Alex White

Born 1976, Boxhill, VIC
Bachelor of Electronic Arts (Hons)
Graduation show: 2004, 2005 (Hons)
Graduation ceremony: Complicated

Artwork in Space YZ  

Smile, 2005
Single channel video with sound
5:00 mins

Smile was made in 2005, while I was doing Honours at UWS. The work was conceived as a sort of 'cover' version of Film No.5, 1968 by Yoko Ono. In the original work, Ono filmed John Lennon slowly smiling over a 3 minute period with a high speed camera capturing 333 frames per second, resulting a 52 minute long film of Lennon's barely perceivable moving facial expression. Ono has referred to her interest in the distortion this process caused, revealing a grotesque banality beneath the natural and aesthetically pleasant action.

For my own work, I was assisted by Anastasia Freeman who was also a UWS student and fellow member of the collective Dysfunctional Feed, who was the model for a series of photos. Anastasia pressed her smiling face up against a pane of glass, over the 24 frames in the roll of film her smile became more distorted, awkwardly squashed against the glass.

These images, captured on colour slide film, were then cross processed and scanned in the highest resolution scanner I could access. The zoomed-in images were animated in trembling movements from side to side, composed to match a noisy recording of my own performance at Impermanent Audio earlier that year.

Like so many works coming out of UWS Electronic Arts and Fine Arts at that time, my own Smile was also contemplating the massive shifts in modes of production and technology we found ourselves amidst in the early 2000s from analogue to digital based tools. I do not think we were captivated by 'new media' works that seemed to do little more than demonstrate a possibility of a new technology. What we were experiencing was a democratisation of tools (laptop and PC based audio and video editing) and techniques (web-based forums, how-tos, etc). I think we wanted to know what these possibilities meant to us as artists, but simultaneously we were equally concerned with what were losing with the rapid obsolescence of older tools.

There was a reverence for tools new and old, the U-matic video editing suite, the chemical darkroom and the analogue synth, I think many of us were as alive to these fading processes and the unique possibilities they offered as we were to the dawning of seemingly infinite scope, offered by digital computer based media tools.

I think Smile was a way of expressing these interests in the old and new simultaneously. The fuzzy dotted warmth of the film images are revealed and explored through the high resolution scans and frame by frame digital animation.

At the time I started Electronic Arts at UWS I was living in Annandale and traveling out to the Kingswood campus. I'd just secured my first (and as it turns out only) vinyl release on a European techno label. I remember at my interview with Julian Knowles and Joyce Hinterding in late 2001 playing my music to them, Julian enthusiastically headbanging and Joyce somewhere between appreciative and perhaps a little bored. I have no idea how many aspiring techno producer interviews she had already sat through that day.

We then walked through Z block together, Julian enthusiastically encouraging me to stick with my application to UWS and to not worry about the other media studies option I was considering at UTS. Along the way we came across two students from the 2001 first year group, who awkwardly gave enthusiastic praise for the Electronic Arts program, a young Ivan Lisyak and Jon Hunter whose art, music and friendship among many others I would come to know through my time at UWS.

My experience of the interview provided a some accurate example of what I would experience in my time at UWS Electronic Arts. My own ideas and passions (and arrogance!) borne of my love for the more experimental varieties of techno and other electronic music genres, were rarely sneered at from a high art standpoint, but I was also pushed and encouraged to step beyond my own (limited cultural experiences) to produce and experience and discuss works that operated in a more deliberate, conceptual and abstract forms.