Peter Callas

Peter Callas has worked in the fields of film, video art and computer animation for over twenty years. His work is in the permanent collections of numerous major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kunstmuseum, Bonn and the Australian National Gallery, Canberra. He has held individual screenings of his work at the Kunstverein, Cologne, 1991; the ICA, London, 1990; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989; and the Berlin Film Festival, 1988. His works have been screened frequently on television stations worldwide, including BBC2, London; Canal +, Paris; SAT1, Cologne; WGBH, Boston; NHK Satellite, Tokyo; and Television EspaÒola, Madrid.

Amongst many commissions he has completed work for Luna Park, Sydney, 1995; the Adelaide Festival, 1992; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1991; the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 1988; the Australian Bicentennial Travelling Exhibition, 1987; and Pioneer Laserdisc, Tokyo, 1986. Peter Callas has won numerous awards including the "First Prize", Bonn Videonale, 1994; "Golden Switchblade Award", New York International Video Festival, 1994; Honourable Mention, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, 1994; World Graph Prix, Euro Video Fest, Lisbon, 1994; Grand Prix, International Festival of Video Art, Locarno, Switzerland, 1990; Best Computer Art, Videobrasil, S„o Paulo, Brazil, 1990; and The New Horizons Award for Innovation in New Media, International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Berkeley, USA, 1989. He was artist-in-residence at the Experimental Television Center, the Visual Arts/Craft Board Studio, PS1, New York, 1989 and has recently completed a period as an artist-in-residence at the Zentrum f¸r Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM, Centre for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany.

In 1999 dLux media arts, Sydney, presented a twenty year retrospective of Peter Callas' video works. Titled "Intiialising History". Peter Callas is also a curator and writer.

His curatorial projects have included "Traversals: Instructions to the Double" for the Long Beach Museum of Art, 1990, a program of videotapes dealing with cross-cultural issues in the Pacific Rim; "Subtopian Zones: Visions of the Virtual Body" for the 1992 Video Television Festival in Tokyo; and "An Eccentric Orbit: Electronic Media Art from Australia", designed for exhibition throughout the United States and Europe through the American Federation of the Arts, 1994-1996. "Phantasmagoria: Pre-Cinema to Virtuality" (co-curated with David Watson), an exhibition of installations by video and interactive computer artists commemorating the centenary of cinema, was staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, from March till June 1996. A recent curatorial project, "Peripheral Visions", commissioned by dLux media arts, is an international exhibition of screen-based work to travel Australia in 1999 and 2000.