Put Up A Signal

Put Up A Signal is a multifaceted artist exchange exploring Indonesian and Australian screen-based art. Exploiting the ease with which video, image, text and sound files can be shared across the world, this project will reveal opportunities for richer collaboration and exchange made possible through the Internet and digital platforms.

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With the downgrade of relations between Australia and Indonesia, much attention is being paid to the differences between the two countries. But a a group of artists is working together on a unique project to mend cultural fences.

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Irwan Ahmett and Tristan Jalleh

Smartphone Bilocation Collage Experiment

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Irwan Ahmett and Tristan Jalleh

Smartphone Bilocation Collage Experiment

(image may offend)

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Irwan Ahmett and Tristan Jalleh 

Smartphone Bilocation Collage Experiment

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http://akiqaw.com/portfolio/to-the-landscape-and-beyond/

To The Landscape and BeyondAkiq AW

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http://www.realtimearts.net/article/116/11317

At the turn of the millennium video festivals and screening programs were reaching plague proportions, but now that screens themselves have become infestations and we live on a drip-feed diet of YouTube, the festivities have been floundering for want of a cohesive context. This is a challenge Channels, the newest video festival on the block, is tackling head on.  Channels has been initiated by an all-lady curatorial team of Jessie Scott, Rachel Feery and Eugenia Lim. The women met while participating in the Next Wave Kickstart program and over the years have, independently and collaboratively, curated a range of video and time-based media events. I asked Lim what compelled them to launch a new video festival. She suggested that perhaps there is currently “a loss of criticality about the medium. It seems like the history of video gets lost and re-invented with each generation. I think we felt that now was a good time to try and connect to that past but also to look at the directions video is going in. It seems to be in constant mutation. [The impetus] was a combination of our own experiences of programming and curating up to this point, trying to look critically at the practice, and also [a desire] to promote video to a wider audience, making it accessible but with a certain rigour to it. [We want] artists working in this way to feel like they’re part of a larger community and audiences to get a look at some of the finest work that we feel is being made at the moment.”

Soda_Jerk, The Phoenix Portal, 2005

Channels is attempting to present video as a medium in a range of manifestations. At the core of the event are the single-channel screenings drawn from an international open call that attracted 900 entries. These have been narrowed down to 33 works split across two thematic screening sessions; Sensory Drive + Media Mash-ups and Constructed Worlds + Bodies Collide (see ticket giveaway at the end of this article).  In an attempt to reach a wider audience, the main screenings will be in the ACMI Cinemas. There’s also a program specifically curated for Federation Square’s big screen, Channel Surf, which has been carefully programmed to suit the less concentrated viewing context. Lim says, “Channel Surf is a nod to that transient experience of passing through. The works that we are showing there are almost visual billboard works that you can come in and out of […] There are some really great artists being shown—Jessica McElhinney has made a really great work called CatTube. It’s a wonderful, concise look at internet and video culture…For us it was a great opportunity to try and screen something in such a high foot-traffic, general public kind of space. It’s a way of broadening the reach and the awareness of what else we’re doing.”

Ms&Mr, Videodromes for the Alone series: Amputee of the Neurotic Future 1988:2012

The other cornerstone of the festival is Transformer, an exhibition at ScreenSpace comprising two commissioned video installations. Ms&Mr will continue their Videodromes for the Alone series with Amputee of the Neurotic Future 1988:2012 which incorporates footage from the artists’ own videographic past into a JG Ballard-Cronenbergian contemporary reality. This will be exhibited as a three-channel work with an automotive sculptural component. Both complementing and contrasting with this will be Benjamin Ducroz’s Cumulo, filmed in the Pilbara, combining stop motion animation of cloud formations and a kinetic sculpture which appears on screen and as an object in the space.  Exploring the relationship between video and performance art is Mirror Screens, co-curated with Laura Castagnini. This comprises three specially commissioned performances by Emile Zile, Hannah Raisin and Salote Tawale where each artist has made a new performance/video piece (ie performance on, for or with video) inspired by a work from the historical avant-garde canon. For example Zile, appearing via Skype, will conduct a wake, using a roll call of names generated from Russian spam and scam sites that references Ant Farm’s 1975 performance Media Burn. But don’t turn the dial yet—there’s more. Co-presented with the Victorian College of the Arts, US performance and video artist Barbara Rosenthal is a special guest delivering her lecture “Old Masters of New Media,” an overview of her prolific career from 1963 to 2013. There’s also a forum, Video Art In The Internet Era featuring Vernon Ah Kee, Ian Haig and Norie Neumark with video postcards from Skip Blumberg, Joel Stern and Soda_Jerk. Channels has also teamed up with the ikono On Air Festival, an international event which sees artfilms broadcast across the world on satellite channels and via internet streaming (see last week’s In the Loop). No video festival is complete without some outdoor projections, in this case a program called Nocturnes screening on Chin Chin’s Wall of Art on the corner of Higson and Flinders Lanes. And of course there’s a party to finish off the event in style. Channels has teamed up with Speakeasy Cinema (run by Ghita Loebenstein) to present Videodromes, including VJ performances, smoke installations and a beanbag cinema. So if you’re in Melbourne, get off the couch and go surfing.

Channels Video Festival, curators Jessie Scott, Rachel Feery, Eugenia Lim, program associate Ghita Loebenstein, Memory Screens co-curator Laura Castagnini, ACMI and various venues, Melbourne, 18-21 Sept; Transformer exhibition, ScreenSpace, 12-21 Sept; http://www.channelsfestival.net.au/  GIVEAWAY: Channels festival is offering one double pass to the Video Visions sessions 1 & 2; email [email protected] with Channels in the subject line (by Sept COB Sept 12). Barbara Rosenthal will also be appearing in Brisbane at Metro Arts (Oct 4), Audiopollen (Oct 6), Room60 Talks (Oct 9) and IMA (Oct 10).

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http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue117/11367

Performed

The intersection between video and performance art, past and present, was the inspired starting point for the Memory Screens program in which artists Salote Tawale, Hannah Raisin and Emile Zile each presented newly commissioned works paying homage to selected iconic works by video and performance “elders.” As well as live performances of the three new works, excerpts were screened both from the artists’ previous output and from the chosen ‘source’ works.  Emile Zile, whose work to date humorously interrogates and replays conventions and tropes of cinema, television and the web, chose Ant Farm’s 1975 Media Burn as inspiration in which a Cadillac smashes through a pile of burning TV sets. In the most oblique response of the three artists, his new performance (via Skype), Random Name Generator Memorial Roll Call, comprised a tongue-in-cheek, funerary video roll call of randomly generated, unborn internet users, accompanied by vases of white lilies. 

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http://theinstrumentbuildersproject.com/video/

Ardi Gunawan’s 6 String Instrument

The Instrument Builders Project is collaboration project between Australian and Indonesian sound artist/instrument builders

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http://seanpeoples.com/exhibitions/20%20Days%20of%20Dream%20Telepathy.html

Photography attribution: Sean Peoples, Veronica Kent  While on a residency together in Spain Sean and Veronica performed 20 days of Dream Telepathy. Every evening before we went to sleep (in our bedrooms at opposite ends of the apartment) we would put something in an envelope and place it under the others pillow. We would then dream on this all night and in the morning would meet in the studio and recount the nights remembered dreams to each other. We would then open the envelope from the night before to see if the image inside had seeped into or influenced the dream. The picture on the left in each image is what was put under the dreamers pillow. The writing on the right describes the nights dream. Some of these dreams were made into collaborative dream paintings on our return to Australia. 

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http://ixcxexdx.tumblr.com/?og=1

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http://olivervanderlugt.com/Untitled-2012

Untitled, 2012

Laser cut frosted adhesive vinyl, large format laser prints on paper, Australian banknotes.  Work exhibited in Dodecahedron, a group exhibition curated by Adam Cruickshank at Platform, Melbourne

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http://emilezile.com/selected-work/omg_sisyphus/

Wednesday November 30 2011, Open Archive Melbourne Thanks to Jared Davis, Helen Grogan, Lara Thoms, Ry David Bradley Photography by Jo Duck

With his history of performances that engage with popular culture and consumer technology Emile Zile recently premiered OMG_Sisyphus. The Greek mythology of Sisyphus, a tale of burden and absurdity, is used as a prop on which to enact a contemporary performance situation: being on YouTube. The performance happens in the midst of laptops, amplifiers, digital cameras, projectors and a heavy looking stone that the artist carries in from outside. In recent performances of OMG_Sisyphus at (Open Archive Melbourne, 30 November 2011, Palais Paradiso Amsterdam 16 February 2012) Zile enacts a humorously calculated switch. In his treatment we begin to understand that the laptop/webcam is now a rock, or vice versa. Its physical presence, weight, and texture become entwined in a passage of worship, as the ubiquitous Apple product is now something more equivalent to a Chinese scholar stone (Gongshi). Throughout the whole performance it is as if through some application of post-production what we should be seeing as a computer (the adored gateway to online audiences) is now a small volcanic boulder. Simultaneous slips between live action and published content begin, as Zile sits staring at the rock we imagine him staring at his computer, alone in a room while addressing an imagined YouTube audience. In doing so the actual live audience sitting in the gallery space is distanced, even denied.

At some points in the piece we are made to feel the joys of web 2.0 publishing, light relaxation muzak plays, we are all connected by technology. But the gallery space begins to fall out of step as the artist struggles against what appears to be self-doubt and loneliness. The rock remains motionless on a small table under lamplight. Is real life different to projected life? Maybe it used to be. Zile seems to suggest a new friction is built in this crossover rather than a seamless merger. Whilst various elements of the performance are online, the crux of this work hinges on being present live in the gallery space – where multiple facets of contemporary being are felt and fired simultaneously. As it happens we are pointed toward a space where states of alienation, corporation and intense connectivity collide into a state of indivisibility.

- Ry David Bradley, February 2012

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http://tlsc.co/work/spam-hut

Spamhut.biz – Gavan Blau & Rowan McNaught

SPAM HUT introdu_ctory offer // 2 ~days only  Hello compadre!  \/\/e invite you to take advantage of our free spam services at our temporary office on Friday or Saturday this week, 14-15 Oct 2011.

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Screen shot, 16.8.13

http://tristanjalleh.tumblr.com/

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http://www.stayhomesakoku.com/

Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project is an introverted performance exploring the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori or ‘shut in’ syndrome. Over one week, Eugenia Lim will live in a bedroom-style installation within West Space. Although physically ‘on view’ to gallery goers, communication between herself and the outside world will occur via a web portal or ‘hiki-site’ through which everyone is invited to chat and participate in the project from their own networked phones, computers and lives. Without leaving the space or receiving any visitors, Lim will rely on the kindness of others for food and survival.

Hikikomori confine themselves to their rooms for months and, in extreme cases, years on end. Without physical contact, hikikomoriexist in isolation. Yet, many survive on a diet of pop culture and live a networked existence through an online community of forums, games and chatrooms. Increasingly, through daily engagement with Web 2.0, we are all becoming networked beings. Stay Home is a project for anyone whose life intersects with technology and the Internet. Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project is part of theToday Your Love program, which is generously supported by the Australia Council. Lim will inhabit the Back Space from Thur 22 Mar – Thur 29 Mar, however the installation will be on display until 14 April. Project collaborators are Dan West, Yumi Umiumare, David Wolf and Nicole Dominic. Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project is supported by the Australia Council and City of Melbourne.

Eugenia Lim is a video and interdisciplinary artist based in Melbourne. Her work spans video, photography, installation and cross-disciplinary practice to explore themes of identity, cultural stereotypes, mythology and race. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and internationally at galleries including 24Hr Art, Dianne Tanzer + Projects, Platform ARI, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art and the Tate Modern London.

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http://www.stayhomesakoku.com/

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