Channels – The Australian Video Art Festival

Channels, billed as “The Australian video art festival”, is a far cry from MIFF. The Channels’ program is a panoply of forums, discussions and screenings, where the summaries use verbiage like “prosumers” and “video brains” and the selection of content is labelled as “thoughtful.” Make no mistake, this is a capital A Art show.

However, Art shows can still have some killer parties. This brings us over to Videodromes, the Channels’ closing night party on September 21, presented by Speakeasy Cinema.

Speakeasy Cinema is one of those great groups that goes out of its way to show you obscure movies on the big screen. Their previous programming has included Lena Dunham’s pre-Girls film Tiny Furniture, Girl Walk//All Day – a full length musical documentary set to mash-up artist Girl Talk’s latest album, and the entire oeuvre of Xavier Dolan (I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats, etc.). This is a collective that gets the artier side of cinema and the planning for the party shows this understanding in spades.

According to the Channels’ website description of the event, Videodromes will feature live DJing, live projections, performances and a whole lot of video art being shown all over the damn place. To quote the description, this party won’t use video as mere “visual wallpaper.” It’s going to be an absolute riot of art and video and moving image shoved right into your frontal lobe backed with some pumping music and fuelled by expensive booze.

If you fancy yourself a lover of the arts, a fan of the moving image, and still love a good party, then get your tickets for Videodromes today. Plus, they’ve promised “smoke installations.” I don’t know what that means but it sounds pretty neat. Check it out.

For more info on the Channels festival (running from September 18 to 21) head to channelsfestival.net.au For details on Videodromes check out channelsfestival.net.au/program/475-2.