Science

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.

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.

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.

The Ferrovores at the 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens

The 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens is on-line this year. The program is large, diverse and guaranteed to be amazing. I’m delighted my video The Ferrovores is part of this.

This is now the 5th consecutive year I’ve been part of this Festival. Hopefully, next year we will be able to visit Athens again for the 10th Festival.

The Ferrovores – The Iron Eaters – explores a future where we subsist on rusted iron, using metabolic pathways symbiotically acquired form bacteria.

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

Colony Collapse at Broto Art-Climate-Science: Agency

My video Colony Collapse has been selected for an international on-line exhibition, Agency, hosted by Broto Art-Climate-Science in Cape Cod. It’s associated with their conference on 15-16 May entitled Greetings, Earthing: How does global citizenship affect our climate response? As part of the conference, I’m also taking part in a discussion on Agency: Arts as Civics Teacher.

Curated by Margaret LeJeune, the show asks “What exists at the intersection of empowerment, the climate crisis, and radical empathy?  What does agency look like in a post-human world? And, can it be ascribed to non-human species, rivers and/or ecosystems?”

As well as my work, the show features Caspar de Gelmini, Susan Hoenig, Sydney Parcell (in collaboration with Ildiko Polony), Nicole Lehne, Se Jong Cho, Daniel Ranalli, Jacqui Crocetta, Espen Tversland, Paloma Marquez, and DM Witman.

Here is the video of our wide-ranging discussion: Agency: Arts as Civics Teacher.

And here is a link to all the talks from the conference:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmUCpgkFxuy171_LFMEzKaQ

… Click here for more.

floodtide exhibited in Berlin

My video floodtide has been selected to be shown at the Gallery for Sustainable Art in Berlin as part of their 1.5 degrees international exhibition, running from 15 January – 12 March 2021. The exhibition is about whether or not we reach our climate goal and includes object, installation, photo, painting, video, and readings.

floodtide imagines a city in the near future when sea levels have risen significantly. What does it look like? How will we cope?

The composition process making the video was very complex. Nearly every scene has been composited from multiple sources requiring more than 500 individual sequences from original footage filmed around Adelaide, the Fleurieu Peninsula, Inner Suburban Melbourne, the Western Highway, and Far North Queensland. Each scene required matching of lighting intensity, colour and direction, as well as wind direction (in clouds, water, trees, etc), atmospheric haze, perspective, scale and more. In most scenes containing water, footage of the sea has been added to the landscape or cityscape. Similarly, nearly every sky and cloud bank has been composited from mixed sources. Almost none of the building skylines is from a single location.

These scenes might be imaginary, but the reality may not be far off…… Click here for more.