- Art & Design research seminars, DMU.
A very enjoyable talk with plenty of documantary video about Chris Meigh-Andrews' practice over the last 30 years, starting with some documentary footage of 'a performance with the machines' on two screens, but of course documented with one camera, Continuum, 1977.
A well-focused pan across the development of video art as reflected in his body of work:
- 1977-87 video work on single & dual screen, exploring the boundaries and materiality of the medium.
- 1989-95 video sculpture and installation - such as the 35 monitors comprising Fountain, and the 9 monitors with a wooden bridge over forming Streamline, shown in Osnabrick, Germany, 1992. Lots of other classic titles such as Heaven & Earth, Vortex, Perpetual Motion, and For John Cage (compressing and extending sound in time, installed in Estonia, 5 years after it's creation, in 2000). Also interesting seeing several works made in and around Bath - at a similar time that I was making video for screen projection and installation on the BA Fine Art (sound & image) at Bath Spa... I'm sure he must have worked with other tutors there, if not come and speak to us about this work... certainly an overlap with Harrison and Wood (pictured with Vortex, ex-grads of Bath spa and visiting lecturers at the time I was there).
- 1997-2009 Site specific installations and commissions including Mothlight 1999, 'bug in the system' moth interference with computer. I particularly liked Fenetre Digitale, Galeri Brighi, Paris 2000 - rear-projections onto a translucent glass door within the gallery. 'Making something with the digital that couldn't be made with the physical' as a blind raises and lowers revealing the artist's upside down and inside out world of hammers that shatter the unbroken glass, and other mirages.
Meigh-Andrews described his interest in the history of the medium which he sees as a continuum from photography-film-video and the history of fine art and history of ideas. Work made during his 5 year, part-time PhD includes Mind's Eye 1997, a several-part site-specific (and sight-specific) installation with animated brainscans of his brain resonding to visual stimulus of looking at particular colour and form, which the viewer can also look at - becoming aware of their own visual cortex response. Made in collaboration with Prof. Semir Zeki - mri scans/neurology/brain decoding visual stimuli.
More recent/current work involves cameras and web transmission, for example 2002 For William Henry Fox Talbot (True Pencil of Nature) broadcasting a solar-powered image of the window shown in the oldest - FT's (solar-developed) - photograph, projected at life-size in real time via the web onto a perspex 'window' (glass not allowed for h&s reasons!) in the V&A.
Other projects were the Ruskin wind-and-solar powered panorama broadcast from the top of a tree to view at the bottom of the tree in Grizedale Forest. And the subsequent invitation to create, install (and maintain) a 360* camera on top of the London Monument.
Links/references:
Book: A history of video art
Pub. Berg 2006 (reworked from PhD thesis over 5 years and soon to be revised and republished as The history of video art.)
Curatorials:
The digital aesthetic. (incl. Sean Cubitt) 2001, 2007, 2012.
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