Empire

Empire re-animates found historic stereographic photographs predominantly of Melbourne’s city centre between 1927 and 1940 when the colonial trace was slowly receding. Melbourne’s main Flinder’s Street Intersection is unsettlingly transformed into a Cubist perceptual maelstrom through repetition and flicker.

The house that eye live in

Migrating by sea from Holland as an eight-year-old, Dirk de Bruyn went on to be a doyen of Australian experimental cinema. But as this intimate film reveals, his work is suffused with the trauma of migration, and the struggle to recognise himself as a ‘new Australian'. In conversation with documentarian Steven McIntyre, Dirk guides us through more than 40 years of his filmmaking: the early years exploring technique and technology, a subsequent phase of unflinching self-examination brought on by upheaval and overseas travel, and more recent projects where he attempts a fusion of personal, cultural, and historical identity. What emerges is an inspiring, rugged, and at times poignant portrait of an artist committed to self-expression and self-discovery through the medium of film. The House That Eye Live In features spectacular footage of Dirk's renowned expanded-cinema performances, and newly transferred excerpts from his extensive filmography, some of which are seen here for the first time.

Projection art

Array

Insights from Arakawa and Gins' Table

Within the four-day festival organised by Keane, j., Prohm, A. and Manning, E. called "The Proceeding Procedure: Festival of In/Confluence"there was an evening of performances, reading, improvisation and films curated by Alan Prohm and Mike Hornblow, I was invited to read from my current writing within this evening's program.

Jondi Keane, Alan Prohm, Erin Manning (2014): organisers and curators

Keane, Prohm and Manning organised performative process for collecting and assembling materials for a publication. The event/process focused on work related to and inspired by the work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. the festival will be held over 4 days at the Glasshouse in Brooklyn (4-7 June, 12-5pm). The publication, planned for release in 2015/16, is being imagined as a print + digital document an/archiving this moment of movement around – and going forward with – the work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. This book will be dedicated to Arakawa and Madeline, with special tribute to Madeline, whose own last book, "Alive forerever, not if but when", will be coming out in 2015/6.

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.

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.

Spatial design 3.0

Spatial Design 3.0 forms a new dialogue between the artist and design artefacts, lens-based practice and the entanglements of contemporary critical theory. The artist was invited to exhibit at the Peninsula Art Gallery in Plymouth, UK at the Envelop Exhibition as part of the UK Festival of Design 2015. The artwork involves wire, photography, printing, mark making, typography and patterns negotiated and frozen within spatial arrangements. These elements are manipulated as a means to engage the traditional tools and instruments of art and design methodology in contemporary practice. The work was published and internationally distributed in the accompanying catalogue.

Woven

Woven was a visual exploration of 'Bloodlines' in the Australian landscape aligned with practice-led methodology exploring an intersection of landscape/archaeology and immersive performance.

After Skye Gellmann’s “Snow”

J. Patrick Lewis calls poetry ‘a circus for the brain’. After watching Skye Gellmann’s ‘Snow’, a circus performance at the 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival, I found that the only way I could respond was through poetry. While my intentions no longer matter once the reader’s eyes balance down these lines, the poem attempts to offer a sense of what it was like to witness Gellmann’s stunning acrobatic performance. Just as contortion bends and flexes the body into unconventional forms, this poem endeavours to offer an alternative version of the traditional prose review.