~ Poet: Ian Gibbins ~
Thesaurus of Reconstructive Microscopy by Ian Gibbins
Ian Gibbins‘ work has been featured here so often I’m apt to say he needs no introduction, but this video in fact serves as an introduction to an earlier chapter of his life, when he was better known as a scientist than a video artist, poet and electronic composer. I grew up in a natural history-obsessed family, so scientific instruments were major objects of lust in my prepubescent years, just as my poetic muscles were beginning to develop, and this takes me back to that fertile imaginary landscape. It’s super high-concept, though, so I’m gonna do the lazy thing and drop in the whole description from Vimeo:
“The Microscope Project” was a major installation / exhibition at the Flinders University Art Museum & City Gallery, 26th July – 21st September, 2014, in Adelaide, South Australia, featuring work by Ian Gibbins, Catherine Truman, Deb Jones, Angela Valamanesh and Nicholas Folland, curated by Fiona Salmon and Madeline Reece.
For much of his time at Flinders University, Ian managed the main microscopy research facility, contained divers kinds of sophisticated microscopes. In 2012, several old scanning electron microscopes, some fluorescence microscopes, and other ancillary equipment were decommissioned. Once state-of-the-art, they were now largely dysfunctional and no longer practically operational. However, they had long histories of contributing to internationally-recognised research into the nervous and cardiovascular systems, the gut, and much more.
… and then there was all their supporting documentation: schematic diagrams and plans, manuals, advertising brochures, catalogues, certifications of performance, packing lists.
Although much of the equipment had been disassembled down to their component parts, it was all to valuable to be dumped for scrap. There were many more stories to be told about these instruments. Perhaps we could re-imagine their pasts, their futures, the people who had made them, maintained them, used them…
So, over more than 12 months, the artists collaborated with these elements in the unique shared environment of The Distillery to create “The Microscope Project”. As part of the project, Ian wrote a series of texts that became the basis of the book, “How Things Work”, a unique collaboration between him, Catherine and Deb. Accompanying the book is a CD of “Microscope Music” composed using samples from the microscopes themselves and the various documents accompanying them.
In celebration of 10 years since The Microscope Project, this video is built around a set of images from the “How Things Work” book, their accompanied text, and a remix of some Microscope Music that did not make it onto the CD.
Listen to the full “Microscope Music” album at iangibbins.bandcamp.com/album/microscope-music
For more see: iangibbins.com.au/projects/the-microscope-project/
Demolished by Ian Gibbins
None of the images in the video are as they seem in real life. Instead, we imagine what could be if “progress” proceeds at its current rate. What will remain? How will the survivors operate? Where will the ghosts of our history end up?
Australian videopoet Ian Gibbins needs no introduction here, and his background as a scientist makes his films about the climate and extinction crises especially compelling. In a recent blog post introducing Demolished, he asked,
Is it possible to have a one-word poem?
Very short forms of poetry have a long history. Perhaps the best known are haiku, which in their classic English form consist of only three lines with a total of 17 syllables. But then there are 6-word poems, a popular form of extremely compressed writing. Visual poetry and concrete poetry is often based around a single word, perhaps with its multiple variations.
For me, one of the primary attractions of video art is that I can create visual worlds that do not exist in real life. The roles of juxtaposition, movement, and the tension between familiarity and strangeness in the visual domain act like metaphor and allusion in written poetry. When audio is added, we gain an additional dimension within which ambiguity, shifting mood and rhythmic energy can inhabit.
My video DEMOLISHED was created for a group exhibition curated by Tony Kearney at The Packing Shed, Hart’s Mill, Port Adelaide, South Australia, as part of the 2024 Adelaide Fringe Festival. None of the scenes in the video exist in real life. Every one of them has been composited and, in some cases animated, from multiple images recorded in the immediate area around Hart’s Mill, including some from inside the Packing Shed itself. The soundtrack was created from a single spoken sample of the word “demolished”.
For me, the video incorporates the feeling of a poem in some way. I originally had intended to include much more text, but as the video came together with the soundtrack, it became clear that the visual imagery told the story, following the rhythms of the soundtrack. If you know the area, the scenes look strangely familiar but impossible to pin down, perhaps like images from a dream or a poorly-recalled memory. Hopefully, they act as metaphors for the loss of human and natural history extending back generations, as old work sheds, warehouses, docks and wetlands are demolished in the name of so-called development of the Port Adelaide district.
So is it possible to have a one word poem? Maybe… But I’d like to think it is certainly possible to have a one-word poetry video… DEMOLISHED.
Sensurious by Ian Gibbins
The videopoetry of Australian artist and thinker Ian Gibbins is strikingly unique. This version of his 2015 piece Sensurious was just this week uploaded in higher definition and with English and Spanish subtitles. He has previously written about his work with video, poetry and translation for Moving Poems Magazine.
The text in the video first came into being as a response to the art of Judy Morris, written specifically for an exhibition of her Sensurious series. From Ian’s artist statement about this at Rochford Street Review:
Judy and I have collaborated on many projects over the years. Sensurious – drawings to stimulate the sense was her third solo exhibition. It was held at Pike Wines gallery in Clare Valley, South Australia (2014) and at Magpie Springs winery gallery neat McLaren Vale, South Australia, in 2015. I wrote short pieces of text for each of the drawings and they became the basis for poem. The video features the formal Latin names of the plants, the meanings of which inform the text of the poem.
A number of other videos by Ian Gibbins have been featured at Moving Poems here.
The Long Slow Effect of Gravity by Ian Gibbins
A 2020 poetry film by the Australian multimedia poet, musician and scientist Ian Gibbins, with
Footage taken around Adelaide CBD, Belair, Blackwood, Sturt River, Mount Compass and Middleton, all in South Australia, and Athens, Greece.
The soundtrack is in polyrhythmic 6/4 time and contains audio samples of bird calls, rain and various falling objects recorded in Belair, South Australia.
3D models of shark, roses and dog skeleton obtained and used under license from sketchfab.com. They were animated within Motion 5.
[ The Ferrovores ] by Ian Gibbins
Ian Gibbins‘ work is generally the first I mention when making the case for videopoetry as a genre in which “difficult” poems can become highly entertaining, even gripping. In Ian’s case, this has a lot to do with composing a groovy soundtrack. But his filming, text animation, and editing are all top-notch too. My only complaint here is that I wanted more ostrich emu.
Anyway, this one’s pretty high-concept, so I’d better reproduce the description on Vimeo:
“this time, this place… beyond open circulation closed reciprocity… closed hydration spheres wrought cast smithed… this is what we are what we eat … ”
Iron is the most common metal on earth. Indeed, it forms much of the molten core of the planet which in turn generates the earth’s magnetic poles. The red soils of the world are due to iron. At a biochemical level, iron is essential for human life, amongst other things, making our blood red. In the societal domain, iron is essential for manufacturing, electricity generation, and much more. Certain bacteria can derive energy for life directly from dissolved iron compounds (“rust”) rather than from oxygen as we do. Perhaps, at some time in the future, we, our descendants, the Ferrovores, may need to do the same.
Filmed mostly in the Southern Flinders Ranges, South Australia, in the midst of a multi-year drought.
A remix (2020) of the original version published in the Atticus Review (July, 2020).
Here’s that older version at Atticus Review. And Ian shared the complete text in a blog post.
these days by Ian Gibbins
I had the pleasure of watching this film by Australian videopoet and musician Ian Gibbins at the Big Poetry Weekend in Swindon, UK last fall. Prophecy never sounded so groovy.
Over the years I’ve seen a lot of videopoems with footage shot from cars, but this is the first time I’ve seen the driver credited (Judy Morris). A nice touch. And I like what Gibbins does visually to suggest the way our vision and possibly our very relationship to the landscape is warped by our love affair with the automobile. Of course it has to have a driving rhythm, as well.
Isolation Procedures by Ian Gibbins
Australian videopoet Ian Gibbins has always been good at breaking down ordinary language into its elemental phonemes and graphemes. Here, it works especially well to point up the grotesque inadequacy of official communication during a time of crisis. Here’s the description on Vimeo:
“WE ARE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE… MAINTAIN YOUR SOCIAL ISOLATION…”
After the pandemic has passed, the lockdowns persist: this is the new normal…
Recorded during the 2020 coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic mostly on location at Sleep’s Hill, Blackwood and Belair, South Australia, under partial lockdown conditions. The audio samples are made from birds, frogs and voices in the immediate neighbourhood. The text samples advice from various government, business and community organisations.
Floodtide by Ian Gibbins
Fellow Australian film-maker and poet Ian Gibbins asks in Floodtide how a city copes, and what does it look like, after years of drought, rising sea levels, relentless storms.
The video was shot around Adelaide, the Fleurieu Peninsula, Inner Suburban Melbourne, the Western Highway, and Far North Queensland. An only-slightly futuristic vision of a flooded urban landscape was achieved through the use of video compositing.
After The Incoming, The Overflow, our future lay within the tides, no turning back, no neap, no ebb, an undertow of uncertainty and doubt… Taunting us, an illusion of normality… We have run out of options, we are battling for breath…
It received the Honorable Mention at the Experimental Forum Film and Video Art Festival (Los Angeles, July, 2019).
Hexapod by Ian Gibbins
This two-year-old videopoem by the Australian polymath Ian Gibbins is more relevant than ever, with this past week’s dire new report on the worldwide collapse of insect populations, which found that “More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered… The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.”
Compared with that forecast, Gibbins sounds down-right optimistic. Here’s how he describes the film on Vimeo:
“nearly extinct … we burrow… far from toxic miasmata … we will wait … once more fill the skies…”
Brooding, breeding underground, the insects wait until the time is right to escape the confines of gravity and environmental degradation.
Hexapod was short-listed and screened at 5th Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition, Cork, Ireland, 2017, as part of the IndieCork Film Festival.
It was screened at the 6th International Video Poetry Festival, Athens, January, 2018 and published on-line at Atticus Review in February, 2019.
Do visit the Atticus Review for additional process notes.
Blue Moon by Ian Gibbins
A recent video by Australian poet Ian Gibbins, made by panning along a single, huge, composite image, as he describes in some very helpful process notes:
The underlying sequence of buildings panning along to a beachscape is actually a single still image that I built in Photoshop. It is constructed from about 100 images of buildings around the Adelaide CBD, North Haven, and Brighton. They were photographed on days with bright sunshine and clear blue skies so that the lighting was comparable across the shots. Even so, I needed to adjust colour, brightness, saturation, scale, perspective and so on to get the visual mix right. The blue skies also allowed for easier compositing later on. In the final mix, the background sky was processed to be the same in all assemblies and was derived from the average sky colour in the images. The final Photoshop file is huge: 62,000 x 1800 pixels and about 500 MB. It was assembled from 5 smaller montages, each of which was from a specific location, and each of which contained dozens of layers.
I then took the final composite image into Final Cut Pro X and animated the pan from one end to the other. To save memory, I rendered it, and used the resulting video clip in the final composite. The sky with moving clouds is composited from three sets of vids I took all on the same day, but in slightly different parts of the sky so that the cloud movements were not quite the same. They are sped up and looped to varying degrees. The various flying objects are from a commercial image library that I animated. The final moonrise sequence is taken from the recent lunar eclipse we had (click here to see that). It is composited via an animated mask and a couple of other image processing tweaks. The whole lot was composited using colour keys, background colour gradients, key framed text and opacity animations.
The soundtrack is tin can, a performance I did as part of a Paroxysm Press tribute to David Bowie. The text is inspired by Bowie’s Space Oddity, Arthur C Clarke & Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and NASA’s Pioneer 10 / 11 space probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, with all due reference to Homer’s Odyssey. The music is derived from the chord pattern of Space Oddity. You might find a few other references as well…
Ian’s text also demonstrates, I think, why poets can benefit from greater scientific literacy. When was the last time you read or heard a poem about the moon that didn’t still act as if ours were the only moon in the sky?
Heist by Ian Gibbins
A new version of a videopoem by Ian Gibbins, transferring the majority of the text, which had been entirely on-screen on an earlier version, into a voice-over. I find this approach much more effective, though the earlier version is undoubtedly more accessible to the deaf (and possibly also to the dyslexic). Here’s the Vimeo description:
… the rippling enfoldment, across the ebb, failure below deck, only By-the-Wind-Sailors … text originally published in Cordite 45: Silence (2014)… images and sounds recorded from the seas and islands around the Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia.
Be sure to follow Ian’s blog to keep up with all his video- and music-making. He claims to be retired, but the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.
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