The War on Television

The War on Television is a video based ‘performance’ work that explores interference fractured television broadcasts based mainly on the war in Iraq. The work has a range of source video and sound that form the basis of an improvisation, ‘randomly’ processed and manipulated through ‘scratch’ layers exaggerating the fragmentation. Though improvised in each performance, the work follows a consistent pattern and has been repeated in various venues.

The work is the result of an extensive research period involving the collection and cataloguing of source material within the theme of television representation of war and of technical innovation in the way this material may be flexibly selected and presented in a ‘real-time’ performance.

The digital techniques for selection and presentation were the result of applying database techniques to audio and video files. These techniques are combined with digital methods of image manipulation I developed in the production of two earlier video works. Though technological invention is fundamental to the creative strategies of these works and War on Television, the resulting changes in image and sound ‘language’ is seen as integral to the symbolic meaning of the representational sequences. Thus the research is concerned with integrating content, aesthetic quality and technology.

Research Interests: Artists’ Moving Image, Archives and Collections, Experimental Film, Video Art, Landscape, Urban
Space.

As Research Fellow attached to the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, my research activity broadly encompasses the history and contemporary practice of artists’ moving image. The Study Collection includes video copies of artists' works, writing by and about artists, institutional documents, books, catalogues, posters, etc., it is accessible to internal and external academic and curatorial research. In this context my research activity involves the collection, cataloguing and digitization of copies of artists' film and video works, documentation and publications, the dissemination of Study Collection research outputs, and facilitating research in artists’ moving image across UAL and beyond. I am also developing research projects around the nature of the relationship of artists’ moving image practice to that of the wide range of contemporary collections and archives in their analogue and digital forms, online and physically located.

My other research interests are in the relationship between audio-visual media practice, spatial representation, landscape, and urban space within a practice encompassing audio-visual media, performance, curation and writing. These have manifested themselves in projects such as: Figuring Landscapes, artists’ moving image from Australia and the UK, touring programme co-curated with Professor Catherine Elwes (Camberwell), (2008 ongoing until 2010); The Centres Project, an ongoing exhibition and publication research project in collaboration with Irene Barberis, Metasenta Projects, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, which has included the Transcentric exhibition at Lethaby Gallery (2008); After Lethaby video performance with Martin Blazícek, (Czech Republic), Lethaby Gallery, 2009.

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