technology – RM Moving Image Archive

Charlotte Parallel

Title: When do the trees sleep?
Year: 2017 Singapore
Length: 02:35
Credits: Asia New Zealand residency at A.I.R: Instinc Gallery Singapore. Videographer: Chin Wan Xuan

When do the trees sleep? is a poetic question that seeks to draw attention to the energetic forces that intersect within the streets of Singapore. When do the trees sleep? sound walk was part of a telematic performance with Jon He, held at INSTINC Gallery, 24th of March at 8pm. Singapore. Charlotte Parallel uses a DIY light-to-sound transducer/solar panel to amplifier, to play the ‘lumen noise’ as electrical networks in the block around Instinc Gallery.

Charlotte Parallel is a New Zealand artist based in Koputai Port Chalmers working in the fields of sculpture, sound, performance, collaboration and site responsive projects. Parallel completed her MFA at Otago School of Art Dunedin in 2016. She has exhibited throughout New Zealand and internationally since 2010.

Instagram: @charlotteparallel

Shelley Simpson

Title: Subduction C
Year: 1997
Length: 19.40
Format: Digitised SVHS
Credits: Audio editing: Joost Langeveld
Subduction C is a recording of a performance of Subduction, a participatory image and sound work exhibited at Artspace, Aotearoa in May 1997

Robert Leonard, then the director of Artspace wrote, ‘Digital technology is revolutionising the way movies are made. Not only is it invigorating existing forms like the feature film and the music clip, it is also making new kinds of moving-image work possible. Shelley Simpson works in one of these new areas, mixing video recordings and live feeds in real time to create moving-image accompaniments for performances by the techno band Unitone HiFi.

Subduction extends this work into an art gallery context. Simpson took her title from geomorphology, where ‘subduction’ refers to the movement of one of the Earth’s tectonic plates underneath another. In a darkened room, a video wash of abstract monochrome mirror patterns is accompanied by an ambient bass drone. The mirror patterns, reminiscent of the old title sequence from Doctor Who, suggest by turns a watery vortex, heat waves, shadows playing on the wall, animated Rorscharch blots, cross-sections of body or brain. The droning soundtrack is also ambiguous, in turn reassuring and ominous. The viewer can interact, injecting two-second audio-visual samples into the mix using a keyboard. By contrast, these samples are coded as either ‘natural’ and ‘mechanical’, but they also formally cross-reference: the opening of a bud resembles the opening of the circular door of a space station, a spinning reel of magnetic tape echoes a spinning seed.

Overlaying and interweaving sounds and visions, Subduction provides an immersive aporia. Opposites like ‘nature’ and ‘technology’ are subducted, losing their direct oppositional status. Subduction exemplifies rave culture’s promotion of the dissolution of distinctions: between self and community, inside and outside, culture and nature.’

Thematic tags:environment/ecology, sound, technology

Shelley Simpson’s multi-disciplinary art practice is concerned with exploring the porous boundaries between the binary concepts of nature/culture and human/non-human. She works with materials that reference ecology and materialism, with specific attention given to agency, affect, labour, transformation, cooperation and symbiosis. Her recent projects explore extractive mining practices as a vehicle for examining wider issues. She is the recipient of a Wild Creations grant from CNZ and DOC for 2018 which funded a project based on 19th century tin mining in Stewart Island. Shelley received an MFA (First class honours) from Elam in 2016. In September 2017 she attended the course Posthuman Ethics in the Anthropocene, with Prof. Rosi Braidotti at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
www.art.shelleysimpson.co.nz

Sarah Callesen and Shelley Simpson

Title: The Entities
Year: 2018
Length: 15.00
Format: Two screen digital video
Credits: Audio: Sarah Callesen, video: Shelley Simpson
Our experience of the world around us is often mediated by technology, contributing to the idea that humans are separate from nature. In The Entities, artists Sarah Callesen and Shelley Simpson use visual and audio relationships between human and non-human, natural and artificial, culture and nature. All recording is subjective, mediated by both humans and technologies used in the process. The Entities considers the role of each player within the communication system, where each offers its own affect.

Simpson has created photographs of forest floor worlds in the temperate bush of Rakiura, Stewart Island – an intense, remote environment mostly devoid of human activity. We generally perceive events that occur at human scale, not too big, not too small. We can extend our perceptual range using technology. Scale shifts, time slows. The images are presented as a two-channel video work scaled up to an immersive size. Subtle animation augments the imagery, bringing attention to the sense of process, of visibility, of observer and of mediation.

In response to the macro imagery, Callesen presents an accompanying sound piece that considers change in sound at a qualitative scale other than loudness. Echo and reverb are tropes often used in film to exaggerate the sound of small things. Natural history documentaries often apply imagined sounds to visual footage, particularly for small fauna such as insects, which are too minute to capture with existing technology. Designed sound in film, television and now virtual environments, continue to fabricate what humans imagine unheard phenomena to sound like. Callesen has used designed planet atmospheres and other constructed sounds sourced from stock libraries, as well as manipulated field recordings taken by both artists.

Shelley Simpson’s images were created with the support of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa and The Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai.

Thematic tags: Landscape, environment/ecology, sound, technology

Sarah Callesen holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts (with distinction) and a Bachelor of Design. Her practice explores a relationship with technology, particularly the mediation of perceptual experience. She works predominantly in the mediums of drawing and sound. Her work has been exhibited as a Merit Award winner in the 2018 Parkin Drawing Prize, as well as a finalist in the 2016, 2015 prize exhibitions. A finalist in the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award (2017), and in the Wallace Art Awards winners and finalists travelling exhibition (2015). The artist had a site specific work in the 2018 Auckland Art Fair ‘Projects’ exhibition, the group show ‘I Understand If You Are Busy’ at RM gallery (2018), and group shows at the George Fraser and Projectspace galleries, Elam School of Fine Arts (2017, 2016).
www.sarahcallesen.com

Lara Lindsay-Parker

Title: Glitch
Year: 2018
Length: 02.05
Format: Part of a 3 channel video entitled Beach body
The following is an exercise in attempting to localise my train of thought. Often fragmented and linked in ways that aren’t immediately clear to the spectator, it serves to negotiate and navigate the fruits of my research, my body, my emotions, my subjectivity and my objectivity. Although it seems conceptually naïve at times, I think it’s important to understand the complexity and extent that our technological landscape is being covertly constructed to serve and perpetuate the social and political interests of the hegemony. Particularly in relation to ideas surrounding freedom from the body (planet earth) and freedom from the body (human form) and the push to frame this ‘freedom’ as the ultimate form of liberation.
Thematic tags: Performance, body, landscape, feminism, technology

Title: Sad @ the beach
Year: 2017
Length: 03:00
Format: Digital video diptych
Originally made in response to a home video from the 90’s and walking by an abandoned VHS on the side of the road left in the rain. I was overwhelmingly sad upon both watching the old home video and seeing the VHS all alone in the rain, thinking back to all the nostalgic currency the two things hold. The work comes from a desire to be reconnected with a previous version of self; an obsolete self. The female body contextualises technology within the realms of objectified flesh and contextualises flesh within the realms of objectified technology. Both remain indifferent to the encroaching tide and miserable weather.
Thematic tags: Performance, body, landscape, feminism, technology, sex and sexuality

Predominantly working in moving image and video, Lindsay-Parker aims to examine the ways in which female identity is constructed and represented through shifting technological interfaces. At varying degrees of depth and seriousness, her practice is built around the metaphorical premise that technological objects have the capacity to feel. Lindsay-Parker frequently return to nostalgia as a means to explore empathy, emotions, identity and ultimately, to disrupt a general sense of apathy towards our current techno-social condition.

https://www.circuit.org.nz/artist/lara-lindsay-parker
https://vimeo.com/userlaralp

Raewyn Turner

Title: Fallible
Year: 2016
Length: 03:49
Format: HD video
Credits: Cinematography: Raewyn Turner & Brian HarrisEditing and green screen: Raewyn Turner

To detect the scent variations in flowers, unscented flowers rotate above a vase which holds a sensor. As the rotating flowers are passed over the smell sensor a computer fan draws their scent past a ceramic bead sensor and a microprocessor measures a voltage dependent on the scent concentration and type. The notes are synthesised in piano voice. The sound changes as the flowers wilt and die. Synopsis: The political and cultural interests of the 1700’s that sent out explorers to collect exotic and rare botanical specimens also created an aesthetic of beauty that embodied the precarious balance of life; one tilt out of balance, one degree of heat, one minute and its gone.
We’re exploring the fragrance of contemporary existence, illusion, and sense-making in a largely visual culture. We’re interested in subliminal odours, airborne particles that affect minds and emotions.

Thematic tags: environment and ecology, technology, history, affect, sound, olfactory

Title: Lucky
Year: 2006
Length: 21:51
Format: Digital
Lucky is a documentary about the making of a fragrance to fortify the lower senses of the gambler playing with chance on pokie machines, which are essentially random number generators. Each perfume bottle is unique as there is a random number generator in the design.
Thematic tags: environment and ecology, technology, affect, olfactory

Title: Pick Up Styx
Year: 2008
Length: 01:04
Format: Interactive software
Credits:
The video interacts with the movements of the players playing a game of pick up sticks which were each fragranced with celebrity perfumes brought to market during the years ofthe war on terror 2001-2008
Thematic tags: politics, history, olfactory, technology, interactive

Raewyn Turner’s interdisciplinary work is concerned with cross-sensory perception and the uncharted territories of the senses. Her works have been shown in numerous national and international exhibitions including Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, Parque de las Ciencias, Granada, Spain, 11th Prague Quadrennial of Scenography and Theatre Architecture 2007,Prumyslovy Palace, Prague, Argentina, Georges Pompidou Center, Te Papa Museum, and Academy of Fine Arts, New Zealand. She has worked with olfaction since 1999 and in collaboration with Dr Richard Newcomb, molecular biologist, NZ. In 2011 she was recipient of a Fulbright Travel Grant for an artists residency at Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia. Her works include videos, interactive installations, performances, exhibitions and large scale international performance in theatres and stadiums, working as a concept and design artist and lighting designer in collaborations with musicians, orchestras and choreographers.

http://www.raewynturner.com