Working the Screen 2000

Introduction

In the 12 months since Working the Screen 1999 appeared it has been a constant point of reference in print and online for keeping track of digital media works-in-progress. Some of the works previewed in 1999 are com- plete and are reviewed in the pages of Working the Screen 2000, others are still being developed, such is the creative (and labour-intensive) nature of this work and the challenge of funding it.

Given the large number of requests for reviews and the paucity of review space in general for digital work, we decided to allocate space to reviews as well as previews in the 2000 edition. We couldn’t review every- thing submitted, but we got close to it.

Working the Screen provides a unique and much needed resource. Our thanks to the Australian Film Commission for providing the initiative and their continuing support for Working the Screen.

Our thanks too to the artists and writers who have kept us up to date with work evolving across the country.

As in 1999, we hope that Working the Screen will encourage the keen anticipation and comprehension of new work and the breadth of activity in Australia, be it in video, film, installation, online or in performance and their ever-increasing combinations and permutations. The Editors

Cover image: Unstill life, from Spectrascope

Photograph of the Mari Velonaki and Gary Zebington installation Unstill Life, exhibited as part of Spectrascope, curated by Julianne Pierce and Jacqueline Phillips, Performance Space as part of the Sydney Biennale. For a response to Unstill Life.

I found myself returning to Spectrascope every time I went to see a performance at Performance Space in recent months, seduced by Mari Velonaki’s offering of a real apple to manipulate a digital image of the artist herself; entranced by Denis Beaubois’ hand-cam-surveillance camera view of the act of writing what he sees before him in an occasionally glimpsed public space; moved by the curious alchemy of the ever dissolving golden face of John Gillies’ sister (her photos held before a camera, splitting into pixels as it struggles to focus); and, after these intimacies, unnervingly entertained by the spectacle of Adrienne Doig and Peter Spilsbury’s to-scale-recreation of the Little Boy A-Bomb, its nose reflecting video projections of political low points and Doig playing “the cheerleader, the spy and the warrior...enact(ing) a form of complicity in the structures of power” (Julianne Pierce, catalogue). KG

RealTime issue #38 Aug-Sept 2000 pg.

© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

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