Cloud Copy - now showing at Lismore Regional Gallery

20 MAY - 17 JUNE 2023

Cloud Copy places the viewer inside an alternative universe in physical and virtual space. It ushers us in...

‘Nothing here is true
Truth stopped in 2001
Respect stopped in 2016
2020 never really existed
It’s a conspiracy
 
We’ve reserved you a space in your own private echo chamber
Scream in any direction
Somebody is bound to react
 
You’re part of something greater now
Pulsing in the algorithm
 
Let your thoughts fragment into a galaxy
Of subreddits and subtweets and subcultures
 
Welcome to sub-cultism
Pick a faction
Don’t worry you can change stream at any time
Simply navigate to a new tab
Go deep
Deeper
This void is cavernous
Begging to be filled.’

Xanthe Dobbie, Cloud Copy 2021, installation view UQ Art Museum, Don’t Be Evil. Courtesy of the artist, photo: Louis Lim.

Cloud Copy places the viewer inside an alternative universe inside a VR experience headset. Dobbie has brought together snatches of internet content, exaggerating the online world many of us experience daily, with corporate logos, pornography, every seduction that makes are click further into this boundless space. 

Cloud Copy was first commissioned for an exhibition at University of Queensland Art Museum.

A Lismore Regional Gallery exhibition. Lismore Regional Gallery is a creative initiative of Lismore City Council supported by the New South Wales Government through Create NSW and assisted by the Australian Government through Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Friends of the Gallery.

Cloud Copy (2022) - by artist Xanthe Dobbie with original music by Jorde Heys

Exhibition Documentation, Photo By Rebecca Rushbrook

The Long Now - now available to view online

Via ACMI

Technocapitalism, climate grief and ancient history collide in Xanthe Dobbie's single-take desktop performance exploring the human urge to seek immortality.

“There is a giant clock ringing deep inside a mountain in the belly of the Sierra Diablo Ranges – the land of the Devil... It is a huge clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. The mountain in which the clock resides is privately owned by Jeff Bezos. Programmed never to chime the same melody twice, its anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.”

— Xanthe Dobbie, The Long Now

The Long Now by artist Xanthe Dobbie, ponders the human urge to seek immortality. Set to an original score by composer Jorde Heys, this new experimental desktop performance collides technocapitalism against climate grief against ancient history, refracting these competing narratives through the technicolour lens of the internet.

Featuring original epic hero Gilgamesh and the disembodied deep fake voice of Alan Rickman, The Long Now collapses histories, illuminating ancient and contemporary myth-making practices.

This FREE online exhibition is showing in Gallery 5 on the ACMI website.

WATCH NOW from 11 July - 3 October 2023

Immortality, neoliberalism and popup windows: Xanthe Dobbie on The Long Now

Via ACMI

- Isabella Hone-Saunders

Get a glimpse inside the multi-windowed mind of Xanthe Dobbie and discover what makes their latest desktop video-collage work tick.

By simultaneously combining images of beehives, Keanu Reeves, 3D rendered creatures, Guardian articles and Tweets, artist, filmmaker and PhD candidate Xanthe Dobbie's characteristically chaotic style and practice is laden with humour and iconography. The Long Now, a new experimental video-collage work, which premiered online in ACMI’s Gallery 5, is a densely layered and complex intertwining of multiple contemporary and historic narratives, combining queer theory, art history, techno-capitalism and internet culture to address ideas of immortality and neoliberalism. This expanded desktop performance lends itself to multiple viewings, and even after repeated watching, new reference points emerge.

When speaking with Dobbie about The Long Now, our conversation slipped in and out of talking directly to the work and exploring their broader practice – very much a part of Dobbie’s nuanced creative process. On my third viewing of their work, prior to our chat, I decided to record most of what I saw and heard; pop-up windows, roaming cultural references, images of the galaxy, notes written across various text apps, descriptions of gifs. These sporadic notes now sit in a Word document on my desktop, mirroring what appears on the screen in The Long Now.

“I don’t think of my own works as overwhelming when I’m making them, but I know that to be the way that people experience them,” explains Dobbie when asked about what they are seeking to achieve when they make such rich and densely layered works and how they consider that impact and/or desired effect on their audience. “Honestly, it is just the way that my mind is processing the information, that is what storytelling looks like inside my mind.”

There are moments during The Long Now where it is as though the screen might burst open. Providing a glimpse into their visual imagination, Dobbie confessed, "it actually makes me anxious to think of a single image on a screen," which explains why, before seeing the work, the viewer must close several popups in order to press play; mimicking the effect of a virtual virus taking hold.

“One of the things that I love about collage and desktop performance is the idea of being able to present, literally, multiple streams of story and information simultaneously, which I think has something to do with my own attention span and my own ADHD,” Dobbie explains.

In The Long Now, Dobbie often includes a historical or mythological counterpoint, suggesting that we are re-living similar or the same journeys of selfhood. The story of Gilgamesh acts as a through line for this work and has been paired with Jeff Bezos’s large-scale project of building a giant ‘millennial’ clock that sits inside a mountain in the Sierra Diablo Ranges. To Dobbie, Bezos’s clock represents a futile search for immortality and so by pairing the story of Gilgamesh they hope to reimagine The Epic of Gilgamesh as a contemporary story. As the myth has a limited history of visual representation there was great freedom and scope for visually reimagining and re-interpretation. While researching, Dobbie found parallels with The Matrix (1999) and expressed how elating and stimulating it is when such connections occur in their process.

Across the duration of this work, we pivot from first hearing an auto-generated – and slightly disconcerting – voice of Alan Rickman reading to us, then to the sound of ticking clocks, to a Fatboy Slim sample and then to moments of languid synth drone before returning to Rickman. Dobbie worked collaboratively with Jorde Heys on the score. Heys is a classical composer who has worked with Dobbie on various projects, after meeting while both studying at AFTRS. As a part of their combined process, Dobbie provides a mood or inspiration board to Heys who then returns a set of atmospheric sounds; Dobbie then uses these samples while live mixing and layering, describing the collaboration as “a deeply unruly process”.

As a viewer of their live recorded desktop performance, we slip in and out of awareness of Dobbie as ‘author’ or ‘performer’ switching between tabs, scrolling, controlling what we see, when and how long for. There are moments where it is brought more strongly to our attention and other moments where the work washes over us in a familiar filmic way. When developing this work and deciding upon the references that ended up in the final cut, Dobbie undertook substantial periods of research. The breadth of references span everything from Mariah Carey to John Steinbeck to T.S. Eliot to found footage of erotic wrestling to Jonathan Van Ness.

“I always use pop culture references because I believe they are very succinct,” Dobbie explains when asked how they arrived at each of the cultural, theoretical and historical references that they incorporate, and how these high and low reference points converge and interrelate. “Everyone has a point of reference for them already and if you are trying to deal with big ideas such as neoliberalism and climate grief, these reference points can hold the audience and invite them in through multiple access points.”

The Long Now also responds to concepts such as planned obsolescence, economics post-currency, the power and influence of hedge fund billionaires and survival of the richest. The work draws upon traditional storytelling ideas – a three-act structure and prologue – while being compositionally inspired by 14th and 15th century religious and still life painting. Thematically, they engage with concurrent moments of chaos in the world – politically, socio-economically and environmentally – and how these themes are reflected back to us on the internet and how in turn these reflections impact our neural pathways.

I asked Dobbie about the contemporary practitioners who have inspired their practice or those who they admire. Artists and collectives such as Soda Jerk, VNS Matrix, Candice Breitz and Sidney McMahon were at the top of their list, many of whom are current peers and who share a conceptual premise or stylistically overlap with Dobbie’s own practice. “I think that an artist such as Candice Breitz uses the politics of space incredibly well in heightening the way she installs her works,” Dobbie observes.

The overlapping ideas and imagery in The Long Now do not only require extensive research, but computer capacity. The computer essentially fails to hold and run each of the windows or programs that are running on the screen. Dobbie noted that this threshold pushing was an integral part of their making, and they rationalised what it means to work with a methodology that happily embraces error and glitch and how these become subsumed as a self-reflexive part of the work itself. “Because it is a performance, I think that it does create a sense of liveness when you see something starting to deteriorate, and in this work, you are allowed to see that.”

– Isabella Hone-Saunders, Assistant Curator.

You can watch The Long Now screening until October in ACMI’s Gallery 5.

'High Wind Over Hasegawa' (2021) at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

Via BRAG

Referencing Tohaku Hasegawa's ‘Pine Trees’ screens circa 1595, and the works of Hiroshige and Hokusai, Damian Gascoigne's dual screen artwork 'High Wind Over Hasegawa' (2021( is now showing in 'Cel: The Artist as Animator' at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery.

Of this work, Damian says, 'The hand drawn ink animation is made for two-screen projection, drifting in and out of sync, exploring Buddhist ideas of non-duality as we take off and find ourselves tethered at the same time. The drawings swirl, hats fly off, a shout goes up- do it anyway, what’s yours is mine, we’re going to be fine somehow. The work marks a period of great uncertainty - and considerable excitement - as I sought the courage to make big change happen, and to step out into a high wind.'

'Cel: The Artist as Animator' is on display until Sunday 3 April 2022.

Congratulations to the 2021 Screen Music Awards winners

Via APRA AMCOS

The winners of the 2021 Screen Music Awards have today been announced by APRA AMCOS and the AGSC (Australian Guild of Screen Composers) with dual winner Joff Bush leading the results for his musical magic on the children’s television global sensation Bluey.

Described by Fairfax Media as “the most successful local musician you’ve never heard of”, composer Joff Bush has taken out Best Music for Children’s Programming for Bluey. Joff and his co-composers, David Barber, Helena Czajka, Marly Lüske, Lachlan Nicolson and Steve Peach have also captured the voting panel’s hearts and ears to receive Best Soundtrack Album for Bluey: The Album. These are Joff’s first ever Screen Music Awards wins.

Also winning his first ever Screen Music Award is Brian Cachia, who has scored the Feature Film Score of the Year for horror thriller Bloody Hell. Brian’s score creates tension as the movie follows a man with a mysterious past who flees the country to escape his own personal hell – only to arrive somewhere much, much, worse.

Multiple Screen Music winner Caitlin Yeo has received a nod for Best Music for a Documentary for her suspenseful score for Playing with Sharks. The documentary provides a front row glimpse into the life of pioneering diver and conservationist Valerie Taylor and her love of sharks.

The Best Original Song Composed for the Screen is Bagi-la-m Bargan from Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky. The song was composed by first-time Screen Music Awards winners Nathan Bird (pka Birdz), Fred Leone and Daniel Rankine (pka Trials) and was written specifically for the NITV one-hour documentary, which offers a fresh look at the Cook legend from a First Nations' perspective. The song is viewed through the lens of a young Butchalla man seeing Captain Cook sail past Kgari (Fraser Island). Leone, a Butchulla Song-man and Birdz’ cousin, sings his part in language.

Father and son screen music duo Cezary Skubiszewski and Jan Skubiszewski have collaborated to win Best Television Theme for Halifax Retribution, the crime series that sees Rebecca Gibney reprise her role as forensic psychiatrist Jane Halifax. Long-time screen music collaborators David McCormack and Antony Partos have teamed up to score Best Music for a Television Series or Serial for Jack Irish, ABC Television’s long running crime drama starring Guy Pearce in the title role.

Prolific musician and multi-Screen Music Award winner Roger Mason has composed Best Music for a Mini-Series or Telemovie for Hungry Ghosts (SBS On Demand). In a Film Ink interview, Roger described creating the eerie soundtrack as an opportunity to "create new techniques with a combination of acoustic instruments processed through synthesizers."

Composer Adam Moses has scored Best Music for a Short Film for Yellow Jack, which takes place entirely on deck and in the bowels of an old 1960’s frigate and moves from tongue-in cheek parody to claustrophobic madness and bloody mutiny. Adam took home a Screen Music Award in the same category in 2016.

Berlin based screen composer Jonathan Dreyfus has won Best Music for an Advertisement for The Untold Tale of Isabelle Simi - the extraordinary story of SIMI winery’s most fearless leader. The original score which was written, recorded and produced in the co-composers hometowns of Melbourne and Berlin.

Composing duo Adam Gock and Dinesh Wicks have taken out Most Performed Screen Composer – Australia for the 8th time. Adam and Dinesh collaborate under the moniker The DA’s Office and have worked on projects such as MasterChef, The Biggest Loser, 20 to 1, and Anh’s Brush with Fame. Globally successful screen composer Neil Sutherland has received the award for Most Performed Screen Composer – Overseas for the record-breaking 14th consecutive year! Neil’s significant body of work includes Border Security, MythBusters, Dancing with the Stars, Getaway and Bondi Vet.

APRA AMCOS and the AGSC congratulates all the winners of the 2021 Screen Music Awards. Please see complete list of winners below, and watch the nominated works and winners on YouTube.