Then I let you

In this video, a male voice recites a teenage love poem. Words flash on screen in time with the spoken words. Sometimes the two sets of words match, and sometimes they differ. This work examines processes of signification. It emphasizes disruption and disconnection as fundamental and generative operations in making meaning. Extending on post-structural and deconstructionist ideas, this work questions the relationship between written and spoken words. By actively disrupting the sincerity of a teenage love poem, it questions the sites and mechanisms of comprehension, poetry and signification.

The feeling

In this video, a thumping house-music track is accompanied by lines of rotating text, which resemble computer screen-savers. The text is sourced from websites offering tips for dating and seducing potential lovers. This work engages with the language of online forums. It reworks text from online advice forums and mixes them with visual codes of computer graphics. By extending on some of Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas around ‘postproduction’ and the creative and critical strategies of ‘editing’, it offers new speculative perspectives on the relationship between screen realities, desire and romance.

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.

The switch

In this video, text types across the screen one line at a time set to an emotive stock music soundtrack. The text combines two teen film plot descriptions into one story. This work engages with the language of Hollywood narratives. By emphasizing the potentially abstract and convoluted qualities of linguistic communication, it challenges our capacity to assimilate information into conventional narratives. It draws specific attention to the conventions of Hollywood plot development, and questions the mechanisms by which they construct and communicate meaning.

Selling James Bond : product placement in the James Bond films

The character of James Bond for many people is intrinsically linked in their minds with particular brands – Aston Martin, Bollinger, Omega, Smirnoff vodka, and so on. This direct association between character and brand highlights the intrinsic role of product placement in the film industry, and in the James Bond films in particular. Selling James Bond: Product Placement in the James Bond Films provides a comprehensive overview of the history of product placement in the James Bond series – charting the progression of the practice and drawing direct correlations to significant cultural and historical events that impacted upon the number and types of products incorporated into the series. While primarily a financial arrangement, it is also important that the practice of product placement be examined and understood in relation to these cultural contexts, an area of research so far largely ignored by academic study. Through extensive content analysis of the official James Bond film series, as well as utilising directors’ commentary and industry reports, this book illustrates the strong impact specific cultural and historical events have had on the practice of product placement in the series. In doing so, it provides an exciting and in-depth “behind the scenes” look at the James Bond film series, and its complicated and sometimes contentious history of product placement. In the process, it charts the gradual emergence of product placement from the more traditional background shot to becoming so embedded in the actual film narrative that they have become simply yet another method for filmmakers to produce cultural meaning.

People, content, location : sweet spotting urban screens for situated engagement

A growing body of research is looking at ways to bring the processes and benefits of online deliberation to the places they are about and in turn allow a larger, targeted proportion of the urban public to have a voice, be heard, and engage in questions of city planning and design. Seeking to take advantage of the civic opportunities of situated engagement through public screens and mobile devices, our research informed a public urban screen content application DIS that we deployed and evaluated in a wide range of real world public and urban environments. For example, it is currently running on the renowned urban screen at Federation Square in Melbourne. We analysed the data from these user studies within a conceptual framework that positions situated engagement across three key parameters: people, content, and location. We propose a way to identify the sweet spot within the nexus of these parameters to help deploy and run interactive systems to maximise the quality of the situated engagement for civic and related deliberation purposes.

Hankering

As a man and woman take turns reciting their favourite simple pleasures, text fades in and out on screen. The visible words, which float against a starscape, are approximations and variations of those being spoken. As the video progresses, the voices and the correlating texts start to overlap slightly. What at first seems to be a testiment to small, saccharine satisfactions starts to become a passive-aggressive race for modest contentment. Rubbing the fine line between sweet and sour, “Hankering” plays with the indirect messages that float through our desires, relationships and the languages we use to communicate them.

Auric Variations

A female voice softly recites physical and psychological associations of aura colours. On screen, individual words fade in and out rhythmically amid a field of swirling and morphing colours. The animated words correlate with the words being spoken, but not every word is displayed, therefore enabling an alternative range of verbal associations to emerge. “Auric Variations” plays with the mix of affirmation and anxiety that can underscore contemporary subjective experiences and the new age techniques we sometimes used to understand them.

Outlook

This wall-mounted sculpture features eight photographic prints displayed on a computer monitor mounting system. The eight panels each swivel and articulate separately. Together, they combine to create an abstract landscape based on a desktop background image of an idyllic tropical setting. Recalling the workstation of a futures trader, logistics manager, or design guru, the screen armature draws out the simultaneously romantic and vacuous characteristics of the imagery. By combining the visual languages of both physical and on-screen desktop environments with the pictorial traditions of landscape and abstraction, this work questions how and where we deploy nature, desire and wonderment in our increasingly technologised lives.

The drift

In this video, text floats on screen amidst a field of swirling coloured orbs and a stock music soundtrack. The text is sourced from Internet dating websites and combine into a single animated portrait charting an array of likes, dislikes, influences, beliefs and hobbies. This work examines the nature of consciousness and identity in a contemporary context. It reworks the languages of Internet dating websites to question how we construct and communicate our sense of self. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theoretical work on “liquid modernity”, this work presents an exaggerated take on contemporary identity that emphasizes its construction through consumer tastes, lifestyle choices and relationships with popular culture.

Spin

“Spin” borrows idioms and metaphors from sports commentary and squeezes them into a single emotional rollercoaster. Accompanied by a driving soundtrack, text appears and disappears one word at a time. As the work progresses, multiple words fade in and out at the same time, filling the screen and testing our ability to read and assimilate these well-worn phrases. On the one hand, the work mimes some of what we enjoy about sport – its ability to take us to another place, to incite passion and emotion, and to enable us to share in common experiences, goals and desires. On the other hand, it plays up the hyperbolic language often associated with sports broadcasting. The very language that helps take us to another place, incite passion and make us feel part of something bigger than ourselves, is pushed to its extreme and starts to burst at the seams. This work was commissioned for “Kick Off: contemporary video art program” at Metricon Stadium, Gold Coast, and supported by Project Services, Department of Public Works, Queensland Government.

Outward-looking Australian cinema

Over the last twenty years or so, Australian cinema's international relations in production and policy have expanded and become more complex, while those with Hollywood have been transformed. The boundaries of the national cinema stretch much further than the national territory. Australian production and postproduction companies work in Australia with international partners or on international projects. In this article I will trace some of the material and discursive entailments of this new international turn to explore how dynamic and shifting relations between the local/national and the international have transformed the ways in which we might think about what constitutes Australian cinema, and to illustrate how relations of commonality and continuity with the international called up in the new arrangements challenge the dominant articulation in policy of difference from 'other kinds of filmmaking' as the basis of Australian cinema. I draw on Deb Verhoeven's work on simultaneously national and international films and filmmakers, and adapt Doreen Massey's concept of 'outwardlookingness' to consider Australian cinema's international aspects.

Cinematic and televisual cities

This article introduces the nine articles that comprise the 'Cities' issue of Studies in Australasian Cities. Established and emerging scholars explore cities in Australian and New Zealand film and television. Articles cover aspects of media production, reception and exhibition in particular cities, studies of various city characters and spaces, and analyses of the relationship between representations of a city on-screen and the 'real' city.

Locomotives and stargates : inner‐city studio complexes in Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto

This article examines the place of large studio complexes in plans for the regeneration of inner-city areas of Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto. Recent developments in each city are placed in the context of international audiovisual production dynamics, and are considered in terms of the ways they intersect with a range of policy thinking. They are at once part of particular urban revitalisation agendas, industry development planning, city branding and image-making strategies, and new thinking about film policy at national and sub-national levels. The article views studio complexes through four frames: as particular kinds of studio complex development; as 'locomotives' driving a variety of related industries; as 'stargates' enabling a variety of transformations, including the remediation of contaminated, derelict or outmoded land controlled by public authorities or their agents close to the centre of each city; and as components of the entrepreneurial, internationally oriented city.