Panel Statement

Panel: Crisis Narrative of Landscape: Future Inherent

In­com­pat­i­ble El­e­ments is an on­go­ing pro­ject that evolved dur­ing an artist res­i­dency at Per­for­mance Space, Car­riage­works, Syd­ney in 2009. The media art in­stal­la­tion ex­plores ways of rep­re­sent­ing the re­la­tion­ship be­tween na­ture and cul­ture, em­bed­ding po­etic texts into an­i­mated satel­lite im­ages of global land­scapes at par­tic­u­lar risk from cli­mate change. Starrs & Cmielewski en­gage in a kind of dig­i­tal geo­chem­istry, ter­raform­ing new wa­ter­ways and bar­ren patches of sand that tell sto­ries in wind­ing, cur­sive script. – ex­cerpt from the cat­a­logue essay for In­com­pat­i­ble El­e­ments :  Bec Dean, Per­for­mance Space, Syd­ney, 2010.

• Leon Cmielewski & Josephine Starrs are Aus­tralian artists whose video and new media works have been shown ex­ten­sively in Aus­tralia and in­ter­na­tion­ally. They have cre­ated nu­mer­ous pro­jects in­clud­ing Seeker an in­stal­la­tion that ex­plores is­sues of mi­gra­tion, ter­ri­to­r­ial bound­aries, con­flict com­modi­ties and human dis­place­ment. Seeker won an Award of Dis­tinc­tion in In­ter­ac­tive Art from the 2007 Prix Ars Elec­tron­ica, Aus­tria. Cmielewski and Starrs have been in­vited to par­tic­i­pate in sev­eral in­ter­na­tional res­i­dency pro­grams in­clud­ing Banff, Canada 1998, Sarai, New Delhi, India, 2006 and Fu­ture Lab, Linz, Aus­tria, 2009. Cmielewski lec­tures at the School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts, Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Syd­ney, Starrs is a Se­nior Lec­turer and Chair of Film & Dig­i­tal Art at Syd­ney Col­lege of the Arts, Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney. starrscmielewski.com

Full text (PDF) p. 462-464