Current Commissioned Works
Marco Bresciani (b. 1960, Manly, Australia)
Marco Bresciani is a Melbourne-based artist. Bresciani’s interactive installations involve computer animation, motion sensors and image manipulation technology. Through his work, he seeks to deconstruct visual reality and reassemble it into animated reflections of the human condition. His work often incorporates the viewer’s own image and seeks to present viewers with a reinterpreted vision of themselves and the world around them. Bresciani has previously exhibited with Experimenta in 2003 in Experimenta House of Tomorrow.
The commision
The Digital Picture of Dorian Gray 2010
Bringing a classic tale to a contemporary medium, Bresciani’s The Digital Picture of Dorian Gray provides a spellbinding glance into a deeply personal future. The viewer is seated before a digital ‘portrait’ and their face, captured by a camera, emerges on the portrait’s screen. Within a few moments, a gentle but ominous soundtrack and subtle, animated cityscape background herald a transition into the future. Slowly, alarmingly, the viewer’s face and features age as they watch: eyes sink, skin becomes wrinkled and translucent and hair starts to grey.
First printed in 1890, the gothic horror novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was written by renowned Irish playwright, poet and author Oscar Wilde, who was known for his biting wit. Wilde’s tale addresses themes of corruption, hedonism and humankind’s desire for perpetual youth. Presently, as medicine, cosmetics and genetic engineering are increasingly capable of facilitating extreme measures for those who desire to preserve their youth, Bresciani’s at once engrossing and confronting work serves as a reminder to be respectful to ourselves and the environment and to pursue our desires with caution.
Van Sowerwine (b.1975, Melbourne, Australia)
and Isobel Knowles (b. 1980, Ballarat, Australia)
Melbourne-based artist Isobel Knowles’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses animation, music video, installation, visual art, film soundtrack and music. She has screened, exhibited and performed nationally and internationally, most notably at the ICA, London (2006), FACT, Liverpool (2006) and Seoul New Media Biennale (2004). She has held various exhibitions with Experimenta and ACMI in Melbourne and her animated short films have been shown around Australia. Melbourne-based artist Van Sowerwine works across the areas of stop-motion animation, interactive art, sculpture and photography. Her work explores ideas of childhood and its darker underpinnings. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the ICA, London (2006); FACT, Liverpool (2006); Seoul New Media Biennale (2004), at the Art Gallery of NSW (2004) and as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2005). Sowerwine has also previously exhibited with Experimenta
THE COMMISION
You Were In My Dream 2010
You Were In My Dream is an exhilarating interactive installation that involves the viewer directly, inviting them to leap and cavort from the enchanted to the fraught in mere moments. Seated at a simple wooden housing, the viewer places their face in a small hollow from which the image of their expressions is fed live onto the face of the child character featured on the computer screen within. Using a mouse, the viewer navigates through a choose-your-own-adventure style narrative.
Within the dream, the child discovers a stop-motion paper animation world of charmed beasts and mysterious forest characters. With just one click a path is chosen and the journey begins, but the illusion of control over the future of any character or narrative soon unravels. The viewer’s expressions remain central to the story, even as they morph between a cast of spirited human and animal forms in pursuit of their unique adventure. Aesthetically sublime and richly engaging, You Were In My Dream offers an allegory for the unpredictable and risky nature of life’s choices for the immediate future.
Kit Wise (b. 1975, Portsmouth, UK)
Kit Wise is a Melbourne-based artist, art writer and curator. He has held 11 solo exhibitions in Italy and Australia, exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in Australia and Europe and has published more than 30 articles, reviews and catalogue essays for journals. He has undertaken residencies in Paris, Rome, New York, Tokyo and Melbourne. He has been included in exhibitions and screenings at: the Estorick Collection, London (2006); LOOP ‘08, Barcelona (2008); Urban Screens ‘08, Melbourne (2008); International Film Festival, Rotterdam (2009); and the Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan (2009). Wise is currently Acting Head of Fine Art and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, Australia.
THE COMMISION
Xanadu 2009
Xanadu critiques popular representations of the increasingly virtual ‘ideal city’; here conceived as a trans-cultural model of contemporary utopia. Seductively hyperreal in full HD, Xanadu depicts a vast and spectacular urban space of uncertain spatial, temporal and cultural origins. Selected details are flawlessly animated, providing an almost hallucinogenic quality of visual sensitivity.
In this intricate, almost symmetrical digital composition, Wise has synthesised imagery from various resources: found in open source archives; purchased from global stock agencies; still and video footage he recorded in Australia and abroad. His diverse reference sources include Western medieval narrative painting, traditional Japanese ukiyo-e (floating world) landscapes, science fiction cinema, and the literature of Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities) and Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle).
Individual zones of ‘truth’ sewn with such convincing thread lend a disquieting sensation to the reading of the work. Wise has crafted a mesmeric no-place, a true utopia-in-arcadia. Xanadu’s megatropolis fulminates harmoniously within a natural paradise. While disorder and dissent seem unimaginable in a place so carefully conceived, Xanadu constantly tilts the kaleidoscope between the desirable, the attainable and the real.
Experimenta Experimental Space
2010 Commissioned artists also include Rhys Turner & Melissa Ramos (NSW) Sarah Firth (ACT) whose projects are funded through the Australia Council’s Young and Emerging Artists’ Initiative for artists under 30. These commissions help to grow the young artist’s practice, strengthen their understanding of media art process, exhibition considerations, collaborations and technical process.
RHYS TURNER AND MELISSA RAMOS
HEARD
Heard is an interactive artwork exploring cultural and social views through sophisticated tracking technology in virtual as well as physical space. This work explores ideas around online social networking environments and how the proliferation of these spaces effect the way by which people relate and interact with one another.
To see Rhys Turner and Melissa Ramos’ commission in action go to: http://vimeo.com/9670233
sarah firth
admonition
Firth’s work, Admonition, is inspired by her concerns for nature in the 21st century. Admonition is a kinetic sculptural tree that, once approached, comes to life and begins to draw. The tree produces a range of mark making from precise diagrammatic drawings to wild lyrical scribbling and works relentlessly in its pursuit to communicate with the viewer. It could be that the drawings express the cycle of nature, from subtle and soothing to violent and seemingly erratic or perhaps it’s a warning, a plea for us to listen to nature and stop destroying it.
To see Sarah Firth's commision, go to: http://vimeo.com/8959388
