For Shared Medium, Channels splices together an exciting program of works, performances and perspectives and deploys them at Blindside and Composite over three weeks from 21 July - 6 August.

Channels Festival re-emerges to team up with Composite and Blindside to present Shared Medium, a compilation of overlapping audiovisual performances, single channel screenings and knowledge sharing as part of the Blindside Screen Series 2022.

As Channels continues to morph, shape shift, and discover new methods of moving-image programming, we take this opportunity to tap our deep roots of grassroots video collectivity. From our inception, Channels set out to expand awareness and appreciation of video art as an important, powerful and vital practice. Shared Medium, co-programmed with Blindside and Composite, creates a temporary collective space where artists and audiences can come together to consider video art’s broader social and critical discourses and histories, finding new pathways through them.

A 'shared medium' in telecommunication refers to a channel of information that serves more than one user at the same time. Riffing on this term, Shared Medium, will unfold over 3 weeks, engaging a farrago of artists, filmmakers and publics.

Opening on Thursday 21 July at Blindside, we feature live audiovisual performances by Don Gray, Sara Retallick & Andi Leibscher.

Over the following three weeks at Blindside, a trifecta of new works will be screened by Deborah White, Daniela Zorba and Al Morton culminating on Thursday 4 August when filmmaker Lucie McMahon will present a deep-dive into the process of making her most recent feature-length documentary Things Will Be Different (2022) which chronicles neighbours Will and Najat’s experience of forced displacement as a result of the public-private redevelopment of the Walker Street public housing estate in Westgarth, Melbourne.

This will be companioned by an offsite program at Composite, an artist-run organisation established in 2020 to support artists’ moving image through exhibition, research, education and distribution. In their screening room at the Collingwood Yards we will present a number of events for Shared Medium beginning on Friday 22 July with a special screening of Harun Farocki: The Counter-Image (2020) by Kevin B. Lee; continuing on Thursday 28 July with an evening of single channel video works by Deborah White, Katie Turnbull, Zeth Cambell, Daniela Zorba, Jody Cleaver, Lily Nguyen, Sarah Diamantis and Alexa Malizon, and concluding on Friday 5 August with the fifth iteration of Release Cycle featuring works by Tina Stefanou.