Biography

Chris Howlett (born 1974, Kokopo, Papua New Guinea) is an Australian artist based in Brisbane, Queensland.

Howlett graduated with a MFA from the Californian Institute of the Arts in 2000 and previously graduated with First Class Honours in a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Queensland University of Technology in 1996. His works have been exhibited internationally in festivals including the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts in Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm; Videoholica International Video Art Festival in Bulgaria; Los Angeles Freewaves Festival of Film, Video and New Media and exhibited work at the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, California. His solo and collaborative works have also been exhibited locally at the Gallery of Modern Art, Institute of Modern Art, the QUT Art Museum, the Arc Biennial for Art & Design and interstate at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Hobart Art Gallery, Cairns Contemporary Art Space and Blindside Artist Run Space Inc. in Melbourne. His public art commissions include "KICK OFF" which is a curated screen-based program at the new Metricon Stadium homeground of the Gold Coast Suns and Australia's largest public art canvas the QUT billboard project.

Photographer unknown.

Concerned with how virtual and real environments shift cultural and political understandings of our physical and psychological selves, Howlett's work often results in long term performances, computer game design, hardware modifications, sound and sculptural works, site-specific installations, painting, machinima, film and video art. His diverse, artistic universe expands preconceived notions of narrative and documentary by using autobiography, architectural simulations, pop music, fiction and fantasy to explore how technology redefines and influences our subjectivity through its pervasive use. His short machinima films include "Metropolis: Part I-III", "Michael Jackson 4 ways: Part I-IV", "Homesteads", and "Homesteads: Part I & II".

In his machinima film entitled "Metropolis: Part I-III", he uses the game SimCity Societies to construct three imaginary psychological zones which undermine the logic of the game to create a meditative space for reflection, seduction and poetic, apocalyptic reverie. Abstraction, repetition, the grid, and architecture all play their role in the actual town planning strategies of cities throughout the world in order to produce territory and the modern civilized society. Within the narrative of the film, dystopian and sublime, gated estates merge and dissolve into one another and are subjected to natural disasters, conjuring up disturbing comparisons between our real, lived experience and the day-to-day spectacle of mediated trauma.

In another machinima film entitled "Michael Jackson 4 ways: Part I-IV", Howlett questions the slippery position the viewer inhabits to make informed, truth based decisions with the personal information they encounter online. This experience is further complicated, when these personal and moral online statements take their final form in the depoliticized realm of entertainment and video games. Where does one locate one's moral and ethical decisions based on Jackson's aesthetics?

In 2010 he founded the Queensland Centre for Contemporary Art which is a collaborative performance project that discursively realizes its curatorial art projects within institutional and community partnerships and is currently lecturing in Sculpture at the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane, Australia. Upcoming, in 2012 he is part of major group exhibition that is in development to be held at the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles surveying Australian artists links to the United States curated by Max Presneill.