This year, Sydney plays host to the ‘2013 International Symposium of Electronic Art’ (ISEA): an annual, international platform of exhibitions and events that explore a range of themes surrounding the integration of new technologies into today’s society. Through exhibitions, performances, public talks, workshops and debates, ISEA regenerates ideas around social and political uses of technology in everyday life as well as art, with themes including social media, locative technologies, surveillance, climate, and communication.
Stephen Jones, a video artist and electronic engineer, has curated ‘This is Video’, an archival research project that is presented by Artspace in their Reading Room as part of the ISEA program. Jones has re-mastered key historical material from the prominent 1981 exhibition Video Art from Australia as well as sourcing additional work, to highlight early video practice in Australian art.
In doing this with the backdrop of ISEA, ‘This is Video’ emphasises the important role that video has played in contemporary art for decades – from performance documentation to abstract psychedelic work of the mid-70’s – and is a reminder of the roots of the new media art we have become accustomed to seeing today, such as immersive, interactive, and augmented environments.
With the emergence of electronic and portable means of recording video, artists began working in new and experimental ways to explore the full potential of this new technology: it allowed greater recording time, instant playback abilities, the opportunity to mix multiple camera perspectives into one image, time lapse, slow and reverse motion, fly-overs, and pattern effects. These aesthetics ultimately provided new perceptions of time and space which have resonated through to media art today.
For example, the earliest work in the collection, Mad Mesh, 1968, by David Perry, was made by recording images through a damaged television camera. Today, we still see artists using error of technology as a creative intervention in glitch art aesthetics.
Mick Glasheen, an architect and pioneer of early cinema and experimental film, created work that was heavily influenced by media theorists. His video Teleologic Telecast from Spaceship Earth: On Board with Buckminster Fuller, 1970, is a re-mixed recording of a Buckminster Fuller’s lecture given at UNSW, presenting Fuller’s ideas on science, metaphysics and the universe, merged with just as radical techniques of moving image production, creating a multi-layered expression of image, voice, and sound.
Glasheen went on to produce Uluru, 1978, in which he uses video as a new way to tell the stories and traditional knowledge of the indigenous people and their land. Made with a video portapak, this work shows how mobility made room for further developments of video. It was the starting point to further collaborative works and the establishment of experimental video collectives, such as Bush Video.
‘This is Video’ shows us a lot about artists’ engagement with technology. Looking back at this collection highlights the evolution of media and reveals how intervention with technology creates opportunity for creative expression and experimentation – and that this is not a new phenomena. Just as artists are experimenting with emerging technologies now, as we can see in the rest of ISEA – they did so in the 70s, which had led to the increased availability of the moving image that we take for granted now. By reframing the availability and capabilities of video, ‘This is Video’ presents a new historical perspective on media art, which asks where our experiments now, may lead to in the future.
Artspace, Reading Room
30 May to 16 June, 2013
Sydney
ISEA2013
7 to 16 June, 2013
www.isea2013.org
Peter Callas, I Would Have Run But I Had a Heavy Cold, 1980, still from video
Mick Gasheen, Teleologic Telecast from Planet Earth: on board with Buckminster Fuller, 1970, still from video
Courtesy of the artists