Abstract

View from the Castle

Brogan Bunt

The plan: drive several hours from the suburbs to a remote wilderness location, walk for several hours to the top of a mountain and record media at designated locations along the way (making especially sure to record the iconic summit view). Repeat this process seven days in a row. Combine the media at each location to render an impossible composite journey. The broad aim is to explore a relation between the romantic imaginary of wilderness engagement and the dry logic of mechanical and computer-based repetition. I am interested in how this will affect both the experiential scene and the thinking of repetition.

The actual mountain is called ‘The Castle.’ It lies within the Budawangs National Park, a few hundred kilometers south of Sydney (New South Wales, Australia). I will be driving from Wollongong, a mid-sized industrial city at the southern commuter limits of the Sydney train lines. The broad thematic dialectic that I have described above is realized in terms of a more specific encounter between various aspects of the Australian landscape - suburban home, factory, highway, dirt road, walking track, cliff face and distant wilderness view.

The finished work will be an algorithmically structured ‘video’ piece showing across a number of monitors. In my view, the issues of spatial mediation that the project addresses make it relevant to the ISEA symposium theme of ‘locating media.’