charting memory : framing memory exhibition

The dynamic relationship between art, science and medicine, and the community is the subject of a new exhibition - Charting Memory, Framing Memory - by two members of the University of Newcastle, Ms Miranda Lawry and Professor Philip Schofield.

The exhibition will be held in The University Gallery, Callaghan campus, from Thursday 23 August until Friday 28 September 2007. The University of Newcastle, through the University Gallery, is an advocate for the development and strengthening of hybrid visual forms developed through the combining of research and disciplines. This exhibition and the ones to follow are the stories of these creative
collaborations.

Virna Rodriguez: Art Curator


charting memory : framing memory exhibition

Our realities, identities and lives are constructed through the ways we remember events and objects we have experienced. In this
exhibition, Philip Schofield and Miranda Lawry use non traditional media forms to explore the evocation of memory and to extend our language for describing what we see.
What makes up memory? How does it infiltrate our minds and bodies? These are some of the questions that inspire the work of Philip Schofield. An installation of collaged images of DNA sequences and combinations are represented in bands of colour and texture. They wrap themselves around a wall of the gallery. Intermittently, in tiny squares, small faces appear. In this work, Schofield is interested
in the layering of memories and identities using the language of science to transform the biochemical units of DNA into hand drawn abstractions. Each image contains some aspect of another image, and in turn, is further reconfigured into new patterns and forms. Each of these represents a unique person connected by the same unit of life.
Schofield integrates art and science through his involvement in Biochemistry and in the visual and graphic arts. The series of works entitled The barcode of life break the confines of media application through the combination of the hand worked images, digital media and prints, photography, and prints generated by medical imaging equipment such as those used to analyse the chemical make-up
of DNA. Without privileged knowledge of the source and common use of the materials and images, they can all be viewed as tools of
visual representation. Schofield aims to show the processes of medical imaging are photographic processes, providing a common link
between art and science.

In the work, Nomogram for calculating memory, Schofield asks how we arrive at a memory. Do we use a chart to find where point A
and point B intersect in time and space? The image shown here is print of a blurred face of a girl overlayed by the rigid clarity of a grid
- a reworked image from a machine is intercepted by work of the human hand. It is as if the image appears to be forming in our mind’s
eye in the same way that a photograph is developed during the printing process. Schofield illustrates how nerve endings etch the
biochemical and electrical impulses in our bodies. A hybrid visual form is produced, using the language of both art and science.

As an exploration of the regenerative benefits of expressing grief, Lawry invites the viewers to put on a different pair of eyes and enter
another person’s experience through a panorama of windows from the now closed Royal Newcastle Hospital. This project was part
of a collaborative work between the University staff, in partnership with the staff and community of the Royal Newcastle Hospital, and
the Arts for Health Program at The John Hunter Hospital. The project responds to community reactions to the official closure of the
Royal Newcastle Hospital in March 2006. Lawry, in collaboration with colleague, Professor Anne Graham, engaged with the staff at
the Hospital to express their feelings at the closure. These interactions were translated into an installation of photographic work and
memorabilia. The work was conceived as site specific installation in the foyer of the John Hunter Hospital in homage to the Royal
Newcastle Hospital. In this recontextualised space Lawry’s photographs still resonate strongly with the original intention. They are
interpretations of the exact window views where staff were invited to recall their most vivid memories of their workplace. Each window,
absent of a figure, is a ghost-like reminder of the lives that were lived in the Royal, and reflects on the very foundations of the hospital’s
existence. The salt haze through which the views were photographed document the environmental factor, which was a continued source
of frustration to the community through its impact on the maintenance needs of the Hospital.
In another major project, Lawry revisits the idea of the memories held within objects and places. In working with elderly people in
the community, Lawry interprets personal histories through photographing the objects that are collected and displayed in homes and
through the activities in which her subjects participate. Again, though most of the images do not feature individuals, they are all about
the individuals who belong to these objects through their memories. The movement of disembodied hands is captured as they play with
jigsaw puzzles and letter tiles to represent the piecing together and scrambling of memories. Other images invite responses of humour
at the characters portrayed by the objects in the photographs. In one image, a chest of drawers is labelled according to the articles of
clothing contained within.
Charting memory, Framing Memory juxtaposes romantic images of nostalgia with associations of order, measure and structure. These
ideas function as tensioning devices that question attempts to place them at opposing ends of a spectrum. As shown in the works of the
Lawry and Schofield, the intricate workings of memory need not be separated by the language of art, science and community; they are
fuelled by dynamic combinations of these frameworks of knowledge.

memory & contemporary art

pbs series: art in the twenty-first century: memory episode

How does memory function? What is history? How do contemporary artists frame the past in their work? The Art:21 documentary “Memory” explores these questions through the work of the artists Susan Rothenberg, Mike Kelley, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Josiah McElheny, and concludes with an original video artwork by Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler. See a slideshow of artworks showcased in the “Memory” episode, watch a video preview of the show, or explore a slideshow of artists from multiple seasons of Art:21 discussing the theme of memory in their work.


program 10: memory

Whether critical, irreverent, or introspective, the artists in “Memory” delve into personal memory and the past, transforming them in their work. The artists wrestle with complex topics such as the veracity of history, the nature of interpretation, subjective versus objective truth, and the ways in which objects and images from the past embody cultural memory. Introduced by actor Isabella Rossellini, “Memory” is shot on location in Galisteo, New Mexico; Los Angeles, California; Paris, France; New York, New York; Chicago, Illinois; and Austin, Texas.

A transplant from New York, Susan Rothenberg produces paintings that reflect her move to an isolated home studio in New Mexico and her evolving interest in the memory of observed and experienced events. In her early career, she became noted for her series of large paintings of horses. Now, however, she does not find herself creating series. “The paintings are more of a battle to satisfy myself now and I don’t have a sense of series,” she says. Drawing on material from her daily life, she confesses that in her current work “the second painting seems to complete the series.” Sitting in her studio, Rothenberg speaks candidly about her working process and her occasional battles with artistic block.

In a body of work that includes sculptures, performance, and installations, Mike Kelley explores contemporary culture's obsession with repressed trauma. Many of Kelley’s projects draw on his own memory. "Educational Complex," he says, “is a model of every school I ever went to plus the home I grew up in, with all the parts I can’t remember left blank.” That project has led Kelly to create of a performance/video called "Day is Done," which will eventually consist of 365 tapes, one for every day of the year. In scenes that he writes, directs and scores, Kelley has drawn on yearbooks to re-stage high school rituals with surreal elements, such as donkeys, devils, and eerie music in a student-body assembly.

“To me photography functions as a fossilization of time,” says Tokyo-born
Hiroshi Sugimoto, who uses traditional photographic techniques to produce images that preserve memory and time. “I start feeling that this is the creation of the universe and I am witnessing it,” he says of his black-and-white seascapes. Sugimoto recalls the influence of Marcel Duchamp on his art, and especially on his own exhibition where he has mounted giant white plinths with photographs of 19th-century machines. These are juxtaposed with images of three-dimensional models that illustrate mathematical theories. “It’s not just a photography show,” he says, “It’s like a space sculpture.”

“All of my work is essentially derived from some previous source,” says Josiah McElheny. “A lot of times what I’m doing is re-imaging something or transforming it slightly, but it’s always very much in connection to its source.” In his exhibition "Total Reflective Abstraction," he uses a silvered glass technique to build on the theories of Isamu Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller proposing a completely reflective “utopia." McElheny's mirrored objects relate to one another in an infinite matrix of reflections. “The definition of being a modern person is to examine yourself, to reflect on yourself and to be a self-knowledgeable person,” he explains, as he himself reflects on the meaning of his work.

post memory: makeshift memorials in contemporary art exhibition

curated by yaelle amir, the exhibition features artists investigating alternative approaches to the process of memorializing, representing “various outcomes of remembrance through a mediated history.” using vicarious experience as their source, the artists enlist a variety of disciplinary practices such as performance, intervention, and mapping, to redefine the act of commemoration of people and events that have faded from collective consciousness. Participating artists: Binh Danh, Joseph DeLappe, David Maisel, Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry, Emily Prince, Benjamin Tiven, Anna Von Mertens.
EFA Project Space, 323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10018

reflections in a chinese eye blog

reflections - abrupt change in the direction of propagation of a wave that strikes the boundary between different mediums.

visual art as cultural memory in modern china

Interdisciplinary Symposia
(Oct. 15-16, Oct. 22-23, 1999)

In Conjunction with
Picturing Power:
Posters of the Cultural Revolution

October 6-22, Hopkins Hall Gallery and Corridor,
The Ohio State University, College of the Arts

Organized by
Xiaomei Chen and Julia F. Andrews
Sponsored by the Mershon Center

With major support from The Ohio State
University Office of Research and Graduate School Interdisciplinary Seminar Grant Program

Co-sponsored by The Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities (ICRPH), College of Humanities, College of the Arts, Hopkins Hall Gallery and Corridor, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL), Division of Comparative Studies, Department of History of Art, Department of Art, Department of History, Huntington Archive, and AsianAmerican Student Services.

avoiding myth & message: australian artists and the literary world

7 April - 12 July 2009

avoiding myth & message is primarily an mca collection based project featuring artists whose works have been informed by australian literature. the exhibition looks at some of the major themes within both the literary and visual traditions and considers where the two streams of creativity overlap thematically: the landscape/interior, text and image,urban life, politics and the personal.

writing from art

Memories of a Certain Time: Tate Film Program (2009)

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's film, Atomic Park (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, France 2004, 9 min). Also shown are La Jetée (Chris Marker, UK 1962, 28 min) Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, UK 1970, 32 min) Toute la mémoire du monde (Alain Resnais, France 1956, 20 min) (Toute la Mémoire du Monde (All the World's Memory) (Part One) (Part Two) is a short documentary by director Alain Resnais about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. With its long tracking shots through cavernous library hallways, it imagines the Bibliothèque Nationale as a forbiddingly inhuman landscape in which man attempts to imprison "knowledge" in an effort to counter the limits of his own memory. Only in the act of individual selection -- a single patron choosing a specific text -- is there hope that this undifferentiated mass of knowledge can be redeemed, as the reader makes discriminating use of the collective national memory for the fulfillment of a constructive individual purpose). From BA to Rio, Paris to Kyoto, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster moves through eleven of the world’s most famous cities to create short portraits of urbanism. Filmed in public places like parks, beaches and even deserts, Parc Central (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, France 2006, 50 min), takes the viewer on a visual, auditory and poetic journey through urban spaces. Both films at this screening use monologues as their central device, where the actors' thoughts are voiced over the film and not spoken. Gonzalez-Foerster's melancholy Central (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, France 2001, 10 min) follows a girl waiting at a ferry terminal in Hong Kong, and Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne's Un homme qui dort (Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne, France 1974, 93 min), set in Paris, is a classic about a young man who retreats into himself. In Gonzalez-Foerster's Riyo (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, France 1999, 10 min), a teenage girl calls a boy from the riverside in Kyoto. But as the conversation goes on, our focus shifts from the pair to the cityscape around them. Two lovers are also separated in Zhang Ke Jia's Still Life (Zhang Ke, China/Hong King 2006, 111 min), and the film uses their story to reflect on the changes a new dam has wrought on the Yangtze river.

David Blair: Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

This was the first video ever transmitted on the Internet in 1993 all 85 mins.

"Wax" is very likely the oddest film I've ever seen. Marvelously, beautifully, lyrically, and profoundly intellectually stimulating in all respects. Breathtaking in its scope and achievement. But very odd. 

I have read medical reports containing sodium pentathol interviews and transcripts of schizophrenics' monologues. I have read memoirs and fiction by schizophrenics and hard drug users. I have read Surrealist and Beat Movement literature. I have read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. I have read the visionary poetry of Charles Williams and H.D.

I have watched films by Kenneth Anger and David Lynch and Maya Daren. I have read Yoruba ethnic literature from West Africa and studied Aleister Crowley's skryings on the Enochian aethyrs. I have read H. P. Lovecraft and also Kenneth Grant's post-Crowleyan magickal writings describing journeys behind the Tree of Life which would have preempted H.P.L.'s usual nightmares had he but known of them.

"Wax" stands tall in that company. A hypnotic, hallucinatory, purely poetic fusion of words, images, political ideas, and mystical transformations, nothing quite resembles it. "Pi" (1998) tried for something as distinctive, but that film gave us a glowering, paranoid, tortured vision shot in deliberately painful close-ups. "Wax" makes a complete contrast in its joyful freedom of eloquence in narration and visuals.

"Wax" enhances life while critiquing it. The film employs early, simple computer graphics. It juggles idiosyncratic desert architecture, prosaic photography, and absurd juxtapositions of common images.

It tells a story of Middle Eastern honey bees along with offering a hard view of the original U.S. military actions against Iraq in 1991 (a time so simple in retrospect as to seem the good old days). It links Los Alamos with transformations in consciousness. "Wax" leaps beyond the merely political in its luminous metaphors for human existence.

You can find stronger films, more beautiful films, more linguistically spry films, but you will probably never find anything quite like this fireworks display of language and image. Think "2001: A Space Odyssey" on a home movie budget. Your grasp of reality (and cinema) may never feel the same.

The movie starts out with James Maker, who is a member of something called the Supernormal Film Society whos goal is to film the spirits of the dead walking among the living. There's some background on this which seems largely irrelevant. Then we meet his grandson, Jacob Maker who is the main character of this story. Jacob is a programmer who works on aircraft simulation programs. He's also a beekeeper of Mesopotamian bees he inherited from his grandfather.

So, after a bit the bees drill a hole in his head and put in a television, which the bees use to start showing him things. About this time, a statue of Kane outside his house kills the statue of Able, and Kane is marked with the X symbol. Then at work, Jacob wonders why his co-workers never wonder what happens to the missiles they launch that don't come back (never mind that a programmer probably doesn't deal with missile launches), and he realizes that they turn into flying saucers which fly to the moon where the dead live.

About this time, the bees start showing him things on the television and he makes a big pilgrimage to the Garden of Eden Cave which the bees tell him is the entrance to the world of the dead. Jacob then realizes that the bees are actually the dead of the future, and goes to the cave. Although it is a 40 miles walk through the desert, he makes the journey a bit easier by becoming a bomb part of the way. He then learns that he has to kill someone to fulfill his destiny, which is to be reborn in a wax body that the bees make in the cave.

When arriving at the cave, Jacob learns that the cave is actually the entrance to a planet inside of our planet where the bees live. There, he dies and goes to join the world of the dead. For a while, he becomes the X symbol. Then he becomes a poem in the language of Kane. Then he travels to some other planets, including the Planet of Television. Next he becomes a rival beekeeper of his grandfather. Then he decides it's time to fulfill his destiny, which is to kill someone. So, he becomes a bomb and blows up two Iraqi soldiers in a tank. Then he becomes the X symbol with himself, his grandfather's arch enemy, and the two soldiers he blew up.

As far as I can tell, this is a movie about a weapons manufacturer who feels haunted by the souls of the people his weapons have killed, and eventually has a schizophrenic meltdown.

To see full move go to filmmakers website Webwax.

Wax Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees is the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film (independent or otherwise) to have been re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the internet. The New York Times recognized the accomplishment, and ran the article "Cult Film is First on the Internet" in its May 23, 1993 business section.

Waxweb is a hypermedia version of the film "Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees" by David Blair.

The online version of Waxweb has been hosted since 1994 by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. It is an 85 minute movie in 80,000 pieces.

In the story at the centre of Waxweb Jacob Maker is a beekeeper who designs flight simulators. "One day, the past arrives out of the future, and Jacob enters". The online version uses Realmedia format and enables users to watch the sequences in the order determined by choices made at every step of the way through the story. There is also a CD Romversion.
The production has received support from the New York State Council for the Arts. Between 1995 and 1997, technical support (and inspiration for this final version) was provided byRACE Laboratory, at the University of Tokyo. An early version of Waxweb ran as a MOO, technically supported by Brown University Graphics Lab students (Tom Meyer, Suzanne Hader, David Klaphaak, and others). Additional software for that version was provided by Eastgate Systems with additional assistance from Melynda Barnhardt.

In the movie David Blair plays Jacob Maker, Meg Savlov plays Melissa Maker, Florence Ormezzano plays Allelle Zillah, William Burroughs plays James "Hive" Maker and Dr. Clyde Tombaugh is himself.

The movie was created in co-production with Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, a program of ZDF Channel 2 of German Public Television.

********

David Blair's Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees is the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film (independent or otherwise) to have been re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the Internet. The New York Times recognized the accomplishment, and ran the article "Cult Film is First on the Internet" in its May 23, 1993 business section.

"Cult Film Is a First On Internet

As historic moments go, this one, it could be argued, was closer to "Watson, come here!" than to another Saturday night at the movies.

A small audience scattered among a few dozen computer laboratories gathered Saturday evening to watch the first movie to be transmitted on the Internet -- the global computer network that connects millions of scientists and academic researchers and hitherto has been a medium for swapping research notes and an occasional still image.

Yes, the cult movie, "Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees," had to be reduced from full color to a blurry black and white. And true, the spotty audio occasionally went silent. But coming as companies in the cable TV, telephone and computer industries are hot on the trail of 500-channel, all-digital TV, let history record that Saturday night marked the first baby steps in that direction.

The movie, an 85-minute feature by David Blair about a beekeeper who ends up being kept by the bees, has attracted a cult following since its release in 1992. Mr. Blair transmitted it Saturday night from a film production studio in midtown Manhattan. He played it on a VCR and fed it into a computer that converted it into digital form and fed it into the Internet. Promises, Promises."

Director Blair pieced Wax together over a period of six years, writing the film as he edited it, letting creative accidents and "directed random readings at the public library" (as Blair puts it) guide its creation. The result is a work much like the early structuralist films of British director Peter Greenaway, an obsessive, artificial history which has been fastidiously detailed with fragments of real and imagined facts.

The film is set at a flight simulation factory in Alamagordo, New Mexico, where Jacob Maker (Wax's narrator, played by Blair) is a computer programmer. Jacob designs gun sight displays and lives with his wife Melissa near the weapons testing range. He is also a beekeeper, whose "Mesopotamian" bees have been handed down to him from his grandfather, Zoltan. These bees are not ordinary bees; they have the power to put thoughts and images into Jacob's mind, and Jacob soon realizes that he is able to personally identify with the weapons he is helping to create. One day the bees put a special "television" in Jacob's mind. Through the bee television Jacob is subject to a bizarre series of fictions and hallucinations, and is finally lead by the bees to their subterranean home: an enormous cave below the Alamagordo desert. In the cave it is revealed to him that he must actually become a weapon and destroy his "target" in Iraq, before rebirth in a new body.

Wax wears its low-budget origin on its sleeve (it was shot on video) but has enjoyed an art-house reputation due to its wild imagination, its hybrid media existence as part-film-part-Internet-site, and its similarity to works of postmodern literature. Enthusiasts of Greenaway's early films, and readers of Jorges Louis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Thomas Pynchon, should look this one up. all movie.

Jonas Mekas: Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR (2008)

Forces of time, memory, change, and the human condition collide in Jonas Mekas' compelling work Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR (2008). The work's title refers to the historical time when the world watched as Mekas's home country of Lithuania fought for independence from the stronghold of Soviet rule. Comprised of four chapters with a total running time of 4 hours and 46 minutes, it will be presented in four parts with short breaks for reflection, as a chronological overview of Lithuania's birth as an independent nation.