Design and Art Australia Online

Karkador (1986), 2:55 mins, Tokyo.
Commissioned by Pioneer Laser Disk for a project titled “AV Cocktail” (representing the 5th anniversary of laser disk in 1996) ...

The Esthetics of Disappearance (1986), 5:55 mins, Tokyo.
This work, which takes its title from Paul Virilio’s publication of the same name, explores notions of the cinematic in relation to recent global history, with particular focus on the role of the media in conveying information and events into the home via the medium of the television.
Virilio’s thesis upon cinema and temporal experience proposed that ‘with the cinematic accelerator.. ...

Visions (1986), 4:45 mins, Tokyo.
An eye blinks as it observes an empty space …

Kiru Umi No Yoni/Cutting Like the Ocean; A Didactic Document, Version II, (1986), 21:53 mins, Tokyo.
One of Callas’ most personally confronting and important works to date …

East Meets West (Sandii & the Sunsetz), (1986), 3:37 mins, Tokyo
Music video produced for Sandii and the Sunsetz …

Sailor (Takahashi Yukuhiro) (1986), 3:17 mins, Tokyo.
Music video produced for Takahashi Yukuhiro of Yellow Magic Orchestra …

installation incorporating video, 1986“Ohya Underground” Ohya Quarry, Utsonomiya, Japan (1986)
A small field monitor was placed on a menhir-like structure built of three pieces of quarried stone in the cavernous space of the Utsonomiya quarry near Nikko, Japan …

Image Music: Tim Donahue (1985) 4:43 mins, Tokyo.
Image Music was the first piece I completed with the Fairlight CVI ...

dual screen installation with drawings, 1984Roslyn Oxley Gallery Sydney (1984); “Correspondences” University Gallery Hobart (1984)
A series of drawings from 1979 (when I was living in the Shepherd & Newman Warehouse in Darlinghurst, Sydney) are reworked as video imagery through a series of negative/positive video mattes and wipes …

Kiru Umi No Yoni / Cutting Like the Ocean; A Didactic Document Version I, (1983), 21:53 mins, Tokyo.
One of Callas’ most personally confronting and important works to date …

installation incorporating video, 1983
Kaneko Art G1 Tokyo, (1983); Roslyn Oxley Gallery Sydney (1983); “Interface” University Gallery Adelaide (1984) Installation on which the tape Kiru Umi No Yoni is based.
In this work a monitor supported on cut banana tree stems points upwards towards a slide projector …

Nin Nin (1983) 3:00 mins, Hobart.
The silhouettes of figures (drawn with the keys of a character generator) move in and around a series of television sets …

Massage (1982), 7:00 mins, Sydney.
In Massage (made with Dianne Lloyd) an actor (Geoff Miller) is being massaged with chromakey coloured grease paint …

(with Diane Lloyd) three monitor installation 20:00 mins, 1981The Sydney Studio (1981)
A Story Story was a 3 monitor piece predicated on the fact that all analogue tape decks in the era in which this tape was made (1981) ran at slightly different speeds …

three monitor installation, 20:00 mins, 1981Roslyn Oxley Gallery Sydney (1981) and “A Different Perspective” Artspace Sydney, (1981)
This three monitor installation was the result of a workshop with Douglas Davis and Jane Bell in Sydney in 1980 …

three monitor installation, 20:00 mins, 1981Roslyn Oxley Gallery Sydney, 1981
This piece was made in reaction to my involvement in the filming of the documentary Deadly Harvest in Thailand and the Shan States of Burma …

Singing Stone, 4:22 mins, Sydney, 1980
A hand clutches an oval stone which is drawn back and forth across a white surface in tight circular motions, grinding pigment …

Curtain (1980), 4:00 mins, Sydney.
Curtain is an early experimental work in which Callas’ physical presence is of central importance …

I Would Have Run But I Had A Heavy Cold (1980), 15:00 mins, Sydney.
In I Would Have Run But I Had A Heavy Cold I enter the water beside a pontoon on the Hawkesbury River near Sydney …

Transition Transmission (1980), 5:00 mins, Sydney.
Recorded under the Iron Cove Bridge in Sydney, this tape contrasts the rhythmic sound the traffic makes on the bridge structure with the enigmatic appearance and disappearance (using the colouriser) of a figure in the landscape. 1

1. Peter Callas from “Peter Callas: Initialising History, video works 1980-1999”

Our Potential Allies (1980), dual monitor installation, 15:00 mins. Reconfigured for single screen (1999).
Various locations including The Sydney Studio (1981); Australian Perspecta (1981) Art Gallery of NSW Sydney; “Portopia 81”, Kobe, Japan (1981); “Vision in Disbelief”, 4th Biennale of Sydney (1982); “Parallel Universes”, Queensland University of Technology (2012); “Digital Aesthetic”, Preston, UK, (2012)
Our Potential Allies draws upon a well established history of Western colonial intervention, anthropological speculation and missionary zeal, while proposing an intuitive and ironic critique of Eurocentric belief-systems founded upon the dichotomy of self (the West) and the Other …

Two monitor installations 11:00 mins, 1980
These dual screen works aimed to contrast manipulated and unmanipulated imagery …