Poetry

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…

unvoiced at the 2020 Film and Video Poetry Symposium

unvoiced is made from the text of Articles 18 – 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, having removed all the vowels, rendering the text unvoiced. 

This is a form of redaction, whereby ruling bodies erase portions of publicly available text deemed to be against national interest or community standards or the well-being of holders of high office or whatever. Yet this reduced, redacted text can still be spoken, albeit by a computer algorithm that does its best to articulate what remains, to give some kind of voice to the unvoiced. 

Visualising the outcome of this process employs the imagery of video streaming and surveillance in a world where bandwidth and access can be reduced or cut off at … Click here for more.

ISOLATION PROCEDURES Official Selection in Festival Fotogenia 2020 in Mexico.

When I made my video “ISOLATION PROCEDURES”, we were in the early stages of COVID-19 close-down here in South Australia and I wondered what would happen if the laws necessary for restricting the spread of the virus became entrenched in a more authoritarian government regime. With things getting worse around the world on many levels, it seems opportune that my video has been selected for screening at the 2020 Fotogenia International Festival of Film Poetry and Divergent Narratives in Mexico City in November. Rather than subtitling the video in Spanish, I’ve integrated a Spanish version of the text into the video, as part of my long slow project on exploring how text and image can interact. For more information on … Click here for more.

Colony Collapse screens in European festivals

“I am still watching ghosts, eyes rimed with salt, homesick… this was never our natural state, our true inheritance… we should not be here…”

My video Colony Collapse, originally published in Verity La, is an official selection for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, and has been short-listed for the 8th Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition in Cork, Ireland. Both screenings are in November, 2020. It was also screened at Lyra ’20: Bristol Poetry Festival – Poetry and Climate in March, 2020.

SALA 2020: The Unwelcome

from floodtide

The 2020 South Australian Living Artists Festival (SALA) is mostly on-line this year. I have put together The Unwelcome, a showcase of my video art commenting on the environment, corruption, border controls, colonialism, authoritarianism… unwanted circumstances that, by design or active neglect, now or in a dystopian future, can make us, and those around us, feel isolated, afraid, oppressed, forgotten, erased, silenced… unwelcome.

Click here to see The Unwelcome entry in the SALA 2020 program.

Click here to go directly to The Unwelcome.

The Ferrovores in Atticus Review

My video poem The Ferrovores had been published in leading USA literature magazine Atticus Review. It has since been picked up by Moving Poems (USA) and ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival (Germany) facebook page.

Filmed mostly in the southern Flinders Ranges, it explores the idea of alternative energy sources for food after environmental collapse.

Ferrovores

“this time, this place… beyond open circulation closed reciprocity… closed hydration spheres wrought cast smithed… this is what we are what we eat … “

Iron is the most common metal on earth. Indeed, it forms much of the molten core of the planet which in turn generates the earth’s magnetic poles. The red soils of the world are due to iron. At a biochemical level, … Click here for more.

Coming Through at Poetry Film Live

Poetry Film Live, run by Helen Dewberry and Chaucer Cameron, is one of the leading sites for supporting and promoting video poetry in its various forms. They recently have expanded their brief to include performance poetry. So I am very pleased that they have selected my audio-poem Coming Through, a sort of a road trip saga through rural Australia ending up in Sydney. It’s one of my favourite pieces to perform live, especially with the backing track, which I composed and played myself.

Coming Through
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