A Curious Smile: Betty Bell, Martin and Me, China 1986

BACKGROUND 'My projects have included work on the archiving of memory and the impact of new technologies, specifically the effect that digital video and the web have on the gathering, editing and the telling of stories. The original footage was filmed by me in China in1986. This 9 minute movie was made specifically for The Garden of Fire and Water show at Avoca and 64:Beyond. 64:Beyond, a group show, was an exhibition exploring ideas of China by a number of Australian artists. CONTRIBUTION My work A Curious Smile, Betty Bell, Martin and Me is an investigation of the 'affective response' through the interaction with the camera. I went through the 1986 footage and edited together all of the sequences where someone smiled back at my lens as I was filming in order for the viewer to respond to that 'curious' smile. I am interested in transitioning, expressions of affect and sensation. 'Affect' for the purpose of this project is informed by contemporary affect theorists; Deleuze and Guattari, and the work of Brian Massumi.'I have been influenced by a number of contemporary artists who work with time, sequence, motion and the human body as a conceptual mode of practice and who have used the human body in order to closely observe reactions to events. Tanya Leighton's (2008) very informative collection of essays, in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader provided a contemporary framework for an understanding of the history of the moving image as an art form. SIGNIFICANCE This work investigates the current theoretical and conceptual notions of affect theory in relation to contemporary imaging practice.