d/Art/07 13-29 July 2007

Written by Zubbie Lima
Image courtesy of dLux Media Arts

dlux.org.au/dArt07

If you know anything about video art, then you’re probably familiar with the d/Art festival. d/Art is d/Lux/MediaArts’ survey of screen and digital media arts from around the world, and this year the overall theme is “the increasingly fragmented edges of the digital media world, where device shifting, bandwidth and media distribution technologies are fast becoming the key apparatus of contemporary screen culture”.

d/Art runs from 13 July until 29 July, and as per other years, d/Art is split between an exhibition, a series of screenings and a forum. A couple of things of note in this year’s exhibition: the works for mobile phone come from the Pocket Film Festival (Paris) and they’re all short videos shot on mobiles (and shown on mobiles). The exhibition also looks at what’s happening in the virtual world Second Life, and for those of you who haven’t been out much lately, Second Life (SL to you from now on) is a 3D social networking site where participants have representations of themselves (avatars) and can not only meet with each other but could also contribute to the design, coding and construction of their new world. When the laws of physics have no meaning, when people can fly and when a large number of the women you meet are actually men, it is inevitable that this new world has evolved in …er… unconventional directions that no longer simply mirror real life.

So through a series of in-world guided tours, public discussions and screenings of SL Machinima (videos made using SL avatars as actors) in the gallery, d/Art will explore the work of artists practising in SL and some of the interesting communities that are emerging there. The guided tours are a great idea, you can go to the Australian Centre for Photography where a host will take the audience through some of SL’s most respected gallery spaces, and also visit offsite installations, communities, themed islands and even shopping malls. If like me you’d love to be a tourist in SL, but can’t quite figure out how to get there, these tours promise to be a great introduction. There are other types of tours organised, and of course you can join them inside SL, from the front desk at Odyssey Gallery. The exhibition runs from 13 July at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, and there are tours planned on every Saturday throughout the exhibition. It’s free, but you need to book to join the tours (bookings: d/Lux/MediaArts, 02 9267 4777).

One other event that deserves a mention is the Wolphin screening at the Chauvel Cinema on Saturday 21 July at 6:30pm. Wolphin is a “DVD magazine of unseens films” which has gathered quite a cult status among short film buffs. Wolphin was founded two years ago by Brent Hoff and Dave Eggers (Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s Publishing House fame, among others . . .), and according to Wikipedia, Eggers and Hoff claim they were inspired to create it after the Cannes Film Festival, which is one of very few places at which many of these short films can ever be seen. Short films and documentaries have limited exposure to the general public because, in the words of Hoff, "they're too short to show on TV, and they don't play in theaters because they'd rather show some great trivia about Adam Sandler."

Brent Hoff is in Australia as a guest of d/Lux and the Revelation International Film Festival (Perth), and he will be introducing the screening, which is a compilation he has selected from the Wolphin vaults. But before that, next door at the Australian Centre for Photography will be the d/Art/Forum (4-6pm), where Hoff and others will be discussing ‘the Art of Video Distribution’ with other guests and the audience. So essentially the Forum and the Wolphin Screening is a double whammy.

The other screening at the Chauvel Cinema during d/Art is d/Lux/MediaArts’ survey of new Australian and international experimental single-channel video works (d/Art/Screen07) on Saturday 21 July at 7pm. Observation and representation of the human figure in the real world is a common theme of this year’s compilation. Drawn from over 150 entries, the 11 videos from six countries were selected by book and exhibition maker Ricardo Felipe.

For full details of d/Art/07, check out the website (dlux.org.au/dArt07)