EXHIBITIONS (selected)

Influencer Series (ongoing)

SUPERCUT: Project 2 // citizenry, Outerspace Artist Run Space, 2022

In these digital works, I explore the sub-culture of The Influencer. In the context of online, these are content creators who are Bloggers, YouTubers, or Podcasters. These individuals have the power to affect the judgements of large groups of people and who regularly work with corporate interests to develop ideological messaging dressed up as self-interest. The artists role in some way is closely linked to this idea of the Influencer. Artists are content creators like Influencers who …​

Group Exhibition: Machinae Anima

Curated by Alina Batichkova, Gallery 24×4, 25 Feb - 22 April 2021

Machinima is a way to shoot movies and video art inside a video game. The concept itself was invented by mathematician and video game enthusiast Anthony Bailey and originally looked like “machinema” (a combination of the words “machine” and “cinema”). Subsequently, another enthusiast Hugh Hancock decided to create a website for publishing works and communicating with a professional community of players, developers, and artists. However, Hancock made a mistake and accidentally replaced one letter in the name of the site, thanks to which we ...

New Statements

The Block, Queensland University of Technology, 2016 - 2019

New Statements is a new media exhibition that showcases an installation of interactive and screen-based Machinima works developed from 2016-19. This PhD practice–led research project explores the operations of a ‘techno-stice’ that demonstrates digital technology's capacity to generate dissensual space in the form of new subjectivities and ethico-political perspectives in contemporary art. …

XX1 Triennale International Exhibition, Milan, Italy.

21 Century. Design After Design: GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY, APRIL 4 – JULY 31, 2016

An official event of the XX1 Triennale International Exhibition. 21 Century. Design After Design, GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY is the largest exhibition of digital game-based videos ever staged in Italy. Transforming the spaces of IULM’s Contemporary Exhibition Hall into a series of installations that immerse visitors in a landscape of pixels and polygons, GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY brings together recent (2006-2016) works by more than thirty international artists using video games as raw material. Also known as machinima, these artworks explore themes related to simulation and representation, replay and re-enactment, architecture and urbanism, sex and race, politics and ideology through the lenses of the videogame…

ARGARMENIA

Game Play - Yerevan City, Armenia, 2013

ARGARMENIA was a series of real-time gaming environments designed both within real and virtual environments that challenge players' ability to problem solve, and develop their imaginations whilst learning how to manipulate narrative structures. Players learn to collaborate and construct an imaginative space that ultimately expands the participants' shared understanding of reality in how meaning is constructed out of history and the bodies that inhabit this temporal space of existence...

ARGARMENIA

Exhibition and Screening, Tumo - centre for creative technologies, Yerevan, Armenia, 2013

ARGARMENIA was a series of real-time gaming environments designed both within real and virtual environments that challenge players' ability to problem solve, and develop their imaginations whilst learning how to manipulate narrative structures. Players learn to collaborate and construct an imaginative space that ultimately expands the participants' shared understanding of reality in how meaning is constructed out of history and the bodies that inhabit this temporal space of existence...

YEREVAN BIENNALE 01

Armenian Center For Contemporary Experimental Art, 2013

The final installment of the four ARG’s in Armenia began as a closing event for the first Yerevan Biennale staged at the Armenian Center For Contemporary Experimental Art (NPAK). The ARG used the function of the International Art Biennale and the tour guided experience as a way to frame the final episode in the four part series which was first started by students at Tumo – center for creative technologies…

New Dawn

Part I, Boxcopy, Brisbane, Australia 2013

The first component to New Dawn is a multi–channel video work which conflates the online spectacle of real events with virtual gaming. How do we determine certainty or truth and remove doubt from the decisions we make about real–time and online experiential data; now that our lives are progressively more than ever entwined with virtual space. The purpose of this new moving image work is to question this new phenomenon and what are the political, social and economic repercussions for these new technological developments on our bodies and subjectivities. By doing this my work asks us to reflect on how we function as a society in response to these new spaces of interaction, how we might respond to the political dimensions of these expanded sites of inhabitation, and how they might also represent a more troubling scenario for the possibility of dissent or opposition in our media saturated culture...

New Dawn

Part II, Metro Arts, Brisbane, Australia 2013

The second component to New Dawn is an ongoing series of sculptural works that have been in development since 2010. This new body of work will examine the mysterious nature of our reality by combining 3D printing technology software with traditional studio based sculptural practices such as mould making and air brushing techniques. All of my past video work, machinima, performance and installation practice all attempt to activate an immersive space from which to critically and creatively consider how reality and simulated environments both construct and reconfigure our ideas about the nature of identity. Unlike previous moving image works, these static sculptural works aim to primarily bring the body from a technological and virtual three–dimensional space into the real gallery space of the viewer...

GAMERZ FESTIVAL #09

Arcade P.A.C.A., Aix en Provence, France, 2013

The word “glitch“ first appeared in spaceship programmes in the USA in 1962. A computer glitch is the failure of a system, usually containing a computing device, to complete its functions or to perform them properly. The word spread to electronic music in the 1990’s. Glitch goes with the notions of bug, repetiton , linearity or fragmentation to quote Iman Morandi’s ‘Aestehetics of glitch’ 2004. Made purposefully...

Weapons on the Wall

Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, 2004-05

The title of Chris Howlett’s ongoing series of exhibitions comes from the description of World War II propaganda posters as Weapons on the Wall 3. This phrase indicates the extent to which such wars are not just about fighting an enemy, but also about waging a war for people's hearts and minds. Support for a cause cannot be assumed, but must be won - through reason, inspiration, emotion and, if necessary, deception. Seen in this light, propaganda can be seen as advertising ...

Flashbacks

City Hall, Balmoral Room, Brisbane, Australia, 2009

When thinking about how to address the complex political, social and aesthetic implications of Chris Howlett's exhibitions, I had something of a flashback of my own and was drawn to revisit Andrew Feenberg's Critical Theory of Technology (1991). As I recalled, this was one of the first books I had read that specifically engaged capitalist, socialist, economic and cultural viewpoints in order to hypothesise on the role and functions of technology in our near future. In what turned out to be a key text on the subject, Feenberg provided ...

Flashbacks

Main Gallery, Metro Arts, Brisbane, Australia, 2009

In this installment of Flashbacks, Chris Howlett continues to examine the way in which meaning is derived from a multiplicity of places, spaces and texts. By making apparent how these complex discursive practices complicate what is meaningful and meaningless, he wants to make us aware of how these often-arbitrary judgments shape the particular ideological spaces we ...

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