Part of a series of friendly video art com­pet­i­tions to cre­ate a work from a col­lec­tion of sup­plied found foot­age, this piece cen­ters on Queen Eliza­beth II’s 1953 roy­al vis­it to New Zea­l­and, fol­low­ing her recent coron­a­tion. It was cre­ated in Feb­ru­ary 2004 for The Remix Pro­ject (v2.04).

Ten­sion is cre­ated by use of the post-colo­ni­al gaze, and cor­res­pond­ing recent devel­op­ments in the revi­sion­ist his­tor­ic­al per­spect­ive. “Koro” is a col­lo­qui­al Maori term for eld­er (with the cap­it­al K also stand­ing for rebel­lion and rad­ic­al­ism), and “Nation” implies a sense of col­lect­ive iden­tity, and through that, account­ab­il­ity. The soundtrack is a dis­son­ant drum ‘n’ bass/maori chor­ale “mash-up” of New Zea­l­and band Shape­shifter­’s “DNA (Pylonz Remix)” and “Po Ata­rau (Now Is The Hour)” by the Aotearoa Maori Chor­ale, which serves to fur­ther high­light the con­trast between old and new.

This 30 second short film was cre­ated for the rADz (Rad­ic­al Art Ad) series in Novem­ber 2000.

“Rad­ic­al Art Ads” are short, Haiku-like art films — ads that don’t sell any­thing. With ad-space dur­ing off-peak times being rel­at­ively cheap, Wel­ling­ton-based pro­du­cer Barry Thomas hit upon the idea of using these spaces to make very short films. Without any com­mer­cial incent­ive behind them and using Cre­at­ive NZ fund­ing, this was an innov­at­ive and unique way to nur­ture emer­ging tal­ent. Screened in NZ by TV3, TV4 and Sund­ance Chan­nel across their daily sched­ule (includ­ing prime time).

The visu­als include a live audio visu­al­isa­tion gen­er­ated from the soundtrack “Asturi­as (I. Alben­iz)” per­formed by gui­tar­ist Timothy Dean Walker.

Cre­ated as a tem­por­ary site-spe­cif­ic install­a­tion for the ‘Elect Them All’ Arts Fest­iv­al (Feb­ru­ary 2004).

Sat behind the bar through­out the fest­iv­al on per­man­ent loop, this film con­tains snip­pets of ‘They Live’ (dir. John Car­penter), the tongue-in-cheek music video for “Love For Sale” (from the movie True Stor­ies) by Talk­ing Heads and vari­ous con­tem­por­ary TV advert­ise­ments. The idea was to catch view­er­’s atten­tion in an indir­ect way, with ref­er­ences to altern­at­ive nar­rat­ive struc­tures appear­ing in the middle of what would be ordin­ary tele­vi­sion advert­ising — thereby alert­ing them to embed­ded con­sumer-based nar­rat­ive that may exist with­in TV commercials.

Cre­ated for the BBC Radio 1’s “Super­star VJ” Com­pet­i­tion, to pro­mote the open source licens­ing mod­el of hun­dreds of clips from the BBC Cre­at­ive Archive Group.

All music ©2005 Blue Leaf (Cre­at­ive Archive License terms apply).