Videomania in Pixelmosh

Christopher Bonador loves anachronisms.

His apartment is filled with them — in his studio, a behemoth of a video synthesiser straight out of the 80s (“they’re really hard to find nowadays,” he says); in his living room, a stack of old-school vinyl next to a record player.

“People tell me I’m so duped,” he says of his record collection. “But these are mine from when I was 4 years old — the reason I listen to them is because of their high fidelity!”

This kind of authentic fascination for technological relics permeates into his work too. His latest, showing at the Sydney Underground Film Festival, is called Videomania in Pixelmosh — Videomania, after the now-defunct video store-slash-cinema that he used to visit in Rosebery as a child, and Pixelmosh, after, well, the pixels moshing across the screen for the duration of the short film.

It’s psychedelic, and it’s chaotic, and it’s overwhelming, but to describe it in any of these terms would be too reductive. For almost six minutes, we’re bombarded with glitches upon glitches upon glitches — colours flickering and melting into one another, metamorphic shapes that distort and disappear as if by will.

“We see so much glitch nowadays — like if you have really bad Internet and you’re streaming — but I wanted to see how we could look at that in a way that was an art form,” says Bonador. “When you see it, it’s an accident, but to replicate it is very hard. You have to open the video, break open the data, and cross your fingers and hope it works — otherwise you’ve crashed your computer and your file.”

And therein lies the tension of Videomania in Pixelmosh: this element of performativity, of replicating organic errors and transforming them into a conceptual framework. Videomania sees Bonador turn what begins as footage of himself wrapped in lights into an analogue acid trip, formalising a random series of glitches into a methodical datamoshing practice (spreadsheets and all) — and by doing so, he offers a vital critique on what it means for technology to be high-quality.

“We’re living in a time where 4K video is on the rise,” he says, “but can our eyes even see 4K? Does resolution even matter?

“I want to open up a conversation about these questions, because in some respects it is important, but in others I don’t think it matters at all — especially because we’re so bombarded with HD now. I hope people compare technology old and new, and question what they’re doing with technology and how they view things.”

In many ways, Videomania was destined for the Sydney Underground Film Festival, a festival known for its sharp provocation and references to 80s and 90s cult films — the same cult films Bonador watched as a child allowed to roam in Videomania with reckless abandon.

“My mum and dad would let me borrow what I wanted, so I would pick the video covers that looked the weirdest, and I ended up freaking myself out,” he says.

His parents were classic opposites — his dad, an early tech-head who was all over the latest AV equipment, perennially in search of the highest fidelity without ever quite having the cultural intuition to make full use of that hi-fi, and his mum, a lover of New Order and Kate Bush and grand cinematic epics.

“She had great taste,” he says of his mum. “And she exposed me to a lot of music video. The way she did that would be to show me an entire collection of videos — ‘here’s Madonna’s The Immaculate Collection,’ she would say — and it was great seeing an artist evolve.

“But after I watched these pop music videos, my dad would tell me to look up the director, and we’d look up all their techniques and their equipment.”

It was this strange (and fortunate) mishmash of influences that imbued within him both the skills and the imagination to experiment with his own craft. At first, it was little more than taping over his mum’s daytime soap recordings with Janet Jackson videos, but it eventually developed into the style we see today. Not without a hiatus and a couple of unfulfilling jobs in between, but going back to study at Sydney College of the Arts after these false starts facilitated the creativity he’d been searching for.

“It just felt natural,” he says of his Bachelor of Visual Arts degree, which he graduates from this year. “Right from the beginning, I had these really great lecturers who became — who are — mentors to me. Just having these very well renowned artists willing to share knowledge is so great.

“As a collective we all want to get to a place where we’re making really meaningful work for ourselves and for the community. So for the students who are there now, let’s keep going. Let’s do this thing.”

The 2018 Sydney Underground Film Festival runs from 13–16 September at the Factory Theatre in Marrickville.

We have double pass giveaways for LSD Factory, OZPLOITS! and WTF short film sessions. Email fass.communications@sydney.edu.au with the name of the session you'd like to attend.

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