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Old Tom, new Tom

conference contribution
posted on 2005-01-01, 00:00 authored by Dirk De Bruyn
This presentation will Involve a discussion of Canadian fringe artist Mike Hoolboom's experimental narrative Tom (2002 75 minutes, Digital Video) The presentation will Include a short excerpt and stills from the film Tom is a biography of experimental filmmaker Tom Chomont who tells of his struggle with HIV and Parkinson's disease and disarmingly recounts confronting memories of infanticide, incest, fetishism and death It is how these revelations are innovatively processed through excerpts of Chomont's films, home movies, photos, Images lifted straight form Video Busters, archival and found footage that is so telling it is as If the surface of cinema itself is the body that is being marked and reconstituted and "the personal" forever changed by the Infection of this material Into our psyche.

This work is offered as exemplary evidence of the strong link between an experimental non-narrative cinema that flourishes In North America and new media art

The presentation will touch on the following areas:

> The Innovative marking out of the self In terms relevant to a new media practice.
> The correspondence between this film and media theorist Arthur Kroker's Ideas about panic bodies and excremental culture.
> An examination of erasure and loss In non-narrative forms.
> The historical context of Hoolboom's work as part of a North American experimental tradition and as a shared non-narrative tradition With New Media.

The presentation Will conclude With some comments about the relationship between experimental film and new media In this country and how the failure to Identify this relationship constructively here may have contributed to the current "death of the new" The concept of new media and New Australian Will be contrasted to attain some Insight Into the Ideological underpinnings of "Creative Nation".

History

Event

Vital signs (2005 : Melbourne, Victoria)

Pagination

1 - 5

Publisher

RMIT University

Location

Melbourne, Victoria

Place of publication

Melbourne, Vic.

Start date

2005-09-07

End date

2005-09-09

Language

eng

Publication classification

E1 Full written paper - refereed; E Conference publication

Copyright notice

Reproduced with the specific permission of the copyright owner.

Editor/Contributor(s)

P Anastasiou, K Trist, R Smithies

Title of proceedings

Online proceedings of the vital signs: creative practice and new media now Conference

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