Torrent

Background The representation of natural environment in art practice, is an enduring and topical theme both historically and in current contemporary practice. Moving image works such as Eva Koch's I am the River 2012 and Broersen & Lukács, Mastering Bambi, 2010, are international contemporary artworks exploring our changing relationship to the natural environment mediated through cinema and video. These works rely on the fidelity and mimesis only possible by technological advancements in projection as a spectacle of comparison in the absence of the real thing, the natural environment. Contribution Torrent is a collaborative audio-visual projection that is a continuation of a series of multi-screen animations dealing with water flow I have been producing since 2010. The intent of this work was to evoke the kinetics and movement of a natural phenomena (a whirlpool and waterfall) in a very reductive and stylised form of representation, suggesting other forms of mediated representations of nature such as TV animation, desktop screensavers as well as the many allegorical ideas pertaining of the flow of water, in particular the BitTorrent or Torrent file of illegal online downloading sites. This work is a collaboration with acclaimed Melbourne artist Philip Brophy who scored the composition for the work, made entirely of recorded harp sounds. Significance Torrent was selected as part of the International MONA FOMA festival Hobart, and was presented by Contemporary Art Tasmania, it has since been invited by the Centre for Contemporary Photography to be part of Melbourne Festival in Oct 2015 and has also received funding assistance from the City of Yarra.