4 new media artists
Linda Wallace
Mel Donat, Memory Play Back
Combining the warmth of analogue audio and video equipment with the calculated cool of their digital offspring, 4 Sydney artists explore a range of transitional/crossover/meeting points—between sound and image, personal and public, past and future, remembering and forgetting, observer and observed… Andrew Gadow, Mel Donat, Tim Ryan and Phil Williams emerged from Honours level electronic arts studies guided by senior lecturer Peter Charuk at the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney. This year they will have an exhibition, Digital Decoupage, at First Draft Gallery, December 3-14. With varied interests, they work separately as well as on collaborative projects.
Gadow explores the translations from sound to vision and vice versa, generating pulsating video images from analogue synth keyboards, and making sounds from video footage. Most recently he exhibited in Tracking at Bathurst Regional Gallery. Gadow’s next appearance is at the upcoming Electro-fringe festival in Newcastle. Donat, working primarily in animation and installation, uses “subversion and contradictions to explore issues that may be considered disconcerting.” The installation—to be shown at First Draft—Memory Play Back, incorporates a hand-made soft toy rabbit, which operates as an interactive interface via which the viewer manipulates 3D imagery and sound. Donat’s experimental piece Trigger Displacement screened in the 2003 St Kilda Film Festival. Williams works mainly with sound in performance and installation, and for Digital Decoupage he continues with themes developed in the recent installation approaching silence at Casula Powerhouse, “a site specific meditation on the pursuit of absence.” Ryan’s work is a kind of minimal video. His Crash Media is currently touring New Zealand in the show Dirty Pixels. Ryan says the new piece, Future Proof, is concerned with ideas of obsolescence in the digital age.”[I]n this work I use defunct and faulty video technology to de-construct analogue footage.” Future Proof will show in Digital Decoupage in December, and, with Donat’s Bathing in A Warm Glow of Nothing will also be exhibited in Brainfeed at the Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers’ Bequest, Oct 5-Nov 30.
RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 39
