Music

ISOLATION PROCEDURES Official Selection in Festival Fotogenia 2020 in Mexico.

When I made my video “ISOLATION PROCEDURES”, we were in the early stages of COVID-19 close-down here in South Australia and I wondered what would happen if the laws necessary for restricting the spread of the virus became entrenched in a more authoritarian government regime. With things getting worse around the world on many levels, it seems opportune that my video has been selected for screening at the 2020 Fotogenia International Festival of Film Poetry and Divergent Narratives in Mexico City in November. Rather than subtitling the video in Spanish, I’ve integrated a Spanish version of the text into the video, as part of my long slow project on exploring how text and image can interact. For more information on the festival, follow their Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/FestivalFotogenia

Colony Collapse screens in European festivals

“I am still watching ghosts, eyes rimed with salt, homesick… this was never our natural state, our true inheritance… we should not be here…”

My video Colony Collapse, originally published in Verity La, is an official selection for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, and has been short-listed for the 8th Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition in Cork, Ireland. Both screenings are in November, 2020. It was also screened at Lyra ’20: Bristol Poetry Festival – Poetry and Climate in March, 2020.

The Ferrovores in Atticus Review

My video poem The Ferrovores had been published in leading USA literature magazine Atticus Review. It has since been picked up by Moving Poems (USA) and ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival (Germany) facebook page.

Filmed mostly in the southern Flinders Ranges, it explores the idea of alternative energy sources for food after environmental collapse.

Ferrovores

“this time, this place… beyond open circulation closed reciprocity… closed hydration spheres wrought cast smithed… this is what we are what we eat … “

Iron is the most common metal on earth. Indeed, it forms much of the molten core of the planet which in turn generates the earth’s magnetic poles. The red soils of the world are due to iron. At a biochemical level, iron is essential for human life, amongst other things, making our blood red. In the societal domain, iron is essential for manufacturing, electricity generation, and much more. Certain bacteria can derive energy for life directly from dissolved iron compounds (“rust”) rather than from oxygen as we do. Perhaps, at some time in the future, we, our descendants, the Ferrovores, may need to do the same.

Here is the complete text of The Ferrovores:

.title .basename {set: text=ferrovores; reset @article=the;
lang1=eng;
… Click here for more.

Coming Through at Poetry Film Live

Poetry Film Live, run by Helen Dewberry and Chaucer Cameron, is one of the leading sites for supporting and promoting video poetry in its various forms. They recently have expanded their brief to include performance poetry. So I am very pleased that they have selected my audio-poem Coming Through, a sort of a road trip saga through rural Australia ending up in Sydney. It’s one of my favourite pieces to perform live, especially with the backing track, which I composed and played myself.

Coming Through

ISOLATION PROCEDURES

“WE ARE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE… MAINTAIN YOUR SOCIAL ISOLATION…”

After the pandemic has passed, the lockdowns persist: this is the new normal…

Recorded during the 2020 coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic mostly on location at Sleep’s Hill, Blackwood and Belair, South Australia, under partial lockdown conditions. The audio samples are made from birds, frogs and voices in the immediate neighbourhood. The text samples advice from various government, business and community organisations.

The video is an official selection for Fotogenia, International Festival of Film Poetry and Divergent Narratives (Mexico, November, 2020); selected for New Mediafest 1st Corona Festival and The Wake Up! Memorial (Cologne, Germany, April, 2020); selected for Life in the Time of COVID-19: Fragment 4 (July 2020); and selected for Oblò TV (Cinéma Oblò, Lausanne, Switzerland, May 2020); and has been featured in Moving Poems (USA, April, 2020).

future perfect screens around the world

Amongst all the isolation and angst of COVID-19, some good things are happening… I’m totally amazed that my video future perfect has been selected for five (5!) international video festivals already this year: REELPoetry (Texas); Newlyn Short Film Festival (UK); Carmarthen Bay Film Festival (Wales); FILE Electronic Language International Festival (Sao Paolo, Brazil) and Cadence Video Poetry Festival (Seattle). It was first screened at the 8th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens last year.

Although these all were planned to be live theatre screenings, most of them will end up being on-line, so stay tuned for info as it comes to hand.

Here’s my blurb for the vid – maybe a harbinger of where we are and where we are going…

“Words stripped of their ornamentation, pared back to monosyllabic cores… Are these the roots of language? Or are they the skeletal remains of a lost form of communication? Who is trying to speak here? What exactly are we being told? Perhaps a coded message. More likely, a cry for help…”