Topics include post-war documentaries and migration, Asian-Australian subjectivity, cross-cultural romance, “wogsploitation” comedy, and post-ethnic cinema. This collection also provides a useful reference text for scholars of Australian film and cultural studies, with material on contemporary film-making and pre-World War II cinema. Containing previously unpublished articles by some the most recognised experts on Australian cinema, the book is a vital contribution to the burgeoning international interest in diasporic cinemas.

For reasons which are not clear to me as yet I went silent and retreated in a world of books, ideas, and movies during my teen and early adult years. Yet as an artist, critic, writer and educator, over the years, I have found my speaking voice once again. In an age where to converse is sadly a passing art and to listen also a dying thing in our social media saturated world I have become progressively thankful to others who may think similar things.

Face-to-face encounters are what our age needs more of . It was said that Luis Buñuel in his old age would rise early in the morning so he could capture the morning light and see and hear how trees would sway in the morning breeze. On doing this Buñuel’s face would came alive with our world’s infinite capacity to enchant us.

I have decided not to smooth over through editing out the idiosyncratic rhythms, inflections, meandering digressions, impasses and argumentative circularity of my conversations in order to retain their overall non-linear character.

For reasons which are not clear to me as yet I went silent and retreated in a world of books, ideas, and movies during my teen and early adult years. Yet as an artist, critic, writer and educator, over the years, I have found my speaking voice once again. In an age where to converse is sadly a passing art and to listen also a dying thing in our social media saturated world I have become progressively thankful to others who may think similar things.

Face-to-face encounters are what our age needs more of. It was said that Luis Buñuel in his old age would rise early in the morning so he could capture the morning light and see and hear how trees would sway in the morning breeze. On doing this Buñuel’s face would came alive with our world’s infinite capacity to enchant us.

I have decided not to smooth over through editing out the idiosyncratic rhythms, inflections, meandering digressions, impasses and argumentative circularity of my conversations in order to retain their overall non-linear character.

Kythera and Antikythera are located between Peloponnese and Crete and in the bosom of three seas, Ionian, Aegean and Cretan.

Chapter Authors:
Matthew Perkins: Australian Video Art: An Incomplete History
Matthew Perkins, Elena Galimberti and Anne Marsh: Contextualising Early Australian Video Art
Stephen Jones: Video in the 1970s: The Decade Before the Digital
Jacqueline Millner: Australian Video Art in the 1980s
Darren Tofts: ‘As Yet Unwritten’
Daniel Palmer: Australian Video Art since 2000
Anne Marsh: Relations: Video/Performance/Document

Sleeve Information:
Front:

• John Conomos, Autumn Song (1997) Video. Image courtesy of the artist;
• Daniel Crooks, Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement), 2010. High Definition digital video transferred to Blu-Ray, 16:9, colour, sound, 5 min 23 seconds

Credit: Image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Back:

• John Gillies and The Sydney Front, Techno/Dumb/Show (1991) Videotape, 23:35 minutes. Colour and black and white, stereo. Image courtesy of the artist;
• Jill Scott, Stick Around (1975) Video. Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas (editors). In Relive, leading historians of the media arts grapple with this dilemma: how can we speak of “new media” and at the same time write the histories of these arts? These scholars and practitioners redefine the nature of the field, focusing on the materials of history – the materials through which the past is mediated. Drawing on the tools of media archaeology and the history and philosophy of media, they propose a new materialist media art history.

The contributors consider the idea of history and the artwork’s moment in time; the intersection of geography and history in regional practice, illustrated by examples from eastern Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; the contradictory scales of evolution, life cycles, and bodily rhythms in bio art; and the history of the future – how the future has been imagined, planned for, and established as a vector throughout the history of new media arts.

These essays, written from widely diverse critical perspectives, capture a dynamic field at a moment of productive ferment.

With a background in biology, Doris based the idea of a ‘breathing’ wall on the unique way in which a grasshopper takes in air through its sides and uses the air to cool its body.

You can find more information about Doris Kim Sung and her designs through the TED website: here

What kind of person thinks to make this creative connection, from a grasshopper to a building material? How can people across various disciplines be encouraged and trained to make connections such as these; to work more inventively?

Traditionally, invention has been seen as isolated to the realm of scientific discovery. But are artists, designers and musicians also inventors? The contributors to Ecologies of invention, (ed. Andy Dong, John Conomos and Brad Buckley) attempt to answer these questions – and ask and answer even more.

Ecologies of Invention is the first collection of essays that brings together writers and scholars of international standing from the University of Sydney and beyond to examine the assumptions underlying notions of inventiveness. In doing so, an important distinction is made between ‘inventiveness’ and ‘creativity’.

Significantly, the contributors look at origins, approaches and attitudes towards inventiveness across the disciplines, including art, architecture, design, history, engineering, science, law and economics. As Marc Newson, designer of the famous Lockheed Lounge, points out in the Foreword, Ecologies of Invention ‘makes an important contribution to our understanding of that “light bulb” moment of realisation or invention that takes place across all disciplines’. As well as sharing similarities across disciplines, the contributors demonstrate how invention on all different scalesfrom personal capacities to the social, spatial and network configurations, share similar processes and production.

Edited by Andy Dong, Professor and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Sydney and holder of the Warren Centre Chair for Engineering Innovation; Brad Buckley, artist, activist, urbanist and Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture at Sydney College of the Arts; and John Conomos, artist, critic and theorist at Sydney College of the Arts, the concept of invention as explored in Ecologies of invention moves beyond the individual chapters and contributions by Faculty of Architecture Academics Lian Loke, Dagmar Reinhardt, Chris Smith and Rob Saunders, to the design of the book itself.

The book poses new questions for scholars, artists, architects, designers, historians, engineers, scientists, lawyers and economists about the nature, origins and processes of invention.

Su Baker, Bruce Barber, Mikkel Bogh, Juli Carson, Edward Colless, Jay Coogan, Luc Courchesne, Sara Diamond, Lauren Ewing, Gary Pearson, Bill Seaman, Jeremy Welsh, Bruce Yonemoto.

Rethinking the Contemporary Art School examines the reasons for the art school and its continued existence, its role in society and what should be taught and learnt in the context of what is now a globalised art world. The book also considers different art school models from innovative graduate programs, to independent stand-alone schools such as Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCADU) and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art to art schools, which are departments or schools of major research universities and the problems they face operating in what James Elkins describes as ‘marginalised in university life.’

Republics of Ideas examines the social, political and cultural implications of an Australian republic in the context of the visual arts and new global economy. An expanded collection of essays based on two Artspace symposiums held in the lead-up to the Australian republican referendum.

On one hand a major contribution to the realm of moving image and new media theory, Mutant Media is also a kind of autobiography of someone whose eclectic life as an artist, writer and educator centres around cinema’s grand, unpredictable adventure spanning three centuries.

Read an extract from the book.

George Alexander’s introduction to Mutant Media at the book launch, Gleebooks.

It’s a great pleasure to launch this book and a great pleasure to read it. The voice is buoyant and fascinating. But it also brings out your readerly limitations. Mine reveal themselves early…as JC shuttles effortlessly between cinema, literature, new media and the visual arts. 

The artworld can usually only handle one identity per person, and JC has lots: teacher, art historian, media artist, prolific critic and writer, editor and curator. Not just a pretty interface, John! 

Readers of Mutant Media will get the benefit of his life-long fusion of several imaginative activities in one – a combination of a very receptive mind at work, with a hint of the more compelling dramas of art. 

MM is a generous batch of essays – about 14 of them – that skip across everything to do with the business of cinema – art/genre/experimental – and that provides a useful cat-scan of the audio-visual continuum that runs from video to new interactive media art in the brave new 21st century. 

It’s so hard to make a place for yourself in the confusion of it all. But this book helps. It is an area with too many named new things. Too much that needs explanation to understand what it is, much less what it’s for and what’s remarkable about it. You start to look for reasons to trust your guides.

And JC, a gentleman scholar, uses his brain and feelers to become a very trustworthy guide. His great advantage is his ability to build bridges, rather than walls. 

Who else could do this job? Some one who doesn’t polarise & divide. He avoids the natural instinct to see either a revolution or a conspiracy in every new thing that comes down the pike. 

With his encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema/video/photographic/art history (- and I mean the whole menu -from soup to nuts) provides a stable context – through the bewildering advances in technological innovations and mutations and convergences (now you can watch “Lawrence of Arabia” on a 2”X3” iPhone screen).

Man, JC will hypertext hypertext. Leads to intertextual games that make your head spin: (at one point he quotes Timothy Murray quoting Raymond Bellour quoting Deleuze speaking of Resnais’ cinematic transformations of Proust and Bergson).

He understands cinema’s own allegiance to prior arts: theatre, photography, painting,  -while shepherding us through, all the monthly tremors of fashion, and the winds of opinion. He’s the switchboard operator across these diverse media platforms and the atomising of trans-generic styles and micro-practices. 

Erudite, but never as a display, learning moves on waves of thought and feeling.

And he’s less and less forgiving of anything sensed as doctrinaire or narrow-minded.

JCs been a benevolent presence in the art scene (who as many of you also know, keeps in touch by phone with his trademark “Just touching base”).

I’ve known John from late 60s waiting in queues to see Godard and Truffaut at now defunct arthouses around Sydney – The Gala, Savoy, Lido, and Rose Bay Wintergarden. – Both from a blue-collar past, and the great Australian multiculture, we became fellow pilgrims,  –My first Godard was that film about film Le Mepris –The earliest lessons from those days were that Movies come to life when we are looking, thinking, testing; they demand definition, not just awed witness.

(Godard said that crap films like “Titanic” demand only 10% of your personality. Good films get smaller audiences, but get more of the viewer.)

Godard with his TV screen glasses and rasping doom-laden voice hovers over this book. He is the cultural polymath who practically invented French screen modernism, using a vast repertoire of cinematic, literary, artistic and historical references to forge his hyperserious and hyperplayful cinema. 

But cinema in those days – and before it (touching image of him watching Greek cinema in Newtown with his mum) it was a trapdoor to wonder as well – the birthplace of cinephilia; that slightly mystical experience of attending to the Big Screen (at about the height of an altar) along with its communal atmospherics.

And I think that ability to reconcile the two: distancing mechanisms on the one hand, and blissed absorption on the other – head and heart, basically.

Along the way we survived the cultural fever blisters of the 1980s where we sat at some tough poker tables of theory, academic cinema studies, where pleasure was politicised and every desire psychoanalysed. It was around that time – when he was living in Darghan Street (around the corner here in Glebe), I was asked – along with Adrian Martin, to take part in one of his early Jacques Rivettish films.

His later video installations and digital sculptures: –  reminded me of wishing wells that he could dream or scream in. They- Museum of Fire, Night Sky, Autumn Song, Album Leaves were self-interrogating fictions –or autobiofiction – where dissolving past selves were tucked beneath outlandish masks poached from John’s dreamstore of celluloid flashbacks. This capacity to transfigure the past – not just the literal autobiographical past, as Godard said, images of the past -into the contours of his own emotional context – allowed him to explore the labyrinth of time & pulled his imagination deeper into his vision of this post-colonial subjectivity forged by exile, longing and restlessness: that reveal film’s special affinity for passing time, for change and evanescence, for memory or forgetting.

…..so places like Tempe where he grew up, or Cythera in Greece were not just geographies but signifiers, a fantasy, an accoutrement to identity, a ghostly palimpsest in slo-mo.

This creative side has allowed him to explore from the inside the paradoxical nature of the image – which you believe in & are distrustful of at the same time. 

In Mutant Media the writing is paced, not written at a gallop, or overcooked. The pace is the kinetic relationship between head and heart, not too theoretical, not too personal. a mix of inwardness and outer focus, a useful manual and a plaintive blues.

Arguments have plot twists like whodunits. But the takeaway from the book is the idea of New Media as a form of writing.

With Godard – Chris Marker – as the two pillars in his argument:  you can see how he’s making a context for the essay-film. And the idea of the camera as pen (Astruc’s camera-stylo).

Godard’s move from narrative to the essayistic, with its autumnal even melancholy tone. Chris Marker uses film clips, stills, music, text, fragments of sound – new kind of reflective, non-narrative cinema – private, solitary, exploratory, full of epiphanies (like the breathing face in La Jetee).

MM is an intellectual bustin’ up the joint. So thank God or Godot or Godard – for JC this builder of bridges 

This is Red Bull for the grey matter.

(You’ll like this book And it will like you back!) 

I am honoured to be asked to launch JC’s book.  Light the blue paper. Or splice on the black leader. 

George Alexander 2008.