Invisible Cities by Alex Monteith
October 6th - 30th, 2004

Computer technology, internet search engines, CCTV surveillance technology, a dark back-room, Director code by Sean Kerr and over 2000 nouns from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities novel converge in this new media installation. Two simultaneous live web searches comb the web. One search engine trawls the inventory of objects in the gallery and the other searches for Calvino’s nouns or phrases:

…Canoes, Banks, Green estuary, Land, Mullioned windows, estuaries, Hole, Wheels, 63, half-cities, roller coaster, carousel, Ferris Wheel, Death ride, Big top, Trapeze, Half-city, Stone, Marble, Cement, Bank, Factories, Palaces, Slaughterhouse, School, Half, city, Half-city, Marble pediments, Stone walls, Cement pylons, Ministry, Docks, Petroleum, refinery, Hospital, Trailers, Shooting galleries, Carousel, Cart, Roller coaster, Caravan, 64, territory, one city, rolling plateau…window sills, flapping curtains, ground, gutters, manhole covers…

Alex Monteith is interested in redescribing in art commercially available shooting and screening (AV) apparatus to explore how this formatting contributes to limiting ways of interpreting machine assisted vision. Her intermedia practice incorporates surveillance technology, motion picture technology, kinetic/mechanical/electrical components and performative uses of video imagery. She is also interested in digital interpretations of analogue information and processing in art. She uses film/video to explore the limitations of vector based, numeric, formulaic and lateral experiments in alternative narrative practice.

During the last 5 years her time-based work has been exhibited in the UK, Italy, Germany, France, Poland, Canada, USA, Mexico, Ghana, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand. She has won awards for experimental film from the International Surrealist Film Festival (1999 & 2004), USA and Worldfest Houston, USA (2000).

Invisible Cities by Alex Monteith is the final instalment in the 2004 Samplerseries, which has also featured Robin Neate, Karin van Roosmalen, Joanna Langford, Iain Cheesman and Scott Flanagan.

Sampler.  
Essay by Rosemary Forde
in The Physics Room Annual 2004
ISBN 0-9582651-2-7