 |
Crime Scene
Exhibition
In 1998 Ross Gibson and Kate Richards began collaborating on a suite of works, known collectively as Life After Wartime. In a range of different media, the suite of works responds to an archive of crime scene photographs from Sydney, 1945-60. Conserved by the Justice and Police Museum, the photographs are the property of the NSW Police. Over the decades, before coming into the safekeeping of the Museum, the collection was repeatedly salvaged from flood, re-location and the duress of overwhelming Police workloads. As a result, the records that conclusively explain the cases have been lost. All that remains are the pictures, plus some notes originally jotted on the envelopes protecting the negatives: the name of the police photographer, the date of documentation, and the nature and location of the case being investigated. The photographs offer glimpses of life and death in Sydney fifty years ago. We see a world often ignored by the records that historians usually consult. It's a world full of yearning, folly, mendacity and nobility, a world as complex and mysterious as our own moment in time.
|
|
The Crime Scene Exhibition is based around one hundred large format photographs from the Scientific Investigation Bureau archives of the NSW Police. To interpret the pictures, Ross Gibson and Kate Richards have gathered interactive databases, documentary interviews with Police Detectives (including some of the photographers featured in the exhibition), soundscapes, objects from the forensics collection, evocative narrative texts and succinct curatorial accounts. Focussing on Sydney in the decade after World War II, the exhibition shows an era of great turmoil, repressed yearnings and violent outbursts. The Crime Scene Exhibition is a revelation - dark and foreboding, thrilling and disturbing. It challenges our common sense presumptions about the past and about our everyday life in the present. The exhibition had a record-breaking season at Sydney's Justice and Police Museum in 1999 and 2000. It then went on an extensive tour of regional NSW museums and galleries. Technical Specifications
|
|
|
Life After Wartime Live with the Necks is an improvised collaboration involving Ross Gibson, Kate Richards and the music group, The Necks (Chris Abrahams, Lloyd Swanton and Tony Buck). For the past fifteen years The Necks have been at the forefront of the experimental music scenes nationally and internationally. The London Guardian has described their music as something 'entirely new and entirely now… they produce a post jazz, post rock, post everything sonic experience that has few parallels or rivals. Their music is a thrilling emotional journey into the unknown.' In Life After Wartime Live, Gibson and Richards improvise an image-and-text 'movie' responding to the evolving moods and patterns of the Necks' performance. The result is an intuitive interplay of sonic, pictorial and narrative aesthetics that evokes the hidden impulses of our recent past. Life After Wartime Live with the Necks was performed at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in 2002 and to standing-room-only crowds at The Studio, Sydney Opera House in 2003. Technical Specifications
|
|
|
Life After Wartime CD-ROM is a story-engine utilising a database of crime scene photographs, haiku-like texts, combinative music and sound design. Alternately buffeted by clues and intrigued by possible interpretations, the investigator of the CD-ROM collaborates with the tendencies written into its algorithms. Gradually the investigator creates a contentious street history of a blustery port-side city. Technical Specifications
|
|
|
Bystander is an immersive environment composed of photographs, sequences of short text, and musical patterns that all knit together to conjure haunting moods and stories for a large, darkened gallery space. The images, texts and sound files of Bystander are all governed by computer systems to form an environment that responds evermore intelligently, semantically and aesthetically to the behaviour of visitors interacting with the historical material over time. Feedback relationships develop between the visitors and the environment so that the 'eco-system' of Bystander offers emergent patterns of narrative and ever-altering rhythms of dynamic reaction. Employing eight channels of sound and four large projection screens configured as an investigative gallery, Bystander dramatises interactive and dynamic approaches to historical interpretation. It encourages visitors to ponder what life was like on the streets, in the taverns, bedrooms and ferry-stops of the boisterous, harbour-side town of Sydney in the years after World War II. It places visitors in an environment buffeted by a kind of 'spirit weather', where swirls, gusts and storms of emotion and interpretation all surge around the investigator in response to how attentive or distracted s/he might be in the presence of evidence from the past. Bystander is in development in partnership with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Technical Specifications
|
|
|
Darkness Loiters is an algorithmic story-engine. Designed for public exhibition in a gallery context, it can be played for any amount of time. The investigator chooses images from a dynamic interface connected to the Life After Wartime database. The investigator's choices construct intriguing narrative sequences of image, music and text. Darkness Loiters has been exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne and Johannesburg. Technical specifications
|
|
|
Biographies
His books include: THE DIMINISHING PARADISE (1984); SOUTH OF THE WEST (1992); THE BOND STORE TALES (1996); EXCHANGES (1996, editor); SEVEN VERSIONS OF AN AUSTRALIAN BADLAND (2002), and REMEMBRANCE + THE MOVING IMAGE (2003, editor) His films include: CAMERA NATURA (1985), DEAD TO THE WORLD (1991) and WILD (1993). He was senior consultant producer for the establishment phase of the Museum of Sydney, between 1993 and 1996. He was inaugural Creative Director of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, between 1999 and early 2002. He is now Research Professor of New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Technology, Sydney.
As a multimedia producer/designer she works in the cultural and museum sectors; recent projects include multimedia design for the Sydney Olympic Park Visitors Gateway; interpretative interactive and collections database for Susannah Place Museum; multimedia design for the Dismal Swamp site in NW Tasmania for architects Jacob, Allom and Wade, and multimedia heritage interpretation for the Wentworth Hotel in Sydney with architects Otto Cserhalmi and Partners. From 2001 to 2003 Kate was the in- house multimedia producer for the Historic Houses Trust of NSW.
Greg is a founding member of Sandy Evans' new jazz ensembleGEST8 and the new director of short courses at the Australian Institute of Music in Sydney.
His film, Project Vlad (2000), screened to acclaim internationally and was nominated in two AFI Award categories. In 2002 he was commissioned to direct a short film – China Girl – for Federation Square’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). He is currently undertaking an MA Hons at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
Chris has worked extensively as a composer for film scores including - with The Necks: The Boys and In The Mind Of The Architect (ABC). With Lloyd Swanton: A Case for The Coroner (ABC). And by himself: Bad Behaviour(ABC). and Lenny Cahil Shoots Through (SBS).
|
||
|
