PROFILE: LINDA WALLACE

: : Seth Keen

: : printable version  

Linda Wallace has a diverse background in photography, cinematography, radio, journalism and publishing, experiences she brought together in the media company machine hunger formed in 1995. This diversity, in combination with curating a range of international media arts exhibitions, informs her art practice. Consequently, Wallace has embraced the convergence of media and art in the medium of video. Her obsession with the transitive nature of video has successively involved short pieces and multi-monitor installations; large multi-screen public installations produced through machine hunger; digitally-composited single-channel video; and is now returning to installation and public space works. The single-channel video works eurovision (2001) and entanglements (2004) are examples of a video style that explores the narrative territory between interactive video and documentary essay. A broad range of media elements are layered together as multiple tracks of data to investigate a new form. This technique is used to question an era of media saturation and the technological expansion of video.

In eurovision, film excerpts from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) are combined in split-screen format with TV grabs from the ‘Eurovision’ song contest, archival documentary footage and original video-photos recorded by the artist. All these elements are composed into a magazine-style template of separate multiple frames that screen simultaneously. In contrast, the audio is a single computer music track fusing this mix of imagery.

entanglements continues this exploration of frame fragmentation, the screen becoming a grid through which multiple streams of mixed images are pushed at the viewer. Television news excerpts from Palestine, Pine Gap, the Iraq War and the Moscow theatre siege are set into multiple frames that consume and slice up the whole of the screen, which becomes a videowall of symmetrically repeated and mirrored television bites occasionally broken with the more familiar full screen image. A singular composed soundtrack silences the television audio, while a cloned newsreader repeated in a bank of frames speaks but is never heard.

In an interview Wallace talks about the way video constantly devours other media and new “technological developments.” It is the porous nature of the medium that prompts her to use video to re-use media. In techniques which hark back to Guy Debord’s ‘detournement’ of the 1960s or the Scratch video of the 1980s, she re-uses and re-mixes images and text to recontextualise the original sources in another form. Interested in the differing tonal qualities of video formats, emerging video technologies are used to explore the “textuality” of the medium, such as the green monochromatic tonal quality of military night vision cameras in entanglements. Each type of video image offers differing resonance in terms of narrative construction and the transformation of context.

As a recombinant video practitioner, Wallace also explores with rigour the spatiality of the frame. Splitting the screen into multiple frames instigates an engagement with multi-linear narratives. [1] Described by Wallace as a “linear version of an interactive project”, eurovision emulates the viewer and user experiences on the Internet. Lev Manovich argues that computer operators working with numerous fragments of information are constantly engaging with the concept of multiple simultaneous associations. [2] This notion is translated into eurovision and entanglements. Engaging with new media technologies and cultural paradigms, this video work extends a shift towards the orientation of space as part of converged media and art. Wallace is currently extending these spatial explorations as an artist in residence at Montevideo Time Based Arts in Amsterdam. Living Tomorrow uses multiple streams of video, sourced and compiled from an array of video fragments lodged on a server, and projects these streams into a public space. This work examines rule-based and random narrative construction and the resultant materiality of high-resolution video over networks. The outcome becomes part of what she has called “architectural media space”.

NOTES:
1. Peter Weibel, "Narrated Theory: Multiple Projection and Multiple Narration (Past and Future)." In Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, eds., New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative, London: British Film Institute, 2002. pp. 105-19.
2. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 322-326.

Seth Keen is a lecturer, researcher and artist, based in the Centre for New Media Arts (CNMA) at The Australian National University, Canberra. He is currently completing a Master of Arts (by Thesis), through the University of Technology, Sydney, focussing on the changing conditions of video practice and theory in new media environments.