Reinventing the Wheel is a stop motion animation in which a poem plays out on a gameboard such as seen on TV’s Wheel of Fortune. As the contestants guess at phrases (and prizes), the doll-like hostess who turns their guessed letters becomes a medium.
Dr Elena Knox is a performance, video and installation artist, and a scholar in the FTS (feminist technoscience studies) field. She is engaged in challenging the encoded performativity of gendered technologies, and their related epistemologies and aesthetic logics. She looks at cultures of kitsch, drag, queering and futurisms in intimate collocation with mainstream cultural product and performance, in order to question rationalist, culturally inherited assumptions about what is believed to be possible.
Knox’s PhD built a pioneering practice-based analysis of the aesthetic evolution of the service gynoid, winning the 2015 UNSW Art & Design Postgraduate Award for Research Excellence. Her BA Class 1 Honours project investigated the phenomenon of Pop Idol as it manifested in Baghdad in the low budget, locally produced Iraq Star.
Knox’s works are shown in theatres, cinemas and festival venues internationally, including Athens Video Art Festival and International Video poetry Festival, Cairo Video Festival, CologneOFF, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) Hong Kong, K11 Art Mall Hong Kong, Zebra Poetry Film Festival Berlin, Sydney Opera House, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Façade (Plovdiv), Sydney Underground Film Festival, St Kilda Film Festival, Sydney and Melbourne Writersʼ Festivals, The Box Visualcontainer (Milan), Women and Theatre Program (New York), Centre for Performance Research (UK), Australian Poetry Festival and Art Currents (USA). She has received project grants from four discipline boards of the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Embassy Berlin, and was awarded the Videotage/FUSE residency in Wuhan, China.
As an actor Knox has appeared for La Pocha Nostra (Mexico/USA), and in Jane Campionʼs Holy Smoke. She has written, performed and produced four innovative experimental electro-cabarets, including the Green Room Award nominated Bild-Lilli at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne. She performs in electronic pop duo Actual Russian Brides, and co-directs production house Lull Studios in Sydney and Berlin. She has published poetry in Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA, some of which was selected for the syllabus of the University of Oxford literature summer school.
After studying Advanced Film Production Techniques at North Sydney College of T.A.F.E. from 1989-1991, Campbell built his career in cinematography on movies, TV series, documentaries and commercials. Starting as a video-split operator and working his way up through the camera department from clapper loader to focus puller to camera operator and director of photography. Having studied editing as his elective subject whilst at college, Campbell now combines his knowledge of cinematography and editing to bring clients the best possible result. www.cncfilmfactory.com.au