Rainbow Video

Through lively interviews and site studies of many legendary, now defunct video shops, Rainbow Video uncovers a secret history of a brief but impactful era. Artists and programmers such as Philip Brophy, Ian Haig, Cassandra Tytler, Xanthe Dobbie, Jean Lizza, Diego Ramirez, Emile Zile and Spiro Economopoulos delve into their own libraries, and back catalogues, to talk about how they used video shops: as a direct source of material, as an informal art school, and as a social space to trade in cultural capital. Against a backdrop of 30 years of constantly shifting technology, Rainbow Video explores a twin history of indie video shops and libraries in Melbourne, and the underground artists that used them, showing that video shops weren’t just a plot point on the historical chart of film distribution, but a crucial period of creative transition, whose impacts live on.

Schedule

Friday
Doors from 6:30pm
Rainbow Video screening at 7pm with an artist talk afterwards
Booking required (see the button below)

Saturday
Open 12pm – 4pm
Rainbow Video screening on loop + additional footage, photos and sound
Video Rainbows screening on loop
Video Art Video Shop library open

Sunday
Open 12pm – 4pm
Rainbow Video screening on loop + additional footage, photos and sound
Video Rainbows screening on loop
Video Art Video Shop library open
Video Shop Algorithm from 1pm – 3pm

Program

Video Art Video Shop

Video Art Video Shop is a pop-up library that collects the unseen video art and experimental film projects of artists and amateurs collecting dust on shelves and in personal archives. As the head librarian, I lovingly ingest these items into my temporary library, symbolically re-instating them into the art historical archive, before offering them to the public for redistribution. Visitors to the library can browse the collection and even sign up and take home a video. 

WE WANT YOUR VIDEO ART: Submissions for Video Art Video Library are taken at all times, in all formats – contact Jessie at jesspicable@gmail.com for more information, and check out the website: https://www.jessiescott.tv/portfolio/video-art-video-shop/.

Video Shop Algorithm

Imagine if there was an algorithm that WASN’T dumb…What if there was an algorithm that didn’t deliver what it thought you’d like, but what you didn’t even know you wanted? In short, an algorithm that harnessed the chaotic discovery of a Video Shop, where chance encounters in the stacks could birth discovery and new ideas? Sadly, there is no such algorithm, but now, there is a game…

Video Shop Algorithm revives the “cognitive congeniality” of the video library, where objects and people in space combine to create fresh connections and new knowledge about film and video – ever the currencies of contemporary culture. Working together as a team, you are rewarded for the number and complexity of connections you can draw between an ever-expanding mind map of film titles. Without access to your smartphone, you must draw deep on your own memory, and build on your teammates’ to tease out a spectrum of unexpected connections. 

Recommended 4-8 players, 45-60 minutes playing time. Facilitated drop in sessions between 1pm-3pm, bring a group to have your own game, or come with a friend or solo and join a table. 

Video Rainbows

Video Rainbows explores the cultural phenomenon of now-defunct physical video shops and considers their influence on the artists who frequented them. The exhibition features a curated program of video works influence by video store and film culture, presenting a selection of artists from WA and the Victorian artists featured in Scott’s documentary.

Video Rainbows is curated by Moving Image Lab Perth  (MILP) — Cassandra Tytler and Andrea Rassell

Participating artists:
Philip Brophy
Eric Coates
Arie Glorie
Ian Haig
Anna Nazzari
Xanthe Dobbe
Diego Ramirez
Cassandra Tytler
Dominic Redfern
Andrea Rassell
Corey Khan
Emile Zile
Ellen Broadhurst
Tom Rogers

Artists Bios:

Jessie Scott is an independent video artist, writer, programmer, teacher and parent working in Narrm (Melbourne). She makes distributable art across multiple media. She was a founding member of audiovisual art collective Tape Projects, and co-directed and founded the inaugural Channels Video Art Festival in 2013, and continues an ongoing research project with Nina Ross and Lizzy Sampson about parenting in the arts. She currently teaches video art and digital media in the School of Design at RMIT and recently completed a PhD in art about the relationship between video lending libraries and creative communities in Melbourne. 

Cassandra Tytler is an artist working in single-channel video, performance, video installation, and site-specific practice. Her interests lie in the performance of video and its encounter within place, to create a relational and aware politics of resistance to normalising narratives of exclusion. Her is an ongoing examination of the mechanics of video performance, both onscreen and by the hand of the video artist. She completed her practice-led PhD within the Faculty of Art (Theatre Performance) at Monash University in 2021. Tytler has exhibited in galleries such as The Torrance Art Museum, L.A.; F.A.C.T. Liverpool; Gallery Titanik, Turku, Finland; Harold Golen Gallery, Miami; The Counihan Gallery; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; Metro Arts, Brisbane. Her films have screened in numerous festivals internationally. She is currently a Forrest Creative & Performance Fellow, based in Boorloo (Perth), situated with the Centre for People, Place, and Planet and working across the School of Education and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University.

Andrea Rassell is a moving image artist and interdisciplinary researcher in science art. Working in nanoart — artforms that engage with nanoscience and nanotechnology — she creates experimental films and moving image installations that explore technological mediation and the multisensory perception of the sub-molecular realm. For the project Wildly Oscillating Molecules, she turned nanoscientific instrumentation into cinematographic tools, ultimately creating immersive sonic and tactile experiences of the nanoscale environment. Her work has been shown at the New York Imagine Science Festival, Oaxaca FilmFest in Mexico, the New Zealand International Film Festival, White Night in Australia and Sónar+D in Spain, and has been recognised by awards and grants from the Australian Government, the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), the Council of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Australia), St Kilda Film Festival, and Oaxaca FilmFest. Andrea was the 2019 recipient of the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s Synapse residency, where she developed moving image works that explore the social and cultural implications of diagnostic systems in collaboration with the Ian Potter NanoBioSensing Facility. In 2020 Andrea was an artist-in-residence with Taller 30 (San Miguel de Allende), and Laboratorio Arte AC, Tecnológico de Monterrey, and a member of the ANAT Ideate programme (Australia). She has been a Research Fellow at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia and is currently a Creative and Performance Leadership Fellow at the Curtin HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch