Holy Cow

War of terror. Funniest home videos. Snapshot portraiture

Original audio by Carl Anderson.

‘In Holy Cow [2006] Zile examines the way the experience of “media events” is constructed from a bricolage of visual cues from television, the web, newspapers, magazines and the cinema. In Holy Cow Zile took online footage of September 11 to isolate the words “holy cow” uttered by a horrified witness as the World Trade Tower was struck by the second passenger jet. This footage is juxtaposed with strobing footage of someone being hit by a model aircraft in a suburban backyard. The video concludes with a long sequence of the artist asking passersby in a subway tunnel to stand and have their photo taken with him in front of poster asking the public to be on the lookout for suspicious characters. Zile’s comic video particularises the experience of terrorism as a media event while contextualising the effects of a real world incident in an immediate and physical manner.’ – Andrew Frost, Scanlines: Video Art in Australia since the 1960s.

Selected work

Upcoming

Writing sabbatical.

New films, new words.