“Video as Craft: How Engaging with Media Art Collections Can Re-constitute Experience and Restore the Experimental Spirit” presented by Law
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Digital Museum Practices (full papers)
Presentation Title:
- Video as Craft: How Engaging with Media Art Collections Can Re-constitute Experience and Restore the Experimental Spirit
Presentation Subtheme:
- Shifting temporalities
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
The turn of the new millennium was a time of generational changes in technologies, materials and artistic inquiries in experimental arts. The 2020s will see many not-for-profit media arts organisations marking their fourth and fifth-decade milestones. What stories will their collections tell, and what new stories will be composed from (re)visiting these works?
In this paper, I look back to the rapidly evolving decades of the 1990s using an autoethnographic method with a focus on Australia and Hong Kong. I present the case study of my video works through the lens of craft to highlight how the haptic and the social dimensions of making influence the stories we (re)tell. I locate the workshop and the cinema as sites where experiments invite open dialogues and exchanges about mate-rials, techniques, processes, tools, and experiences. I argue that attending to these dimensions in how we experience artworks of the past restores the experimental spirit within our stories.
I hope to show how an active embodied engagement with media artworks and collections has the capacity to re-constitute experience afforded by the creative act.
