BROGAN BUNT
Brogan Bunt, installation photograph showing digital image from interactive multi-media project Theatre, 2006. Photo: Shelley Webster 2017. From the exhibition Travellers from Australia, exhibited at the Pailia Ilektriki, Ktima Pafos, Cyprus, 2-15 October, as part of the official program of the Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture.
Artist Statement
Working to reveal layers of spatial and narrative imagery was part of my artistic exploration in digital media. I participated in the project Sonic Architectures: Mapping the ancient theatre in image and sound (Diana Wood Conroy, Brogan Bunt, Diane Epoff, Stephen Ingham) at the University of Wollongong in 2006, which asked how an understanding of the ancient theatre might give contemporary artists new imaginative insights in working at the cutting edge of electronic technologies. By discovering the parameters of visual and sonic (acoustic) mapping of the ancient theatre in the University of Wollongong team at the Paphos theatre we tried to construct a cross-disciplinary alliance across the senses of sight, sound and touch. I devised a multimedia work to provide virtual navigable access to two Paphos archaeological sites, Panagia Chrysopolitissa and the ancient theatre.
I must now actually use the past tense. The work did provide access to these sites, but in the decade since the project was created the underlying technologies, Quicktime VR and Flash have become deprecated. The project is now only available on a legacy Windows installation. It is ironic that while the ancient Paphos sites have maintained their identity for millennia, the technology that was designed to record them has become almost instantly anachronistic. Digital virtual heritage is far more fragile and ephemeral than the places it sets out to document and preserve.
If this simple work obtains a belated aesthetic dimension, it is precisely because it no longer properly works, because it draws digital ephemerality into curious relation with the loss and disappearance affecting the ancient world. More than any explicit effort to capture aspects of ancient space, this is what aligns the work with a reflection on antiquity.
I no longer produce these kinds of spatial tours. I am still very much concerned with space and navigation, but now more directly through lived actions such as walking. My recent work has involved walking through the Illawarra escarpment and along local creeks. Here my interest is less in tracing contours of natural loss than in recognizing - despite the obvious impact of roads, railway lines, heavy industry and suburbs – the powerful hybridity and resilience of natural systems. The works called A Line Made By Walking and Assembling Bits and Pieces of the Bodywork of Illegally Dumped Cars Found at the Edge of Roads and Tracks in the Illawarra Escarpment were part of The Situated Line group show (Michele Eliot, Jo Law, Boni Cairncross, Ruth Hadlow, Brogan Bunt), Articulate Gallery 22 April – 12 May 2013 with sculpture, photography, drawing, blog-posts/booklet. The project is included in Curating Cities, a database of eco public art (2014 ongoing), National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts.
It occurs to me that antiquity can also be viewed in these terms. While I am in Cyprus in 2017, I hope to develop a work on Petra tou Romiou that engages with the continuing presence and relevance of Aphrodite’s birthplace.
Brogan Bunt, May 2017.
Biography
Associate Professor Bunt (BCommMedia (Canberra), MA (Macquarie), PhD (Wollongong) is Associate Dean (Education) within the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. With a background in media and new media production, as well as computational art Brogan’s work involves aspects of software authoring, writing, photography and lived action. He has produced the spatial-exploratory documentary Halfeti—Only Fish Shall Visit (2001), software projects such as Ice Time (2005), Um (2009) and Loom (2011) and the writing and installation work, A Line Made By Walking and Assembling Bits and Pieces of the Bodywork of Illegally Dumped Cars Found at the Edge of Roads and Tracks in the Illawarra Escarpment(2013).