Occupy this: a dialogic derive

This dialogue is the text-based component of an evolving performative multi-media lecture. By re-reading Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, in relation to the global Occupy movement and the rise of social media, we ask: in what ways does the proliferation of digital imagery enable and limit this recent form of political activism? By subjectively responding to selective quotations from Debord's writing, we link the triumvirate of global capitalism, public space and digital technology, producing commentary on the displacement imposed by contemporary 'spectacular' technologies, the networked 'technical image' and the politics of public space.

Microscopic / telescopic (universes unfold)

This exhibition was inspired by lens based observation; what is observed through the microscope – plankton and single cell organisms – finds its origin in what is observed through the telescope – stars and galaxies. The project explores two spatially divergent contexts. Artist, Melinda Capp explores the micro-scopic with porcelain objects, artist books and images derived microscopes and Daniel Armstrong references the macro-scopic with video, photography, lens based objects and installation of interactive sculpture / optical instruments to create an experiential connection between celestial phenomena/images and the viewer.

The performance of trauma in moving image art

With reference to recent neurological research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using new imaging technologies and models of implicit and explicit memory systems developed from this research, The Performance of Trauma in Moving ...

Neil Taylor’s experimental animation

This paper explores from a phenomenological perspective the work of Australian Experimental Animator Neil Taylor (1945-), works situated between animation, performance and sculpture. Taylor’s animated scribbling repetitively and automatically inscribe the surfaces of flipbooks or note pads (Short Lives (1980-90)) and cash register rolls (Roll Film 1990 and Copy Copy 1998) often enhanced by hand-made ‘machines’ designed to facilitate and shape this idiosyncratic activity. Taylor’s work is informed by his successful wire-based sculptural practice and his 20 years experience of teaching animation to tertiary students and 8 years previously in the Australian Technical School system (a system that has since been dismantled but for which these animations remain as an aesthetic trace). His work can be generally situated inside an avant-garde project ‘that continues to explore the physical properties of film and the nature of perceptual transactions which take place between viewer and film.’ (John Hanhardt, 1976: 44) This is performative research into the minutiae of the moving image and its ability to register body gesture. Hanhardt, John G. (1976) The Medium Viewed: The American Avant-Garde Film. A History of American Avant-Garde Cinema. New York, American federation of the Arts.

Partially digested

program Notes: Projecting the untrammelled intensities of human experience via an array of photo-chemical, optical and vocal means. To convey the force of feeling symptomatic of everyday life under post colonial capitalism in the space of the transplant, de Bruyn harnesses the energies of multiple 16mm projectors, hand-made filmstrips and his own, somewhat disturbing vocalised stream of consciousness. This is materialism stripped back, bleached, bitten, chewed, partially digested and possibly rejected; discarded.

Scanning Animafest: the 24th Animafest

Animafest’s 24th iteration in Zagreb, Croatia brought two innovations. The Animafest Scanner Symposium and the third outdoor screening at the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU), both noted by Daniel Šuljić, the Festival director, in his introduction to the festival’s dense and detailed catalogue. The amount of quality animation and the array of technique on display in the specialist showcases, the student and competition programs overwhelmed. So many sweets, so many bitter pills, so much technical innovation in search and in service of the human condition.

Marking time: duration as subject (Tony Woods)

Tony Woods: Archive, edited by Andrew Gaynor and published locally in 2013, records the durability of the artist’s primary painting practice as will as his filmmkaing, a painting practice in which he has accrued a level of prestige over many years and changes of circumstance.

Lynsey Martin: A case study in 1970s Australian experimental animation

Lynsey Martin’s short experimental Animations remain largely unknown internationally. His graphic 16mm films Approximately Water (4 minutes 1972), Whitewash (1973, 4 minutes), Interview (25 minutes 1973) and Leading Ladies (1975 5 minutes) are analysed for their technique and cultural position, artifacts of a productive if marginalized period of artist made films. These graphic films stand as critical works at the heart experimental filmmaking in Australia and speak through their design and production method to current trends in digital media. Martin’s work includes the use of collage and its erasure, the grain of the photographic image and handpainting and drawing imagery directly on the film surface. Martin deals with the graphic and material elements of the filmstrip, the nature of filmic movement and the nature of photography in public space. For martin his films deal with films deal abstraction and illusionism, elements of chance, the deconstruction of film language, the diary film and process as content. These films stand as historic aesthetic traces of an immediate hands-on approach to image making that came into crisis in Australia through the disappearance of technical education in the 1980s when Martin taught graphic design in technical schools.

No photography please

Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek to create new ways of seeing by staging a variety of interventions into the material makeup of celluloid. Handmade artists tattoo film’s skin not only with scratches and paint, but also with blood, dirt, paper, candy, sand, nail polish remover, and seawater. Seeking media not normally found in a filmmaker or artist’s studio, they mine their own bodies and backyards for things to make into moving images.

This program highlights rarely-seen works of artisanal film production from the Coop’s collection. Some of the works are wonderfully constructive, building up the visual surface of the film by combining found footage with painterly abstraction. Others are destructive, subjecting film to a variety of elemental and material stresses. Taken together, these films not only exhibit the diversity of handmade practices and concerns, they also provide a framework for rethinking how cinema can be made through its unmaking.

In other words, handmade cinema—in concept, material, and execution—is counter-cinema.

Abstract & experimental animation – A century of innovation

This compact history of 100 years of abstract and experimental animation in Australia spans the earliest cameraless classics through to modern examples of what’s happening in the vibrant VJ scene. Australian animators and experimental filmmakers have been as innovative as anybody when it comes to creating abstract animation. This history is more elongated than many people believe, in part due to the inherent lack of commercial or popular screening opportunities for much of this sort of filmmaking. This program showcases a rich collection of films from this most elemental of all animation genres. It will be introduced by a small panel of filmmakers who will contextualise this history and explain its future.

Knights moves

This essay examines how the found footage films of Martin Arnold (Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 1998) and Peter Tscherkassky (Outer Space, 1999 and Dream Work, 2002) can be read as a belated response to Peter Wollen’s 1970s splitting of the avant-garde. Wollen’s tactical move, his article The Two Avant-gardes (Wollen, 1975 and revised in 1982) marked a historic moment when both critics and artists gained easy access to the film editing-machine for both film analysis and reflexive film production respectively. Wollen’s text asserted differences between a political and formalist avant-garde, opening up a space between structuralist/materialist film and feminist film theory and its counter-cinema. This move enabled Laura Mulvey and other Cine-Feminists to eschew formalism in favor of a political feminist counter–cinema and further, as part of its move into the academy, to develop and enlist Textual Analysis as a tool for uncovering the patriarchal ideologies at the heart of Hollywood melodrama.

2nd hand cinema

Image of scratched frames from 16mm film, reframed and published as stand-alone image