[spectre] 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, 
bookshop and artists studios.

Lion Arts Centre North Terrace at Morphett Street Adelaide
PO Box 8091 Station Arcade South Australia 5000
Tel: +618 8211 7505  Fax +618 8211 7323
email: eaf at eaf.asn.au  bookshop email: eafbooks at eaf.asn.au web: 
http://www.eaf.asn.au
Director: Melentie Pandilovski  Administrator: Julie Lawton
Program Manager: Michael Grimm Bookshop Manager: Ken Bolton

Assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Visual Arts Craft 
Board of the Australia Council and the South Australian Government 
through Arts SA. The EAF is proudly smoke-free.