Office skate

BACKGROUND: In 2011 the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) commissioned Laresa Kosloff to produce a new video work as part of "Things that Go Bump in the Night", a Late Night Programming initiative by the City of Melbourne. Kosloff's video was digitally projected onto at a large-scale wall that measured 9 x 7 metres in the Melbourne City Square. The video was screened as a repetitive loop from 5 - 10pm each evening throughout the duration of the exhibition. CONTRIBUTION: Laresa Kosloff's video work titled "Office Skate" features black and white Super 8 footage of people undertaking work and leisure activities within a city environment. Kosloff filmed the footage with a Super 8 camera and then digitally scanned and processed it into a video file. The resulting footage has an abstracted and 'distanced' quality, which disengages it from a contemporary sense of time and space. Physical activities such as ice-skating and "parkour" are contrasted with static office workers and bureaucratic environments. This footage was then re-situated back into the city as a large-scale video projection, thus investigating the relationships between analogue and digital media technologies and the slippages between abstraction and everyday working life. SIGNIFICANCE: The significance of this research is that a video work about various modes of energy and agency within the city was displayed as a large-scale public projection within a city environment. The night screening, public context, scale and city imagery extended viewers experienced of video artworks which are usually presented in the closed walls of gallery settings. The importance of this project is attested to the large public audience for this work and the esteemed context in which it was commissioned. "Kosloff's films turn the city into a cinematic location full of kinetic charisma."