Co-curated with Olivia Koh from recess – a Melbourne-based online platform showcasing contemporary moving-image works – this series will comprise daily screenings in Community Hall. Featuring all Melbourne-based filmmakers, the films highlight the city’s breadth of talent in art-filmmaking – an expanding arena of creative practice with a bright future.

Stanton Cornish-Ward and Trent Crawford are filmmakers and artists. Cornish-Ward’s work explores the nuances of memory, intergenerational trauma and the human impact of advancing technologies, while Crawford’s work investigates the impact images and image based technology have on notions of truth, belief and agency.

LOCK, 2021, is a speculative film forecasting the future of decentralised personal-development movements. The film shadows the fictional lives of three people swept up in a digital form of peer-to-peer therapy called ‘LOCK’, whose leaderless community begins to radicalise as its practitioners become increasingly invested in developing alternative models for living a meaningful life. Guided by hope, the film questions the desires that drive these users to insulate themselves from the outside world.

LOCK was made by merging film production stock footage with a range of artificial intelligence techniques. The film builds upon the previous collaborative work of Cornish-Ward and Crawford to consider how the future of the internet (often referred to as Web 3.0) and its modes of production could impact contemporary cinema, people’s world views and the ways they relate to each other on and off screen.

LOCK won the Best Experimental Film award at the Cologne International Film Festival in 2022 and has been exhibited in Australia, Italy and Germany.

Cornish-Ward is one half of Hiball, a film production company specialising in the moving image for the digital world. Her filmwork has been officially selected for film festivals in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Crawford has exhibited artworks at Palazzo San Giuseppe, Italy (2022); 4649, Tokyo (2022); ACE, Tarntanya/Adelaide (2021); Hobiennale, nipaluna/Hobart (2019); Myojuji Sarue, Tokyo (2019); and Auto Studio, Beijing (2018). He is a recipient of the Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship and, most recently, the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, which he used to participate in the Maumaus Independent Study Programme in Lisbon, Portugal

Film credits
LOCK, 2021, single channel HD CGI video, 21:57mins, Stanton Cornish-Ward & Trent Crawford