Seth Keen

The Hazzard Diaries
Digital Video Work

>>> VIEW PROJECT (Quicktime file, 4.7mb)

The artists Charles and Sheena Hazzard recorded the original 8mm film footage presented in this audiovisual project from 1959-1983, in the Bundaberg region, Queensland. The footage is unusual as the viewer is privy to a local family's life unfolding over two decades. The film diaries are a record not only of their family journeying through life but also their long-term commitment to art in the community. As painters and model-makers we witness their outdoor painting excursions, exhibitions and float building for the annual sugar harvest parades in the region.

The project combines oral history and audiovisual research to produce the installation Sugartown, the triptych video work The Hazzards and the Internet video work, The Hazzard Diaries. The Internet version is re-purposed specifically for presentation in the online 'Making Badlands' artspace. Each version of the original source footage has formed part of research that examines the emerging trend of articulating and disseminating video content in the form of multilinear narrative structures.

The Hazzards (DVD) single-channel version was presented in the 'Making Badlands' Conference and is archived in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, memory grid collection, community section. In the triptych split-screen format, the narrator Nicholas Hazzard, the youngest son, is seen concurrently as a baby, teenager and married with children. The notion of chronological time is disrupted and temporal montage is combined with spatial montage. Multilinear narratives occur across the concurrent streams of video. Nicholas' direct verbal response to the footage presents a historical and geographical context on the Bundaberg region.