This Colourful White Night
Theatre of Dreams :: Watts // Big Up // No flashLast night Melbourne held its inaugural White Night, during which art and culture took over the city from 7pm until 7am. The city was divided into precincts celebrating music, light shows, art, film and installations of all sorts. The streets were jammed, the laneways packed like sardines, but Melburnians behaved themselves on the whole.
Wonderland :: Lucifer VI // Rock BW-11 // No flashAlthough we heard some music (it was difficult to fully appreciate some of the acts because of the enormous crowding), my out-of-town friend and I most enjoyed the sound and light shows around town. The precincts had such evocative names as Wonderland, Theatre of Dreams, Elizabeth What Were You Thinking, The World Above, Light Fantastic, and Loved & Treasured. We only missed out on seeing the acts from Pictures & Posers and the Outer Limits, but it was impossible to see everything without a minute scrutiny of the program and careful mapping of the streets. I’m looking forward to next year already!
Read more at The Age website.
The Beasts From Behind :: TInto 1848 // D-Type Plate // No flash
Magic Lantern
Puppet Man :: Lucifer VI // Dylan // No flashIt was a freezing evening on Saturday night, but since it was the last night, Rapunzel and I stepped out to view the Gertrude Street Projection Festival.
The Festival, organised by the Gertrude Association, has been running since 2008. This year’s theme is Elements, and the work of guest artists and community groups is projected on buildings all along Gertrude Street, from the high-rise commission flats to the humble pub wall.
From the amusing – a life-size shadow of a man playing with dolls in a window, to the tiny – a little magic lantern with a creature astride the branch of a tree, to the monumental – geometric patterns flung up on the twin tall apartment buildings; they all provided a challenge to the dedicated Hipstamatic photographer, as did the freezing air. Quite a few shop windows caught my eye too. It was a fun evening.
Video Stars
It’s been a year in the making, but the two children’s book apps I have been working on are nearly finished! We’re ironing out the app of the second book in the series, and I have just a few more bits and pieces to finalise.
On Saturday we shot the promotional video, with my client – Bridget Cull, the author – and I working at our desks. They were not really our desks, and Bridget was not actually writing rhymes, but I really was demonstrating some illustration techniques live on camera. (Demystifying the trade – eek!) Later, Bridget demonstrated the various aspects – fairly simple animation – of the app.
The video was shot by Adam Perry and is being produced by Liz Re. We can already tell that working with professionals – as opposed to muddling along with amateurs wielding a DSLR – will make a huge difference to the marketing campaign Bridget is planning. (I was, however, disappointed that the hair and make-up artists were inexplicably not in attendance. I am sure I put in a request for them.)
Hopefully we will be launching the video on YouTube and the apps in the iTunes store in May, so stay tuned.
Dream Worlds Within Worlds
Lilypads from underneath, in ‘Gravity Be My Friend’ 2007, in the second roomOn Friday lunchtime some work friends and I wandered down to the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art to take in Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase. I’ve always been a bit sceptical about video installations since most I’ve seen make me yawn and move on fairly quickly (maybe I’m just impatient), but I went along with an open mind – after all, it takes us only five minutes to walk there. And unexpectedly I was blown away!
There are four rooms to wander through. The first begins innocuously enough, with a painting on one wall and an oval table in the centre of the room, set with an odd assortment of wine glasses and a peach and some cherries on a plate. Around the table are five unmatched chairs. There are two projections running simultaneously, one cast on the painting, and the other in the centre of the table. They are mesmerising, fluid, taking you from our world into the galaxies beyond, opening out like the petals of a flower worshipping the sun, or like a kaleidoscope. It was a long time before I could stop staring and go into the next room.
Take a seat and enjoy the show; ‘Laguna’ 2011 in the first roomThis large room has two projections on amorphous shapes suspended from the ceiling. Beneath them, in mirroring shapes, are padded mountains, contoured like a map showing the heights. I lie down and look up.
It’s our world, seen from below, literally because one is lying on the floor looking up at the projection, and because the artist has filmed the world from a camera that is always looking up, through endlessly moving water, through waving trees, past the limbs of swimmers. ACCA’s website puts it perfectly:
Lush and Edenic, sexy but sinless, the hedonistic pleasure worlds created by Pipilotti will delight, refresh and chillax you. Pipilotti’s vivid video environments take you into a dream state of elements. Earth, wind, fire and water are alchemically activated in her mesmerizing loops of trippy experience.
‘Administrating Eternity’ 2011; Chloe in the third roomThe third room takes you through a forest of semi-opaque projections, and the fourth into the mind of the artist herself.
The experience was fascinating, refreshing – we managed to spend almost our entire lunch hour there (it was hard to tear ourselves away), and I’m definitely going back.
If you’re in Melbourne, don’t miss it. It’s on until 4 March.
‘Administrating Eternity’ 2011
‘Administrating Eternity’ 2011; concentric rings of light projected onto the floor of the third room
A glimpse of the artist in ‘I Couldn't Agree With You More’ 1999; looking into the fourth room from the third