cmielewski & starrs
Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs are artists whose long term collaboration has produced a variety of screen-based installations. Their work often uses play as a strategy for engaging with the social and political contradictions inherent in contemporary life.
Their recent media artworks including Incompatible Elements and Land[sound]scape are situated at the juncture of cinema, information visualisation, and data mapping, playing off the tensions between the large and small screen, and between information and sublime landscape.
video still: days like these, Incompatible Elements.
Their video and sound installation, Waterways showed in a group exhibition, Urbanition at Carriageworks, Sydney from August 4th - September 3rd, 2011. The exhibition is a sister city project between Sydney and San Francisco and was shown at the San Fransisco Arts Commission gallery in San Francisco in April-June, 2011.
Cmielewski and Starrs’ past projects include Seeker, winner of an Award of Distinction at Ars Electronica 2007, Floating Territories, an installation combining distributed printed cards, swipe card reader and abstract screen based games, Dream Kitchen, an interactive stop-motion animation featured at Transmediale, Berlin and the European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruk, Germany, and Trace, which used sensor techology to explore biometrics, installed at Sydney Records Centre, 2002. Bio-Tek Kitchen, a modified computer game was exhibited in Experimenta’s House of Tomorrow exhibition, Melbourne in 2003 and the Seoul New Media Biennale, 2004.
Both artists have been recipients of Australia Council New Media Fellowships. Cmielewski lectures at the School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney, Starrs is a senior lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.