The popular motive for users and manufacturers of lens-based technology (photography, film and video) is to transparently record a subject without an awareness of the camera apparatus, film material or pixellated screen. However, technological advances towards ever-more seamless simulations have not prevented radical artistic interventions with equipment and media. This two-day event is being organised by Emma Hart and Dan Hays in connection with their practice-based doctoral research at Kingston University.
The aim is to bring together artists directly engaged with image-making technology, variously exploring its potential to extend experience of time and space, offering new meanings arising from its limitations, flaws and persistent materiality. Invited artists will screen or present selected works in a large informal studio setting.
Out from the Video
Thursday 15th July 2010. 10.30am - 5pm.
When we watch a video or film, we understand it as coming from the past; someone, somewhere hit a record button and, like the photograph, the moving image becomes a description of something that happened. Yet some video and film works act to complicate, ignore, if not smash, their status as an index. Through facets of the moving image itself their retrospective record aspect is challenged, negated or made irrelevant. The day will include screenings, performances and presentations from an exciting range of artists and writers considering how the tense of moving image work can be pushed out from the past and into the present. There will be a panel discussion which will bring together the selected works and their makers to explore questions around the experiential impact of a direct address to the viewer and its different forms. We will also consider what happens when the subject of a video is the process of making that video. How does that alter the temporal address to the viewer? Ultimately we will investigate how a moving image can act on the world, and not just describe it.
Invited artists and presentations: Benedict Drew, Marcia Farquhar, Emma Hart, Gil Leung, Laure Prouvost, Lucy Reynolds (who will also chair the discussion) and John Smith.
Screen as Landscape
Friday 16th July. 10.30am - 5pm.
The discoveries of science, and the intrusions of technology within our environment, offer new paradigms, profoundly extending human perception and reach in spatial and temporal dimensions. Is the genre of landscape ideally placed to tackle debates around technology and human subjectivity – its relevance and poignancy heightened through our desire for control over, and consequent separation, from nature? Will humankind be consumed by the technological sublime, lost in a virtual wilderness: prismatic and poetic sensibilities integrated perfectly into code? Or is it vital or reassuring to engage with visual material and processes that reveal the flaws and limitations of technological representation, in a sense humanising it, giving the ubiquitous screen tangible form?
Invited artists and presentations: Beth Harland, Andy Harper, Dan Hays, Lizzie Hughes, Malcom Le Grice, and Guy Sherwin. Chris Horrocks will chair the panel discussion.