Presented in collaboration with Queensland Film Festival, and programmed especially for our current exhibition Nicholas Mangan: Limits to Growth, this free screening brings together four works that bend the frictionless ideal of modernity against the presence of time and its physical origins.
350 MYA
Terra Long 2016 | 5 minutes
In Terra Long’s 350 MYA, a sheet whips before the camera, shaped by the same wind that forms the rigid, undulating lines of sand below it as the film conjures the continued presence of the now vanished Rheic Ocean in the Tafilalt region of the arid Sahara Desert.
Courtesy of CFMDC
All That Is Solid
Louis Henderson 2014 | 15 minutes
A technographic study of e-recycling and neo-colonial mining filmed in the Agbogbloshie electronic waste ground in Accra and illegal gold mines of Ghana. The video constructs a mise-en-abyme as critique in order to dispel the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology – thus revealing the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.
Courtesy of LUX
The Birth of the Robot
Len Lye 1936 | 7 minutes
This experiment with colourful animated puppets was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. After using the Dufaycolor process for his previous two films, Lye now tried Gasparcolor, another new type of colour film. Making colour films was still a complex process (involving three separate film strips), but Lye succeeded in creating vivid sequences of movement and a storm scene that critics praised as “proof that the colour film has entered a new stage.”
Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation
F for Fibonacci
Beatrice Gibson 2014 | 17 minutes
F for Fibonacci takes as its departure point American author William Gaddis‘ epic modernist novel JR (1975). An eerily prescient, biting social satire, JR tells the story of a precocious 11 year-old capitalist who, with the unwitting help of his school’s resident composer, inadvertently creates the single greatest virtual empire the world has seen, spun largely from the anonymity of the school’s pay phone. F for Fibonacci develops a particular episode from JR, in which a televised music lesson is scrambled with a maths class on derivatives inside the mind of its child protagonist. Musings on aleatory music become muddled with virtual stock pickings and a theory of ‘market noise’ as they unfold within the modular machine aesthetics of the video game Minecraft, text book geometries, graphic scores, images from physics experiments, and cartoon dreams.
Courtesy of LUX.
Free, all welcome. This screening will take place in the Theatre Rehearsal Space, Level 4, Judith Wright Centre.
