BRISBANE FESTIVAL 2008 is here! Ahead of the launch of festival video art exhibition BIG SQUARE EYE, SEANNA VAN HELTEN chats to concept designer and producer VIVIAN HOGG about multimedia art, Retravision, and why ‘Gen-Y’ is a dirty word.

If you live in a regional community, where there is barely an art gallery in town let alone a media gallery, how do you find (and fund) the audio-visual resources and space required to show multimedia and video art? The solution could be as easy as a trip to the local shopping mall, discovered Vivian Hogg. “Often in regional areas, even where there are galleries, they have a limited capacity for media artwork, so they might only have one projector or one television screen … It interested me the way a Retravision outlet could in fact be a media gallery – in a renegade kind of way.”

The idea has since evolved into a massive collaborative kaleidoscope of multimedia art, involving Hogg, five video artists, and fifteen young Queensland students. The project is called Big Square Eye, and it will be launched on July 19 as part of the 2008 Brisbane Festival.

“For want of a better word, the human resources in this project are the project,” explains Hogg. “Kate Geck does animation; Alan [Nguyen] has more of a film background, so he’s more interested in parts of films that could be considered art; Ross [Manning] does awesome kinetic art; Archie Moore is interested in identity through art … and Andrew Gibbs has a VJ background. They all represent different facets of video art.”

 These five artists in turn offered intensive mentoring support to fifteen promising student artists, selected from regional and outer-Brisbane workshops held at the start of this year. In April, the students joined their five mentoring artists in Brisbane for what Hogg describes as “a kind of a deluxe art camp.”

“The very first session … we were like, ‘Well we don’t really like the terms ‘young people’ and ‘artists’ because you’re young people but we’re also young people, and we’re artists but you’re also artists,” Hogg says. Thus while she and the five mentors were reluctant to impose any guiding topics on the students’ work, they did find that some common themes emerged. “One of the biggest things in terms of a rationale that emerged as the project was evolving was a response to the banal and offensive category of ‘Generation Y’,” Hogg says. “It’s really totalising and it sees a whole age group as having similar qualities, and particularly in relation to technology.”

The exhibition itself, Hogg explains, is a play on the concept of “embedded” technology. “Rather than just whacking [the works] on Plasma screens, they’re in these embedded contexts, so they’re actually within bigger works or within sculptures made of the screens.” As well as being on show in a gallery space for the duration of Brisbane Festival, the works will also be online, and in sixteen Retravision stores across Queensland, including in Noosa, Margate, Bundaberg, and Mt Isa. “A lot of the stores are in the same areas where we were doing workshops. It folds back again to the community process – enabling the work of young people to be seen in their community.”

Hogg adds: “In Retravision stores often technology such as Plasma screens sits next to a hairdryer and a blender, and it really brings technology being back to something with a plug,” she quips. “Which I think is kind of like a demystifying quality similar to the way we’re trying to demystify Generation Y – it’s just a computer, these are just young people, a screen is just a screen.”

BIG SQUARE EYE, commissioned and produced by Brisbane Festival 2008, launches on July 19 at The Block, Creative Industries Precinct, QUT Kelvin Grove, and runs until August 3. Satellite venues include 16 Retravision outlets across Queensland and online viewings at www.brisbanefestival.com.au

Brisbane Festival Special

The Brisbane Festival 2008 runs July 18 to August 3, featuring over 900 performances across a range of styles, including theatre, dance, opera, physical theatre, music, multimedia, cabaret, visual art, fringe theatre, and free community events in the suburbs.

So like a kid in a candy store, here are SEANNA VAN HELTEN’s top 5 picks for the Brisbane Festival 2008:

1. under the radar (July 19 – August 3): Camp yourself outside Metro Arts for the festival and feast on fringe theatre. All shows are bite-sized at under 60 minutes, and bargain fare to boot.

2. The Courier-Mail Spiegeltent (July 18 – August 3): Literally a ‘tent of mirrors’, this brassy burlesque big-top ain’t no ordinary circus: the world’s largest Spiegeltent will host dances, jazz, salons, bars, and some of this country’s best cabaret performers (including my favourite act from the Brisbane Cabaret Festival 2006, Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen).

3. The Navigator (July 30 – August 2): A world premiere from Barrie Kosky, ‘enfant terrible’ of Australian theatre. Operatic in scale, this production explores unity and transformation, gleaning stories from Indian and German epics.

4. The Grand Inquistor (July 19 – 26) & Three Sisters (July 29 – August 3): Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and two Australian premieres – for Soviet-philes everywhere! Marie Hélène Estienne’s monologue adaptation from Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov promises to be utterly gripping, and Chekhov’s Three Sisters will play entirely in Russian!

5. The Fiveways (July 31 – August 2) & alice21 (July 31 – August 2): Someone did their market research – if it’s free and outdoors, Brisbanites will come. These two new works by Brisbane artists explore contemporary Queensland identity, within an entire ‘Across Brisbane’ program of free world-class events.

For full program details visit www.brisbanefestival.com.au

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