Swayers

Large graphic abstract image of Abel Tasman's exploration map of Tasmania, framed by filmstrips and upon which are projected 5 minutes of abstract images. The soundtrack reads that section of Abel Tasman's diary that relates to his landing on 'Van Dieman's Land". The title Swayers relates to the only word that is scratched out in Tasman's diary.

Somewhere else

Faraways, 2012, 10 minMagic Miles, 2014, 15 minTelescope, 2013, 80 minAudrey Lam's films follow people in situations and places familiar to her, them and others they know. Sometimes moments and landscapes are revisited in some way to remember thoughts and time missed.Telescope is a time-lapse of reflections, changes in sunlight of Dirk de Bruyn’s backyard, assembled over 20 years. Telescope starts in Super 8 and ends with digital video, shot mostly while his family were themselves at work, somewhere else. It is an emptied landscape.Audrey Lam was born in Hong Kong and lives in Australia. She studied film and photography at Queensland College of Art. She has participated in art festivals including Next Wave, Otherfilm and Yebisu, and her films have screened at film festivals in London, Rotterdam and Oberhausen. Her work often builds on shared experiences, re-chronicling everyday encounters to reflect on the nuances of place and belonging. She has been developing new work during her Asialink arts residency at Green Papaya Art Projects.Dirk de Bruyn was born in the Netherlands and migrated with his family to Australia in 1958 as young child. He has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation films, videos and performance and installation work over the last 40 years. He was a founding member and past president of MIMA (Experimenta). His book The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art was published in 2014.

Hillegonda: 3 projector performance

Dirk de Bruyn is one of Australia’s most successful and acclaimed abstract animators. His career spans a significant portion of the history of abstract and experimental animation in Australia and his films are as addictive as they are bold and uncompromising examples of the genre. He displays a remarkable ability to learn the lessons gifted us by earlier greats and yet produce a flowing, beautifully realised river of imagery that is all his own. MIAF’s look at the various iterations of de Bruyn’s work continues with this special one-off live performance in which he will utilise three projectors to create an experience that blends a suite of moving image artwork drawn from his practice with an improvised sound track. Hosted by the VCA, this performance is FREE and will take place in VCA’s Founders Gallery at 234 St Kilda Rd just a few short minutes walk from ACMI.

Material damage: 4 projector film performance

Dirk de Bruyn’s expanded cinema performances engage the æsthetics of process at a number of levels. At the core of these performances are several of three- or four-screen, essentially abstract films of the same duration which comment upon and echo each other in a constant interplay of flicker-like positive and negative imagery. The soundtrack of the films works in a related way: the same or similar words and sound fragments are overlayed, or are repeated in an absurd call-and-answer pattern running from one speaker to another. This overall design or formal system is then set into play and relativised in the live event through a number of treatment-techniques. Reels are placed out of order or interspliced with other short films or fragments of found footage or tests, the bulb of one or more projectors can be occasionally turned off while the soundtrack continues, or the projector can be stopped altogether, extending, stretching out or disrupting completely the apparent synchrony between each screen and soundtrack. The light beam of each projector is filtered, distorted, split and multiplied using hand-held colour gels, plastic bottles, prisms and mirrors, or else silhouetted or blocked completely with the artist’s own hands and body. The projectors themselves can be inverted, turned around or physically transported across the space, mixing and overlaying the imagery, animating different areas of the performance environment and transforming the body of the audience itself into a screen medium.

A cavalcade of erasures: an educational audio-visual presentation

Dirk de Bruyn has been creating film works for over 35 years; mostly in the hand-made, 'direct animation' mode. He also performs live with multiple projections of his films in a highly embodied mode of expanded cinema performance. His work is renowned for its intricate, suggestive layering of sound and image, and use of sumptuous, blooming fields of colour.An active participant in our PyR16, Dirk will be discussing his conceptual work, his meticulous creative process, and his particular relationship with the materials, light, space and time both on film and stage, illustrating with some examples.We'll conclude with a Q&A session with the attendants.

Book Review - An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers and Industrialisation in Britain 1940–1970 by Christine Wall and Architecture and the Welfare State, edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel.

Reconstituting the invisible out of structure and repetition: a walk through diary V3.2.

This presentation will discuss the production of an interactive personal diary constructed in digital form as an interactive CD-Rom: Diary V 3.2. This diary was conceived as a digital version of the family photo album of the artist's nuclear family, which unfortunately disintegrated during 4 years of the diary's making. As a result Diary V 3.2 became more a documentation of the mood and state of mind of the maker than the family it began to focus on. It acted more as a trace or a remnant of mood, an artifact of loss. This was communicated not so much through narrative but ideas of loss and erasure. Another layer to this work concerns the migration of images, technique from the old analogue technology to the new digital technology which can act as a replay of the migrant experience.

Dreaming dreaming

These notes explore some of the background, the influences and pre-occupations at play in the construction of my short film Traum A Dream (Australia 6 minutes 2003) that was shown at the 2004 Double Dialogues Conference. This exercise thus places me in that terrain, that double dialogue between theory and practice. As both artist and commentator it also threatens to catch me hovering in that no-man’s land between the written word about the art and the artefact itself, judging my own folly.

Old Tom, new Tom

This presentation will Involve a discussion of Canadian fringe artist Mike Hoolboom's experimental narrative Tom (2002 75 minutes, Digital Video) The presentation will Include a short excerpt and stills from the film Tom is a biography of experimental filmmaker Tom Chomont who tells of his struggle with HIV and Parkinson's disease and disarmingly recounts confronting memories of infanticide, incest, fetishism and death It is how these revelations are innovatively processed through excerpts of Chomont's films, home movies, photos, Images lifted straight form Video Busters, archival and found footage that is so telling it is as If the surface of cinema itself is the body that is being marked and reconstituted and "the personal" forever changed by the Infection of this material Into our psyche.

This work is offered as exemplary evidence of the strong link between an experimental non-narrative cinema that flourishes In North America and new media art

The presentation will touch on the following areas:

> The Innovative marking out of the self In terms relevant to a new media practice.
> The correspondence between this film and media theorist Arthur Kroker's Ideas about panic bodies and excremental culture.
> An examination of erasure and loss In non-narrative forms.
> The historical context of Hoolboom's work as part of a North American experimental tradition and as a shared non-narrative tradition With New Media.

The presentation Will conclude With some comments about the relationship between experimental film and new media In this country and how the failure to Identify this relationship constructively here may have contributed to the current "death of the new" The concept of new media and New Australian Will be contrasted to attain some Insight Into the Ideological underpinnings of "Creative Nation".

Representing traumatic space

This presentation will begin by the screening of Traum a Dream (2003, 7 mins, Digital Video, Sound)

A representation of traumatised space, depicting a person who is consumed by a body of pain, consumed by fire. Slowly something is remembered (Festival Catalogue: Transmediale.03. February 2003).

The screening will allow a discussion of some of the material embedded in and ideas used in the film's construction. This includes Atwood's view of the colony as victim, Peter pan and never-never-land, Kroker's concept of the panicked body as it relates to the cinema of Mike Hoolboom's hyper-collage and also the use of the abstract and repetition to depict the process of remembering, re-ordering and forgetting. It is also suggested that Random Access Memory as a method of information storage in Digital Media can provide a model for the architecture of traumatised space and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.