Neil Taylor’s experimental animation: the technical habitus as aesthetic trace

This essay examines Neil Taylor’s (1945-) animations, situated between the moving image, performance and sculpture and in the shadows of his recognised wire-based sculptural practice. Taylor’s animations automatically inscribe the surfaces of flipbooks and note pads, (Short Lives 1980-90) cash register rolls (Roll Film 1990) and are enhanced by hand-made ‘machines’ (Copy Copy 1998) designed to shape this idiosyncratic activity. These short films are part of 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). Taylor’s practice is additionally placed, through Vilem Flusser’s ‘technical image’ in relation to the ascendancy of digital culture, and Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ is used to frame both Taylor’s art and teaching practice, in order to examine the discounting of the technical classes that these fields of production consistently perform.

Dissociation

Dissociation is an abstract materialist film that has migrated from 16mm film to the digital. It is made up of scratches, half-baked images and flicker. The film explores the tension between the image, the written text and the spoken word and the consequent struggle for meaning. A report on the anti-social nature of corporate space inspired by the first non-sense poem “The Great Lalula” by Christian Morgenstern.

New Australian

Found Footage document that explores the implicit racism inside the 1950's term 'New Australian", used to describe migrants to Australia in the 1950s.

Gidal's materialist film

This paper belatedly re-evaluates Peter Gidal’s texts Materialist Film (1989) and Structural Film Anthology (1976) for contemporary use within digital media moving image production. Materialist film’s direct methods reproduce Abstract Expressionism’s essentialism in painting and sculpture and can be related to Samuel Beckett’s minimalism, of which Gidal has also written. Gidal’s texts are recounted in relation to the splitting of the avant-garde in two by Peter Wollen in 1975, a move that subjugated materialist film in favour of an emergent feminist counter cinema.

In praise of the everyday

The following forgotten text is flawed. It is a failure. It has many mistakes but few regrets. It was written 20 years ago and first appeared in the Melbourne Super 8 Group Newsletter Issue 135 in May 1998, 25 years after I solarized my first 25 feet of 16mm film of the Carlton Cemetery fence, just down the road from Goodtime Studios and did my first bit of sepia toning in a Russian processing tank that still lies with its warped plastic spiral in my garage in suburban Melbourne. As Pearls Before Swine sang in one of their songs, a faint memory now; 'The More things change, the more they stay the same'. They were not the first to say this. Technology continues to develop massively and the rubble of its passing slowly recedes to invisibility. I continue to live through this conundrum every day. It sings me to sleep. It wakes me up.

Thresh, hold

Thresh, hold reviews an illustrated oral history of the impact of industrialization and its decline on a regional metropolis. This discullsion's primary focus are the photographic collections of Charles Daniel Pratt and Wolfgang Sievers.

Two films by Jean-Claude Bustros

Jean-Claude Bustros’ La queue tigrée d’un chat comme un pendentif de pare-brise (1983-1989) and Zéro Gravité (1990) mark an ethical endpoint of the scientific revolution so critical to growing up in the 60s and 70s, when the triumph of scientific thinking delivered both a trip to the moon and the atom bomb, all colonized and framed by an American voice and all part of the re-processed content available in these films.

The tragi-comedy Down Under appropriates Cronulla rather than offering insight

Review of the new Australian feature film Down Under.

A tissue of denials: film retrospective (1979-2016)

My abstract moving image making has provided a foundation for my practice since I first started processing and solarizing my own 16mm film in one of those LOMO Russian processing tanks in 1973. Feyers, Zoomfilm (1976) and Running (1976) rework some of those early strips of black and white film. Whenever funding dried up I always fell back on my abstract direct on film work. It was cheap. Like knitting, it gave me a space to process the dilemmas and incongruities of daily life and to escape its clutches. I also began to understand that these forces were still there, embedded implicitly in the work. Now, more than ever, I understand this as a survival response to corporate doublespeak. I would never throw anything away. New scratching, painting, taping or bleaching strategies could be added later. Intensive cluster editing of single frames became an obsession. The translated difference between what you saw over a light-box and what was projected drew me in. Like the migrant position I was allocated from childhood I survived in the space between these two territories. As well as an archive of images and movement I collect optical effects. The flash frame. The trail of afterimages resulting from flickering between positive and negative images. At their liveliest these images float above the screen. Now the digital allows me to amplify the material presence of 16m and 35mm film and a whole new world opens up before me. I cobble together found footage films from my own archive of discarded data and unfinished sentences.

Summer reading series #2 : seeing eye to eye

Martin Rumsby’s Eye I Aye (2007) appears a straightforward, almost naive film. A camera is zoomed into a flat image of a community bench in front of a shop, with cars and some pedestrians passing by. It could be any suburban street. At times the de-facto main characters Dida and Erana or their surrogates are seated there, both are of mixed race from Māori and Pākehā parents and the soundtrack frames their ‘history’. This meditation is interrupted by the weather, with sheets of raindrops caught by the camera’s autofocus, patterning the window, wiping out the outside scene. Later Rumsby also inserts his body and face between the camera and window, his eyes in shot re-securing the camera’s position. This technical tampering registers as unsettling and suspicious.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation: violence, delusion and the question of guilt

If you want your cinema neatly wrapped with a bow on top by the time you walk out of the theatre, then Sotiris Dounoukos’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2016) is not for you. The events that this film portrays will keep working on you, testing your thinking on truth and fantasy, probing where you sit ethically in relation to mental illness, manslaughter, and its complicit witnessing.

Re-processing The Mystical Rose

This essay explores the animation practice of Australian filmmaker Michael Lee, whose career spans the late 60s to the present. His notoriously dissident and innovative feature length work The Mystical Rose (1976, 65 minutes) is the primary focus, the fulcrum point of an analysis balanced by a review of his earlier shorter formative films, his cultural milieu, the thinkers that shaped his youth and particularly his changing relation to the Catholic Church. This relationship with Christianity has gone full circle through a critical rejection, worked through in The Mystical Rose, to a re-embrace in his later films Turnaround (1983, 60 mins) and The Contemplation of the Cross (1989, 27 minutes). This trajectory is understood here in relation to Magic Realism, Michael Bakhtin’s conception of the ‘Carnivalesque’ and Surrealism. What is of particular interest historically for animation is Lee’s pioneering innovative combination of animation with live action documentation, conveying both inner and outer realities, and mapping the relationships between them.

Mobile Architecture and Built Environment Laboratory (MABEL) - a building performance evaluation tool

This paper describes the Mobile Architecture and Built Environment Laboratory (MABEL) and its application for systematic building performance evaluation for compliance testing, commissioning, strategic and operational facility management and continuous improvement in the built environment.

The first part of the paper introduces the application areas of on-site building performance evaluation and discusses the shortcomings in this regard in current practice. It emphasises the need for on-site investigations to generate information on 'as built performance' for the 'feedback' loop between design, operation and occupancy of new buildings, retrofit or adjustment.

The second part introduces the Energy-Comfort-Behaviour Framework for 'across-the-board' building evaluation and discusses MABEL's role in this scheme. MABEL's objectives, procedures and the performance measurement matrix are explained and discussed.

Towards a digital representation of physical phenomena to assess comfort in future environments

This paper presents the concept and a test implementation of a digital representation of the physical world designed to assess comfort quality in
future environments. An integrated set of physical phenomena is modeled three-dimensionally to investigate the dynamic behavior of design objects
holistically.

The formulation supports the integration of computational simulation in the performance-based design process. It employs the principles of
geometrical and physical selfcontainedness to avoid that complex geometrical and physical circumstances have to be specified at design time. The concepts of congeneric cells and congeneric conjunctions are
introduced to simulate various physical phenomena simultaneously with a uniformly structured set of equations.

The concept, the prototype implementation and selected test cases are presented. Although it was not possible to implement all features and model parts completely, the research and the discussion of its achievements make valuable contributions towards more effective integration of computational simulation in the performance-based design process.