Contemporary Australia: Women

134 The Time that Remains (stills) 2012 2-channel digital video, 16:9, black and white, sound, 11:00 mins theory. While often featuring a melancholic dreamlike familiarity, this integration of practice and research is reflected in the distinct aesthetic style of each work in ‘The Dark Matter Cycle’ — the smooth science fiction slickness of The Phoenix Portal , the pops and scratches inherent in 8mm film integrated in After the Rainbow and the distortion caused by digital compression in TheTime that Remains . This deliberate degradation of the audiovisual material, a technique known as datamoshing, invokes an unsettling view of an imagined future through the lens of visual and aural decay, offering another metaphor for death. As the artists state: This interpolation of past and future is enabled by the capacity of recorded media to inscribe traces of the past. In this way the phrase ‘the time that remains’ not only refers to the time that is left (of life, or the time leftover after the main event) but also the sense of time that is inscribed on film — the time that remains behind, preserving a trace of the body beyond death. Film actors provide the perfect site for these questions because they age across time in front of the camera and therefore have their chronology embalmed and preserved within the cinematic archive. As Jean Cocteau has said, cinema ‘films death at work’. 4 Amanda Slack-Smith apparitions of their past and present, and confronted by their fears of aging and death. The depth of their relationship divide is further amplified by the individual nature of their respective narrative loops — as Crawford sleeps, Davis becomes caught in an unsettling story that sees her wandering aimlessly through abandoned houses with dreamlike uncertainty, filled with inexpressible fears and unsatisfied longing, a cycle that continues until Crawford wakes and they reverse roles. Captured in black and white, the footage is presented with the stylistic characteristics of a gothic thriller or film noir and features persistent reminders of time passing, through metaphors such as photos, mirrors and ticking clocks. These themes of aging, death, cinematic sampling and speculative narratives, seen in ‘The Dark Matter Cycle’, are also reflected in a parallel project: The Carousel 2012. Presented as part Embodied Acts — a performative strand of the ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ exhibition — the work is a multi-channel performance lecture that combines spoken narration with projections of film fragments, producing what the artists describe as a ‘multi-channel film essay where we are present to trigger and narrate the samples’. 5 Developed during studio residencies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and the Freemantle Art Centre, Freemantle, The Carousel draws on the tradition of performance lecture practice in 1960s performance art and reflects the artists’ research-driven interest in activating the space between art and critical