This Hideous Replica

23 Aug — 16 Nov 2024
RMIT Gallery, 344 Swanston St. Melbourne

Lifting its title from a misheard line in a 1980 song by The Fall about a reclusive dog breeder whose ‘hideous replica’ haunts industrial Manchester, this experimental project—an admixture of artworks, performances, screenings, workshops, a ‘replica school’ and other uncanny encounters—adopts monstrous replication as a tactic, condition and curatorial framework for exploring algorithmic culture, simultaneously alienating, seductive and out-of-control.
Exhibition includes works by Amy May Stuart, Angie Waller, Anna Vasof, Debris Facility, Diego Ramirez, Emile Zile, Joshua Citarella, Liang Luscombe, Loren Adams, Masato Takasaka, Matthew Griffin & Heath Franco and Mo Chu.
Performances, talks and workshops by Catherine Ryan, Chloe Sobek, Jennifer Walshe, Joel Sherwood Spring, Machine Listening, McKenzie Wark, Roslyn Helper, Tomomi Adachi and more.

Curated by Joel Stern and Sean Dockray.
This Hideous Replica has been produced by RMIT Culture and supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) and the RMIT Design and Creative Practice Enabling Impact Platforms. This project is a part of the City of Melbourne’s Now or Never festival. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body and by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Image: Mochu, GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE, 2022, digital video (still), Image courtesy of the artist.

Philip Brophy — Screenic: Politicised Writings on Being Screened

Philip Brophy
Screenic: Politicised Writings on Being Screened
290 pages, softcover, 110 × 180 mm
Edition of 700
ISBN 978-1-7635372-1-7
http://www.discipline.net.au

Discipline is pleased to announce its latest title, Screenic: Politicised Writings on Being Screened—an anthology of Philip Brophy’s writing on art over the last twenty-five years. The focus of the selection is on art that involves screens: projected as film in museums, digitised for installations in galleries, curated as documents within exhibitions, presented as outdoor illuminations on buildings, utilised for the production of VR and AI-generated content, and even wall murals derived from televisual screens. The driver for the writing of these articles is an interest in media literacy within fine art contexts. Together, the articles reinforce the view that ongoing changes taking place in the mediascape over the last two decades create challenges for artists, producers, curators, viewers, and critics—sometimes resulting in a rejuvenation of how media art can be imagined and presented, other times evidencing an anaemic grasp of the contemporary mediascape that whorls outside the white cube.

Screenic has been designed by James Vinciguerra and Duncan Blachford, and printed in Narrm/Melbourne by Documents on Call. It features a preface by Helen Hughes, an introduction by Emile Zile, and has been edited by Olga Bennett.

RMIT ACMI AudienceLab

BAITHOUSE – Henry Lai-Pyne, Emile Zile, Audrey Pfister, Liam Wolfs, Babs Rapeport

https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/acmi-rmit-audience-lab/march-expo-2024/

BAITHOUSE is a 3D animated motion-capture livestream talk show. Using live motion capture, physical performance and animation, guests and hosts will be presented in a constructed digital world and in conversation with one another. As an expanded form of hybrid public programming, performance and critical discourse BAITHOUSE is a new digital and artistic platform that will host hyper-threaded conversations around networked technologies, contemporary aesthetics and new media. Accessible to view online and presented as a hybrid live event for local audiences BAITHOUSE invites guest artists, writers, academics, and designers from across Australia to engage in Q&As and discussion around swamp technology, digital life, and internet (sub-)cultures.

Session times: 11.30am, 1pm & 2.30pm
ACMI Fed Square 16/03/24

ACMI Gallery 5 commission ‘We Are As Gods’

ACMI Gallery 5 – We Are As Gods
We Are as Gods explores the informal, spontaneous commentary that accompanies cooperative videogame streaming. Through a series of portraits of gamers in the act of live streaming, we hear dialogue that is simultaneously directed at the players themselves, at a remote audience, at a rival player of the game and at anonymous third parties. Using longform recording, stream of consciousness rants and animation, We Are As Gods seeks to find the human in the network, the flesh in the data packet.

Work commissioned through Gallery 5 will enter the ACMI collection.

Many thanks to Senior Curator Fiona Trigg for her focus and patience and Jini Maxwell, Isabella Hone-Saunders at Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Visual FX don Henry Lai-Pyne for being the best in the game, Web maestro Simon Lofler for the clickable NPC streaming interactivity, Flood Slicer for the green screen studio and all Mountain Dew drinkers out there preparing to raid.

Showing now online at ACMI; https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/emile-zile-we-are-as-gods/

Western Digital screening, Charleroi Belgium

LI-MA Presents: digital trees and talking machines
Saturday, 24 June, 2023 QUAI10 in Charleroi, Belgium
Programme: 20:30
Entrance: €6

https://www.li-ma.nl/lima/news/li-ma-presents-digital-trees-and-talking-machines-0

LI-MA has had the honor to curate a digital art program taking place at arts center Quai10 in Charleroi during the festival Canaux, Pays-Bas x Pays-Noir.

Thanks to communication technologies working at the speed of light, we are everywhere, all the time. We are in constant contact with each other, but what does that mean, and what are the consequences? In this video screening programme, artists ask themselves and us how we are connected to each other and the surrounding landscape in technological times. Curator Sanneke Huisman selected six video works made between 1970 and now, which are each from the LI-MA collection. Together they show a broad palette of new relationships between people, landscape and technology through the lens of video art. A colorful procession of analogy tricks and digital techniques breaks through existing boundaries of the natural and the artificial. Find yourself surprised by early experiments with the video camera, get lost in a dilapidated digitized primeval forest and become familiar with the strangest AI creations. With works by Steina, Broersen & Lukács and Emile Zile, and more!

This event is made possible with the support of ‘Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgium’.

ACMI Podcast interview

Amber Gibson interviewed me about humour, performance, technology and gesture in her ongoing series that profiles artists working at ACMIX.

https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/inside-acmi-x-podcast/episode-10-making-dark-comedy-with-emile-zile/

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/making-dark-comedy-with-emile-zile/id1016322772?i=1000582208788

ACMIOnline · Making dark comedy with Emile Zile

Logical Conclusions/Automation Effects

20 JULY 2022. MISCELLANIA 2/401 SWANSTON ST MELBOURNE VIC.

Curated by Mark Andrejevic, Laura McLean, and Joel Stern, this free experimental program at Miscellania club features artists, musicians, writers and researchers thinking with and against the logic of digital automation, algorithmic culture, and AI in order to trouble and subvert systems that extract, aggregate, model, and predict.

With performances and presentations by Monica Lim, Sean Dockray, Mara MacDonald, Vaughan Wozniek O’Connor, Roslyn Orlando, Emile Zile, Zacharius Szumer, Jathan Sadowski, Tom Smith, Sahej Rahal, Shareeka Helaluddin, Karen Ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato.

Logical Conclusions/Automation Effects is part of the 2022 ADM+S Symposium ‘Automated Societies: What Do We Need To Know?’ showcasing the Centre’s distinctive cross- and multi-disciplinary approach to automated systems and exploring a range of critical current and emerging problems, challenges, and conceptual questions.

Logical Conclusions/Automation Effects is presented by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and Liquid Architecture.

Audience/Performer/Lens (after Dan Graham) performance at LIMA Amsterdam

https://www.li-ma.nl/lima/news/unfold-audienceperformermirror

On the 15th of January 2020 LIMA invites Keren Cytter, Jan Robert Leegte and Emile Zile to present their version of Dan Graham’s performance and video work Audience/Performer/Mirror. Reinterpretations by Adad Hannah, Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard, and Judith Hopf will be exhibited as well.The works together show the possibilities of reinterpretation and give an artistic anthology, and criticism, of the work of Graham. Gabriella Giannachi (researcher & professor of Performance and New Media at the University of Exeter), Annet Dekker (curator & researcher, assistant Professor of Media Studies University of Amsterdam) and Willem van Weelden (curator & researcher, tutor media theory Gerrit Rietveld Academie,) will reflect upon reinterpretation as both an artistic as preservation strategy. Moderated by art historian & dramaturgist Suzanne Sanders.

New light on iconic work
LIMA presents a new edition of UNFOLD, focusing on reinterpretation and Dan Graham’s iconic work Audience/Performer/Mirror, 1977, De Appel, Amsterdam. During this performance, Graham describes his own actions and the reaction of the audience. The work is questioning who or what motivates who to act and respond and is a reflection on time and direct feedback. All of this happens largely through language: Graham’s flow of words is unceasing, and betrays his background in stand-up comedy. The gaze of the camera, in addition to that of Graham and the mirror, plays an important role in this. The work is effective and layered in all its simplicity and has become an iconic work. The analogy that Graham uses in the work, both at the level of technology and that of language and physicality, has invited many artists to make a homage or a new version of the work. What does Audience / Performer / Mirror stand for today? How is the work experienced; which part of the work is still relevant, what needs to be ‘updated’? LIMA invites Jan Robert Leegte and Emile Zile to translate the work to contemporary time and its digital techniques. Keren Cytter is invited to present her subtle feminist critique on the work. UNFOLD: Audience/Performer/Mirror offers the opportunity to think about reinterpretation and provides insight into both their working methods and the lasting (attraction) power of Dan Graham’s work. This core may be somewhere else for every artist, and each new work will highlight a different aspect of the ‘original’.

About UNFOLD
Reinterpretation is a core concept in music, dance and theater. Every re-performance is a translation into a new, often contemporary, context. Re-performing a work based on documentation, a script, memory or score is an essential part of artistic practice. For complex works in the field of media art and digital art, this is not common, but just as urgent. Reinterpretation of media art can contribute to the preservation and better understanding of the work. Since 2016, LIMA has put reinterpretation on the map as an artistic and conservation strategy. In the interdisciplinary and international UNFOLD project contextualizing, documenting, analyzing, understanding, embodiment and transferring digital culture are central. Relevant questions are: What is the core and production method of a work? Which techniques are used in which context? How do we translate this artistic legacy, practice and knowledge to the next generation? How do reflect and learn from different interdisciplinary practises?

 

Programme
5 pm Doors open
5.30 – 6.15 pm Presentation Rietveld Students (*free entrance)
6.30 pm Opening exhibition (in collaboration with De Appel): Dan Graham’s iconic work and documentation material of Audience/Performer/Mirror, 1977 De Appel, Amsterdam. Reinterpretations by Adad Hannah, Performer Audience Remake, 2008; Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Audience Performer Fuck Off, 2009, Judith Hopf, What Do You Look Like / A Crypto Demonic Mystery, 2006. (*free entrance)
6.30 – 9 pm Performances Keren Cytter (Performer/Audience/Mirror, 2012), Miron Galić reenacting Cursor, 2016 in Jan Robert Leegte’s Mirror (2020) and Emile Zile (Performer/Audience/Lens, 2018) + artist talks followed by a panel discussion with: Gabriella Giannachi, Annet Dekker and Willem van Weelden moderated by Suzanne Sanders (*a ticket is required for this part of the program).

Event
UNFOLD: Audience/Performer/Mirror
With works and contributions by Dan Graham, Keren Cytter, Emile Zile, Jan Robert Leegte, Gabriella Giannachi, Annet Dekker, Willem van Weelden, Adad Hannah, Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Judith Hopf and students from the Rietveld Academy.
Wednesday 15 January, 2020
5 pm Doors open
5.30 – 6.15 pm Presentation Rietveld Students (free entrance)
6.30 pm Opening exhibition (free entrance)
6.30 – 9 pm Performances & artist talks Keren Cytter, Jan Robert Leegte and Emile Zile, followed by panel discussion (a ticket is required for this part of the program)
Entrance: € 7,50 / 5,- /Free with Cineville
LIMA/LAB111, Arie Biemondstraat 111, Amsterdam
Language: English
Facebook event

Exhibition
UNFOLD: Audience/Performer/Mirror (in collaboration with De Appel)
With works by Dan Graham, Adad Hannah, Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard and Judith Hopf.
15 – 22 January 2020
Every day from 12 – 23 pm, entrance is free
LIMA/LAB111, Arie Biemondstraat 111, Amsterdam

Graphic design by Bin Koh.

UNFOLD Audience/Performer/Mirror is supported by De Appel, Rietveld Academie and the Mondrian Fund and is part of the collaborative research project Documenting Digital Art, supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Emile Zile and Philip Brophy in conversation

Join Emile Zile and Philip Brophy for a conversational and unmoderated exchange as they select, screen and discuss each other’s video work. Both artists move horizontally between visual art, filmmaking and performance, working beyond the confines of strict categorisation. Their methods and tools are post-cinematic: scavenging and re-presenting the moving image material that surrounds them.

11 September 2017, 6.30pm
Free entry, bookings requested

Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square Melbourne

https://www.acmi.net.au/events/emile-zile-and-philip-brophy/

 

Another Space: VR Eyeballs and CGI Limbs

Diego Ramirez on Another Space groupshow Dumb Brunette blog 20 July 2017
http://www.dumb-brunette.com/another-space

Speaking of gestures, Emile Zile performed a live reading with a video component on the closing night of Another Space at Testing Grounds. This performance featured the artist standing up and reading from a laptop as he projected his image with enlarged eyes on the wall behind him. Like a Skype video conference, the audience could see Zile’s alien reflection in conversation with an overbearingly utopian background that resembled a Mac desktop stock image. His reading was ironically aligned with a post-4k rhetoric, seemingly welcoming us to a future that already seems dated. As Emile Zile’s performance unraveled, flashbacks of Zile’s past works came to mind: particularly the logo miming in Five Production Company Logos in 3d (2010), where he pantomimed a succession of hyperbolic logos, and his equally idiosyncratic performance OMG_sisyphus (2011-13) – in which he treated a heavy stone like his laptop in a ritual of futile dis-connectivity. The artist’s hands now seemed forced to stay still, carrying the weight of an actual laptop that kept him from gesticulating his words. Suddenly, Emile Zile’s proclamations made me aware of my sore back, strained computer vision and the IRL social anxiety that comes after my ‘sassy’ tweets. Indeed, the bodily effects of banal technologies, like the snapchat filter on Zile’s face, became manifest.