Chris Howlett

User Bio

Presently, my art practice utilizes interactive video, performance and sound art, site-specific sculpture, machinima, and painting to explore a number of fundamental questions around the way in which new technologies shift cultural and political understandings of our physical and psychological selves. Through combining 3D game play with interactive game mods, video projections, sound works and site-specific installations, my works activate an immersive space from which to critically and creatively consider how reality and simulated environments both construct and reconfigure our ideas about the nature of identity. By doing this, my work asks us to reflect on how we function as a society in response to these new spaces of interaction, how we might respond to the political dimensions of these expanded sites of inhabitation, and how they might also represent a more troubling scenario for the possibility of dissent or opposition in our media saturated culture. His works have been exhibited internationally in festivals including the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts in Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm; Videoholica International Video Art Festival in Bulgaria; Los Angeles Freewaves Festival of Film, Video and New Media and exhibited work at the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, California. His solo and collaborative works have also been exhibited locally at the Gallery of Modern Art, Institute of Modern Art, the QUT Art Museum, the Arc Biennial for Art & Design and interstate at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Hobart Art Gallery, Cairns Contemporary Art Space and Blindside Artist Run Space in Melbourne. Upcoming, in 2013 he is part of major group exhibition that is in development to be held at the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles surveying Australian artists links to the United States curated by Max Presneill. He is currently based in Brisbane, Queensland.