Category Archives: Uncategorized

Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Digital Media, Interactive Art, online research, Uncategorized

Strange Cities interactive curated in Play It Again- Archiving Australian Media Arts 2023

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Strange Cities (Aroney/Pentes 2023) interactive documentary 🎮 curated PLAY ACMI Play It Again- Archiving Australian Media Arts, Australian Centre for the Moving Image curated by Candice Cranmer, accessible by WiFi footprint onsite making accessible Australia’s rich history of onlineart interactive artworks. Strange Cities interactive documentary was co-produced with Screen Australia.

Strange Cities (Aroney/Pentes 2023) interactive documentary 🎮 curated PLAY https://lnkd.in/gVdZk52j ACMI Play It Again- Archiving Australian Media Arts, Australian Centre for the Moving Image curated by Candice Cranmer, accessible by WiFi footprint onsite making accessible Australia's rich history of onlineart interactive artworks. Strange Cities interactive documentary was co-produced with Screen Australia. — Image: Strange Cities (Aroney/Pentes) screen 2023 PLAY ACMI

“Building on the preservation efforts initiated in the Play It Again projects that aimed to preserve significant Australian videogames from the 1980s and 1990s, the AAMA project, and now the Australian Emulation Network, an ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities project continues a collaborative approach to media arts preservation. Significantly, these projects, with AARNET’s infrastructure have also introduced Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSi) for partners to emulate legacy software environments and enable access to these works again where possible. This preservation work is a significant step forward in allowing continued access to our history of Australian media and social memory of this innovative time.”

Discover and play

To see and play media art works in an exhibition of selected works from ACMI’s and or Experimenta’s legacy collection, Explore the Collection while logged in to ACMI’s Wi-Fi. To play Australian videogames from the 1980s and 1990s head to our Play it Again I and Play It Again II pages.

Explore the Collection

‘Strange Cities’ is an experimental interactive multimedia work that tells of the survival of the Russian and Chinese Communist Revolutions by two Russian exiles. It draws upon the legacy of the Shanghai milieu, the Chinese gangster film, a musical cabaret genre, orientalist erotic literature, intrigue novels, and the films of Josef von Sternberg to explore memory, transience and the urban imagination. It is an experimental interactive multimedia work authored for CD-Rom release and exhibition. Through the disclosure of evidence, Sasha dreams, discovers, remembers the exilic identity of her grandparents Xenia and Sergei Ermolaeff (a composer and orchestra leader) in fragments and traces of their music, memories, personal effects and photographs, in their struggle to survive the Russian and Chinese Communist Revolutions. The inspiration for the work is a tune of the same name – a musical illustration, an imaginary vision of old Shanghai, Chinese metropolis, and International Settlement, conjuring mythic, filmic, musical and personal images of the city port. The ‘Strange cities’ musical score1 written by Alexander Vertinsky, Serge Ermoll and Ira Bloch, was first performed by a jazz orchestra of White Russian emigres in the cabarets of the International Settlement of Shanghai, China in the 1930’s and 40’s. ‘Strange cities’ draws upon the legacy of the Shanghai milieu, the Chinese gangster film, a musical cabaret genre, orientalist erotic literature, intrigue novels, and the films of Josef von Sternberg. Coined capital of the international underworld, the city of Shanghai became a seductively strange locale symbolized in the Western imagination, in reality the city was most often the final port of call for political refugees.

Explore Strange Cities in the Collection

Cast
Xenia Vladimirovna – Xenia Wayne; Sergei Ermolaeff – Peter Tartarinoff; Newsreader – Tony Baldwin; Sasha (Voice) – Katya Rozenblit; Young Sasha (Visuals) singer/pianist – Isabella Manfredi; Rose Tsing (Visuals) – Rose Tang; Tango Dancers – Katya Rozenblit & Evan Darnley-Pentes, Serge Ermoll (Sergei Emolaeff) piano.

Production
An interactive digital work, hybrid documentary and fictional musical by Tatiana Pentes (Writer/Director) & Geoffrey Weary (Co-Development/ Cinematography & Photography), Eurydice Aroney (Producer), Roi Huberman (Sound & Music Design), Glenn Remington (Interface Design), with music by Sergei Ermolaeff (Serge Ermoll). Produced in association with Screen Australia the Australian Film Commission (AFC).

Strange Cities (Aroney/Pentes) doco exhibited and researched in Prof Melanie Swalwell “Collecting, Curating, Preserving and Researching Media Arts” Archiving Australian Media Arts as part of the Born Digital Cultural Heritage Now conference at ACMI. Read https://aama.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Collecting-curating-preserving-and-researching-media-arts.pdf

Art, Design, Digital Media, film, Uncategorized

Tatiana Pentes Digital Portfolio

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Explore my professional online portfolio

Tatiana Pentes digital portfolio. Explore an online portfolio of digital work. Includes Mission Australia: Independence is Precious 2015 campaign. — Tatiana Pentes online portfolio of digital work

Explore my portfolio. Tatjana holds over a decade of experience as a digital communications professional, a Doctorate (Digital Media) Communications, (Recommendation 1) UTS 2006, and a Master of Art (UNSW Art, Design & Architecture). Her digital media & film has won Highly Commended (Digital Media), Burwood Art Prize 2022 Livestream awards https://youtu.be/qRXINGtz9gI, AMY, ATOM, HARRIES, IFCT (USA), & W3 Silver awards. Winner ACS Marketing Award, Re-imagination Thought Leaders Summit & Digital Disruptors Awards 2018 reimagination.acs.org.au/disruptors2022.html. Collected by ACMI, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Australian Embassy, Tokyo, JAPAN, AFTRS, & ScreenSound Australia, with an inter/national exhibition record in film & media festivals in the US, China, France, Italy, Greece, Australia, Thailand, Japan, Brazil.

Art, Australian landscape, Black Box, College of Fine Arts, Cosmopolitan Shanghai, Dance Film, Digital Media, feminism, Geoffrey Weary, Germany, Greek Rembetika Blues, Hindustani music & dance, Interactive Art, new media, online research, Painting, Photo Media, Russian Art, Serge Ermoll, Shanghai Jazz, Shanghai Russians, social inquiry, Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, Uncategorized, VDM Verlag, Video art

Black Box: a digital media work

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Exerpt from Tatiana Pentes, DCA thesis, BlackBox: Painting a Digital Picture of Documented Memory, UTS, VDM Verlag, Germany 2009.

Black Box: Painting A Digital Picture of Documented Memory. Written & Directed by Tatiana Pentes, Digital Sound & Moving Image: Geoffrey Weary

Launch BlackBoxv3 online

“It is inscribed as on Pandora’s Box…do not open…passions…escape in all directions from a box that lies open…” from Bruno Latour’s “Opening Pandora’s Box”, in Science in Action: How To Follow Scientists & Engineers Through Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987, p1-17.

Abstract

This work investigates and records the production of a digital media artwork blackBOX: Painting A Digital Picture of Documented Memory, generated through the media technologies of interactive multimedia, exploiting the creative potentials of digitally produced music, sound, image and text relationships in a disc based & online (Internet) environment. The artwork evolves from an imaginary electronic landscape that can be uniquely explored/ played in a non-sequential manner. The artwork/ game is a search for the protagonists hybrid cultural identity. This is mirrored in the exploration of random, fragmentary and non-linear experiences designed for the player engaged with the artwork. The subjective intervention of the player/ participant in the electronic artwork is metaphoric of the improvisational tendencies that have evolved in the Greek Blues (Rembetika), Jazz, and Hindustani musical and performative dance forms. The protagonist Nina’s discovery of these musical forms reveal her cultural/ spiritual origins. As a musical composer arranges notes, melodies and harmonies, and sections of instruments, so too, the multimedia producer designs a ensemble of audio-visual fragments to be navigated.

Dance also becomes a driving metaphor, analogous to the players movement in and through these passages of image/ sound/ text and as a movement between theories and ideas explored in the content of the program. The central concern is to playfully reverse, obscure, distort the look of the dominating/colonialist gaze, in the production of an interactive game and allow the girl to picture herself.

One of my objectives is to explore the ways in which social research can be undertaken by the creation of an interactive program in the computer environment utilizing interactive digital media technologies. The study reveals that, through the subjective intervention of the player/ participant (user)* with the digital artefact, a unique experience and responsiveness is produced with the open-ended text. The work is comprised of a website http://www.strangecities.net; an interactive CD-ROM; a gallery installation; digital photomedia images: and a written thesis documenting and theorising the production.

Classical Indian dance music: Bharata Natyam

Nirmal Jena & Odissi Dance Co.

* The term player/participant (user), while widely debated has been in usage from the 1980s to refer to the unique human interaction with the digital artefact, electronic screen work, and computer interface.

Read the research paper: BlackBOX : painting a digital picture of documented memory. Published University of Technology, Sydney UTS ePress Institutional Repository
Australasian Digital Thesis Program http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/handle/2100/357

Black Box interface still by Tatiana Pentes

Australian Video Art Archive, Digital Media, Geoffrey Weary, Griffith Artworks, Uncategorized, Video art

Red Green Blue: A History of Australian Video Art

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Geoffrey Weary’s video artworks on exhibition in curator Matthew Perkins, ‘Red Green Blue’, “…bringing together works from the 1970s through to the present day, drawn from the archives, artist holdings and the Griffith University Art Collection. Presented over three episodes, each running for a month, the exhibition takes the viewer on a historical journey that is also a celebration of the ongoing dynamism and depth of Australian video art practice.”

“Emerging as an art form during the late 1960s and 1970s, video has continued into the 21st century as a prominent mode of artistic endeavour, with artists responding to the new possibilities opened up by advances in technology. From its earliest days, artists have embraced video’s radical potential – as a medium for artistic expression, a tool for political agitation, and a means with which to question the status quo. ‘Red Green Blue’ explores these intersections across its three themed episodes, tracing connections from early experimental origins through to the multiple and proliferating modes of today, to reassert the importance of video to Australian art history.”

Griffith Artworks wesbite

Episode One – ‘Red: Everything is Political’ runs Friday 31 March to Saturday 29 April 2017
Episode Two – ‘Green: Body, Technology, Action’ runs Tuesday 2 May to Saturday 3 June 2017
Episode Three – ‘Blue: Perception and Encounter’ runs Tuesday 6 June to Saturday 8 July 2017

Australian Video Art Archive, Geoffrey Weary, Photo Media, Photography, portraits, Uncategorized, University of Sydney, Verge Gallery, Video art

BY A WINDOW : Riley: Perkins

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4- 27 AUGUST
https://verge-gallery.net/2016/06/14/by-a-window/

Verge Gallery & Australian Centre for Photography featuring Michael Riley photographs from the University of Sydney Union art collection and archival material from the University of Sydney Archives, The Settlement Community Centre and the State Library of NSW. Encounter key artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Avril Quail and Fiona Foley, Boomalli, The Settlement Mural Project, The South Sydney Visual History Project organised by Geoffrey Weary in collaboration with Tin Shed 1983.#byawindowverge

Uncategorized

SCREEN SURFACE Curated by Geoff Weary

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SCREEN SURFACE Curated by Geoffrey Weary

Artists: Frazer Bull-Clark :: Katherine Berger :: Jing Feng (Sophy Feng) :: Graham Burchett :: Harley Ives

BRENDA MAY GALLERY :: 2 Dank Street Waterloo NSW Australia 2017 ::
4 – 29 August 2015

http://www.brendamaygallery.com.au/details.php?exhibitionID=350

“It is easy to fall into old habits of interpretation. This is particularly true of screen-based artworks when they resemble a narrative or documentary film. Invariably the question of meaning becomes associated with content and “form” is of little consequence. The works selected for this exhibition are engaged in a two–way interaction where social, environmental and identity issues are mediated through highly personalised approaches to the treatment of the surface of the projected screen image. – See more at: http://www.brendamaygallery.com.au/details.php?exhibitionID=350#sthash.yNqS0md6.dpuf ”

Screen Surface curated by Geoffrey Weary, Brenda May Gallery 4 - 29 August 2015 — Screen Surface curated by Geoffrey Weary, Brenda May Gallery 4 – 29 August 2015

Art, Australian landscape, Black Box, College of Fine Arts, Dance Film, Digital Media, feminism, film, Hindustani music & dance, Interactive Art, Painting, Photo Media, self portrait, Uncategorized, University of New South Wales, Video art

WORSHIP: SCULPTURE: DANCE

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Tatiana Pentes, WORSHIP SCULPTURE DANCE, Master of Art (Media Arts), CoFa, UNSW, 1995 [download paper]

Figure 1 Digital montage from A Few Small Snaps digital film artwork by Tatiana Pentes

ABSTRACT
This study documents the production of a set of digital film artworks installed in the College of Fine Arts gallery as the culmination of the Master of Art (Film, Video, Sound, and Computing), Media Arts. The digital film artworks are comprised of : (i) Worship Sculpture Dance: Odissi : Movements in Stone, the imaging an ancient devotional classical Indian dance form Odissi, from the state of Orissa, India; (ii) Zang Tumb Tumb 1, inspired by the Futurist sound poetry of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and the Luigi Russolo and The Art of Noise; (iii) A Few Small Snaps, the digital animation of a series of autobiographical self-portraits stimulated by a study of the Mexican self-portrait painting of Frida Kahlo; and (iv) Strange Cities2 an interactive CD-Rom new media script. Strange Cities script (writing) has been included to the Worship Sculpture Dance study as blueprint for potential future research and development. The aim of this creative research has been to focus on new technology as a contribution to a questioning of traditional (analogue) modes of art production.

The approach has been to explore & image traditional classical Indian forms of representation (dance, choreography, & music) and to re-interpret and translate these ancient forms as a new form of engagement. At the same time, the objective of this creative research has been interrogate transforming notions of the filmic, televisual, radio(audio)phonic, sonic and the (digital) computer medium, and to investigate questions of authorship and to challenge the uniqueness of the art object. This creative work is the outcome of conceptual and art historical research, focusing on the potential of an articulation of the philosophical, historical, cultural, formal and spiritual in a digital (computer) landscape.

Technological and Conceptual Framework
These digital films that have been produced and installed in the gallery context: (i) Odissi : Movements in Stone; (ii) Zang Tumb Tumb; and (iii) A Few Small Snaps, for the Worship Sculpture Dance forming a major creative artwork exhibition.

The objective of this creative research has been to question traditional (analogue) modes of art production, and the approach has been to explore & image avant garde European sound poetry, self-portraiture and traditional classical Indian sanskrit forms (dance, choreography, and music culture) and to re-interpret and translate these (analogue) forms (using a new stylus, pen & glue-stick) and to produce a critical engagement with these representations of Other. Simultaneously, the objective has been to interrogate transforming notions of the filmic, televisual, videographic radio(audio)phonic, sonic and moving image (animation) in the (digital) computer environment; to investigate notions of ‘self’ in a cross-cultural environment; to question the Western concept of authorship and to challenge the uniqueness of the art object.

These digital film artworks have been generated in the new multi-media environment of the computer. The installation of these digital films in the gallery context has provided the context for social interaction and engagment with the artworks in the form of an exhibition. The artworks have been produced using Macintosh computer software and hardware, and the following
software digital imaging and editing programs.

Worship: Sculpture: Dance: a digital film by Tatiana Pentes: special thanks Geoffrey Weary

Image 2. Digital film still Chitritta Mukerjee, Odissi Dance Company performs Konarak Kanthi at The Performance Space, Sydney 1993, by Tatiana Pentes

Art, Black Box, Diego Rivera, feminism, Frida Kahlo, Mexican Modernism, Painting, self portrait, Sydney College of the Arts, Uncategorized, University of Technology

CRUEL BEAUTY: The Broken Column: The self-portraits of Frida Kahlo

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CRUEL BEAUTY

The articulation of ‘self’, ‘identity’ and the creation of an innovative feminine vocabulary in the self-portrait paintings of Frida Kahlo.

A dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Letters (Art History & Theory/ Gender Studies), University of Sydney, 1998 (with Merit), book published VDM Verlag Germany, 2009. [download book Sydney eScholarship Repository]

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column (1944), oil on tin, Source: Herrera, Hayden, Frida : A Biography, Harper and Row, New York, 1983.

Feet what do I need them for

If I have wings to fly. 1953

Frida Kahlo’s Diary 1

Abstract: The Self-Portraits of FRIDA KAHLO

This book examines the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo and explores the way in which they articulate a ‘self’ and ‘identity’ through creating an innovative feminine vocabulary. The aim of this creative research is to explore the way in which Frida Kahlo represented her sexual subjectivity in the body of self-portraits she produced in her short life time. The self-portraits, some of which were produced in a state of severe physical disability and chronic illness, were also created in the shadow of her famous partner- socialist Mexican muralist/ revolutionary Diego Rivera. An examination of the significant body of self-portrait paintings produced by Frida Kahlo, informed by her personal letters, poems, and photographs, broadens the conventional definitions of subjective self beyond the generic patterns of autobiographical narrative, characteristic of an inherently masculine Western ‘self’. In Kahlo’s self-portraits the representation of the urban Mexican proletarian woman-child draws stylistically from the domain of European self-portraiture, early studio photographic portraiture, and the biographical Mexican Catholic retablo art, with its indebtedness to the ancient Aztec Indian

symbology of self.

The Impulse to Represent the Self: Narcissus

The first image was a portrait. In classical mythology, a lovely youth named Narcissus lay beside a pool gazing in adoration of his own reflection…In the Bible St Veronica compassionately pressed a cloth against Christ’s face as he stumbled to Calvary, and found His true image miraculously printed on the material…St Luke became a painter because, having experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary, he was inspired to produce a faithful portrait of her. 2 The self-portraits of Frida Kahlo significantly open up a new horizon in twentieth century painting. The works, created in Mexico in the 1930’s and 1940’s intersect with and extend the tradition of self-portraiture in the West. Contemporary modernist Mexican concerns to conserve, celebrate, and resurrect indigenous Mexican Indian culture were likened to the classical re-discovery of Greco-Roman antiquity in Renaissance Art. The portrait genre existed in Western antiquity and the early Christian world in the form of statues, busts, coins, sarcophagi and wall paintings. 3 The re-discovery of portraiture has been considered a definitive feature of the Renaissance, as exemplified by the artist Albrecht Durer’s project to represent the self. Durer fashions his 1500 Self-Portrait as an emblem of the powers of the individual creator, with the visual allusion to the vera icon of Christ.

“ Durer mythicises the identity between image and maker …endowing his likeness with the “omnivoyance” of a holy icon, he celebrates himself as a universal subject, whose all-seeing gaze is subject to none.” 4

Strikingly, there are parallels with Kahlo’s own impulse to represent the self in a period of Mexican history that has been termed the Mexican “Renaissance”. The legacy of Durer in Kahlo’s art is manifest in the close analogy between (i) bodies and texts, (ii) the artist’s self-portrait and the holy image (in the case of Durer, the body of Christ); and (iii) the Renaissance painter’s ascent from craftsman to artist, celebrating the artist’s art as the vera icon of personal skill. The Renaissance humanist notion of Man as created in the image of God is envisioned in Durer’s idealised 1500 Self-Portrait, where he is both created in the image of God and through artistic production creates as God. Kahlo’s repeated imaging of her incomplete barren body, a suffering and wounded body, places the woman-child at the centre of the universe, as universal all-seeing subject, yet corrupted and incomplete, as in Durer’s later self-portraits. Kahlo’s self-portrait works such as The Broken Column (1944); The Wounded Deer (1946); and The Two Frida’s (1939), recall the representation of the body in pain in Durer’s Self-Portrait as Man of Sorrows and Self-Portrait of the Sick Durer (a. 1512). In these works there is no illusory sense of self mastery in depictions of the wounded and incomplete body.

A shadow flickers across the history of the self-portrait, from Durer’s art in the Renaissance to twentieth century modernism – the original founding myth, the desire for self knowledge and the Fall. Transcending the Biblical manifestation of this myth and at the heart of the desire to regain the paradise lost of immortality is ever-present tyranny of the flesh – Death. Durer analogises his body and self in his self-portraits to the divine emblem of Christ, whose ability to transfigure Death in the Resurrection image and his eternal life, is reiterated in Kahlo’s self- portrait’s which iconocise her suffering body, expressing the interior landscape of the artist, and a psychological space of sensation, emotion, and memory.While these qualities are present in traditional masculine self-portraits, in Kahlo’s self-portrait work it is perhaps for the first time that Western painting has represented the specificity of feminine sexual subjectivity.

Photographic Portraiture

Frida Kahlo’s Jewish/German immigrant father Guillermo Kahlo was introduced to photography by his second wife (Frida’s Spanish/ Indian mother) Matilde Calderon de Kahlo, whose own father was a photographer. Matilde encouraged Guillermo to take up her father’s profession. This resulted in Guillermo Kahlo’s first major Commission – by the Secretary of the Treasurer under dictator Porfirio Diaz – to record Mexico’s architectural heritage for the 1910 celebration of the centennial of Mexican Independence. This won Guillermo the accolade of “first official photographer of Mexico’s cultural patrimony”. 5

Modern photographic portraiture had a profound influence on Kahlo’s self-portraits, which she often used as the basis of her paintings. In the work My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (1936) there is visual evidence to suggest that the portraits of her parents are directly based on their wedding photograph. 6

This highlights the legacy of the recent photographic medium upon modern painting, a medium with a tradition spanning centuries. As Roland Barthes writing on photography articulates… ” Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse has signs which have referents… Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that a thing has been there. 7

The self-portraits represent Kahlo’s reality, like the folk retablos in which the village artisan pins objects from the accident to the votive offering (a victims hair, samples of a vehicles wreckage), she symbolically rather than physically incorporates traces of imaginary and material objects. In all the roughly fifty five self-portraits produced the lens is turned back upon the viewer who is forced to apprehend the dominating subjective gaze of the model Kahlo, thus the surveyor becomes surveyed.

2. The Bus Accident, “Assassinated by Life”

Figure 2. Frida’s drawing of her accident in Herrera, Hayden, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, Harper and Row, New York, 1983, plate 10

Central to the Frida Kahlo narrative of self is a tragic bus accident, the injuries incurred of which she never physically or emotionally recovered. Indeed the physical injuries sustained in the accident when she was eighteen

years old prevented her ability to hold a pregnancy, and in later years, of being able to walk. Kahlo remembered the bus accident on the afternoon of 17 September, 1925: The accident took place on a corner in front of the San Juan market exactly in front. The streetcar went slowly, but our bus driver was a very nervous young man. When the trolley car went around the corner the bus was pushed against the wall…It is a lie that one is aware of the crash, a lie that one cries. In me there were no tears. The crash bounced us forward and a handrail pierced me the way a sword pierces a bull… 8 Frida’s lover Alejandro Gomez Arias described her situation:…Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone on the bus, probably a painter had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida…and then I noticed with horror that Frida had a piece ofn iron in her body.” …They thought she would die on the operating table… The steel handrail had literally skewered her body at the level of the abdomen; entering her left side…“I lost my virginity”, she said. 9

The images of suffering, wounds, loss, grief, and barrenness appearing in much of her work could be derived from this fateful accident, an event scarring her body for life. The tears that she claims she never shed on that day seem to be endlessly reproduced in her pictures. The pain that she suffered throughout her short lifespan necessitated the long term and perpetual use of pain-killers and morphine. Indeed, all medical evidence pointed towards this substance as the cause of Kahlo’s suicide 13 July 1954. 10

1 Kahlo, Frida,The Diary of Frida Kahlo, Bloomsbury, London, 1995, p134.
2 Woodall, Joanna (Ed), Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Manchester University Press, New York, 1997, p1. (via the translation of Arabic texts into Latin)
3 Woodall, Joanna (Ed),op cit p1.
4 Koerner, Joseph Leo, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, The University of ChicagoPress, London and Chicago, 1993, p242.
5 Herrera, Hayden, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, Harper and Row, New York, 1983, p5.
6 Herrera, Hayden, op cit p8.
7 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Flamingo, Great Britain, 1980, p76. [my italics]8 Herrera, Hayden, op cit3, p48.
8 Herrera, Hayden,op cit p48.
9 Herrera, Hayden,op cit p49.
10 Kahlo, Frida, The Diary of Frida Kahlo, Bloomsbury, London, 1995, p134.

Art, Australian Jazz, Australian landscape, Bathurst Advocate, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Black Box, Digital Media, film, Geoffrey Weary, Hill End, Jean Bellette, Painting, Paul Haefliger, Photo Media, Sydney College of the Arts, Uncategorized, University of Sydney, Video art

Geoff Weary’s film ‘An Eye for An I’, The Third Wave: Two Decades of the Hill End Artists Exhibition 1 Aug – 28 Sept 2014 Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

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‘An Eye for An I’, film on video 3mins
Writer/Director/Producer: Geoffrey Weary
Model: Tatiana Pentes

The Third Wave: Two Decades of the Hill End Artists in Residence Exhibition 1 Aug – 28 Sept 2014 Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

1 AUGUST – 28 SEPTEMBER 2014
http://www.bathurstart.com.au/images/stories/2014/slot_4/3rd_wave_Room_Sheet.pdf

“…landscape architect and film-maker, Gavin Wilson, was researching the artistic heritage of Hill End and the region for his 1995 exhibition The Artists of Hill End: Art, Life and Landscape for the Art Gallery of NSW. Aware of Bellette’s bequest, and withthe support of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Evans Shire Council and the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Wilson invited a third wave of artists to respond to Hill End. Contemporary artists including Richard Goodwin, Anton James, Tom Spence, Wendy Sharpe, Peter Wright, Geoff Weary, Peter Kingston, Mandy Barrett, Emma Walker and James Rogers participated in a series of pilot residencies at Haefligers Cottage in 1994 and 1995. Works from these residencies were exhibited alongside historic works in The Artists of Hill End exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.

“The historic Haefliger Cottage at Hill End and the spectacular surrounding scenery are prividing an ideal location for artist in residency, Geoffrey Weary, who is finding it a welcome respite from Sydney. Mr Weary, who describes himself as a video artists also working with more ‘traditional’ mediums, is the latest participant….Hill End artist in resident, Geoffrey Weary and Tatiana Pentes who are, living and working with the spirit of Paul Haefliger and Jean Bellette in the famous Haefligger Cottage…The house has all their things still intact, the cottage is pretty much as they left it…” in Inspiration For Visiting Artist: Hill End Artist Residency: Geoffrey Weary: Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Advocate, 24 January 1995.

Photograph: Geoffrey Weary & Tatiana Pentes

The foundations of the Hill End Artists in Residence Program were laid. In 1999, under the auspices of Bathurst City Council and Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, the Program was officially launched. In 2002 Murrays Cottage was refurbished with the assistance of the NSW Ministry for the Arts and added as a new studio residence alongside Haefligers Cottage in 2003.Since 1994, a total of 283 residencies have been awarded to artists from a diverse range of disciplines including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, ceramics, textiles, new media, writing, animation, film, sound and performance. Over 150 works by 70 of the artists participating in the Program have entered the collection through donation and purchase. The selection presented here represents just a small portion of the work produced in response to the landscape, history and heritage of Hill End.”

http://www.bathurstart.com.au/exhibitions/current/39-exhibitions/current/352-3rd-wave.html

“Celebrating 20 years of the Hill End Artists in Residence Program,works in this exhibition are drawn entirely from BRAG’s permanent collection. Featured artists include Jean Bellette, Ray Crooke, Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend, Ben Quilty, David Strachan, Rosemary Valadon, Greg Weight and Nicole Welch. A Bathurst Regional Art Gallery exhibition.”

The studio at the historic Haefliger Cottage

Australian Film Commission, Australian Jazz, Black Box, Cosmopolitan Shanghai, Digital Media, El Rocco Jazz Cellar, Geoffrey Weary, Interactive Art, Kings Cross, Russian Art, Screen Australia, Serge Ermoll, Shanghai Jazz, Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, Tatiana Pentes, Uncategorized, Video art

BLOWIN’ AT THE ROCCO: Saturday Night: A Jazz feature

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BLOWIN’ AT THE ROCCO: Saturday Night

Blowin At The Rocco: Photography: Tatiana Pentes & Geoffrey Weary

An Australian Jazz Interactive Treatment for Broadband funded by Screen Australia (AFC/ Screen Australia)

New Media Writer/Director TATIANA PENTES
Photography/ Cinematography GEOFFREY WEARY
Original Jazz Music SERGEI ERMOLAEFF
Dramaturg Prof BRUCE JOHNSON

1. STORY OUTLINE

Expermimental Online Documentary

BLOWIN’ AT THE ROCCO: Saturday Night is an experimental interactive work that seeks to exploit and enhance the creative potentials of digitally produced music, sound, image and text relationships in an interactive online Broadband environment. In this context, the delivery of interactive work online provides an innovative approach to the conventional narrative & documentary forms. In BLOWIN’ AT THE ROCCO: Saturday Night, the participant/player will experience new possibilities produced through the slippage across a series of interactive screen surfaces, engaging the participant/player in a spatial relationship with the program. The participant/player discovers the origins of Sydney Jazz milieu through the eyes of Serge Ermoll Jr. (Jazz Pianist/ Private Investigator) during, smoky sophisticated bohemian, Sydney circa 1968. In addition the user is revealed eight tracks of original Australian jazz, recorded live at the El Rocco Jazz Cellar, 1968.

2.1 COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Serge Ermoll Jr (Sergei Ermollaeff) owns the copyright on all original compositions and recordings of his music. The production Budget would incorporate research fees and broadcast fees for the use of all other archival image, sound, text materials.

3. THEMES OF THE PROJECT: Pathway Elements
BLOWIN’ AT THE ROCCO: Saturday Night is composed of eight storylines, a series of interactive immersive screen environments, characterising the narrative structure of the program. The pathways are named by eight musical movements recorded by Serge Ermoll Jr (Sergei Ermollaeff). The recurrence of musical allusion and composition (a) in the form of musical iconography and (b) in the rendering of musical score in sonic fragments – will resolve in each storyline as the realisation of these eight jazz tracks. From the surface of the computer screen each story unfolds inside a series of frames, inspired by (Black American) Blue Note modern jazz album covers and early Russian constructivist assemblages. The jazz tracks name each storyline expressively, evoking the emotive state of the compositions and shaping the narrative structure of the pathways.

OVERVIEW Story (Musical) Tracks
Opening Titles
Each story pathway is triggered by an visual icon in the music cellar. The Detective foregrounds each pathway with an image/text sound transition

Pathway (1) Movement # 1 – VALSE Kings Cross & Bohemian Sydney

Pathway icon: montage of Alamein fountain & a trumpet
Visual trigger: : movement across a cappuccino coffee cup

This story conjures the memories of the musicians, music entrepreneurs, and patrons. The pathway is inspired by written texts by Bruce Johnson, John Clare, Kenneth Slessor, statements by jazz musicians remembering the milieu, and news stories reporting on the phenomena of the jazz cellar.

Pathway (2) Movement # 2 – FREE KATA Crest of freedom

Pathway icon: montage of Free Kata group
Visual trigger: movement across a Karate figure

This story explores the FREE KATA jazz ensemble of the 1970s, evolving from the seeds of El Rocco jazz culture. This pathway is composed of photographic portraits of the musicians, album artwork, record labels, music publicity material, text from news article coverage of the ensemble, and locates the music in the context of images of urban Sydney in this period and references the larger jazz picture.

Pathway (3) Movement # 3 – JUNGLE JUICE International Influences on Australian Jazz 1968

Pathway icon: montage of Uluru & Wattle matches
Visual trigger: movement across a portrait of a soldier

This storyline contextualises Australian Jazz & the era in archival moments that iconicise the sixties and world events shaping the Australian spirit: (i) the anti-Vietnam war protests (ii) the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, (iii) Robert Kennedy’s campaign against Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam war. The imagery evokes the generational complexity & tension that produced the fresh and vital early Australian jazz. This pathway is composed of original photographs, digital reconstructions, news articles, archival photographs, digitized moving image and sound.

Pathway (4) Movement # 4 – CLOUDS Australia 1968 – Iconic cultural imagery

Pathway icon: montage of hands on a keyboard (piano)
Visual trigger: a framed portrait of a blonde tourist in the red centre

This story evokes Sydney circa 1968, and juxtaposes the Eastern seaboard city with imagery of the Australian red center, (white tourists) a family visit to Uluru in a light plane, in the context of political movements (the anti-Vietnam war protests – students) and populist imagery – Shrimpton wears the legendary mini-skirt. This pathway is composed of original photographs, digital reconstructions, news articles, archival photographs, digitized moving image and sound.

Pathway (5) Movement # 5 – PASSION DANCE Serge Jr. & Stamatia meet on the Patris Ship

Pathway icon: montage of young Serge & wife Matina)
Visual trigger – black & white portrait of an emigre couple on the deck of a Greek ship

This story is personal and exposes in a series of black & white photographs and interviews two immigrant Australians broadening their horizons and making the journey back to Europe.

Pathway (6) Movement # 6 – RASPUTIN Diasporic Music Memories

Pathway icon: black & white montage of parents
Visual trigger –movement across a portrait of Rasputin

This story charts the movement of Serge Ermoll’s forbearer’s diaspora from Russia in revolution through to Harbin, Manchuria and then international capital of the East – Shanghai, China where his father worked as a jazz bandleader. Serge and his Russian parents then immigrate to Australia with assistance from the International Refugee Organisation. Serge Jr reflects on the influence of his China born father on his contemporary jazz endeavors in Australia. This pathway is composed of dramatized interviews/statements & original photographs.

Pathway (7) Movement # 7 – FALLEN FLOWERS
Private detective – Sydney underworld

Pathway icon: montage of a dancing girl over Kings Cross
Visual trigger –movement across a portrait of a dancing girl

This story envisions Kings Cross and Sydney, 1968. The participant/player enters into the space of clubs and strip joints, café culture at night. The participant/player is provoked to uncover a criminal situation, revealed through the character of the detective (Serge Ermoll Jr/ jazz pianist) in a series of reconstructed & simulated photographic & filmic sequences that expose Sydney’s underworld.

Pathway (8) Movement # 8 – SERGERY

Pathway icon: young Serge with band on piano
Visual trigger –movement across a keyboard

Blowin’ At the Rocco 1968 – Serge Ermoll Jr Quintet
Visual trigger; movement across the keys of the piano

This story is a temporal montage of Serge Ermoll Jr music career from his emergence as a musician to 1968. The pathway is composed of news material – newsprint articles, magazine reviews

Resolution Sequence

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BLOWIN’ AT THE ROCCO: Saturday Night: A Jazz feature

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