GARY DEIRMENDJIAN / MICROVIDS

Gary Deirmendjian is currently exhibiting MICROVIDS at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery. MICROVIDS is an entire single channel video exhibition kit in a box, for viewing on smart devices with internet access, such as mobile phones or tablets.

dLux MediaArts have produced a unique touring exhibition consisting of a catalogue and a set of clear acrylic slides, each inscribed with the details and QR code of one of Gary’s 64 MICROVIDS that exist on YouTube.

It is a flexible exhibition, where galleries are able to curate their own vision and where viewers are free to engage with the works in their own time with their own smart device, or those supplied by the exhibition.

MICROVIDS makes gallery walls permeable and creates opportunities for dialogue about what constitutes an exhibition and artworks. This exhibition can be the source of an ongoing and varied program with no time limitations.

Hervey Bay Regional Gallery have in a novel way created a relaxed lounge environment to host the exhibition, where the kit and smart tablets with internet access are centrally placed on a coffee table. Visitors may select a slide take a tablet or use their own device to scan the QR code and watch the respective MICROVID.

"as an artist it is for me essential to find means to connect directly with a broader public one-to-one free of any obligation mediation or justification. this preferably in more public and openly shared space. i have come to appreciate youtube as one such place." - Gary Deirmendjian

Gary Deirmendjian’s MICROVIDS are fragmented snapshots of the contemporary urban environment and our existence within it. Captured typically on a mobile phone (by the hundreds) and over time a few being edited towards resolved works, these short videos utilise lo‐fi technology to document small moments in daily life. Completely reliant on serendipity and the caprices of the city, the works are unplanned and spontaneous urban portraits that capture the exquisite pain and beauty underpinning the human condition.

MICROVIDS will be on display at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery until 8 September, 2013. 

GARY DEIRMENDJIAN / MICROVIDS QR TRAIL

Gary Deirmendjian_microvids QR trail_Along Darling Street Rozelle NSW

A trail of pasted up QR codes have been surreptitiously integrated into the urban streetscape along Darling Street, Rozelle NSW.

This site-specific work challenges the idea of the traditional exhibition situated within the white cube of the gallery. When scanned, each QR code links back to a video work on Youtube by multi-disciplinary artist Gary Deirmendjian. Referred to by the artist as ‘microvids’ these video works exist outside of the traditional fixed physical space of the gallery and can be accessed at any time from any place...

This trail of QR codes is part of the Art Month Sydney Rozelle Precinct Night. On Thursday 21 March, numerous exhibitions, performances & events have been organised throughout Darling Street, Rozelle to bring greater awareness of contemporary art in Rozelle to the local and broader arts community.

To see the PDF catalogue of the Opening Night program, click here.

MICROVIDS ON THE CONTEMPO ART BUS...

Photographs courtesy of Pedro de Almeida

For the uninitiated, Art Bus is a monthly bus tour run by Contempo at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Through back alleys, main streets, studios and pubs it is a three hour introduction to the artist run spaces laying the foundations of Sydney's artistic output. 

In our February instalment we met with Sydney artist Gary Deirmendjian who, for several years, has been channelling his small scale video works online, sublimely capturing ephemeral moments, depositing them on YouTube and referring to them as his MICROVIDS. Accompanying Gary was curator Pedro de Almeida, who earlier this year was invited to select a series of Gary’s videos and respond to them however he saw fit. The result of this was MICROVIDS – an exhibition pamphlet which acts as an intermediary between an online archive and a physical gallery space.

On the day MICROVIDS was to pop up in Prince Alfred Park to feature on Art Bus I woke to bucketing rain and brollies and armed myself with the task of finding a sufficiently rain-proof alternative venue. Serendipitously, the search gave me my first optic of the insides of the Irish (Gaelic) Club where I was launched into a Celtic dance class jam packed with bounding prepubescents in jazz shoes, but was briskly denied afternoon access to their hall. In the end it was the trusty, iconic Shakespeare Hotel at 200 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills that housed the afternoon's introduction to MICROVIDS. I do enjoy the fact that so much trust is placed in artists, bus drivers and tour guides that no one questioned why we were heading to a Victorian pub to meet Gary and Pedro, rather than a gallery to see some art. Dressed in dark wet weather gear, propped up against the wall of the establishment while waiting for our arrival, one voice on the bus piped up upon our approach saying the pair looked particularly curatorial and with tongue firmly in cheek I am inclined to agree. As someone who had arrived at the afternoon having had contact with MICROVIDS, I was eager to see how others would react, especially as they would be coming into contact with the exhibition in a group setting.

The catalogue is divided into eight textual segments which link to an online video via an accompanying QR code. I wondered how the group viewing exercise would impact on the way the content was absorbed as, despite its tendency to provoke conversation, I do associate the catalogue and the streaming of the videos as being something intensely quiet. Scanning one code rather than another to determine the order of viewing is something I would prefer to chance upon, not to have influenced by a companion pointing me one way or the other. 

Despite my scepticism of the clouding effects of group consciousness the format of the day worked a treat. We clambered up to the top level of the Shakespeare which is always an event, but even more so when you are escorting 20 wide-eyed punters to an air-tight room and asking them to ignore the humidity and listen to artistic banter for a moment or two. Packing ourselves around a table, Gary and Pedro gave enough of an introduction to provide context to the work, but not so much as to lead us to conclusions. When I first saw MICROVIDS a few months back, the coupling of Gary's videos and Pedro's poetic text immediately struck me as capturing the elating, often elusive, feeling of first contact. For me the work is an entry point into that first moment of recognition of a new idea, a new thought, a new emotion. You don't need to read Pedro's text to know it is poetry. The format, the font, the absence of capitals makes you view the composition with inspired eyes and syncopates the flow of your reading. The writing seems nostalgic for a time that hasn't passed. In communion with this sense of preserving the now, Gary's videos launch you into a series of captured moments which draw you to intimately consider what immediately preceded and what is to come. Confusions with QR codes and pesky technological questions aside, the Art Bus-ers seemed thrilled to explore the idea of an unconventional exhibition space alongside the idea of joint artistic endeavours. Our other gallery stops for the day had also addressed collaboration and the two elements of MICROVIDS standing strongly alone and coming together to create something poignant and whole seemed to strongly resonate with each person. Surreptitiously the audience was collaborating as well with each person creating their own version of the artwork via the choose-your-own-adventure nature of viewing and responding to each of the eight segments. For many of these people I think it was the first time they had been asked to participate in the act of bringing something to life. Streaming the work is, by default, fulfilling the work and the text/image interplay in MICROVIDS is particularly pertinent to questions of anticipation and expectation, both of the work and of the viewer.It is a liberating thing to have so much control over your consumption and consideration. The beauty of both Art Bus and MICROVIDS being that by their very nature they promote the artwork as a dialogue, not a static response; an ideas exchange, not a dogma.

Whatever happened in that stuffy room, when the arty mob left the pub and went on their merry way home, I think we can be assured that many were mentally recording the physical passage between their day out and their home comforts. They may not have been editing their journey for snippets worthy of mass observation, but if we all helped people evaluate their world as much as they passively observe it then three cheers for MICROVIDS on Art Bus, I say. 

Amy Prcevich

For more information on the Contempo art bus visit: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/calendar/contempo-art-bus/

ARTIST INTERVIEW / GARY DEIRMENDJIAN TALKS ABOUT MICROVIDS...

Gary Deirmendjian's current exhibition MICROVIDS, curated by Pedro de Almeida, challenges audiences to reconsider their understanding as to what constitutes an 'exhibition'.

Presented as a lone black plinth, positioned within the entry to Artereal Gallery and existing outside of the main gallery, the exhibition consists of a simple A5 catalogue placed on the aforementioned plinth. The catalogue itself contains a selection of eight QR codes* and an accompanying curatorial text. When scanned, each of these QR codes links back to a certain video on youtube.

Referred to by the artist as 'microvids' these video works exist outside of the traditional fixed physical space of the gallery and can be accessed at any time from any place...

This catalogue, available as a PDF on the gallery's website, and widely disseminated over the internet and via email, has the potential to become viral - allowing the 'exhibition' to continue to grow in reach and to live on past the set dates of the exhibition within the gallery proper.

In this way, the exhibition MICROVIDS questions existing definitions of 'the exhibition' suggesting instead that an exhibition can exist simultaneously, in many different forms, spread over time and space.

Below is an interview with Gary Deirmendjian in which he discusses the ideas behind this latest exhibition and body of work… 

Can you tell us about this aspect of your artistic practice? When did you first being making these 'microvids' and how are they made?

I have over several years now been quietly developing an online depository on YouTube of what I call my MICROVIDS. The depository is manumente.

The MICROVIDS are very brief and discrete suggestive ends edited from a growing pool of raw footage, the capture of which are enticed only by the incidentals of real life encounter and experience, without premeditation or orchestration.

By virtue of this the mobile phone in the pocket has often presented itself as a handy footage (as well as still image and audio) capture device.

Here, if the raw footage may be seen as raw media, the MICROVIDS may then be appreciated as being small resolved works made by editing … in fact they’re typically found through the editing. 

As a contemporary artist what is the intent behind these works?

Once made the MICROVIDS are released into the ocean of YouTube, where they drift freely to over time find their own audience, free of any obligation mediation or justification. They exist in the ether of the net as bits - for as long as the net or YouTube may be, unable to be trapped owned or sold in the physical world.

With MICROVIDS their primary intent has always been for direct internet experiencing where the viewer, whether ushered to them or discover incidentally, choose their own available device (desktop, smartphone, tablet or other), place and time of experience. Further each viewing may be regarded as a direct experience of the original artwork, as opposed to experiencing its reproduction communicated via another media – this is akin to the direct experience of a painting vs. a photograph of that painting.

To exhibit them within a gallery context trapped on USB or DVD via screen projection or monitor devices, would entirely defeat their purpose.

Where did the idea for exhibiting these 'MICROVIDS' via the use of QR codes come from? And what is it about presenting the works in this manner which appeals to you?

In the form of QR codes the current MICROVIDS exhibition at Artereal, has I believe, found a unique way of featuring them in a gallery space without compromising their purpose.

Pedro de Almeida, an arts writer and curator, was invited to curate the exhibition. He viewed the MICROVIDS at manumente to select a few as one would select works from an artist’s studio for a considered exhibition, and to provide its curatorial direction and accompanying text.

Here Pedro has excelled with a much appreciated development in which he responded individually to each of his selected MICROVIDS in a poetic, rather than a descriptive sense.

In the real world the exhibition space is a single sheet of A4 paper, printed on both sides and folded in the middle to form an A5 pamphlet. The QR codes serve as ever-ready springboards to the internet where the selection can be immediately summoned for play from and on the viewers own device.

Gary Deirmendjian is an artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, photography,video, installation and site-specific works. He has exhibited widely and has received numerous new work invitations and commissions for private and public artworks and site-specific projects. He trained as an aeronautical engineer becoming significantly active in defence research and development and then industrial design before commencing full-time artistic practice and undertaking a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the National Art School Sydney.

Pedro de Almeida, guest curator, b.1980 Porto Portugal. Graduated Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney Bachelor of Visual Arts Honours. Former Program Coordinator Campbelltown Arts Centre. Current Program Manager 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Independent Curator and Writer. Contributor to various publications including Art & Australia, Art Monthly Australia, and exhibition catalogues.

*QR codes, abbreviated from quick response codes, is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode first designed in Japan by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994 to track vehicles during the manufacturing process. Consisting of information that is encoded in a pattern of black modules arranged in a square on a white background users with a smartphone equipped with a reader application can scan the image of the QR code to display text contact information connect to a wireless network or open a web page in a browser. Source: wikipedia.org/wiki/qr_code.

This exhibition exists outside of the traditional gallery space via PDF version of this document which includes individual titles hyperlinked to the respective MICROVIDS. To view the PDF catalogue for this exhibition please click here.