Video as Craft: How Engaging with Media Art Collections Can Re-constitute Experience and Restore the Experimental Spirit.

The turn of the new millennium was a time of generational changes in technologies, materials and inquiries in experimental arts. The 2020s will see many not-for-profit media arts organisations marking their fourth and fifth-decade milestones. What stories will their collections tell, and what new stories will be composed when (re)visiting these works?

In this paper, I look back to the rapidly evolving decades of the 1990s using an autoethnographic method with a focus on Australia and Hong Kong. I present the case study of my video works through the lens of craft to highlight how the haptic and the social dimensions of making influence the stories we (re)tell. I locate the workshop and the cinema as sites where experiments invite open dialogues and exchanges about materials, techniques, processes, tools, and experiences. I argue that attending to these dimensions in how we experience artworks of the past restores the experimental spirit within our stories.

I hope to show how an active embodied engagement with media artworks and collections has the capacity to re-constitute experience afforded by the creative act.