Dorkbot CBR June 2009 meeting

Announcing our June meeting in association with Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS), Dorkbot CBR presents Fiona Hooton.

Date: Tuesday, 30 June 2009
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:30pm
Location: The Fireplace Room, Gorman House Arts Centre
Street: Ainslie Ave. Braddon

Fiona’s career has involved employment as an artist, educator and administrator in both state and national collecting institutions. Over this period of time she has acquired an ongoing interest in Australia’s still and moving image heritage. Currently manager of Picture Australia www.pictureaustralia.org
Fiona will talk to us about how artists can utilise/interface with the Picture Australia Collection.

Mitchell Whitelaw talk at National Archives of Australia

Congratualations to Mitchell Whitelaw on winning the 2008 Ian Maclean Award awarded by the National Archives of Australia.

Mitchell is talking at the National Archives  about his project “The visible archive”  which uses creative visualisation to interpret large sets of archival data.

Time: 12:30 pm
Date:  Tuesday 16th June
Place: National Archives of Australia
Corner Queen Victoria Terrace and Kings Avenue, Parkes ACT

Dorkbot CBR May/June Meeting

Dear CBR- Dorks,

As we had a meeting earlier this month presenting Tim Plaisted and his work we will skip this months meeting and reconvene on Tuesday June 30. At this meeting Fiona Hooton is scheduled from the National Library’s Picture Australia project. Fiona will talk to us about how artists can utilise/interface with the Picture Australia Collection.

More details to follow in June.

Best Regards,

Alex

saw “Let the right one in” – classy vampire flick from Sweden – check it out…

Dorkbot Canberra April/May Meeting

Dear CBR Dorks and friends,

We have held over April’s Dorkbot meeting to host an artist talk by Tim Plaisted on Thurs 7th May in the CCAS gallery.

Tim Plaisted is an artist living in Brisbane working with media art. Plaisted’s work has been exhibited in Australia, Mexico, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, UK, USA and reviewed in Artforum. His current work, Careful Messenger (2008) continues an exploration of realtime 3d and game tools in media art from recent works, River’s End (2007) and Handheld (2006). His earlier work, Surface Browser (2004), was commissioned for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts UK gallery launch and included in “2004: Australian Culture Now” national survey of contemporary art. Surface Browser as well as networkdposition (1999) and 24Hr Coverage (2000) were included in three MAAP (Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific) Festivals in Australia and Singapore.

Tim is in town to install and open his recent work Careful Messenger in the Cube space at CCAS the show opens on Friday May 8 at 6pm.

“Careful Messenger was inspired by my grandfather Stirling Blacket’s time as a dispatch rider in Gallipoli, relaying and confirming messages from command on his horse. In the two-channel work a horse gallops in the left
panel while in the right panel the horse pants exhausted with closed eyes, turning its head towards the viewer. Here Blacket’s horse appears as a modern day messenger, a search engine working overtime for research. In formally combining these two resonating images, the work suggests that the labour and commitments of research and information delivery, is just as critical to us today as Blacket’s missions and should be approached with the same caution and vigilance. “

Tim’s website is http://www.boxc.net/

Date: Thursday, 7th May 2009
Time: 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Location: Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Gorman House Arts Centre
Street: Ainslie Ave. Braddon

Hope to see you there!

Alex

testing, testing

Dorkbot CBR March Meeting

This month at Dorkbot following on from the opening of Collars at Canberra Contemporary Art Space.
Project artist Alexandra Gillespie will talk about the project beginnings, development and exhibition of the installation in the CCAS gallery amidst the work. Project programmer and electronics maestro Ben Lippmeier will talk about the technical aspects behind the project development.

At the centre of Collars, is the symbolic significance of the collar in its role as an indicator of power, control and social stratification. The artists have collected stories from significant others including friends, family and fellow artists. These stories are implanted in the collars, as it were; computer programmed electroluminescent lamps that project texts through the fabric. Through this multi-layered interconnected display of the technologies of spoken word, written word and symbolism, Gillespie and Langley literally shed light on complex personal narratives through the use of a deceptively simple, yet, loaded object, the collar.

-David Broker CCAS, Director.

Ben Lippmeier is a final year PhD student and occasional lecturer in Computer Science at the ANU and dorkbot cbr regular.

Alexandra Gillespie is a media artist whose work is primarily concerned with responding to particular sites and spatial/temporal experiences. She often utilises projection, sound, and found objects to create installations, video and photographic works. As a hybrid media artist she has worked in a range of contexts including public works, gallery exhibitions, architectural collaborations, performance and festivals.

Her work has been exhibited in Australia, Asia, America and Europe.

Alexandra holds a B.A. in Media Studies from the University of Queensland and a Masters degree in Communication Design from Queensland University of Technology. She is currently a PhD Candidate, School of Art, Photography and Media Arts, ANU. In 2007, Alexandra co-founded the Canberra chapter of dorkbot with Tracey Meziane Benson.

Currently Co-Director of the Electrofringe festival, sound/media artist, Somaya Langley also worked as co-collaborator on the project.

Date: Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:00pm
Location: CCAS, Gorman House Arts Centre
Street: Ainslie Ave. Braddon

Collars Exhibition at CCAS opens Fri 27th March

Introduced at the 2008 International Symposium of Electronic Art in Singapore, Collars, an immersive media installation by Canberra collaborators Alexandra Gillespie and Somaya Langely, can finally be seen in all its glory at Canberra Contemporary Art Space. With sound, LED text, and lots of imagination, Gillespie and Langley transform the humble neck piece into an installation of floating collars that symbolize power, control and memory.

In the Middlespace gallery CCAS presents a body of new work by painter Dionisia Salas Hammer, entitled 2009 A * C Odyssey. Dionisia is a recent graduate of the ANU School of Art who imagines how the earth’s geological formation might have looked if she were painting at the time of the big bang. Salas Hammer generates the exhilaration of creation itself while asking how the newly born imploding and exploding earth could be envisioned by means of abstraction.

Showing in the Cube gallery is Damaged Goods – a collection of assemblages by Melbourne based artist Mat de Moiser who uses consumer items such as Ikea furniture as the medium for his artwork. On one level it is a tongue in cheek look at the nature of art and consumerism. On a more serious level Damaged Goods reflects de Moisers’s Estonian heritage and memories of refugee grand parents whose first Australian house was built from re-purposed packing crates, with furnishings either donated by friends or salvaged from the local tip.

Collars : Alexandra Gillespie & Somaya Langley
2009 A * C Odyssey : Dionisia Salas Hammer
Damaged Goods : Mat de Moiser

The exhibitions open at CCAS Gorman House 6pm Friday March 27th
the artists will be present at the opening and all are invited to attend
The exhibitions continue until May 2nd

Opening Tonight of Restless Habitat by Lucie Verhelst, Alistair Riddell and Belinda Jessup.

Restless Habitat
by Lucie Verhelst, Alistair Riddell and Belinda Jessup.
A kinetic textile installation exploring the
concept of home through a fusion of nomadic
culture and western suburbia.
The exhibition will be opened by
Wendy Teakel, Head of Sculpture, ANU School of Art
When: 6pm, 11 February 2009
Where: ANCA Gallery
1 Rosevear Place
Dickson ACT

Dorkbot CBR February Meeting

This month at Dorkbot Canberra we welcome Tim Brook.

From Tim’s web site:

Most of the photographs that I use display a basic technical competence, but not all of them. Photographers often ask me why I show photographs that are overexposed or badly composed. The answer, of course, is that I am not showing photographs, I am showing transitions between photographs. It is the relationship between the images that interests me. As individual photographs they may or may not be well composed. I remain fascinated by the subtlety and complexity of spatial relationships when they are juxtaposed in time. A slide-tape piece invites a viewer to make new connections. (http://hingstonbrook.com/01av/tb0101.htm)

Biography

Tim is an independent audio-visual artist—among other things, he makes slide-tape works. He blends colour slides on a screen one after the other to produce a sequence of slowly changing images. He describes each slide-tape work as ‘an invitation to make connections’. He’s been making them since 1980, working with composers, performers, theatrical directors and with other visual artists. Once he worked with a reggae band and once with a Nigerian Rastafarian and four drummers. Now he works mainly with recorded sound and commissioned music.

As a photographer, Tim was originally known for documenting the work of visual and performing artists. Since 1994, most of his work has been a close study of surfaces—their textures, patterns and colours. His corrugated iron series is one result of this study. More recently he has been photographing reflections.

Tim has undertaken researched into online and onscreen communication. He has identified features of new form of language for education online, a language growing out of spoken and written language but going beyond them. Some of these developments involved word usage but many more involved the use of non-verbal elements to make meaning, for example the systematic layering of information in metaphoric learning environments.

Currently, Tim is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University School of Art and a member of the board of PhotoAccess.

Tuesday Feb 24 at 6.00pm in the Fireplace Room, Gorman House.

Be there and be square!

Tracey