Made during Melbourne's Covid 19 Lockdown, 34’ 14’’
A mutant William S. Burroughs style report from the bunker on the emergence of a new kind of media parasite in a hyper accelerated collage based underground art film with sound by Philip Brophy. Set against the backdrop of daily reports of Covid 19 infections and media saturation of viruses, contagion, media overload and conspiracy theories.
A hazmat-suited researcher in a bathroom/toilet, credited only as the slime narrator, talks about discovering a new kind of parasite that attempts to complete its life cycle within various contemporary media platforms.
It quickly emerges that our narrator has possibly started to lose his mind or has been affected by the parasite as he explores topics such as Virtual Reality worm simulations, our symbiotic relationship to 7-11s, AI censorship parasites, to the appearance of programmable dark matter, slime TV game shows, parasite pornography and mutant YouTube cat videos.
Ian Haig works across media, from video, sculpture, drawing, technology based media, mutant AI and installation. Haig’s practice refuses to accept that the low and the base level are devoid of value and cultural meaning. His body obsessed themes can be seen throughout a large body of work over the last thirty years. Previous works have looked to the contemporary media sphere and its relationship to the visceral body, the degenerative aspects of pervasive new technologies, to cultural forms of fanaticism and cults, to ideas of attraction and repulsion, body horror, transhumanism gone bad, and the defamiliarisation and confrontation of the human body. His work has been exhibited in galleries and video/media festivals around the world. Including exhibitions at: The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; The Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide; The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Artec Biennale – Nagoya, Japan; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; China Millennium Monument Art Museum, Beijing; Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden-Rot, Germany; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; The Museum of the Moving Image, New York; The Havana Biennial, Cuba. In addition his video work has screened in over 200 festivals internationally including The Ann Arbor film festival, US; VideoBrasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Melbourne International film festival and Rencontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin. In 2003 he received a fellowship from the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council and in 2013 and 2017 he curated the video art shows Unco and Very Unco at The Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles.
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