The following are synopses of each work to be screened as part of Multichannel, plus a short biography of each participating artist.

Artists Exhibiting in ArtSway’s Gallery 2:

Film/Video and Music:

Ranulph & Severi Glanville, Generator, 2002, 15mins 30secs

Generator, a sound piece with video, is a collaboration between Ranulph Glanville and his son, Severi. Those who have listened and watched it say it is powerfully moving. The sound from which the piece is made was found in the corridor of the Europa Hotel in Prague. Having only a video camera, it was recorded on that, with (therefore) an incidental video track. This information was digitised and the visual material was stabilised and colour corrected.

The sound and video tracks have some special features that are the contribution of the camera to the piece. The sound of the tape snagging on the reel can be heard and the difficulty of the camera focusing is used as a key part of the work. The piece has been edited and the sound extensively processed and enhanced digitally. However, this processing has left the work with a distinctly analogue feel, complete with clicks and crackles, and is in 5 sections: an image and soundless first section, three main sections, and credits. There is no development, and the piece tells no story, nor is it symbolic. It is just what it is. The sound is also without (classical) form and development. The piece was developed from the sound, although the visual material was finalised first.

Ranulph & Severi Glanville Biography

This is the first film made by Ranulph and Severi Glanville working together. Ranulph Glanville was active in electronic music and performance in the 1960s, since when he has been at the forefront of research in cybernetics, especially second-order cybernetics. He has earned his living teaching architecture and design. Generator represents his return to the use of electronic media for artistic purposes. He lives in Portsmouth, UK and commutes to a professorship in Melbourne, Australia.

Andrew Brand, Wires and Bows, 2008, 2mins 36secs

Wires and Bows is an experimental animation comparing the movements of telegraph wires from a moving train with the music of violins.

Andrew Brand Biography

Andrew Brand completed a degree in Fine Art, specialising in video installations before moving into film and video work. His films become visually engulfed by the atmosphere of the landscapes they are set in, with the landscape itself becoming a character within the work.  www.andrewbrand.co.uk

Anahita Hekmat, Apparition V, 2008, 2mins 59secs

Apparition V features a little boy struggling to climb a toboggan. His disrupted upward movement is treated in the same way as the child-like sounds that affect the music, by Schubert, heard playing in the background. Typology is made of personal rituals that children are performing as a metaphor of the learning process.

Anahita Hekmat Biography

Pete Gomes, I Am Not Afraid, 2004, 3mins 20secs

With kind permission from his estate, Pete Gomes was given the opportunity to work with any piece of music from the vast back catalogue of Luciano Berio's music. Stumbling across a second hand vinyl copy of experimental 1960s music ‘Momenti’ Gomes selected one small section from the composition to work with.

Filmed on a very fast 800ASA Super 8 negative film, Gomes utilized re-filming of hand drawn and coloured animated sequences, which involved removal and manipulation of film emulsion. This 8mm sequence was projected and re-filmed in his studio, using his favoured Sankyo 620XL Supertronic camera. This camera has extensive intervalometers that with additional in camera effects, time-lapse.

Stereo is used extensively, as part of Berio's composition and the images are synchronised to both the left and right ear. The editing was a tackled in two distinct sections. Berio's composition separates the left audio and the right audio channel with completely different sounds happening in each ear. Gomes’ editing process worked with only one audio channel at a time, editing precisely to the rhythm of each sound, and attempting to mimic the subtle movement in the music. The process was then repeated with the other audio channel. The film pays homage to the "Film Excercises 1-5" by John and James Whitney, and the work of Jordan Belson. The title is a quote from Berio's last interview in 2003, which was a requirement of the commission. It is intended not to have a closing quotation mark in the title as the full quote is closed as the end of the film.

"I am not afraid... there are deep solid roots in what we do which cannot be changed or destroyed."

Luciano Berio 2003

Pete Gomes Biography

Jen-Kuang Chang, Drishti II, 2008, 4mins 25secs

Drishti II, a term describing the visions one experiences during meditative states, is the second instalment in the series realized in 2007. Both sampled and computer-generated sounds are incorporated in order to achieve the intended variety of sonic landscapes to match the vivid, but delicate visualization. By presenting this composition, the composer invites the listener to actively contemplate one’s Self and the interaction between Self and the immediate surroundings that might be fallacious and misleading to one’s true understanding of inner divinity.

Jen-Kuang Chang Biography

Alison Ballard, Video, 2008, 1min

A (very) short experimental animation inspired by early experimental film. Abstract and intangible with a low-fi approach to a hi-tech medium, Video focuses on the relationship between image and sound, each influencing the creation and development of the other.

Alison Ballard Biography:

Alison Ballard is an artist working across disciplines to create works that examine our physical relationship with sound. She explores the effect upon the listener and looks at ways that sound can be given physical form as spaces, objects and imagery. www.alisonballard.com

Paul B. Davis, Compression Study 3, 2008, 2mins 49

Paul B. Davis’ works manipulate a compression codec used to play back video on contemporary computers that are orders of magnitude more 'powerful' than the Nintendos he often uses. However the fundamental approach stays the same: the conscious corruption of data, the releasing of bits from their imprisonment within the restrictive, limiting boundaries of corporate software applications. In this case it is Microsoft's MPEG-4 format that is both the target and source for exploration into something that Davis calls "compression aesthetics". The MPEG-4 video differs from the Nintendo video in that it lacks the ecological argument of re-using outdated hardware, but it still carries the message that untapped aesthetic potential exists in everyday gear (software in this case) that is meant to be inaccessible. For Davis the nature of computing machines dictates that inaccessibility never truly exists, and that he can download numerous videos from the Internet to use as source material.

Paul B Davis Biography

Rachel Cattle & Steve Richards, Same Old Scene, 2007, 7mins

Growing out of conversations about memory of film and music, Same Old Scene is a collection of pivotal moments and distilled elements recollected from Hollywood romantic films. The film references Westerns and popular music and conjures an abstract world of possible starting points and alternate storylines. The film uses hand drawn cardboard sets and a hand-held, low-fi aesthetic and comes with an accompanying publication in the form of a drawn ‘comic book’ containing ideas and philosophical statements.

Rachel Cattle & Steve Richards Biography

Richards and Cattle both live and work in London and have collaborated on projects together over the past five years. Their films and publications to date include The Cardboard Films, Same Old Scene and Out Of The Dark and Into The Night.

Flow Motion, The Invisible Workshop, 2007, 14mins

The Invisible Workshop is a sound piece that comes from a body of work inspired by the discovery in astronomy that most of our universe is invisible and dominated by dark energy, an invisible force responsible for speeding up the expansion of the universe. Flow Motion explore connections between the invisible universe, sonic culture, and the creative imagination.

Flow Motion see darkness as precondition of knowledge – of space and self which also finds precedent in cinema: darkness remains the precondition of the cinematic experience and the optimum condition for cinematic pleasure. The artists worked with a series of students on darkness and invisibility in narrative and non-narrative cinema, video and sound art. This work is the result of those classes and workshops

Flow Motion Biography

Artists Exhibiting in ArtSway’s Gallery 2:

Narrative Journey:

Steve Hines, Untitled (Clowns), 2007, 1mins 50secs

At first the image is indiscernible. We immediately hear the cheerful sound of a mobile ‘phone ring-tone. Seconds later a toy clown appears in the background of the image, slowly circling his way around to the foreground in an almost stuttering apparition-like fashion, to confront the viewer before disappearing off screen (stage). The ringing telephone continues. There is a sense of strained repetition, a frustrated call, an inability to answer – to communicate. The sad expression on the face of the clown confirms this disconnection with a symbol of popular contemporary culture. He has nowhere to go except around and around without hope of an exit and with a pained inevitability. Two opposing symbols: one happy; one sad: one contemporary; one of bygone days perhaps. This somewhat surreal film and its unlikely, ill-matched, elements alludes to a growing, yet latent alienation experienced by some, yet welcomed by a great many.

Steve Hines Biography

Steve Hines was born in Nottingham in 1963. From a background in the commercial printing industry he returned to full-time education at the University of Sunderland, graduating in 1998 with a First Class Honours Degree in Photography, Video & Digital Imaging. Hines has exhibited his work regularly and widely, including participation in several international video festivals. In 2006 he successfully completed a Masters Degree in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London. He lives and works in London.

Michael Fortune, Terminal Communication, 2007, 2mins 53secs

Terminal Communication is a fixed-frame video work that shows the actions of drivers as they approach a badly signed junction leading into Rosslare Harbour ferry port, in Co. Wexford, Ireland. Filmed from a vantage point overlooking the junction, the camera captures incidents that local people claim are an everyday occurrence.

Michael Fortune, Bingo, 2007, 2mins 37secs

Bingo documents the unusual social event of a 'Drive-in-Bingo' that is held weekly in the village of Ballymitty in rural Co. Wexford, Ireland.  The 'Drive-in-Bingo' developed after the introduction of the smoking ban in Ireland and it allows participants to partake in the game whilst smoking in their car. Although comedic there is an underlying sadness to the spectacle as the social element of bingo has retreated to the solitary confines of the car.

Michael Fortune Biography

Jeannie Driver, Spike It (2) – Office Investigation, 2007, 18mins 03secs

In 2007 Jeannie Driver received funding from Arts Council England South East to develop the spike it project. This project locates 6ft spike files in offices to explore traffic and flow of work, paper and waste. The work creates stratified sculptures of office activity together with, CCTV monitoring of the spike and filmed interviews with office workers on issues of paper and office culture. spike it aims to slow down time, focus on the ordinary to inform, provoke, challenge, enhance, connect and entertain.

This is one of a series of works emulating from ‘Office Investigations’ residencies where spike it (2) is placed in an office environment. Workers were interviewed on issues relating and emulating from the experience of having a spike it in their office. This is an edited video from those interviews and the CCTV monitoring.

Jeannie Driver Biography

Keyvan Gharaee Nezhad, David Kendall & Marina Loeb, Big Bus Tour, 2008, 2mins 40secs

The city of Dubai offers the tourist the opportunity to consume urban space. Is the tourist directed and trapped by this space? For example: the tour bus is a familiar sight within cities, the bus allows the visitor to visually access the city. This form of transport directs the viewer to certain destinations designated as sites to be consumed. Asking  ‘questions’ disrupts existing narratives, social frameworks and spatial events. The generation of subtle performances and interventions lead us to subvert and recompose notions of the ‘interview’. Highlighting social and spatial divisions between ‘migrant labour construction workers’ and ‘tourists’ in Dubai.“

Biographies:

David Bickerstaff, Pripyat: City of the Future, 2006, 9mins

The city of Pripyat is built next to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which exploded in 1986, sending a radioactive cloud over Belarus and northern Ukraine. The danger was kept a secret from the population of Pripyat, who continued to go about their business as usual as the disaster unfolded. In Bickerstaff’s film children play outside, shops are trading and the residents wonder about the fire raging at the reactor. After three days, the 50,000 inhabitants of Pripyat were eventually evacuated - displaced, damaged, and never to return. Pripyat still remains empty today, a ghostly monument to the devastation caused by nuclear accidents and the loss of a promised future.

David Bickerstaff Biography

Thomson & Craighead, Flat Earth, 2007, 7mins 7secs

Flat Earth is a desktop documentary, which takes the viewer on a seven-minute trip around the world so that we encounter a series of fragments taken from real peoples' blogs. These fragments are knitted together to form a kind of story or singular narrative.

The visual effect is not unlike that of Google Earth, although significantly here, nearly all of the visual material for Flat Earth is taken from satellite imagery freely available on the web. This is with the exception of the close-up imagery from outside the US, which had to be paid for for non-commercial use and a series of images taken from Flickr under Creative Commons attribution license. Flat Earth is an Animate Projects commission with Arts Council England and Channel Four Television. Animatics work is by Cavan Convery, with additional script assistance from Steve Rushton.

Thomson & Craighead Biographies

Gair Dunlop, Simulator, 2007, 6mins

An institutional half-life persisted at RAF Coltishall after the airfield closure in March 2006. Third World War, Middle East invasion, and Balkans crises continued to take place on a regular basis in a nondescript industrial building on the site. Once cutting-edge technology, the last Jaguar flight simulator in the world was approaching its endgame. Pilots drove there from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire for training. Unhappy with the move, and conscious of the imminent disappearance of their aircraft from service, pilots still insisted on ‘flying’ from Coltishall. Dressed in full nuclear/chemical suits, they sweated their way through engine failures, missile attack, refueling scenarios, and attack runs. Carefree about airfield safety, pilots would careen across the “grass,” squeeze through impossible gaps between buildings, and fly through as many suspension bridges as possible on their way to ‘War.’ Outside, as the base neared closure, structures were uprooted, signs taken down, and more buildings were sealed. The virtual Coltishall of the simulator increasingly became more ‘functional’ and homely than the real one.

Gair Dunlop Biography

Kevin Logan, Recitation, 2007, 4mins 29secs

Recitation is an audiovisual piece examining oral traditions and their relationship with text based information and belief systems, in particular religious texts. It incorporates hand made and computer generated text/graphics and footage capture by a mobile phone camera. The work was inspired by and utilises a poem by Jarmain Patrick, which was performed during a development week, which brought together visual, spoken word, and audio artists. This development week led to a number of short films commissioned by B3.Media, Brixton, London for the identities. TV project.

Kevin Logan Biography

Nina Sverdvik, My Father’s Car, (2008), 4mins 1 sec

My Father’s Car is a poetic meditation investigating the emotional space between imaginary and real experiences. Focusing on a young man and a middle-aged man, it is about a journey from the past and a sea crossing from known to unfamiliar territory. However the journey experienced by the audience has no specific beginning or end: the films’ narrative is driven by memories and the timeline is therefore not chronological. There is no dialogue, yet a fragmented story is narrated alongside the visuals on the screen. This is in response to how memories manifest themselves in day-to-day experiences.

My Father's Car is about an experience or a state of mind rather than a specific event or person. It is about the psychological impact of a journey that due to its monotonous and slow nature sometimes forces us to remember and reflect. This project is funded by Arts Council England, Film and Video Umbrella, The Norwegian Embassy and Southampton Solent University.

Nina Sverdvik Biography

Manuel Saiz:

Parallel Paradises – Japan, 2006, 4mins

Rin and Mai are two dancers of parapara, a disco dance trend popular in Japan. Their perfectly synchronized movements have a very precise pace and protocol, like they were speaking an unknown language. They perform in a forest where their figure and attitude is heterogeneous to the organic movement the nature around them; both words exist complete in the same space but do not touch each other.

Parallel Paradises – Ecuador, 2007, 8mins

The interaction between the lama, who belongs to the land of moors, with the supermarket is perturbing. She wanders lost in the codified landscape, free of any understanding of what humans have put there. In the video foreground and background belong to different universes.

Manuel Saiz Biography

John Davis, What for What, 2008, 9mins

Color and black and white Super 8 film supplements the death chamber audio recording of the US state of Georgia's 1984-botched execution of Alpha Otis O'Daniel Stevens. Questioning the notion that two wrongs do not make a right, this film interprets the final minutes of a condemned man’s existence in order to encourage continued debate over the practice of capital punishment in contemporary society.

John Davis Biography

Artists Exhibiting in ArtSway’s Gallery 3:

Film/Video as Material:

Nicola Naismith, Video Triptych, 2003, 2mins 30secs

Nicola Naismith explores the ordinary qualities of everyday items, for example the white shirt and the sewing needle, using a combination of digital and analogue processes. Naismith considers Video Triptych to be a seminal work that asks the question - is the movement generated by human (traditional) or mechanical (technological) means? A traditional tool is combined with new technology to create a new position for the needle and thread. The ergonomics of the making are important as the technology is placed in the space created by the activity, in this case the space between the body and the hands. Naismith’s approach to the needle and video camera is to view both as equal in status and value. The alliance of these different tools in Video Triptych creates a position within contemporary art that bridges fields of skill and knowledge. 

The objects Naismith selects are subject to complex questions concerning production, labour, value and the human machine. She is specifically interested in the relationships between white and blue-collar workers and represents ideas through works that unravel operations between hand, eye, brain, body and machine. The artist gratefully acknowledges the Arts and Humanities Research Council studentship that supported the making of Video Triptych during her Masters Degree study in Textile Culture at Norwich School of Art and Design. www.nicolanaismith.co.uk

Nicola Naismith Biography

Nicola Naismith uses video as part of a multi-disciplinary approach to practice that she has continued to develop since graduating with distinction from a Master’s Degree in Textile Culture in 2003. She has exhibited across the UK and presented at international conferences, The Space Between, Australia and Challenging Craft, Scotland (both 2004). In 2005 she was selected for the Commissions East Mentoring Scheme and later the same year Escalator Visual Arts an Arts Council England, East initiative that included a commission for new work for the Foundling Museum London. RSVP Contemporary Artists at the Foundling (2007) was curated by Gill Hedley and offered Naismith the opportunity to make new site specific work in response to the social history of the Foundling Hospital. She recently gave a presentation of her work at the ICA, London as part of Candy + Code a Textile Futures Research Group salon evening alongside Rachel Beth Egenhoefer and Barbara Rauch (2008).  Bulk, a photographic work was recently exhibited at the 2008 Eastern Open and awarded Joint Best in Show.

Cynthia Beth Rubin & Bob Gluck, Layered Histories: The Wandering Bible of Marseilles, 2004, 3mins 35secs

Layered Histories is the imaginary story of an actual 13th century illuminated Hebrew manuscript, today known as the Marseilles Bible. The music and images of this work mirror the many layers of this Manuscript: as a beautiful artefact, as a work of art reflecting the convergence of cultures in medieval Spain, and as a text which tells stories which themselves are layered in meanings.

The history of the manuscript is only partially known. Created in Toledo, Spain around 1260, the Bible visually embodies the multiple influences of Jewish convergence with Christian and Islamic cultures. When the 1492 Expulsion forced the Bible to flee Spain, it travelled to the Ottoman town of Safed, where it was amongst religious mystics seeking the means to repair the ills of the world. It subsequently disappeared until mysteriously, around 1884, two volumes of the Bible were discovered in the collection of the Bibliothèque Municipale of Marseilles, where they reside today. (Marseilles MS 162, 1-111).

Cynthia Beth Rubin Biography

Cynthia Beth Rubin is a visual artist working in 2D still imagery, inter-activity, animated images, and 3D imaging, who began experimenting with digital media in the early 1980’s. Trained as a painter, her work evokes cultural memories and the imagined past by intertwining photographic elements to create complex layers of color and texture. Rubin's work has been exhibited and screened in such diverse venues as the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Pandamonium Festival at the ICA in London, the Lavall Gallery in Novosibirsk, the DeLeon White Gallery in Toronto, and numerous editions of ISEA, ArCade and SIGGRAPH. Winner of the first award in New Media from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, she was recently awarded this grant for a third time.  Other awards and residencies include the New England Foundation for the Arts, Videochroniques in Marseilles, CYPRES in Aix-en-Provence, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.  She works independently and in collaboration.

Bob Gluck Biography

Karen Reed, Journey, 2006, 4mins 45secs

Journey is a film made using a mobile phone, and was captured during a journey that was personally very difficult. Reed intended it to have a grainy surveillance like feel, referring to the pervasive influence of the technology used to capture the images/sound. The film explores fragments of time moved from one space into another, traces of where Reed has been and the ‘intersection of site’ where large scale becomes small scale. www.karenreedart.com

Karen Reed Biography

Karen Reed is an emerging artist who graduated from Winchester School of Art and Design in 2005 with first class honours in Visual Art.  She gained her Masters in Art by Project, in 2007.  Her groundbreaking mobile phone video work has been exhibited in London, Southampton and New York. Recently she has been involved in an art exhibition for a large corporation.

Joe Duffy, Block, 2007, 6mins

Block is a video piece concerned with the relationship of individuals to contemporary urban environment through the modernist architectural living spaces of an anonymous UK tower block. An observational gaze on social habitués implicates the viewer in a dialogue with surveillance, monitoring and spatial dynamics. The narrative space of the tower block is revealed through light movements as residents travel through its interior spaces, their habitats.

Notions of psychastenia, personality and space are explored through a phenomenological approach to lived experience. The grid like structure of social urban planning is investigated through the rhythmic patterns of lights signaling room occupation and human habitation. The light changes indicate movement paths and spatial usage that create an illusion of the tower block as an entity, the flickering lights as pulses with the residents reduced to signals and data, as reflected through the sound design. The relationship to politics and economic realities is displayed through evidence of material objects such as televisions and curtains but with little trace of subject matter. The patterns and data referencing point towards consumer monitoring. The block itself containing a complex weaving of personal histories, identities, subjectivities and relations hinted at by physical movements that transform the block into a fictive arena.

Joe Duffy Biography

Simon Woolham, Severed, 2008, 32secs; Deracinator, 2008, 33secs; The Isle, 2008, 30secs

Simon Woolham’s films focus on recurring motives that feature in his work, bringing to life a series of landscapes that are digitally manipulated and made to move. These scenes are then modified to show some minor action in repetitive motion. These subtle movements humorously draw attention to the miniscule, the enhanced sound of each action dramatizing life’s kinetic force.

Simon Woolham Biography

Since graduating from Chelsea College of Art with an M.A. in 2000 Woolham has had shows and residencies both nationally and internationally. His first show was at the Hoxton Distillery Gallery in London at the end of 2000. Group shows followed including Becks Futures student prize at the ICA, Pizza Express drawing prize, Oriel Mostyn 11, where he was the prizewinner in 2001, and other group shows in Belfast, Düsseldorf, Berlin and Madrid. Since then he has had solo shows at The Lowry Gallery, as well as emergency 05 at Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth and Perspectives 05 in Belfast. 

Artists Exhibiting in ArtSway’s Gallery 3:

Psychological Narrative:

Hannu Karjailainen, Girl in a Red Sweater, 2006, 2mins

We are looking at an image of an empty park, foggy and dimly lit at night. A figure emerges from the shadows in the rear of the picture. Something or someone is sliding across the picture, we barely notice it from the shadows, and in the end it seems to dissolve into the grass before we can decide what we actually saw.

The central figure, the girl in a red sweater, remains unrecognizable for almost the whole duration of the work, leaving the viewer to speculate as to what is actually seen and whether there is a narrative to be found behind this strange scene.

Hannu Karjailainen Biography

Hannu Karjalainen is a Finnish artist currently living in Strasbourg, France. He graduated from the University of Industrial Arts Helsinki in 2005 majoring in photography and has since been showing his video installation work in solo and group exhibitions in Europe. This summer his work can be seen in Zürich (solo exhibition in Gallery Rotwand with Lovisa Ringborg), in Frankfurt (solo exhibition in Gallery Adler with Susanna Majuri) and in New York (group exhibition in Gallery Adler New York).

Anna Siebert, Der Hammer Ist Nichts An Sich, 2007/2008, 5 mins

The protagonist of Der Hammer Ist Nichts An Sich (A Hammer is Nothing in Itself) is a house being dismantled. Through its disappearance change comes to our consciousness: how do we react to change, cope with it and what takes place in the moments of transformation? The deconstruction of the house is reflected in the construction of the film. The building is slowly disintegrating: brick by brick it is taken apart, losing all traces of human presence, which are then - frame by frame - echoed and reflected in the film. We see decay, the disintegration of objects and the disappearance of human shelter and within that destruction we are able to imagine fragments of an intact place and its history. The process of the demolition contains principles of sculptural work such as taking apart, taking away, adding on to and (re)adjusting: deconstruction as creation is the leitmotif of this film.

Anna Siebert Biography

Lucy Cash, Sight Reading, 2007, 9mins

Set in a room itself modelled on an old library, Sight Reading contains an imaginary re-enactment of an early Twentieth Century experiment into ‘eyeless sight’*. Opening up a territory between documentary and fiction, the film contemplates the act of ‘reading’ – both sound and image – through a carefully choreographed series of movements within and between frames. The soundtrack is a rendition of Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ – a three-line piece of music composed to be repeated over 14 or 28 hours by different pianists. Sight Reading was made as part of an Artsadmin bursary.

* An early twentieth century area of research to prove the existence of extra-retinal vision for both social and medical reasons. 

Lucy Cash Biography

Lucy Cash began her career as a filmmaker and artist in 2000, with a three minute commission from the BFI / FilmFour, (Three Minute Wonder) closely followed by a digital moving image commission from South East Dance, (it’s aching like birds). Her work draws on both fiction and documentary aiming to blur the line between the real and the imaginary, and pays close attention to the relationship between sound and image.

Originally trained in movement and performance, much of her work has been informed by a choreographic approach - considering choreography in many different forms (from abstract dance to public and private gestures). Her diverse background supports her interest in a range of different contexts. As well as single screen works, projects have included film/video installations in both gallery and site specific spaces as well as online. She has twice been a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (for semesters in 2003 / 2005); and a collaboration with Goat Island performance company – Palimpsest - was included in the Tate Modern publication, Live – Art and Performance.

Tina Gonsalves, Melancholia, 2008, 3mins 55secs

FEEL SERIES is a cinematic study exploring four emotional states. The series will become four, three minute films emerging from an established Art/Science research collaboration between emotion neuroscientist Dr Hugo Critchley, clinical hypnotist, David Oakley and artist Tina Gonsalves. Melancholia is the first from the series.

Emotions are part of our everyday. Over the last ten years the artist has explored the intimacies and vulnerabilities of human emotions through video, wearable technology, and interactivity and installation. The film uses hypnosis to create an emotionally potent sound track that becomes the foundation to each film. Under hypnosis, the artist is asked to re-experience potent emotional memories of her life. Using photography, digital and found video, the aim is to evocatively recreate/re-imagine these memories through moving image and sound. Through effects and edits the artist translates the emotional resonance of the event, with the re-enactment being somewhat more evocative, whimsical and poetic than the lived event. The memory becomes more amplified through colour, space and texture.

Tina Gonsalves Biography

Sarah Pucill, Taking My Skin, 2006, 35mins

‘I’m not aware of you taking my skin’, says the artist’s mother to the camera as it zooms in on her eye as close as the lens will allow. Taking My Skin tracks a dialogue between the artist and her mother. Their exchange ranges from narrating the filming process ‘in the moment’ to relations in an earlier time – ‘how long do you think it takes for a child to become separate?’ Throughout the journey film spaces continuously dissolve and collapse only to separate again. Sometimes the artist is behind the camera, sometimes the mother, sometimes both simultaneously behind and in front, or neither. Both perform, film, and alternately instruct, position and direct the other. Formally and thematically, the film is an exploration of closeness, of synching, and the threat this poses to the self.

Sarah Pucill Biography

Sarah Pucill’s films have been screened at major international film festivals including: London Film Festival, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Osnabruck Media Arts Festival and Montreal Festival of New Cinema.  Television broadcasts include: BSB TV Australia (Mirrored Measure, 1996; bought by BSB), Carlton Television (Backcomb, 1995; funded by Carlton), Granada TV (You Be Mother, 1990).   Retrospective screenings have included the Tate and the Lux, in London and the Millennium Film in New York.

Taking My Skin was recipient of the Marion McMahon Award at the Images Festival in Toronto 2007 and was shown as part of ‘Mother Cuts: Experiments in Film, Video & Photography’ at New Jersey University Gallery in 2008 together with work by Mona Hatoum and Mary Kelly.  Her retrospective screenings have included the Tate, the Lux, in London and the Millennium in New York.

Joel Papps, 50 Interesting Facts, 2004, 8mins

50 Interesting Facts is a candid self-portrait made in the style of BBC Video Nations Diary. Through the reading of prepared autobiographical statements, chosen and spoken in random order, an intriguing juxtaposition of the mundane and the more sensational is revealed. The ordinary and the extraordinary are given equal importance, which results in a questioning of how a sense of identity is forged and how experience impacts it. Humorous and poignant at the same time, produced in a lo-fi manner to increase its sense of intimacy, this film explores the very personal in a way that everyone can relate to.

Joel Papps Biography

Kevin Pocock, Sanctuary, 2007, 3mins

Ged has lived in the same house in Manchester, England for 25 years.  Here he talks openly and candidly about the contrast between living alone and sharing his house. With this film Pocock wanted to make something that was very direct and about a particular person and place. This is in contrast to most of his other painting, drawing and video work, which although drawing on personal experiences and memories, tends to be more contemplative and abstracted. www.kjpocock.com

Kevin Pocock Biography

Kevin Pocock is fascinated by the thoughts, memories and dreams we carry with us each day. The ones that make us tick. He strives to incorporate the universal to represent the very personal. Private thoughts made public. The internal made external.

His work consists of paintings, drawings and video. Most pieces start as a very small, rough, spontaneous sketch. He often jots an idea down wherever he might be and later select from these to create a larger piece. This could be a painting on canvas but it could also be a film. The final work is very close in spirit to the original sketch. Pocock was brought up in Dorset, on the south coast of England. His memories of that landscape and coastline, together with his studies as an architect at Cambridge University, has helped form and direct his work. He seeks to mix the artistic with the technical; to try to achieve an effective simplicity. No more no less. A quiet contemplation. A private moment.

Jordan Baseman, Inside Man, 2007/2008, 8 minutes

Inside Man features Geoffrey Trendall, a con man and gangster: the Inside Man. We hear Geoff speaking about his criminal tendencies and sexual prowess as we watch a beautiful young woman dancing in a nightclub along with a small group of friends on the dance-floor. The enigmatic footage was originally shot in 1977 by Jonathan Guilbert and edited and directed by Jordan Baseman in 2007. Inside Man was made during a research fellowship at the Manchester Museum.

Jordan Baseman Biography

Benjamin D Cooper, 11:59, 2008, 11mins 59secs

Benjamin D Cooper is a visual artist and filmmaker whose works explore the recurring themes of implied multiple narratives, the language and conventions of cinema, memory, history and travel. Working primarily in lens based media, his films, photographs and installations explore these themes, which ultimately are realized as psychological, poetic and emotive works. They draw attention to a need for narrative closure and resolution by creating a frustration on the viewer’s part and by setting up ambiguous situations that allow for multiple interpretations. They question and critique traditional narrative forms and structures, posing new and challenging ways of dealing with narrative.

Benjamin D Cooper Biography