Poetry

Videos screen in three Portuguese festivals!

November is a big month for my videos, with screenings all around the world (!!) As part of the mix, I have work showing in three different curated video art festivals in Portugal.

Image Play III – International Video Art Festival curated by Hernando Urrutia runs on-line from Madeira on 4/5th November 2021. It includes epithelium, made with Catherine Truman and Angela Chappell, and SPSS, one of my earlier animated, computer voiced pieces. The first session can be viewed on Youtube here and the second session here.

Transborda III – QTV International Video Art Installation, curated by Alberto Guerriero as part of the 7th Festival of Literature and Cinema in Alcobara, running from 1-21 November. I have two videos here, ISOLATION PROCEDURES and future perfect. The installation here is really beautiful, with multiple screens allowing the viewer to move between different parts fo the program: click here to see an overview of it.

Fonland International Festival of Video Art and Performance, runs in Coimbra from 5-27 November, and screens The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself made with Tasos Sagris and Whodoes.

The Life We Live… and after-image at Tranås At The Fringe International Arts Festival

Two of my videos The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself, made in collaboration with Tasos Sagris and Whodoes, and after-image are official selections at the 2021 Tranås At The Fringe International Arts Festival running 16-24 November 2021 in Sweden. I was interviewed film festival curator, Laura Bianco, about these videos, how I made them and theoretical or scientific underpinnings. Both videos explore the notion of uncertain narrators, with shifting voices, perspectives, and time lines in environments that are disturbingly a little off-kilter and disorienting. Indeed, as I explain in the interview, nearly every scene in each of the videos has been composted from multiple elements: almost nothing is as it seems in real life.

TRANSBORDA III – Q-TV: the response of video art to the quarantine times

TRANSBORDA III Q-TV: the response of video art to the quarantine times is part of the Festival of Books and Movies – Alcobaça in Portugal, 1-21 November, 2021. Curated by Alberto Guerreiro, the event features a diverse international line-up of video artists. Amongst so many good friends and colleagues, I’m delighted that two of my videos are on the program: ISOLATION PROCEDURES and future perfect. I also have a component in the international collaborative project, Chant for a Pandemic by Dee Hood.

ISOLATION PROCEDURES was recorded during the 2020, mostly on location at Sleep’s Hill, Blackwood, and Belair, South Australia, where I live, 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. “WE ARE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE… MAINTAIN YOUR SOCIAL ISOLATION…” After the pandemic has passed, the lockdowns persist: this is the new normal…

In future perfect, we see and hear 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 … Click here for more.

The Extreme Politics of Adaptive Endosymbiosis

This is the Post-Anthropocene. This is a dystrophic climate of floodtides and wildfires. This is a coercive politics of surveillance and self-mutable technology. This is a degenerate ecosystem of engineered life forms, synthetic symbionts, neo-genetic humans dependent on novel microbial metabolisms. We adapt to extreme heat, extreme wind, extreme salt. We harvest oxygen. We feed on iron and sulphur. We are bound by physics and chemistry. We must follow the rules…

Endosymbiosis is the evolutionary phenomenon whereby one organism lives within another for the mutual benefit of both. Our mitochondria that provide us with our all energy need via the oxidative metabolism of sugars are derived from endosymbiont bacteria. Chloroplasts that convert sunlight to energy in plants are also derived from bacterial endosymbionts. At some stage in the future we may be engineered to host bacterial symbionts that can metabolise iron or sulphur or nitrogen to supplement our dwindling energy sources.

The Extreme Politics of Adaptive Endosymbiosis presents a combination of high-definition 10K video, industrial audio, and live vocal performance developed specifically for the giant LED screens of The Lab, Adelaide, South Australia. Source material includes my videos depicting dystopian cities, damaged habitats, and readapted life forms; massively re-processed audio … Click here for more.

5 videos officially selected for the 2021International Migration & Environmental Film Festival

The International Migration and Environmental Film Festival is a not-for-profit cultural organisation that raises awareness about migration and environmental issues through the wonderful medium of film. 

“IMEFF is dedicated to presenting the best of international film, documentary, photo, and artwork that captures migration, trafficking, refugees, pollution, habitat loss, climate change, to educate, entertain, inform and encourage conversations, provokes debate about changes, innovation, sustainability and how to make the world a better place for every creature. 

The aim of the festival is to raise awareness, encourage discussion and inspire people on a diverse range of important migration and environmental issues and to reshape a divisive narrative using film and the arts.

During the festival, there are opportunities for officially selected projects and filmmakers / artists to participate in screenings and discussions with the audience from non-governmental organisations, embassies, ministries, high school, and college-level students.”

So I am delighted that IMEFF has officially selected five (5!!) of my videos for Short Film section of this year’s event: colony collapse, floodtide, The Exclusion Principle, A Captain’s and homeless.

The Festival screens on-line 9-16 October 2021.

Videos screening in Latin America

Latin America currently has strong culture of experimental video and video art. These festivals feature a wide range of challenging and innovative work. They also actively create an engaged community of artists. So I’ve been delighted to have several videos screened recently in film festivals in Latin America:
• floodtide – official selection 7th Concepción Independent Film Awards (Chile, August, 2021);
• Warranty and Conditions of Use – official selection, 6th Canal de Panama International Film Festival (Panama, August, 2021);
• Epithelium; The Life We Live is Not Life Itself; and Isolation Procedures – official selections, Nahui Ollin Film Festival 2021 (Durango, Mexico, August – September, 2021).

Isolation Procedures has previously been an official selection for Fotogenia, International Festival of Film Poetry and Divergent Narratives (Mexico, November, 2020) and Helios Sun Poetry Film Festival (Mexico, December, 2020). future perfect and unvoiced were official selections at FILE Electronic Language International Festival (Sao Paolo, August, 2020).

Most festivals request subtitles in English, which is not an issue for my video poems, since the text is an integral part the video design itself. However, some of these festivals have asked for subtitles in Spanish. The challenge here has been, first, to … Click here for more.

accidentals (recalculated) at Bologna in Lettere 10th edition

… the probability that accidents do happen, if you slip and fall, fly too close to the sun, if your car runs off the road, if you cut your finger, miss a secret assignation, catch (or not) a slip of the tongue, when words fail, when all you have left is abstraction, operators, a lasting approximation, a mathematician’s code … 

I’m really delighted that my video accidentals (recalculated) has been selected for the International Review of Poetry, Videopoetry and Video-Art for the special on-line 10th edition of Bologna in Lettere, screening on 4th August 2021, curated by Enzo Campi.

This video started out life as a more-or-less standard poem. But then I realised that I could replace many of the verbs, prepositions, conjunctions and other linguistic elements with mathematical operators or symbols used in algebra, statistic,computing and engineering. The implementation of these operators and symbols in the piece is all internally consistent, so that a given symbol always means the same thing. Video was the ideal way to integrate the new text with the original poem via the voice-over. Most of the images were filmed in and around my home in South Australia.