d>Art03

[director at eaf.asn.au]

>Press Release:
>
>d>Art03
>
>FUTURE  PERFECT
>
>
>An idiosyncratic tour of recent experimental film and video history,
>current digital practice and future directions.
>
>
>Curated by Brent Grayburn and Scott Donovan.
>Presented by dLux media arts
>
>Screening at the Iris Cinema
>on Wednesday, 19 November 2003
>at 7:30pm and 9:00pm
>
>Tickets: $10 / $8 concession
>Admission: 18+
>
>
>
>d>Art03 Future Perfect is the latest instalment in dLux media arts 
>acclaimed annual showcase of national and international experimental 
>film, animation and video art. d>Art03 celebrates ongoing innovation 
>in screen-based media with a selection of new work by emerging and 
>established screen artists from Australia and beyond. The d>Art03 
>screen program includes work by more than 15 artists from 4 
>continents, reflecting the conceptual and technical diversity of 
>current screen practice.
>
>To mark the Sydney film Festival's 50th Anniversary, guest curators 
>Brent Grayburn and Scott Donovan compiled the Future Perfect 
>program. As they explain, technology's capacity to blur distinctions 
>between the real and imagined is undeniable and seductive. Temporal 
>and physical dimensions dissolve on the computer desktop into a 
>world of paradoxical spaces and hypothetical landscapes, 
>encompassing a range of endless possibilities. Images of transition, 
>abject space and temporal dislocation are features of the 16 short 
>works that make up the Future Perfect program, screening at the Iris 
>Cinema on Wednesday, 19 November 2003 at 7:30pm and 9:00pm.
>
>Future Perfect screening program
>
>Tehching Hsieh (Taiwan)
>One Year Performance: Time Piece (1980-81) 6:00min
>Tehching Hsieh is an artist whose medium of expression is not words 
>or sounds or paint, but his own life. His work consists of five One 
>Year  Performances, done between the years of 1978 and 1986, and 
>Earth, a thirteen-year performance that stretched from the end of 
>1986 to the end of 1999. Each of these performances involves a 
>particular vow, a particular constraint, and a particular mode of 
>being. For the second One Year Performances, known informally as the 
>Time Piece, Hsieh punched a time clock, every hour on the hour, 
>twenty-four hours a day, for an entire year. An observer verified 
>each day's time card. "To help illustrate the time process," Hsieh 
>shaved his head before the piece began, and then let his hair grow 
>freely for the duration. Every time he punched the clock, a movie 
>camera shot a single frame. The resulting film compresses each day 
>into a second and the whole year into about six minutes.
>
>Sergei Bugaev Afrika (Russia)
>Stalker 3 (2002) 53:00min
>Stalker 3, by Russian artist Sergei Bugaev Afrika, caused a 
>sensation when it was shown recently at the I-20 Gallery in New York 
>prompting critics to ask "is it art?" and raising important 
>questions about artistic appropriation. The 53 minute video 
>documents the destruction of a Russian tank convoy by lightly armed 
>Chechen partisans. The footage is intended to be viewed as a 
>military dispatch in video form (edited, with additional sound, by 
>Afrika and fellow artist Dimitry Gelfand) which the Chechens used to 
>support their claim for an Al Qaeda bounty calculated on the basis 
>of a body count. By displaying the video in a gallery, as part of an 
>installation, Afrika raises question whether the footage can, like 
>any other found object, be transformed into an artefact by virtue of 
>his appropriation of it. Writing about Stalker 3 in the 
>international art journal Flash Art (Jan-Feb 2003) critic Craig 
>Garrett suggests the work's "..contradictions stem from the fact 
>that the videographer was not a Russian, like Afrika, but a member 
>of the Muslim rebel faction. So while the video's perspective forces 
>identification with the guerilla fighters, their ambush and ruthless 
>destruction of an entire regiment of inexperienced Russian infantry 
>confounds this sympathy, making it feel uncomfortably close to 
>complicity. That Africa was able to procure this captured video from 
>the Russian government speaks volumes about that country's open 
>attitude towards the arts, in stark contrast to the tight grip the 
>Soviet military holds on the secretive Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky's 
>Stalker, the 1979 film from which the exhibition takes its name."
>
>Bjorn Dahlem (Germany)
>DIE ENDEN DER PARABEL (2001) 6:45min
>DIE ENDEN DER PARABEL begins with flickering and the whirring of 
>nuclear particles fading in from darkness. Then grass appears on a 
>meadow, a silver shining antenna-like object sends a strange buzz to 
>heaven and space. We can see the artist, practising his favourite 
>sport, golf. It is pretty monotonous, to watch somebody playing 
>golf, as you will realize. Especially if the person is an extreme 
>amateur! Then, something happens: Dahlem putts the ball. But what is 
>this? The ball is disappearing in a black hole and goes on a trip to 
>a psychedelic parallel universe! The artist does not seem to realize 
>it and goes on with powerful playing. Later on, in a very 
>melancholic picture, a few golf balls fall down to earth from 
>heaven. How bizarre. Was this film captured by alien observation 
>cameras? Or why is the quality so low? Or why is it all slow motion? 
>Nobody knows. We fade back into the chaos of particles and the 
>darkness of neverending space.
>
>David Noonan and Simon Trevaks (Australia) 99 (1999) 4:00min
>Noonan and Trevaks have produced a series of video installations 
>since 1999 using a looping technique to focus and intensify a 
>minimal cinematic sequence. 99, one of their earliest collaborative 
>works, draws from the genre of science fiction such as Kubrik's 2001 
>or even literary scenarios (Ray Bradbury). A common narrative in 
>such stories or films is the image of man in space dependent on 
>flimsy technology in the most extreme conditions - essentially the 
>ultimate metaphor for isolation  and vulnerability.
>
>Stephen Honneger (Australia)Suspect Device (2002) 3:00min
>Suspect Device depicts a first person perspective of a interior 
>gallery space, recreated using gaming software. Entering a beam of 
>light in the gallery, the viewer is lowered into a glowing black & 
>white maze. Running through the maze, shooting and blowing up 
>hostile "grunts" in typical first person shooter fashion, the viewer 
>is once again transported back into the gallery space and wanders, 
>dazed and confused, towards to exit.
>
>Potter-Belmar Labs (Jason Jay Stevens & Leslie Raymonds) (USA)
>Fortress: The Establishment Kills the Visionary (2003) 5:00min
>Fortress II: Destruction of the Tower (2003) 1:45min
>Potter-Belmar Labs is a collaborative duo working for over 4 years 
>in a variety of media and almost always incorporating elements of 
>video and audio in their work. Whether as components to interactive 
>sculpture, installation or single-channel work, these artists 
>utilize moving image and sound in unique and engaging ways.
>
>Justine Cooper & Joey Stein (USA)
>Reduction (2002) 4:00min
>Justine Cooper continues her involvement with medical and scientific 
>imaging technologies with Reduction, produced in collaboration with 
>Joey Stein. Conceptions of time, space and identity dissolve in a 
>primordial reconstitution of the human form.
>
>Tamshui (Hong Kong)
>[he/] (2001) 4:00min
>[he/] is a term used by Hong Kong teenagers to express their 
>attitude to life. It cannot be written in Chinese, existing only as 
>a form of pronunciation. [he/] represents a suffocating sense of 
>apathy - a
>feeling of inactivity and neglect, of giving up. More than teenage 
>angst, [he/] is product of the social and political uncertainty of 
>contemporary Hong Kong.
>
>Jamsen LAW Sum-po (Hong Kong)
>Matching 4 with 12: Mapping Vapour (2002)10:00min
>Pixel as vapour, colour as mist. What happens if we start to 
>localize the non-localisable? Desire, memory, a hint of smell or a 
>lingering of touch - faint traces as map-points at the edge of 
>perception.
>
>Jayce Salloum (Canada)
>untitled part 3b:(as if) beauty never fades (2002) 11:22min
>A more ambient work of many things, including orchids blooming and 
>plants growing, superimposed over raw footage of the post-massacre 
>filmings at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. 
>With the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a refugee living 
>in the Bourg El Barajneh camp) recounting a story told by the rubble 
>of his home in Palestine, and the collection of audio accompanying 
>the clips, the tape permeates into an intense essay on dystopia in 
>contemporary times. An elegiac response working directly, viscerally 
>and metaphorically.
>
>
>Kedy FAN Ho-ki (Hong Kong)
>Hear (2002) 6:30min
>To hear is to passively perceive the sound. Hypnosis is nothing more 
>than simple relaxtion, guided images conjured by sound. It's as 
>simple as closing your eyes and allowing yourself to receive and 
>relax. Relaxation is a multi- layered psychological wordmind 
>journey, telling you that life is joyful, easy and worth living. We 
>can close our eyes but not our ears.
>
>Brendan Lee (Australia)
>OFTENON (2002) 3:00min
>A re-combination of a classic struggle with oneself. The limitations 
>of personal endeavour are only as constraining as you let yourself 
>believe. OFTENON is an art piece, which outlines some of the 
>challenges faced by the director in attempting to capture the 
>moment. OFTENON uses the theatricality of the reshoot in its goal 
>for filmic perfection.
>
>David Haines (Australia)
>A Golden Autonomy (2001) 4.00min
>A Golden Autonomy is a work in 2 shots originally shown in a gallery 
>in 1999 as an endless loop on a monitor. An inverse ghost, what 
>Haines calls a "Black Casper" encounters for the first time a human 
>on the coast of Normandy, France. The fascinating thing is that even 
>though these beings both exist in the same universe which is the 
>space of the image and even though they are both obviously fully 
>alive, they could never really know each other. They are always 
>living fully in the dark. The work was made in Sydney over two days.
>
>Daniel Crooks (Australia)
>Train 1 (2002) 4:00min
>Tram 3 (2002) 4:00min
>In Train 1 and Tram 3 Crooks puts forth a poetics of public 
>transport, using tramcars and train carriages, perfect units to play 
>with at the junction of time and space. The continuity of video is 
>disrupted, edited, literally making more or less time, more or less 
>space.
>
>Robin Hely (Australia)
>CHERRIE (2002) 9:30min
>In CHERRIE, Hely videos himself placing an advertisement in the 
>personal columns of a Melbourne newspaper. He then records replies 
>to this ad for a 31 year old video artist seeking an openminded, 
>adventurous female and eventually arranges to go on a date with a 
>solo mother of 2 called Cherrie. We then see shots of Hely attaching 
>a miniature spy-camera to his chest and concealing it beneath his 
>suit. The audio is at times hard to hear and the camera shots are 
>occasionally obscured, but there seems to be not doubt that the 
>situation is real, right down to his clumsy advances at the end of 
>the evening.
>
>
>Presented by dLux media arts in association with the Media Resource 
>Centre (MRC).
>For further information, or pre-sale of tickets, contact the MRC on 
>(08) 8410 0979.
>The Iris Cinema is located at 13 Morphett St, Adelaide 5000.
>
>

-- 
EXPERIMENTAL ART FOUNDATION curates its exhibition program to 
represent new work that expands current debates and ideas in 
contemporary visual art. The EAF incorporates a gallery space, 
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