Portraits of People Living With AIDS: An interactive documentary by US multi-media artist Hazen Reed
Exhibition: 14 - 17 October 1993 Panorama Centre for Contemporary
Art, Melbourne. Seminar: 13 October 1993, Australian Film Television &
Radio School, Melbourne.
This work was a part of the Filmmaker & Multimedia
conference held by the Australian Film Commission and the Australian Film
Television & Radio School (AFTRS) in October 1993. MIMA and AFTRS (Vic)
combined resources to bring Hazen Reed and his work to Melbourne.
New York multimedia artist Hazen Reed visited Australia in October 1993
for the Filmmaker and Multimedia conference in Sydney. MIMA
and AFTRS (Vic) brought Hazen Reed to Melbourne to display his interactive
multimedia documentary Portraits of People Living with AIDS, and
to address a seminar on multimedia and its applications in animation, editing
and filmmaking. Hazen has a background in photography and installation.
He explained that his work was a response to the plight of AIDS sufferers
in his community. He was able to edit down sixty or so hours of raw video
material profiling two women and two men who are HIV positive and their
response to subjects including family, art, life and death. The profiles
of each person are stored and viewed on screen. The presentation allows
the viewer to interact with the documentary and navigate through the program
exercising a series of options via the mouse/screen interface. The screen
shown over is part of the portrait of Richard, a painter. A video camera
and microphone enabled viewers to record a personal video message by selecting
the RECORD option. If desired, the message was recorded to become a part
of the documetary. The work has travelled to Germany, Japan, US and Australia.
At the seminar at AFTRS, Hazen Reed spoke about his work and revealed the
software applied: Macromind Director, Hypercard, Quicktime, Photoshop and
others. This software allows rapid non-linear editing, animation and presentation
of text, sound and video. This ensemble of compositional options allows
a filmmaker to manipulate audio and visual material digitally.
With Disney in production with the world's first fully digital movie and
the whole multimedia revolution in full swing, it is not hard to see this
as an imaging processing device of immense significance from now on.
© Brecon Walsh. MESH #2 Summer 1993. MESH film/video/media/art is published
by Experimenta Media Arts
