future perfect screens around the world

Amongst all the isolation and angst of COVID-19, some good things are happening… I’m totally amazed that my video future perfect has been selected for five (5!) international video festivals already this year: REELPoetry (Texas); Newlyn Short Film Festival (UK); Carmarthen Bay Film Festival (Wales); FILE Electronic Language International Festival (Sao Paolo, Brazil) and Cadence Video Poetry Festival (Seattle). It was first screened at the 8th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens last year.

Although these all were planned to be live theatre screenings, most of them will end up being on-line, so stay tuned for info as it comes to hand.

Here’s my blurb for the vid – maybe a harbinger of where we are and where we are going…

“Words stripped of their ornamentation, pared back to monosyllabic cores… Are these the roots of language? Or are they the skeletal remains of a lost form of communication? Who is trying to speak here? What exactly are we being told? Perhaps a coded message. More likely, a cry for help…”

Colony Collapse published in Verity La

I’m delighted that my video poem Colony Collapse has been published in Verity La. When I made this, I had no idea just how relevant to current circumstances it would become…

Massive thanks to Michele SeminaraDavid StavangerAnne-Marie Te Whiu and the rest of the amazing team at Verity La.

The video also was screened at Lyra ’20: Bristol Poetry Festival – Poetry and Climate (UK, March, 2020).

three videos screened at REELpoetry/Houston TX 2020

Three of my videos – dog daze, future perfect and hexapod – have been selected for screening at the 2020 REELpoetry/Houston TX International Poetry Film Festival, showing in Houston, Texas, 24-26th January, 2020. The Festival is screening cinepoetry, mini-documentaries and videopoems from local, national and international poets and filmmakers, with panels, workshops & more. Featured guests include Dave Bonta, founder of Moving Poems, which has featured many of my videos over the last few years.

Firefront

Satellite image of brown smoke from the NSW and Victorian fires hiding New Zealand. Source: BOM, 2 January, 2020.

As fires continue to burn vast swathes of Australia and the Federal Government continues to insist that it’s nothing much out of the ordinary, I was reminded of my poem Firefront which was originally published in The Inflectionist Review and then selected for The Best Australian Science Writing 2014. It also has been republished along with Questions of Impropriety in From The Ashes: A poetry collection in support of the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfire relief effort (ed CS Hughes, Maximum Felix Media, 2020). Of course, nothing can compare with the lived experience of those dealing with the fires.

Firefront

The proposition: a firefront, climbing the hillface, approaching lines of grey box,
an edge, a vibration, ragged, the juxtaposition of above and what lies below.
 
You must decide upon a frame of reference, a coordinate system, within which 
local events, diary entries, arrivals and departures can be securely placed.
 
Option one: (as usual) the sky. Some common descriptors: oppressive, leaden,
foreboding. Alternatively, overcast, cloud-streaked, ambivalent. And yet,
 
notwithstanding prior predictions, there is absolutely nothing to see: (as usual)
the
Click here for more.

floodtide and more at the 8th International Video Poetry Festival, Athens.

I was very excited to attend the 8th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens in December 2019. On the first night, I did a live spoken word performance with my video floodtide; my video future perfect was screened; and another video Game Over – Grand Final Edition was shown as part of a collection curated by Marie Craven. On the second day, I took part in an extended symposium / workshop on how we make video poems, and then performed some of my own poems as part of the multi-media concert that night. The whole Festival was an amazing and inspirational experience!

Click here for a summary / review of the Festival.

Video art in The Wrong

The Wrong is a massive international project of on-line digital art organised into a series of pavilions, embassies, routers and events running from November 2019 and potentially beyond that. I’m delighted to have videos in two different pavilions.

with my eyes closed: imaginary midline was one of the first videos I made, originally as part of not absolute, a collaborative exhibition I did in 2009. It’s been picked up for the in absentia pavilion of The Wrong. This collection is touring sites in Italy in 2019/2020.

Game Over: Grand Final Edition is part of Poetry + Video curated by Marie Craven, which has its own pavilion in The Wrong. This collection also will be touring during 2019/2020, including the 8th International Video Festival in Athens, December 2019.

Click on the links above to see more…