From the original Festival website:

world premiere

Right here and right now I contemplate the new strands that are evolving inside my ideas, research and artistic practice. In doing so I can identify substantial links that arc back to an older work The Size of Things, which I made twenty years ago.

These three video performance works have been inspired by a life long obsession with flight, space travel and human desire to push the envelope.

Catching Sight of Sputnik has been shot day for night by the roadside in the Moab Desert. A digitally enhanced star-filled illusion of what appears to be the surface of the moon is dispelled when a distant figure emerges in the frame. He appears to be performing an Indian tribal dance but is in fact taking “one small step” and then “one gigantic leap” over and over again until finally he collides with the camera. During this passage of time the stars fade to reveal a bright blue sky, the moonscape reveals itself as the Desert and as the camera sits on its side and randomly records a car passing by.

Race is an ironic work derived by the chaotic state of the earth’s eco system where 82 clockwork toys are raced against one another in a time trial on the Bonneville Speedway on the vast salt lake flats of Utah. There is a sense of pointlessness to the trial, it is unclear if the aim is to win or lose. Will the monkey on the tricycle beat the jet car? Will the skier beat the golden robot? Or will the helicopter beat the rowing boat?

Flight Plan of Flyer One has been filmed in Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. It is a recreation of one of the Wright brothers’ first flights, shot with a helmet camera by the performer. The film is aged with dust and scratches like a 1903 film and eventually transforms to 2009 colour on landing.

Lei Cox works with video installation, video art and photography and has shown worldwide since 1985. Major Solo Shows have been presented in the Experimental Art Foundation Adelaide, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Laing Gallery Newcastle and Gallery Rene Coelho Amsterdam. Group shows include Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tate Gallery Liverpool and European Media Art Festival, Osnabruk. His single screen work has been shown in at least 70 international festivals. He is working on an interactive camera obscurae public work with collaborator Mel Woods on Cairngorm Mountain in Scotland.

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