Michael Prior is a media artist working with extended performance and installation. He’s interested in combining old and new media forms to investigate audience perception, participation and social corruption. Works usually involve chance, improvisation and recontextualisation. He’s exhibited work in Australia, Germany, Taiwan and the UK.

A recent project Split Reel invites participants to control surround sound and light in a space transformed into a large instrument. It is currently on show at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts.

Headmuzak was developed in 2006 as part of a studio residency at Firstdraft, Sydney and bastardises household objects such as bathroom taps, cleaning fluid, polystyrene, radios, tiled white structures and
speaker cones. The inertness of the subject matter is subverted by the new context. Headmuzak looks at human nature’s ability to pervert and express itself when contained by strict social and fundamental religious codes.

AV works such as a recent piece for Scratch explore narrative subjects and seek to combine elements of performance, installation and expanded cinema. The collaborative and site-specific nature of such work creates new and immersive experiences for an audience.

Michael graduated from Media Arts at RMIT in 2005 and is co-director of Melbourne ARI Tape Projects. He is currently completing the soundtrack for a new Australian feature film Up For Grabs.

http://www.asianartbiennial.org/english/artist.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8uFvC3k8w4
http://forepaw.org/headmuzak.php