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It is the perfect moment to re-consider the work of Peter Callas. His practice is predicated on key elements that were to figure in a rosy future for the world—international mobility, vastly different cultural perspectives, and the latest technological means. But that future now seems to be in peril with tighter policies on immigration, increased border protection, a general reluctance at coming and going. So what happened to the borderless world, the information society, the multicultural melting pot?
Callas’s work might provide some clues, since it interrelates different strands of some of the grand themes of the late twentieth century: the globalisation of media, technological development, nationalism, and international cultural relations. Over decades Callas has incorporated material from around the world in a giddying mix of the latest imaging technologies, and constructed a personal view of the world measured by the cuts, the mix, the changes, in short, by the edits he makes of found materials.
Picture Callas, then, standing in the middle of the ‘image stream’ wherever he finds himself: first of all, and years ago, in the news edit suite at the ABC where he worked in the 1970s; after that in the jungles of New Guinea and the Shan States of Burma with a camera or a Sendheiser tape recorder; later in the 1980s amidst flows of Japanese advertisements making in-house videos for the giant screen at the Marui Department store in Shibuya; and then wherever else, in the street in São Paulo, visiting the on-line archives of the Library of Congress, riding around Tokyo with his CVI on the back of his pushbike, a Cairo hotel room, Delhi airport.
Indeed, throughout the 1980s and 1990s Callas’s... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline