video art

(originally published on the artist's website)

Angelica Mesiti’s ASSEMBLY is a three-channel video installed within an architectural setting inspired by the historical shape of the community circle and amphitheatre. ASSEMBLY establishes as an evolving set of translations from the written word to stenographic codes then music, and performance. Filmed in the Senate chambers of Italy and Australia, the three screens of ASSEMBLY travel through the corridors, meeting rooms and parliaments of government while performers, representing the multitude of ancestries that constitute cosmopolitan Australia, gather, disassemble and re-unite, demonstrating the strength and creativity of a plural community. 

Curator Juliana Engberg said, “ASSEMBLY uses and personifies the exilic energies of those who seek belonging in the community—the young, the female, Indigenous, the newly arrived and exiled, the refugee as well as the artist. Mesiti’s performers play along to an inherited code, but through translation, improvisation, adaptation, and re-interpretation demonstrate how a new music can emerge. The abstract relations and associations within ASSEMBLY open a space of imagined possibilities arising out of strange juxtapositions and unlikely re-locations.

“Cutting a rupture into the voided place of government to ignite a next succession of communication, ASSEMBLY seeks to create a new space for those who want to speak differently, hear attentively, and act together to form a new translation of the democratic process.”

Commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts on the occasion of the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia and Galerie Allen, Paris.

Curated for the Australian Pavilion by Juliana Engberg.

CREDITS

Artist Angelica Mesiti

Producer Bridget Ikin

Cinematographer Bonnie Elliott, ACS 

Composer Max Lyandvert

Michela Stenographic Advisor Paolo Michela-Zucco

Poet David Malouf

CANBERRA PRODUCTION

Sound Recordist Kimmo Vennonen

Camera Assistant Juntra Santitharangkun

Digital Imaging Technician Jamie Gray

Gaffer Russell Fewtrell

Grip David Litchfield 

Steadicam Operator Pete Barta 

Assistant Sound Recordist Aron Dyer

Costumes Alice Babidge

ROME PRODUCTION

Line Producer Massimiliano Navarra

Producer's Assistant Maichel Marchese

1st Camera Assistant Stefano Barabino

2nd Camera Assistant Mattia Gelain

Sound Recordist Riccardo Gaggioli

POST-PRODUCTION

Editor Angelica Mesiti

Music Mix Bob Scott

Sound Design and Mix Liam Egan

Colourist Billy Wychgel

Post-Production Supervisor Peter Lenaerts

MUSICIANS AND PERFORMERS

Michela Stenographer Michele Pigliapoco

Pianist Sonya Lifschitz

Viola James Wannan

Clarinet Aviva Endean

Sanṭūr Jamal Farokhsereshti

Dancer Deborah Brown 

Drummers, C'DARZ John Afram, Christopher, Dandan, Ricky Hadchiti, Albert Khouri, Rizik Khouri, Bakhos Samrani, Nadim Sleiman, Anthony Younes 

Vocalists The House that Dan Built: Elektra Blinder, Grace Campbell, Sofia Goulding, Brianna Harris, Kittu Hoyne, Kiri Jenssen, Emily Pincock, Harper Pollard, Jayden Selvakumaraswamy, Iris Simpson, Thu Tran, Sylvie Woodhouse

Vocalists’ Manager 
Danielle O’Keefe


Lancia Vendors of Rome

Exhibition Designer Simon de Dreuille

Produced by Felix Media, with the support of Screen Australia

Giardina Papa portrays workers who offer digital micro-services, fetish work or emotional support online, and gives them a voice. In Technologies of Care, we meet seven digital workers: an ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) artist, a virtual boyfriend, an online dating coach, a storyteller and video performer, a social media fan, a scientist working simultaneously as fingernail designer, and a customer service representative. Papa has found these freelancers in Brazil, Greece, the Philippines, Venezuela and the USA, where they offer their services anonymously via online platforms, which make a profit from them. With the exception of the virtual boyfriend, all in- terviews are interpreted by female-sounding voices. While the transcripts read like ethnographic research texts, the interviews in the video function like chamber plays on unfettered digital neoliberalism. (IA)

Technologies of Care​ documents new ways in which service and affective labor are being outsourced via internet platforms, exploring topics such as empathy, precarity, and immaterial labor.The video visualizes the invisible workforce of online caregivers. The workers interviewed in "Technologies of Care" ​include an ASMR artist, an online dating coach, a fetish video performer and fairytale author, a social media fan-for-hire, a nail wrap designer, and a customer service operator. Based in Brazil, Greece, the Philippines, Venezuela, and the United States, they work as anonymous freelancers, connected via third-party companies to customers around the globe. Through a variety of websites and apps, they provide clients with customized goods and experiences, erotic stimulation, companionship, and emotional support.The stories collected in ​Technologies of Care include those of non-human caregivers as well. One of its seven episodes, ​Worker 7 - Bot? Virtual Boyfriend/Girlfriend​, documents the artist's three-month-long “affair” with an interactive chatbot.

While in residence at the Internet Archive, I came across Polly Gone, a 1988 computer animation by Shelley Lake (who was then the technical director of Digital Productions, a prominent 3D animation studio). In the video, a female robot -- whose severe, mechanistic design was inspired by Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet -- zips around a futuristic dome house doing various domestic chores, all while a horror movie soundtrack with synthesized beats plays in the background. Fascinated with how dystopian and surreal the animation seems in retrospect, I attempted to address the horror of the digital sublime in a modern day version: Here, Polly returns in 2017 to find herself awash in a sea of listicle titles. My soundtrack is based on Shelley Lake's soundtrack, which in turn was inspired by the soundtrack from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

This video celebrates Silicon Valley and the founders of successful com- panies, platforms and blogs such as Microsoft (Bill Gates), Apple (Steve Jobs), Google (Larry Page & Sergey Brin), Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), Twitter (Nick Dorsey), Megaupload (Kim Dotcom), Skype (Niklas Zennström & Janus Friis), Buzzfeed (Jonah Peretti), Tumblr (David Karp & Marco Arment), Vimeo (Jakob Lodwick) and others. Advertising slogans such as ‘Hot Creations’ or ‘The Best Selection’, a post-Internet aesthetic and cheesy soundtracks (including ‘Boys of Paradise’ by Unicorn Kid) turn this video into an amusing and simultaneously caustic inventory, evidencing that the brave new world of media is dominated by male protagonists. According

to a study by the American Association of University Women, in 2013 merely 26% of professional computer scientists were women – 9% less than in 1990. Women are even less represented in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is arguably the most disruptive technology since the advent of the Internet. (IA)