I’m delighted that my video poem Colony Collapsehas been published in Verity La. When I made this, I had no idea just how relevant to current circumstances it would become…
Three of my videos – dog daze, future perfect andhexapod – have been selected for screening at the 2020 REELpoetry/Houston TXInternational 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.
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 TheBest 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
I was very excited to attend the 8th International Video Poetry Festivalin Athens in December 2019. On the first night, I did a live spoken word performance with my video floodtide; my videofuture perfectwas screened; and another video Game Over – Grand Final Editionwas 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!
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.
Game Over: Grand Final Editionis part ofPoetry + Video curated by Marie Craven, which has its own pavilion inThe Wrong. This collection also will be touring during 2019/2020, including the 8th International Video Festival in Athens, December 2019.
My videodog days is an official selection in the Artists’ Film Category of the Aesthetica Short Film Festival in York, UK. It will be screened on Thursday 7th and Saturday 9th November (yes, twice!). Here is a little interview I did for it…