Using photography as the starting point for interactivity and cyborg art is the exhibition and performance event Still Moving that opens at the Corban Estate Arts Centre, Henderson next week. Curated by new media artist Angela Main, the show includes a programme of recent experimental film and video art and places these alongside cutting edge interactive new media works that utilise digital technology.

Still Moving

Image: Animalia - cyborg art. The result is a living manifestation of Donna Haraway's cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism. Collaboration between Angela Main and Caroline McCaw.Using photography as the starting point for interactivity and cyborg art is the exhibition and performance event Still Moving that opens at the Corban Estate Arts Centre, Henderson next week. Curated by new media artist Angela Main, the show includes a programme of recent experimental film and video art and places these alongside cutting edge interactive new media works that utilise digital technology.

Still Moving

Image: Animalia - cyborg art. The result is a living manifestation of Donna Haraway's cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism. Collaboration between Angela Main and Caroline McCaw.One of the interactive works Animalia Remix by Angela Main, is a development of a work Animalia completed as part of an artists fellowship at Canterbury University based HitLab (Human Interface Technology Lab) last year, in collaboration with Dunedin-based artist/ lecturer Caroline McCaw. 'Hitlab was a fantastic opportunity to work with some world class computer engineers', says Angela. Animalia has been accepted into an international exhibition, the Zero One San Jose Global Festival of 'Art on the Edge' for 2006.

Animaliaremix can be played online and in the gallery, the installation functions like a life size interactive video game for four players, where participants engage in a masquerade in which their own head is replaced by that of an animal, so becoming part human and part digital chimera. The result is a living manifestation of Donna Haraway's cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.' It is playful and immersive,' says Main, ' to progress through the game environments, requires collaboration, movement and interaction between people who may not neccesarily know each other'.

'The work draws on both Eastern and Western themes of evolution and zoomorphic mythologies, and raises issues about what it means to be human in a technological era', Main says, 'this intersection between physical and mediated spaces as a simultaneous experience, becomes a metaphorical interface for the real and the imaginary'.

Other works in the exhibition include; a series of etched photo negative print works by Cassima Selchow-Martin; a photo snapping robot by Harriet Stockman, and an interactive sound work by Sam Morrison. In Morrison's work the old wine vats at Corban Estate will be 'instrumentalised' so that they can be played by the audience, and the sounds generated will be transmitted via radio waves into the gallery.

The works in STILL MOVING introduce the viewer to new ways of regarding 'new media'. The space of the gallery becomes a laboratory, an active experiment in which the artists create spaces that embrace the onlooker thus made visitor. The frame turns into a doorway.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday June 14th at 6pm and runs until Sunday 18th, from 10am to 4pm daily with Artist Talks on Sunday 18th at 11am. There is a performance event on Saturday 17th , which is an experimental intermedia event incorporating a film and sound perfromance by Eve Gordon and Sam Hamilton; a virtual theatre performance Animaliaremix; sounds from outer space relayed via global radio telescopes and streamed from New Plymouth by sound artist Adam Hyde and an environmental sound collage by P.Westbourne.

An online version of Animaliaremix can be played on www.animaliaremix.com and for more information on the exhibition see www.stillmoving.org.nz. Bookings are essential for the performance event, please call the Corban Estate Arts Centre on 838 4455.

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Schedule

Exhibition Official Opening: Wednesday June 14th at 6pm
Exhibition Open: Thursday 15th to Sunday 18th 10am - 4pm daily
Performance Event : Saturday 17th at 8pm
Artist Talks: Sunday 18th 11 am - 12pm

All events are free of charge except the performance event at $15/$10