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Rankin takes colourful shots of cultural views

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Contamination, followed by repeated sensations of feeling sick and dizzy, and topped off with a bout of art rage. Never mind the hedonistic celebrations for the New Year: perhaps the Microwave video festival is how you should really see in the new millennium.

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There is no obsession with the apocalyptic here. These calamities are the titles of the works going on parade this year. Organised by local left-field troupe Videotage, the theme for the 2000 instalment is 'World, Wave, Wild'; and beefing up the message are many pieces depicting the alienation the human race faces in an age of digital technology - the abbreviation for the theme is WWW, the acronym for the World-Wide Web.

Among the pieces are Contamination, a collection of videos from Brazil, Argentina and Peru and curated by Solange Farkas, artistic director of Videobrasil.

The individual pieces within the collage fall under four larger themes - memory, boundaries, displacement and identity - and deal with how people lose their ability to understand their own culture and roots as their vistas become submerged in a sea of foreign influences.

Sick And Dizzy, meanwhile, is a collection of 11 videos curated by Griffiths Artworks in Brisbane, Australia and Videotage.

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The title refers to the dual characteristics of the work presented: an exploration of new visual aesthetics (the abrupt mobility of the camera) with the re-orientation of people in ever-changing cultural landscapes that are brought about by migration and population shifts.

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