Serial Space

The Time Machine talks program features a range of presentations in the final festival weekend from Jacinta Kelly, Bonita Ely & Diana Smith, Ann Deslandes & Adnan Chowdhury; as well as a panel discussion exploring the relationship between women and technology, hosted by Pia van Gelder.

FULL TIME MACHINE PROGRAM

28.07.12

Jacinta Kelly
Exhuming Maternal Ditches: Mina Loy and Technology’s Bodies
Time: 12:30-1pm
Location: Serial 002

Between 1911 and 1913, while the world sat upon the precipice of a war that radically shifted how technology could intercede with the body, and while the Futurist Marinetti bemoaned the “maternal ditch” that had recently swallowed the mechanical muscle of his new automobile, his lover, the then little-known Mina Loy etched out her first poems. Her poetry struggled between the repudiation and embrace of a new technological age—an age that, in Loy’s view, left no liveable place for women.

Jacinta Kelly is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales. Her research interrogates the way that Mina Loy reconceptualised the poetic body in response to her readings of Henri Bergson. Jacinta has taught modernism in Australian universities, and recently published a chapter on Loy’s poetry in Pockets of Change: Cultural Adaptations and Transitions (Maryland: Lexington 2011)

Ella Barclay, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Gail Priest & Pia van Gelder
The Central Core of Technology
Time: 1:30-3pm
Location: Serial 002

A group of technologically involved women discuss the issues around working with technology. From feminism to the dave-to-girl ratio, they will attempt to scrutinise what it is that might be getting between them and their tools.

Bonita Ely & Diana Smith
Dogwoman Communicates with the Next Generation
Time: 4-5pm
Location: Serial 002

It has been 30 years since Bonita Ely, one of the pioneers of Australian environmental art, first performed Dogwoman Communicates with the Younger Generation (1982) and developed the mythology of the Dogwoman as the origin of all major religions and philosophies. In a conversation with artist Diana Smith, Ely will discuss the various permutations of the ancient cult of the Dogwoman, and together they will consider how performances from the past can be remembered, the difficulties associated with archiving an ephemeral medium, which has historically resisted documentation, and the importance of intergenerational dialogue and exchange.

Bonita Ely is one of the pioneers of Australian environmental art and has been exhibiting urban interventions, sculpture, photography, performances, painting, image and text, printmaking, video and drawing since 1972. Ely is Head of the Sculpture, Performance and Installation Department of the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.

Diana Smith is a Sydney-based artist working across the mediums of video, performance and installation. She is a founding member of the artistic collaboration Brown Council and is a current PhD candidate at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.

29.07.12

Ann Deslandes
Vacant possession
Time: 2-3pm
Location: Serial 002

Carlton & United Breweries was required to deliver ‘vacant possession’ as a condition of the sale of its Broadway site to Frasers Property in 2007. Thus CUB was required to evict a number of tenants housed on Kensington Street on the Central Station side of the site; now undergoing its transformation in to Central Park. In 2008, Kensington Street was occupied by the temporary FraserStudios project. With the tenancy of FraserStudios having ended in June 2012, this Talk considers the entanglements of creative erasure and creative production in the ongoing history of the up-and-coming Central Park site.

Ann Deslandes is a researcher, writer and community services worker in Sydney who is interested at the intersection of urbanism and solidarities.

Adnan Chowdhury
Cinema By/For A Single Consciousness Who Feels
Time: 3-4pm
Location: Serial 002

Cinema, for many filmmakers recently, has become the modeling of a single consciousness experiencing. This talk concentrates on three essential aspects of that mimesis using the work of three different filmmakers: the passing of time in Lisandro Alonso’s ‘Los Meurtos,’ the sense of a place and the things in it in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ‘Syndromes and a Century,’ and the gaze of a single consciousness in Pedro Costa’s Vanda trilogy. All three filmmakers have had an influence on the making of STONEWORK which is currently showing as part of the festival.

Adnan Chowdhury is a Dhaka and Sydney based artist who works primarily in digital film and photography. His short film, ‘Omission’, won the prestigious Gold Award for 2011 at the Australian Cinematographers Society Awards (NSW). His work concentrates on the instability and distrust of dominant narratives and perspectives that comes from being an highly assimilated outsider. Currently he is in postproduction of his feature length film set in Bangladesh.

Image Credit: Bonita Ely, Dogwoman Makes History, Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, 1986