Anakhronismos: video art screening 27 January 2012

I've been invited to curate the next Illuminations video art screening at Bondi Pavilion:
Friday 27 January 2012
6 - 9 pm (one night only)

Here's my catalogue essay:

αναχρονισμός Anakhronismos ΑΝΑΧΡΟΝΙΣΜΟΣ

ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Greek anakhronismos, from ana- ‘backward’ + khronos ‘time.’

Our daily lives are chronologically arranged, time measures our moves, structures our internal narratives and puzzles philosophers and scientists alike. We waste, take, kill and do time, yet the concept remains elusive. We dream of time travel to a nostalgic past or utopian future: how ironic is it that the quintessential time machine, Dr Who’s TARDIS, is an anachronistic British police box? Paradoxically, anachronism has currency in video art practices with the technologies and content implicated by artists. Experimentation with the obsolete and futuristic, the relic and the speculative, and an awareness that our methods today face extinction tomorrow, are part of the joy of connecting past, present and future in video art. Time code is the defining language of digital video. Artists find expression in frames per second, with editing software allowing temporal relationships to be splintered, echoed, layered and suspended, expanding non-linear possibilities. Video, the ‘art of time’ according to video historian Michael Rush, has been used by artists to foreground the subjective experience of both duration and timelessness. Moments can be dramatically fast-forwarded or extended, slowed, repeated, and revisited with re-editing and through looping repetition, a mesmerising endless episode may be created.

With the works of Anne Ferran, Yoram Gross, Matthew Hopkins, Brian Joyce & Trevor Ditcham, Carolyn McKay, Kate Richards & Ross Gibson, and Vanessa White, viewers can reflect upon the relentless process of the present falling into the past, the future slipping into the present, and the sweet anticipation of the future remaining infinitely out of reach.

Carolyn McKay