A Captain’s in Verity La

“Here again, not well, likely a turnspit, jiggered … whose trajectory scours my sleep? What worriment forths mildewed landsend?”

Massive thanks to Michele Seminara and Verity La for presenting my video A Captain’s.

A captain, out on the high seas, on commission from his king, heading to the colonies, reliant on rigging and caulk and the charade of polite society to keep afloat … Is there a prick of conscience? An element of doubt? When duty calls, how much is lost? Most of the  footage for this poetry video was recorded on my iPhone on a series of boat trips taken in Sweden during May 2019. The audio includes recordings from inside an old wooden windmill on the island of Öland. The concluding wave action was recorded at Moana, South Australia, in the summer of 2019. 

Many of the captain’s unusual words are my inventions.

The video was a official selection at Carmarthen Bay Film Festival (Wales, May, 2020) and was screened at Kino Klub Split: Blending Perspectives, powered by AGITATE:21C (Split, Croatia, December, 2019). A slightly different version of the text was originally published in Transnational Literature 8.1 (2015).

Click here to see “A Captain’s” in Verity LaClick here for more.

The Ferrovores and after-image at the 2021 Carmarthen Bay Film Festival

“I see them and look them away … see stinger-ray hide in bush … climb for a better view … afraid of spider-snake-lizard … we watched them watched us … “

Two of my videos, The Ferrovores, and after-image, have been selected for the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival in Wales, which runs in May 2021 and is one of the leading film festivals in UK.

after-image was shot around Port Adelaide, the Adelaide CBD, and Belair, and considers the lives around us that we may or may not see…

But an after-image is also the residual image you see if you look away at a blank wall or something similar having stared at a brightly lit scene. The after-image is a negative of the original in terms of light-dark and colour. It is mostly due to the photoreceptors in the retina becoming desensitised by the original scene. It fades after a few seconds as the receptors reset. The text was originally published in e•ratio 29 (2020).

The Ferrovores, which is about a future life-form dependent on iron for survival, was shot mostly in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

Iron is the most common metal on earth. … Click here for more.

floodtide exhibited in Berlin

My video floodtide has been selected to be shown at the Gallery for Sustainable Art in Berlin as part of their 1.5 degrees international exhibition, running from 15 January – 12 March 2021. The exhibition is about whether or not we reach our climate goal and includes object, installation, photo, painting, video, and readings.

floodtide imagines a city in the near future when sea levels have risen significantly. What does it look like? How will we cope?

The composition process making the video was very complex. Nearly every scene has been composited from multiple sources requiring more than 500 individual sequences from original footage filmed around Adelaide, the Fleurieu Peninsula, Inner Suburban Melbourne, the Western Highway, and Far North Queensland. Each scene required matching of lighting intensity, colour and direction, as well as wind direction (in clouds, water, trees, etc), atmospheric haze, perspective, scale and more. In most scenes containing water, footage of the sea has been added to the landscape or cityscape. Similarly, nearly every sky and cloud bank has been composited from mixed sources. Almost none of the building skylines is from a single location.

These scenes might be imaginary, but the reality may not be far off…… Click here for more.

accidentals (recalculated) in Rochford Street Review

Rochford Street Review is a fabulous on-line journal highlighting Australian and International Literature, Art and Culture – with an emphasis on small press and grassroots cultural activities, run by the indefatigable Mark Roberts. So I’m super pleased that he has featured one of my more complex video poems accidentals (recalculated) in Issue 30 of the Review. This will be the first of five videos that will appear here.

The video was a finalist in the Carbon Culture Review 2016 Poetry Film Contest (USA); was exhibited at 17 Days (Day 9, Vol. 10) at The Bret Llewellyn Art Gallery, Alfred State College, NY (USA; August 28 – September 19, 2017) and Atrium Gallery, Western Michigan University (USA; November 6, 2017 – April 29, 2018); and screened at the 7th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens, 2018.

Sent From Elsewhere poetry and music with Frédéric Iriarte now out on Bandcamp

Sent From Elsewhere is a major collaboration with Swedish/French musician/artist Frédéric Iriarte that we have been working on for most of 2020. When we started this, we decided to make tracks that sounded different from anything we’d do by ourselves. So here are complex improvisations, radical remixes, and strange texts, using vocal effects that I’d been thinking about for ages… We are both very happy with the result!!

The album consists of 9 tracks, featuring Frédéric on guitars, basses, saxophones, keyboard, piano, flute, Jew’s harp, harmonica, vibraphone, FX and percussion. I did the vocal performances, played a few bits, and put the lot together in sometimes major remixes.

ISOLATION PROCEDURES in Spanish at Helios Sun Poetry Film Festival

After screening at the Festival Fotogenia 2020 in Mexico City, my the Spanish version of my video ISOLATION PROCEDURES / PROCEDIMIENTOS DE AISLAMIENTO is an official selection screening at the Helios Sun Poetry Film Festival also in Mexico City in December, 2020. The Spanish version of the text is integrated into the video, as part of my long slow project on exploring how text and image can interact. 

The Long Slow Effect of Gravity at Queensland Poetry Festival 2020

My video The Long Slow Effect of Gravity is a finalist at the Queensland Poetry Festival 2020 Film and Poetry Challenge. (click on this link to see all the finalists).

The footage was taken around Adelaide CBD, Belair, Blackwood, Sturt River, Mount Compass and Middleton, all in South Australia, and Athens, Greece. The soundtrack is in polyrhythmic 6/4 time and contains audio samples of bird calls, rain, and various falling objects recorded in Belair, South Australia.

Thanks to QPF for promoting video in a mainstream poetry festival! Indeed, showing some of my early videos at QPF in 2014 gave me the confidence that I probably really could do this stuff…