Winter like a MOFO

If you check in here with any regularity you might remember earlier this year I participated in the incredible MONAFOMA (or MOFO) festival (that we are so lucky to have here) for the first time as a part of the No Mates Ensemble. It had been a long time since I had done any live performance and that was a real hoot, so when I was invited to take part in the third incarnation of Sound to Light, a kind of blind-date collaboration project, I thought I’d like to try doing something live again and this time I wanted to do some spoken word. After making that bold decision, the stakes for this rose somewhat with the announcement that THIS Sound to Light would be staged as a part of the considerably more high-profile DARK MOFO, the inaugural dark twin to our usual Summer event. So eep. A slightly bigger step than I was ready for but I’m diving in.

My blind date is musician, composer and electro-savant Rod Berry and with us both dreading the coming Winter it seemed our meetings were full of sniffles, common cold remedies, soup recipes and whatnot. As a result what has developed is a performed incantation of protection against the coming big freeze, collaged and extracted from siginfiers of warmth and comfort: soups, knitting patterns, Beach Boys songs.

I’ve been working on a system that will randomise my cut-up text and feed it back to me like an autocue. First I designed an app, but it turned out I was not able to actually install it without paying an annual developers fee to Apple. $99US per annum. As someone with little to no interest in developing apps for distribution, my response was: sod that and BOOOOOOOO.

But I’m liking the perfomance aesthetic of the phone which is considerably different to, and I think perhaps a little more ‘present’ than, laptop performance so I’m sticking with it and have translated my app instead into a phone-scaled website. I’m getting really interested now in the idea of developing my own  ‘performance tools’ (something musos have done for a long time) and have designed it so it will cast a warm glow over my face as I recite the generated incantation. This gif here is kind of a mockup of an early draft design and it’s ended up not too dissimilar.

In the meantime Rod’s having fun with Fair Isle and I’m getting really excited as we start to pull it all together. The event will happen @ Salamanca Arts Centre (Hobart) and Fed Sqare (Melbourne) with a bit of the old web simulcast between the two locations , Saturday June 15, 6pm.

Maybe see you there? MOFOs?

AAA

I’m currently referring to this experiment as Arms for Animating Architecture. I think these limbs are calling out to anthropomorphise a building somewhere with their twinkle-fingers and superpowers projected up nice and large.

The twinkle-fingers, sadly, are possibly a little too subtle in movement to read through the animation… I dunno, what do you think?
Bigger movements from now on in anything destined for overpainting I think…

Vanitas revisited

In an interesting turn of events since beginning work on my video archive I was contacted in February by Berlin-based Dane, Jens Christian Madsen about using an older work of mine, Vanitas 100 (from 13 years ago!!! Is that possible!?!), in a clip for his band/project Tjaere+Fjer‘s song Faking It All.

As a video within a video it will appear without Jamie Kiffiak’s deliciously soporific voiceover, but it’s quite exciting to think something from so long ago has some life. I was intruiged by the directors synopsis and am really looking forward to seeing the finished piece which must be in production AS I TYPE!

I made it while living in Vancouver, Canada in 2000 and there are a lot of things I would do differently now, but I still like the 100 freakishly differing self-portraits taken with a Nintendo Gameboy camera and anyone who’s really UP with everything I do will recognise Jamies script as having been re-used for 2011′s A Pack of Lies and indeed was the concept model for ALL the scripts from that work.

You can hear Tjaere+Fjer’s latest release II including Faking It All here.

This is a video for an earlier track Away which I quite dig too. Retro sounding electronica with 80′s mumbles.

Easter Sunday dance-a-thon

In a slight sidestep from the PhD, on Sunday I commenced shooting a music video for M.0.1.0.s  recently released single ‘Stab’. Led by dance mistress @SisterO (also known as artist/performer/programmer Nancy Mauro-Flude), my three subjects performed marvellously and I’m very excited to push this video through and see the end product. I’d like to name them and give them full credit but I did hoot something at them when begging their participation about a level of anonymity. I’m not sure they don’t still want that so just let it be said: these guys are kind, generous and hard-working chaps and I am immensely grateful.
Some of it may yet see it’s way into the PhD too… let’s see. Stay tuned for the finished video in the meantime…

A postcard from Ballarat

Here is some documentation of Ectoplasmic insitu in Ballarat. It’s so nice when pictures come back of the thing you sent out into the world.

All images courtesy of Ben Cox, Ballarat Art Gallery. Thank you Ballarat Art Gallery.

Ballarat – where it’s at.

Another happy outcome of the Bett Gallery exhibition is an ongoing screening of Ectoplasmic in Ballarat Art Gallery‘s projection window. It’s running from 8pm to 7am until Feb 1 so if you have call or cause to be in Ballarat in the evenings in the next couple of weeks – do check it out.  And take a photo for me would ya?

The Medium wrap-up

Hi, Happy New Year. I’m back to business…

The Medium closed at the beginning of December and along with being more successful commercially than I could have expected, was a totally positive experience. I received such warm, supportive feedback and such warm support from Bett Gallery itself, I really can’t imagine now what it was about a commercial gallery/artist relationship that put me off for so long.

Here follows some installation shots, bit daggy but proof that it ever happened and a good record of the hang.

Thank you to all who got there to check it out, your comments passed back to me via gallery staff have really left me buoyed to keep moving forward with this PhD thingo.

EDIT: BTW If you didn’t get to the show and want to see the video, a poorly compressed (sorry – it’s all that ‘fizzing’ – compression says ‘no’.) upload of the video can be seen here .

Making an archive

In the wake of the Bett Gallery show opening, I decided to finally bite the bullet and create an online archive of my video works. This has never happened before now because in the early days of online video hosting, I wasn’t happy with the quality. This has SIGNIFICANTLY changed now and while the compression can still be problematic, particularly for some of these newer animated works, for the most part they look great and it’s really satisfying to see them all up. I’ve used this blog repeatedly to have a whinge about video being an art form that exists simply as data and without an exhibition, simply remains unseen. Well, this is an opportunity to stop the annual whinge in it’s tracks and actually do something about that.

I’m drawing the line at work from my undergrad days, but there’s stuff from all over my professional practicing career. It’s still incomplete but there will be plenty more going up over the next month. I doubt EVERYTHING I’ve ever made will go up but you can see stuff that dates back to 2000 so far and yes, even back that far it’s MOSTLY videos of my head.

I obviously have a schtick, But we knew that, right?

The work embedded here, Mustang Sally is an exception (still me though), a personal favourite and represents one of those works that I dearly wish had had a greater life than a single installation.

You can view the whole archive here and if you’re really keen, keep checking back as more stuff from all over the timeline is being uploaded over the next couple of months.

Gratuitous product shot

…and if you’re interested, the show catalogue is now online here at the Bett Gallery website.

This morning the first work sold. Eeeeee!

‘The Medium’ opening Nov 9 @ Bett Gallery, Hobart

Opening 6pm on Friday, November 9 in the rear space at Bett Gallery and continuing until December 1,
The Medium will be my first ever commercial show and I’m very excited.

Consisting of 2 animations and a some choice frames from the most recent, it’s been keeping me busier than just about anything I’ve ever done, but it’s ready now.

Come on over.