Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Chris Welsby, SFU Faculty and Award-winning Filmmaker

Wednesday March 26th, 2008 at 2:30 - 4.00 pm

SFU Surrey Campus, Room 5380 (5th Floor Galleria)

Beyond the Sublime: Towards a Re-definition of Landscape Art

Abstract:

Chris Welsby, SFU School of Contemporary Arts faculty, has worked across a number of media but his career has focused on one central theme: our place in the landscape. His work bridges the gap between art and science tradition. (As nature became romanticized in art, technology often became demonized rather than problematized.) Film theorist Peter Wollen argues that “Welsby’s work makes it possible to envisage a different kind of relationship between science and art, in which observation is separated from surveillance and technology from domination.” Instead of observing nature as a Romantic “other,” Welsby uses the mechanics of the moving image to interact with his environment. The resulting films, expanded cinema works, and installations explore notions of interconnectedness and agency within our ever-changing environment.

Chris Welsby will present a selection of interactive art works made between 1972 and 2008, some of which he produced in collaboration with other SFU faculty and students.

Bio:

Chris Welsby has been making films and film/video installations since 1969. A pioneer of moving images in the gallery, Welsby’s expanded cinema works and installations from the ‘70s and ‘80s are now gaining renewed attention by public and private galleries in Europe, North America and Asia. Since 1993, Welsby has been making digital media installations, collections of which were featured in his 2005 solo exhibition Liquid Light at the Plug In ICA, Canada, and his 2007 solo exhibition at the Letherby Gallery, UK. His recent new media collaborations with Brady Marks have been well-received in Toronto, at the 2006 Images Festival, and in South Korea at the 2006 Gwangju Biennial.

Welsby was a founding member of the London Filmmakers Co-op and co-founder of the new Media Department at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London. Currently, he is a professor of Film and Video at SFU and participates in the UBC Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems (ICICS), an interdisciplinary research institute fostering a human-centred paradigm shift in emerging information technologies. Though primarily a science-based research program, there are a number of interdisciplinary art and science research projects in progress.