Found found found

Found Found Found Found Found Found was an audiovisual essay produced as a response, in part to Jonas Mekas’s diaristic films (Lost Lost Lost) and as a way of bringing Media theorist Vilem Flusser’s thinking on the technical image into my own diaristic practice from the early 70s to the present, from analog to digital practice. The video has been screened at a number of European Film Festivals Signes de Nuit in Paris and Alternativa, in Belgrade, Serbia, LIFT in Toronto, Canada and the Portuguese Cinematheque in 2018, but most importantly published as part of NECSUS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) in 2014. Inside it a time-lapse sequence is included a historic program of Australian Innovative and Experimental Film by Nigel Buesst, Paul Fletcher, Lynsey Martin, Michael Lee, Marie Craven, Chris Knowles, Michael Buckley, Sue McCauley, Neil Taylor, Virginia Hilyard, Steven McIntyre and Marcia Jane plus a found footage film I created WAP (White Australia Policy), using images from Rabbit Proof Fence, We of the Never Never. The essay further references the work of George Kuchar and Mike Hoolboom and the soundtrack contains a paranoid rant from Alex Jones’ Info-wars radio program. The film suggests surveillance, metamorphosed from avant-garde and minimalist cinema, as the ‘new norm’, and witnesses the new stasis that hypermobility institutes globally and the florid thinking it elicits. Where does such practice fit in these contemporary discussions on the audio-visual essay, for a practicing artist who belatedly moved into the academy but attempts to present his arguments visually.