Design and Art Australia Online

Chris Caines is an artist who works across a variety of media exploring the impact, effect and story telling possibility of combining cinema and new technologies.

Museum of Fire [1991] – one third of a three part portmanteau project made in collaboration with John Conomos and David Haines – features text placed over pulsating, abstract backgrounds and a soundtrack of hypnotic loops and noisescapes. The text switches between first person narratives and other elements taken from texts of a more formal yet equally opaque nature. Caines’s Rain Shadow [1997] utilises multiple screens within screens, a fragmented voice over and splashes of cut up text that build into a dense collage of visual and aural material.

Sixteen Days [2002] explores multiple texts – one story concerning the narrator’s ability to control the weather rendered as text placed atop collaged layers of imagery of nature, cities and streets, while the second is a voice over relating annecdotes that in turn recall other stories, each adding another dream-like layer to the mix. Flight Recorder [2005] offered a more straightforward story in its voice over, relating the events at the end of a marriage, yet the fragmented text and imagery of snow-covered mountains – and what might be a crash site – relate in a loosely analogous way to the subjecy of the story.

Caines holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts from Wollongong University, a Graduate Diploma from the Australian national University and Master of Arts from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.

Writers:

Andrew Frost

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