Daniel Crooks, Alex Davies, Adam Donovan, Shaun Gladwell, Stephen Honegger & Anthony Hunt, Jonathan Jones, The Kingpins, Mari Velonaki and Cicada (Kirsten Bradley & Nick Ritar)
Guest curator: Julianne Pierce
Negotiating and representing experiences of the city through the lens of new media was the broad theme of this year’s ‘Primavera’, a showcase of work by artists under the age of 35, curated by Julianne Pierce. New media is a slippery term at the best of times, and with its prefix ‘new’—always in a state of becoming—any attempt to define it remains mutable. In an exhibition context, this kind of theme generally sets up expectations of dazzling hi-tech and immersive special effects, alongside tedious interactives with ‘point and click’ interfaces. Thankfully, Pierce’s curatorial decisions made sure the show suffered very little from an uninspiring interpretation of the term: most of the artists extended various critiques of their medium through rigorous formal and conceptual explorations, with video at the fore.
The majority of works were shown in separate rooms as discrete installations, exploiting the slippage between new media installation and cinematic spectatorship. Moving from work to work was like a Surrealist exercise in movie going, stepping from one darkened room to the next, and relying on brief ‘chance encounters’ to weave an overall narrative stream.1
Alex Davies’ installation Filter Feeder (2002) used the live arbitrary movements of domestic goldfish swimming in a bowl to trigger environmental changes in the sounds and imagery of his installation. Neon green and acidic orange light, bruised with a changing palette of muted blues and pinks, generically approximated the look of streaming data in his visual display. The random sound of electronic clicks and murmurs, however, generated the environment’s depth and operated as a more engaging field for imaginative projection. The work’s muffled acoustics, pooled from live radio transmissions, were interrupted by intermittent clicks of