Jondi Keane
2010s Creative Works
Species Of Spacers

(2019) Jondi Keane.
“Species of Spacers” in Venetian Blind project.
58th Venice Biennale Palazzo Bembo, Venice. 8 May–24 November 2019. Curated by David Cross and Cameron Bishop, Public Art Commission.

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Venetian Blind Provocation
As the title suggests Venetian Blind carries with it a level of surprise. From this ethos of entering a context without the protection of forewarned knowledge, the curators are pleased to offer the following.

Provocation:
On the 60th anniversary of the Australian art historian Bernard Smith’s famous text, The Antipodean Manifesto, which spoke to the particularity of a distinctly southern hemisphere culture, 2019 offers us the opportunity to explore a range of issues pertinent to the antipodes, but through a very particular seat in Europe. Smith’s text was prophetic in that his nationalistic vision continues today in assorted digital echo chambers and of course on the floor of the Australian parliament. We offer this context in part to establish a critical dialogue between a site-based public art project developed through Australian filters and a city with an extraordinary history of commerce, migration, culture and politics on the other side of the world. Venice is of course many things to many people. A city of intrigue, of carnival and of romance but also a brutal colonising power and key centre of the slave trade over hundreds of years. Venice, like all cities is a conflicted and complex place with so many of its fissures papered over with a sanitised gloss. What might it mean for Australian artists in 2019 to profoundly grapple with its myriad contexts, its diffuse geography and its provisional status as a city at war with rising water levels? What do you (we) have to offer this city?

Click here to view the "Spacers Notebook" (PDF download)

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Pre-valence: Modelling the Conditions for Life

(2019) Jondi Keane.
Model Citizen Exhibition, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne. Feb-Mar 2019.

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Photo by Mark Ashkanasy.
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Photo by Mark Ashkanasy.
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Photo by Mark Ashkanasy.
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Photo by Mark Ashkanasy.
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Photo by Mark Ashkanasy.
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Photo by Mark Ashkanasy.

For further information see: https://www.rmit.edu.au/events/all-events/exhibitions/2019/february/the-model-citizen

All That Is Solid Melts Into Movement

(2018) Jondi Keane, Kaya Barry & Rea Dennis.
Counihan Gallery, Melbourne. Feb - Mar 2018.

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Almost 200 years ago, the stability of society and culture were seen to be dissolving under our feet. Marx’s famous phrase, “All that is solid melts into air” poetically described a world transforming into an uncontrollable collection of wills and desires.

Almost 200 years ago, the stability of society and culture were seen to be dissolving under our feet. Marx’s famous phrase, “All that is solid melts into air” poetically described a world transforming into an uncontrollable collection of wills and desires.

Our contention is that the dissolution of society—that has led to the Anthropocene, the new geological era—is less a “melting” than a movement from vertical hierarchies of power to horizontal distributions of access. Today, there is no stable connection of ideas to structures. The experience is one of constant movement and uncertainty of the strength of the social fabric.

This exhibition examines how, despite constant movement, common ground can be found. Through the way ideas affect our lived experience, we will focus on the destabilized pillars of meaning and the measure and shifting value. All That Is Solid Melts Into Movement uses the basic conditions of horizontal and vertical / stasis and movement to explore how the unexpected movement of solid, immoveable things affects the way we orient ourselves and make judgements about our shared world.

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A large movable wall, residing in the centre of the gallery, is moved backwards and forwards by the artists. A series of concrete footpath segments, on wheels, can be manoeuvred around the gallery floor. A cyclist zips in and out of the moving walls and floor pieces, adding another level of mobility to the gallery space. Whether walking on, pushing with, wheeling around, or staying still and observing - All That Is Solid Melts Into Movement offers an array of mobile, kinaesthetic, and sensory points of entry and immersion.

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Movable Measures

(2017) Jondi Keane & Kaya Barry.
SEVENTH Gallery, Melbourne. 1 - 16 Jun 2017.



Movable Measures is a participatory artwork that confronts gallery-goers with installed objects and situations that unsettle, unbalance, and amplify their movements in the space. A variety of measuring devices, such as laser levels, foldable rulers, video projections, and a hinged floor that tilts and shifts slightly with each step, offer experiences that momentarily disorient how people walk through the gallery. The installation and video projections aim to activate visitors’ senses to become aware of how one uses them to measure, attune, and adapt their movements to respond to the installation. Movable Measures requires that we mobilise our attention to ‘measures’ across a variety of scales, locations, and motions.





A hinged wooden floor creates an uneven surface that gallery visitors can walk across. With each footstep, the wooden structure shifts and lurches, sending a set of vibrations up through aluminium poles and setting laser levels askew. The laser levels shift and bounce around the four gallery walls, responding and inflecting the pedestrian movements on the gallery floor.






As the gallery visitors walk along the uneven, hinged flooring, the laser levels sway and sync in and out of level with the projected video.

A giant, twelve-meter long foldable ruler is positioned in the gallery for people to interact with. This playful object can be used to measure and reflect the various levels and movements in the space, or it can be adjusted and positioned along the wall to align with the laser levels.

Measuring the Anthropocene

(2017) Kaya Barry & Jondi Keane.
Red Gallery, Melbourne. 27 Apr - 14 May 2017.


The term “Anthropocene” describes the current geological era that has formed due to the scale and impact of human activity on the Earth. Using a mix of installation, hands-on tasks, and interactive projections, Kaya Barry and Jondi Keane’s Measuring the Anthropocene exhibition explores how people perceive and calculate their movements on the Earth using scientific, geographic and creative measures. The exhibition offers audiences playful activities – and community workshops in the nearby Edinburgh Gardens – to measure how their everyday movements are tied to larger global systems and environmental changes.


THEREFROMHERE - Remote Viewing Platforms
Imagine you are fly-fishing. Calculate the distance and measure the force you will need to cast your line. Instead of reeling in a fish substitute, as the goal of your endeavor, project yourself as far and as accurately as your mind will throw you.
Unpack the collapsed space between there and here and populate this distance with a texture that can be felt and experienced.

Walk along the tight rope you have cast across the curve of the Earth to arrive at the summit of Sagamartha, the Challenger Deep trench, the top of Eureka Tower, or the tree tops in Edinburgh Gardens. Once there, take in the view, turn around and prepare the lure that will help you cast your line for the return trip.





"Drifing Coordinates"
(flagging tape, chalk, installed at two points in the gallery of 1.8m NNE apart)
Due to the fact that the continent of Australia moves on average 7 cm each year, on January 1st 2017, the official records of Australia’s latitude and longitude points were shifted almost 1.8m further north-north-east to re-align with global positioning systems (GPS).
Don’t drift off! The pre- and post-updated coordinates of where you are right now—inside Red Gallery—is secured by the bright orange flagging tape.



"Walking Panoramas"
(3 channel video projection)
Multi-channel video projection captures fleeting views and paces of walking movements in Yeronga Park, an urban park in Brisbane. Panoramic images track footsteps, while time-lapse video blurs the pedestrian activity. Movements collide or momentarily align in the video and photographic imagery.

"SYM_SYNC"
(video projection)
Set of videos documenting people walking in Tokyo, Melbourne and New York Streets. At certain moments, their pace and steps align, moving in and out of synchronization. The looped videos emphasize the point that not only do we attune to and come in and out of phase with each other but we lock into phase attunement with communities of humans, plants, animals, locations, seasons and the planet itself.

For further information, see Red Gallery's site: http://redgallery.com.au/27-april-14-may-kaya-barry-jondi-keane-measuring-the-anthropocene/

Technics & Touch

(2015-2016) Jondi Keane & Charles Anderson in residence.
The Hub, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne. 11 Dec 2015 - 30 Jan 2016.


Photograph by Tobias Titz

Photograph by Tobias Titz

This exhibition project tested the limits of human and robot proficiencies through a series of experimental scenarios. The project explored methods of producing feedback systems through perception and action cycles.


Photograph by Tobias Titz

Photograph by Tobias Titz

The exhibition consisted of two parallel events: a laboratory space where the artists were 'in-residence', producing drawings in conjunction with the robot; and a procedural drawing exhibition in an adjoining space, where the outcomes of this human/non-human team were exhibited alongside the work of practitioners who have been exploring rule-based drawing for some time. The aim was to make and to discuss approaches to embodied, expanded and autonomous intelligent systems.

During the exhibition we encountered many issues arising as a function of the interactions with the robot and the new human-non-human system that were constructed and evolved. We were exercised by and pursued issues such as machine embodiment, human-robot communication, translation and interpretation, the agency, extent and variance of human-non-human assemblages. It became evident we were part of an ecology or distributed mode of cognition, and by implication an emergent social robotic system often described as 'natural user interfaces' (NUI).

Two ideas that emerged from the project so far:
- The term 'Robot' actually encompasses an expanded space, which includes a complex human-non-human set of relationships that imprint upon the newly created network of the human-non-human (a better if more cumbersome word for the expanded space we currently call "robot") and,
- This expanded space ('robot) introduces a set of response parameters that were not aimed at duplication or fabrication but at exceeding the critical frameworks that filter and reduce what counts as 'real'. This makes the robot-system, Ela, a speculative robot, one that is thoroughly embedded in the process of co-creation.

For more on Technics & Touch See: http://designhub.rmit.edu.au/exhibitions-programs/technics-touch
Click here to see the Gallery Layout and Phase 2 (PDF opens in new window).

TIMBRE

(2016). Jondi Keane.
Digital artwork and critical writing. In: Cristina Barton, Sarah Treadwell and Simon Twose (eds). Drawing Is/Not Building, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington.

PAN & ZOOM

(2015) Jondi Keane & Kaya Barry.
Interactive performative installation of expanded image-making and viewing. Mick Douglas (curator). Performing Mobilities Exhibition, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne. Sep 24-Oct 26. Part of the Peformance Studies International (PSi) event.

PAN & ZOOM take the effects inscribed in the global language of cinema and turn them into performative and participatory image-making apparatuses. Jondi Keane and Kaya Barry's installation invites visitors to collaborate in the construction of the images in order to re-explore relations between media technologies and embodied experience. The result is an expanded, amplified and dilated experience of the performative power of image-making and image-viewing.

PAN activates an accumulating collection of moving panoramic images – provided by Kaya Barry and PSi Fluid States participants from around the world – that visitors may interactively inhabit. The visitor manipulates relationships between an image projector mounted upon a dolly track, and a trackpad that scrolls the projected panorama. The live event of constructing-perceiving panoramic tracking shots opens up in ways that expand sensory experience beyond usual peripheries.

ZOOM co-opts the 'dolly-zoom' effect in cinema – wherein the camera zooms in while moving backward or zooms out while moving forward – resulting in the image expanding to amplify an intense moment of realisation. Hitchcock developed this technique in Vertigo to show audiences how the protagonist experiences his fear of heights. Jondi Keane pulls apart the double movement of the camera effect by himself performing the pulling back and forth of a moving wall as a backdrop. Moments of realisation are created between visitors who take up the camera operation, and an improvising actor's role, to accompany Keane's durational wall moving. An updating collection of short videos were made over the exhibition period shown on one of the installation screens.

Over a hundred videos were made with participants. Some made one or two videos, others made several. Groups of gallery-goers also produced collective videos.

The relation of the two works - PAN & ZOOM - addresses the way movement relates to the notion of mobility and investigates the way spatial experiences is constructed by individuals as indicative of their qualitative relationship. While each part of the work explores different aspects of spatial experience, they both concern themselves with the difference within and across these experiences and the collective constructions involved.

See the Performing Mobilities website for further details (opens in new window).

2THHTS @ 1NCE

(2007 - present) 7 year blackboard drawing project on handedness and cognition.

Drawing with 2 hands simultaneously: a circle with the left and a square with the right. The aim is not to achieve this but to observe the way one allows, selects, inhibits, sequences, joins and separates thought patterns and processes of perception and action.

(2012) "Chalkdrummers: Embodied Practice and Bi-manual Drawing", Keynote Speech by Jondi Keane & Eiichi Tosaki. UTS Drawing Symposium, Sydney.

Seminar Sessions on Improvisation Practices

(2014) Jondi Keane & Andrew Moorish. As part of the Improvisation Practices Symposium. Critical Path Choreographic Lab, Sydney, Nov 27 - Dec 7.

Knots of Relation

(2014) Immediations group event/exhibition. Group devised processes, performances, installations, public discussions, artefacts and archiving activities. COFA gallery, UNSW, Sydney, Dec 8-15.

"The Proceeding Procedure"

(2014) Jondi Keane, Alan Prohm, Erin Manning (Organisers & Curators). Guided workshops as part of the Festival of In/Confluence in the Spirit of Arakawa and Gins. Glasshouse Project space, Brooklyn NY, June 4 – 7.

"Insights from Arakawa and Gins' Table"

(2014) Performative Reading at The Proceeding Procedure: Festival of In/Confluence in the Spirit of Arakawa and Gins. Glasshouse Project space, Brooklyn NY, June 4 – 7.

Handdunes

(2013) As part of workshop/exhibition: "Souviners of the Senses", Doha.

 

Handdunes is an installation of photography, hand-molded clay objects and 3D printing within the Group Exhibition "Sounvenirs of the Senses" at the Saffron Gallery (VCU) as part of the DOHA2013: Hybrid Making from March-April 2013. These objects address the conference brief of "Hybrid Making" and "Made in Qatar" which guided the workshop program (selected through a peer-reviewed process). Working with 8 local and international artists the aim was to investigate how place-based learning forges connection between sensation-perception and conceptual processing that links practice-led research to the life sciences (e.g. embodied cognition).

Exhibited in Doha, as part of the Hybrid making Exhibition - Souvenirs of the Senses
Saffron Gallery, VCU Qatar (Mar-April 2013).
All artworks resulting from a 7 day workshop in participatory making.
Jondi Keane, Patrick West and Valerie Jeremijenko: Workshop leaders, curators and exhibitors.
Click here to view the Souvenirs of the Senses exhibition booklet
(opens PDF in new window)
Conversations through Colour

(2013) Walker Street Gallery and Art Centre, Dandenong, August.

24 video works installed and presented on i-Pads and performative presentation. Curated by D. de Bruyn & G. D’Cruz.

 

Building Movements

(2013) RMIT Design Hub, Melbourne, July 17-18.

Participants in the workshop and symposium built installations and designed performative events. All works were designed specifically for sites at the Design Hub building at RMIT.

 

Conversing with Buildings, directed improvisation performance.

 

The brief was to activate spaces in the selected architecture, which in this case was the Design Hub at RMIT. Using materials brought by Keane to activate the outdoor stair area. Performers walk, run, stand in addition to finding ways to use the material to emphasise aspects of the space.

Assisted Falling, group improvisation performance.

The brief was to form groups of five, allowing one person to experience falling down the stairs in slow motion. The four assistants must at all times support head and neck to make the contact of shoulders, hips and knees with the concrete stairs as gentle as possible. The aim was to tumble and go head over heels at some point during the fall.

Time-Space Twister, collaborative installation with Pia Ednie-Brown.

The Rub, collaborative installation with Pia Ednie-Brown.

Ghost Muscle: stonewalling teams past and present

(2013) Participatory artwork, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool, Vic.

 

The stone walling projects (Ghost Muscle & Migrant Stones) developed directly from Keane's and others' strong attachment to the basalt stones used to make the walls throughout SW Victoria.

Part of the Flows and Catchments research group (Deakin University, see website: http://flowsandcatchments.org.au/) and was supported by the Warrnambool Art Gallery and the Lake Bolac Eel Festival, winning the Regional Partnership awards in 2012 and 2013.

Migrant Stones: stonewalling with ghost muscle

(2013) Lake Bolac Eel Festival, Vic.

Writing workshop - imagining the life of the stones and telling the stories of connection with the stones

Part of the Flows and Catchments research group (Deakin University) and was supported by the Warrnambool Art Gallery and the Lake Bolac Eel Festival, winning the Regional Partnership awards in 2012 and 2013.

Stone Soup

(2012) Exhibition and community drawing workshop. Warrnambool Art Gallery, Vic, March.


Stone Soup comes from folk tales about travellers in search of food who invent the idea of a magical stone soup to induce cooperation by asking local residents to garnish the 'magical' stone soup with local produce.

Other forms of the folk tale from around the world include nail soup, button soup and axe soup.

Drawing a stone soup together: place, space, earth and memory

Retelling the soup story

Photographs by Dan Armstrong.

Part of the Flows and Catchments research group (Deakin University) and was supported by the Warrnambool Art Gallery and the Lake Bolac Eel Festival, winning the Regional Partnership awards in 2012 and 2013.

nonplus architecture

(2011) Co-founder of collaborative creative research practice with Pia Ednie-Brown

Architectures and Vitality

(2011) Workshop and exhibition. Jondi Keane, Pia Ednie-Brown, Scott Andrew Elliott. Ptarmigan Project Space, Tallinn, Estonia.
The workshop experimented with way sin which environmental surroundings might affect our sense of vitality. In the Ptarmigan Tallinn project spaces, we explored a range of different ways to inhabit, modify and imagine environments, and the production of vitality through architectural means.

The Human Bridge

(2011) Performance at Meekos and Montreal, Canada, July.

 

One of the collaborative projects that formed at "Generating the Impossible" workshop and symposia.
Participants were Jondi Keane, Jamie DelVal, Tony Pape, Saara Hanula, Lincoln Mudd, Mahasti Mudd.

Photographs by Pia Ednie-Brown.






Differential Equation

(2011) Jondi Keane &Pia Ednie-Brown. Presented at Prague biennale & Gwangju Biennale.

 

Image in response to curators brief produced by Keane & Ednie-Brown. Image presented alongside image by photographers Jack Dunbar & Tosh van Veenendaal.

"The differential problem is two non-intersecting roads lead from City A to City B. It is known that two bodies-of-work travelling from A to B over different roads and joined by a cord of a certain length were able to travel from A to B without breaking the cord. Is it possible for two circular bodies-of-work with a radius 1 whose centres move over these roads towards each other to pass without touching?"

 

Appears in hardcopy broadsheet produced by curators and online, documented at: http://website-n.com/n1/index.html





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