Curator: Alessio Cavallaro
From its formal establishment in the Victorian government's 'Film A~t' of 2001 , the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) was destined to struggle. I am not referring to its recent and much-publicised financial and governance problems, but rather to its ability to effectively and viably sustain its mission statement, namely, its dedication to 'the moving image in all its forms'. The moving image is a reliable concept when it comes to film and video and as a continuation of the activities of Cinemedia and Film Victoria, ACMI's vision made sense in this respect. It was always going to be much more problematic, though, when it came to reconciling the historical traditions of moving image arts with the emerging practices of computer-based interactive arts. In other words, computer-based media arts certainly move, but not quite in the same way as film or video. How, then, is media art being accommodated in such an organisation?
With its inaugural offerings in 2003 (Deep Space and Remembrance) ACMI played it safe, privileging film and video and situating installation and interactive media on the periphery. This pretty much tallied with its vision statement, which situates the organisation in relation to 'the wonders of more than a century of the moving image' as well opening a 'door to the art of the future'. For those of us interested in ACMI's advocacy of the art of the future now, the overwhelming prevalence of cinema in these exhibitions suggested that this door was still closed.
Transfigure, however, promised to open it and exhibit the variety of moving image arts at a time of cultural change. Even this exhibition, though, could not escape ACMI's prescriptive desire to