Physalia

“corzee mol o emarlm eszee … tsnyora snook snay nornse … forcanlows sekmalafair nischniss seconlyaire”

Although Physalia, the Portuguese Man O’ War, with its gas-filled float and tentacles bearing venomous stings, resembles a jellyfish, “like all siphonophores, it is a colonial organism made up of smaller units called zooids.” (Quoted from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physalia)

“Physalia” is derived from a Latin word meaning “bubble” or “bladder”. Its stings (nematocysts) create intense burning pain and its neurotoxins can cause paralysis. 

The “Man O’ War” was a sailing vessel developed by the Portuguese in the 16th Century as a powerful warship, heavily armed with cannons. They were widely used by other European colonialists, including the British, French, Spanish and Dutch, well into the 19th Century. The strength of the Portuguese navy was instrumental in acquiring and maintaining its colonial empire from the 15th Century until the 20th Century when the last remnants of the empire were decolonised. 

Physalia is highly successful organism, widespread across the world’s oceans. Nevertheless, its environment is under increasing threat from pollution and climate change. Its potent armoury of highly toxic stings is no match for this type of attack. Perhaps new forms of cryptic colonial zooids … Click here for more.

The Taken Path at Carrick Hill, Adelaide Festival 2025

The Taken Path: a durational project
Catherine Truman & Ian Gibbins

Controls: 2 channel video, HD, 03:43:45, 2 x 75″ screens, silent (2025)
Peripheries: 4 channel video, HD, 00:58:14, 4 x 43″ screens, silent (2025)
Soundtracks: 2 x 2 channel stereo, 01:00:49 and 01:04:33 (2025)

The Wall Gallery, Carrick Hill House Museum
46 Carrick Hill Drive, Springfield, SA 5062

Wednesday 12th February – Sunday 16th March 2025
Wednesdays – Sundays | 10:00am – 4:30pm

https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/events/the-taken-path

The Carrick Hill estate, nestled in the foothills of Adelaide, presents a conundrum of the delicate connections between humans and the greater environment. Here, pure fantasy and the hard reality of both ancient and present life are encountered at once in a microcosm of the wider world.

At monthly intervals over a year, my long-standing artist friend and collaborator Catherine Truman and I used an iPhone and professional video camera respectively to record our walks along a defined path that traverses the natural and altered landscapes at Carrick Hill. This speculative, durational project was inspired by a poetic idea: what would we notice if we walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and … Click here for more.

“Preening”

“shore-bound by force ten gales we dream about the ones that got away… far from any dimly recollected grasp… a compass misplaced forever…”

I’m very pleased that my video Preening will be streamed on-line as part of the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival on 15th October. I’ve had work there before and they are always really good programs, covering a diverse range of topics and styles.

Preening is a strange, slow meditative piece, using a single sequence of seabirds (Crested Terns, Thalasseus bergii cristatus) waiting out a storm on a beach at Marion Bay, South Australia. As they quietly preen, they wonder about their increasingly imperilled future in the face of climate change.

The footage has been slowed down using a frame-blending algorithm that occasionally creates interesting distortions. The sequence was then overlaid on itself with a time shift of several seconds using a complex composting procedure so the birds appear to be interacting with themselves.

The text adapted is from Lessons in Neuroscience, Lesson 1: Phantom Limb, originally published in my 2012 collection urban biology.

Thesaurus of Reconstructive Microscopy

“Our peripheral vision eclipsed, 
travel plans well circumscribed, 
darkness encroaches, binds.”

The Microscope Project was a major installation / exhibition at the Flinders University Art Museum & City Gallery, 26th July – 21st September, 2014, in Adelaide, South Australia, featuring work by Ian Gibbins, Catherine Truman, Deb Jones, Angela Valamanesh and Nicholas Folland, curated by Fiona Salmon and Madeline Reece.

For much of his time at Flinders University, Ian managed the main microscopy research facility, contained divers kinds of sophisticated microscopes. In 2012, several old scanning electron microscopes, some fluorescence microscopes, and other ancillary equipment were decommissioned. Once state-of-the-art, they were now largely dysfunctional and no longer practically operational. However, they had long histories of contributing to internationally-recognised research into the nervous and cardiovascular systems, the gut, and much more.

… and then there was all their supporting documentation: schematic diagrams and plans, manuals, advertising brochures, catalogues, certifications of performance, packing lists.

Although much of the equipment had been disassembled down to their component parts, it was all to valuable to be dumped for scrap. There were many more stories to be told about these instruments. Perhaps we could re-imagine their pasts, their futures, the people who had made them, … Click here for more.

Types of Rain

"Types of Rain
    1. Outside the range of normal atmospheric conditions:
             (a) recently discovered caves
             (b) anti-cyclones on Mars
             (c) water columns, three kilometres deep…"

We have just come off the hottest year on record with extreme weather events dominating the news cycles. The scientists tell us that we are close to climate tipping points, where there will be disproportionate consequences of small additional changes in global temperatures. Already we are seeing prolonged droughts, unprecedented hot spells, widespread floods, and more. Meanwhile, the polar ice caps and alpine glaciers are melting at increasing rates. Underlying all these changes is water as it cycles between the atmosphere and the oceans via ever changing patterns of rainfall.

As these weather patterns fracture and distort in the face of accelerating climate change, how do we define the types of rain than have come and gone, maybe never to return? How do we understand a future when we have failed to comprehend the past?

This video was assembled from footage obtained mostly around Adelaide, its hills, and the coastal regions of South Australia, supplemented with some sequences from coastal regions of Victoria and New South Wales. Unlike many of my videos, all the scenes … Click here for more.

DEMOLISHED

Is it possible to have a one-word poem?

Very short forms of poetry have a long history. Perhaps the best known are haiku, which in their classic English form consist of only three lines with a total of 17 syllables. But then there are 6-word poems, a popular form of extremely compressed writing. Visual poetry and concrete poetry is often based around a single word, perhaps with its multiple variations.

For me, one of the primary attractions of video art is that I can create visual worlds that do not exist in real life. The roles of juxtaposition, movement, and the tension between familiarity and strangeness in the visual domain act like metaphor and allusion in written poetry. When audio is added, we gain an additional dimension within which ambiguity, shifting mood and rhythmic energy can inhabit.

My video DEMOLISHED was created for a group exhibition curated by Tony Kearney at The Packing Shed, Hart’s Mill, Port Adelaide, South Australia, as part of the 2024 Adelaide Fringe Festival. None of the scenes in the video exist in real life. Every one of them has been composited and, in some cases animated, from multiple images recorded in the immediate area around … Click here for more.

Eviction screens at Carmarthen Bay

“We have been ordered to leave. They told us our lease has expired. Their cast-offs litter our landscapes. We have our ways of keeping out of sight. These are our microrefugia…”

I’m absolutely delighted that my video Eviction has been selected for the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival for 2024, screening in Wales in May. This is a very fine festival indeed where I’ve been fortunate to have work screened previously.

The video took over three years to make after I had the original idea. Nearly all of this footage was recorded in the Belair area of unceded Kaurna Land in South Australia. Much of it was filmed among the native plants in our own garden, with key elements recorded in Belair National Park and the Sleeps Hills Quarry reserve across the street from our place.

The music is in 11/4 time and includes samples of birds, frogs, machines, engines and alarms in and around the environments where the videos were recorded.

As human-induced global climate change threatens the viability of nearly every ecosystem on earth, small refuges, the microrefugia, may provide safe havens for the organisms that can successfully survive there. Small plants, fungi and species yet to evolve may … Click here for more.