes an understanding of the Queensland and Australian screen production industry within a broad global context.

Community uses of co-creative media. Digital storytelling and Co-creative Media : The role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice

This report describes a dynamic ‘Co-creative Media System’ that is emerging in the social space bounded by the following institutional pillars: • major cultural institutions (including screen culture agencies, libraries, museums, galleries and public service broadcasters) • the Community Arts and Cultural Development sector (historically supported through various programs of the Australia Council for the Arts) • the community broadcasting sector • the Indigenous media sector, and • the higher education sector. It illustrates how this system activates the immense creative potential of the Australian population through the ongoing development and application of participatory storytelling methods and media.

2015 GO423 Symposium

The 2015 GO423 Symposium is the fourth time for the event. It cements the annual nature of the event. The Game On program and the Game On Symposium supports sector building and sustainability of the local game making industry through strengthening community networks and fostering recognition of our local game making industry. The Game On Symposium – GO423 is a two-day festival focused on Queensland practitioners and community – from leaders in the field to emerging professionals and students (High School and tertiary level). With a program of presentations, debates, discussions, and exhibition around interactive screen culture and practice, GO423 promotes an understanding of the Queensland and Australian screen production industry within a broad global context.

Running Men

In this multi-screen installation, iconic male characters from Hollywood films are reconfigured to create infinitely looping scenes of running; trapping the characters in a kind of Nietchzen eternal recurrence. Stemming primarily from my investigation into anxiety as a shared social experience, the carefully edited, looped, and rotoscoped characters become avatars or surrogates for myself, and for the viewer. Through this editing, they are caught in a space of relentless confusion and paranoia – they run with, and from, anxiety. They are never caught by any unseen pursuers, but are equally unable to catch up to any unseen goal. These figures act as models of masculinity, they are objects of identification and emulation. Simultaneously, as celebrities, they are also fictions of the media sphere, both real and ethereal, they are impossible to grasp. In this duality, the work also references cinema’s tangled conflation of character and celebrity identity. It examines the subjective and intersubjective engagements we can have with popular culture, and the way that these engagements can as strategies to ‘make sense’ of social experiences. The work was exhibited in the Carriageworks space of ‘You Imagine What You Desire’, the 19th Biennale of Sydney.

Zarathustra’s Cave

In 'Zarathustra’s Cave' the iconic apartment set from 90’s sitcom 'Seinfeld' is presented devoid of actors or action of any kind. Instead the ‘apartment’ sits empty, accompanied by the ambient noise of the screen-space and the distant sound of city traffic. At irregular intervals this relative silence is punctuated by the laughter of an off-screen audience. Unprompted by any on-screen action, this spontaneous audience response ranges from raucous fits of cheering and applause to singular guffaws and giggles. The work is the product of a deep engagement with its subject matter, the result of countless hours of re-watching and editing to isolate the aural and visual spaces presented on the screen. In its resolute emptiness, the installation addresses the notion of narrative expectation. It creates a ‘nothing-space’, where a viewer can experientially oscillate between a sense of presence and absence, tension and pathos, or even between humour and existential crisis. The work was first exhibited in ‘NEW14’, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne.

Animal Spirits

Animal Spirits is multi-channel video portrait of key personalities involved in the Global Financial Crisis. The four-screen installation displays these twelve decapitated apostles of free-market economic theory in a tableau of droning pontification. Trapped in a purgatorial loop, they endlessly spout vague and obfuscating explanations and defenses of their ideologies and (in)actions. The work takes a creatively quotidian approach to understanding the language of economics and the financial services industry. Through its endless loop of sound, image, and spoken text, the installation examines some of the ideas, narratives and power dynamics that foster and reward hubris and greed.