The new global traffic of the mediated image generates its own language and referential frameworks. We have crossed a threshold in time where the imagination in all its perverse, miraculous, and banal manifestations flourishes. The thing is, whether it is art or cinema or something else, you will be watching. David Cranswick
From a privileged vantage point — the director chair at the d/Lux/MediaArts, one of the key Australian organizations in the media and art fields —, curator David Cranswick selects, in Panoramas of the Imagination, videos made recently by artists from the country (Matthew Tumbers; John A. Douglas; Soda_Jerk; Brendan Lee; Shaun Gladwell; Daniel Crooks; Sam Smith; rea; Ms. & Mr.; Rachel Scott; The Kingpins).
In works that comprise both the cinema language and visual art practices, the programme illustrates “the texture and diversity” of the country’s audiovisual production, and of the contemporary Australian experience in itself.
artists
Works
- Proving Ground [Excerpt]Brendan Lee, 2007
- Pan No.3 [Rotation Isn’t Movement]Daniel Crooks, 2007
- James Dean Jesus John A. Douglas, 2007
- Gumnut Xanadu: Cumulus Nebulus [A Learning Aid]Matthew Tumbers, 2007
- Videodromes for the Alone: Teleplasmic MassMs & Mr, 2007
- Videodromes for the Alone: The LovecatsMs & Mr, 2007
- Hot NotRachael Scott, 2006
- SlimerSam Smith, 2007
- Picnic at Wolf Creek Sam Smith, Soda _ Jerk, 2006
- Kickflipper: Fragments EditShaun Gladwell, 2003
- VersusThe Kingpins, 2002
- Maang (Message Stick)r e a, 2007
Curator's text David Cranswick, 2007
Question
Where, or how, do you situate the confluence of art and cinema today?
It’s impossible to think about the proposition of art into cinema without considering the broader contemporary experience of screen culture and the moving image or otherwise! This limits us to a discussion about form. Ought we rather be talking about economies - social, cultural, and otherwise - and recognise that the production, distribution, and consumption of mediated images can neither be governed nor contained by conventions? We live in the age of the network with all its extraordinary variety, pervasiveness, and speed. The new global traffic of the mediated image generates its own language and referential frameworks. We have crossed a threshold in time where the imagination in all its perverse, miraculous, and banal manifestations flourishes. The thing is, whether it is art or cinema or something else, you will be watching.
Statment
The program Panoramas of the Imagination is an encounter with intense and sophisticated forms of subjectivity which incorporate established cinematic form and the visual language of contemporary art. It is very much about how artists look at the world and express their response to it. Within the broader Festival theme of art into cinema, we see a range of works which articulates the imaginative worlds of a group of artists and which illustrates the texture and diversity of contemporary screen culture currently being produced in Australia.
I titled this program Panoramas of the Imagination because I am particularly interested in the idea of how artists working with the moving image condense and distil complex aesthetic, political, emotional, cultural, and imaginary phenomena into new experiential forms. I think too that all these works suggest a response to the complexity and randomness of everyday living and global media culture, and insist on the necessity of personal subjectivity and the value of imagination as a tool for negotiating our place within it.
All but a few of the works in this program were conceived for and presented in gallery environments as installations where they successfully established new forms of dialogues and relationships between the screen, the content of the work, and the audience. Here, in a festival screening program, the works are lifted out of their intended context and in the translation into a cinema environment they lose some of the specific spatial, temporal, and material qualities of the original installation.
Nevertheless the works retain their integrity and communicate to me a real honesty about the textures and diverse character of the contemporary Australian experience.
These works successfully articulate the complexity of the interplay between global media culture, local contexts, and personal subjectivities, mobilising an extraordinary array of images, ideas, and techniques to create moments of imaginative insight, humour, and strange beauty.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica SESC_Videobrasil": de 30 de setembro a 25 de outubro de 2007, p.16-17, Edições SESC SP, São Paulo-SP, 2007, p. 145.