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C A T H Y .V O G A N Media Artist / Academic / Journalist Executive Producer at Consortium News
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“Your work escapes all logical categories, including such stable
categories as body/mind, reason/madness, normal/abnormal, nature/culture,
pleasure/need, female/male. It caresses jouissance; a bliss without clear
outlines, an orgasm without a body; it laughs at reason and makes fun of its
prudent categories. I am a poet and I rely upon words, but your work leaves me
tongue-tied, jumping up and down gesturing hysterically. Your work has no need
of words, it simply shows and does not tell; it highlights a place beyond the
Symbolic and its fascist structures. It shows another place woven in lace. Your
work makes nonsense of structuralism and its obsessive search to reduce
everything to deciphered structures and symbolic transactions. It puts under
suspicion philosophy's grand claim to be a master discourse, a universal
meta-discourse, that tells the undeniable story of Reason to all times and all
people. Your work tiptoes around such skiting hierarchies, and is a concrete
flight from representation, that subverts, disturbs the categories, and the
perceptual and moral "certainties" that rely upon it.”
JOHN NAJJARR, Poet.... [on Vogan's MIMOSIS, a video opera performed live at Melbourne International Film Festival 2009 ]
B I O G R A P H Y
Cathy Vogan is a journalist, film-maker, musician and media artist who has shown her award-winning work throughout the world, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Brazil, the USA and Australia. She works as a journalist and executive producer for CONSORTIUM NEWS in Washington DC, and resides in Sydney. Cathy is the author and film-maker behind the flicker-blog THING2THING.COM, a WikiLeaks related journal she began in 2010. Her artist's website VOGANIA.COM covers 30 years of creative production, and spans across two websites documenting her early work and activities to date. Cathy's vintage French site CHEZ-ALICE, was created in 1996 and developed over about 7 years. It was rated in Google’s Top 40 Arts Alternative, with the descriptive "strange web design".
Born in Ireland into a musical family, and raised
there until adolescence, Cathy Vogan - aka CaTV - was a child singer in
the theatre and cabaret and won two major British
talent awards before she was 10. As a student, Vogan won two national awards, from Alliance Franciase and the Goethe Institute, but
after a restless four-year university education in English, Foreign Languages, Psychology,
Mathematics and Philosophy, her attention shifted to IT where she worked for five years; and theatre. She concurrently studied at the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney under the tutelage of Zika Nester and Hayes Gordon.
In 1982 she began another 4 years of study at Sydney College of the
Arts, culminating in a Bachelor of Art degree. In her third year she won the first of 8 video awards for the film 'DEAR ME', at the 1986
Australian Video Festival, which lauched her career as an artist. The following year, Vogan
represented Australia in the same festival at Sydney’s
Roslyn Oxley Gallery, with her video installation: ‘Australia Is…’.
Receiving offers, she went to live in Paris for 16 years where she co-founded, with French artist Dominik Barbier, an art-and-broadcast post-production facility called FEARLESS STUDIOS.
Having an in-house broadcast facility enabled Vogan
and Barbier to create a vast oeuvre of award-winning films, installations, and
live events for a French and international audience.
Vogan's film 'METHUSELAH' - a collaborative work with the dancer, actor and choreographer, Ernest Berk - received special recognition from the jury at Berlin Videofest 1993.
"A sensitive portrait by Cathy Vogan of the dancer Ernest Berk at over eighty years of age. His body, his wrinkles, his views on old-age and sexuality, his zest for life link up with a reflection on time from both a biographical and a scientific viewpoint. Experience and wisdom has gathered in the wrinkles of the skin just as in the warped bark of ancient trees. The recent death of Ernest Berk makes this approach to him as Methuselah, the magician of life, a final poetic document of the times."
MEDIAN KUNST ARCHIVE 2003.... [ on 'Methuselah', laureate of Videofest 1993 ]
Vogan's film 'THE SYNCHRONIZER' won both the Sudwestfunk Videokunstpreis Production Award and the Grand Prix de Palermo at Video Leggere in 1997.
Within the context of her years at Fearless, Vogan produced and collaborated with many other
artists, writers, filmmakers, composers and choreographers; such as Alain
Renais, Pierre Schaeffer, Moebius, Julia Kristeva, TERRY GILLIAM (for 'The Making of Brazil'), Robert Longo and Orlan.
Among Vogan’s numerous awards to date: the 1993 Berlin Videofest
award for the film ‘METHUSELAH’; both the Video Leggere Grand Prix of Palermo, and the Videokunstpreis in 1997 for ‘THE SYNCHRONIZER’; the Amnesty
International Freedom Art Award (Critic’s Choice) in 2006 for the interactive video sculpture: ‘MENU, TITLE, RETURN’; and in 2010, a Platinum
Auddy award for her song “PARTY HARD'.
A C A D E M I C Vogan began her academic career in 1989, tutoring at the University
of Paris VIII, and was a lecturer at
the European School of Visual Arts for 5 years prior to returning to Australia in 2003. Other European
institutions that have welcomed her creative, hands-on variety of teaching
include the Ecole du Frenois in
Lille, and the Kunsthochschule in
Cologne. Vogan & Barbier's Fearless Studios also played host for the training of advanced students from the Parisian-based ESEC Ecole du Cinéma, and to many French and international artists, through annual funding from the DRAC (Direction des Arts Plastiques).
B R O A D C A S T
Cathy has worked in Australian broadcast both as a content producer of TVCs and documentaries, in various roles, and as 'Applications and Training Specialist'. In 2007, she was certified by Apple Australia as a broadcast trainer and began working with the Apple contractor SUPPORT PARTNERS in the role of creative trainer and post-production support for the ABC
nationwide and Disney
Australia, in collaboration with a team of engineers who were migrating the networks to the Apple platform.
M U S I C
In 2007 Vogan decided to revive the legendary industrial music group:
<SPK>, along with one original member, Tone Generator (aka Dominik Guerin). They were joined by K.Osmosis, a somewhat eccentric writer and performance artist, for
the band’s first release in 25 years: ‘DESPAIR’ - a partly archival DVD with web-links to the new <SPK>’s
ever expanding work-in-flux.
”SPK were sold out by one of their number, who turned the band
into a metal-bothering synth-pop outfit; now he's composing film-scores in
Hollywood, living it large in the belly of the beast. Yum Yum. That SPK are
over. But a new SPK has exploded, with the help of Cathy [Vogan], like dead
stars whose light is brighter than ever.” ORLANDO HARRISON, Alabama3[“THE SPIRIT SPEAKS”]
The 2007 <SPK> website contains a wealth of
previously unseen relics, including William S. Burrough’s original type-written notes for The Final Academy, and Vogan’s 1997 film: ‘100 Years of Cruelty’ with Julia Kristeva, on Antonin Artaud and the
Theatre of Cruelty. The ‘DESPAIR’ DVD was Tesco Records best-seller for over two years. M I M O S I S Cathy Vogan live at Melbourne International Film Festival 2009
Vogan writes 'Video-Operetta': In 2009, Cathy Vogan was invited by the Melbourne
International Film Festival to create a half-hour live show. She responded with: ‘MIMOSIS - On Method Acting, Mirror Neurons and Ogres', where she dissects the process of human attraction and its danger zones. Vogan used and synchronized four-screen video projection
with live action, musicians and story-telling. She composed the music and played multiple characters, male and female, old and young. She was joined onstage at the
Ding Dong Lounge in Melbourne by legendary jazz musician, George Washingmachine on violin, 'The Fox' on drums and guitar, and Alla Bekker on accordion. Onscreen
actors included SPK's K.Osmosis, Void Riot, Hobart Hughes and Mark Rogers.
In January 2010, Vogan released her debut album: 'MIMOSIS LIVE' and on DVD, 'MIMOSIS – DARK
MATTERS', in collaboration with K.Osmosis. And that was basically it for SPK. J O U R N A L I S M
In 2012, Vogan released 'THE WIKILEAKS TAPES' - a 24 part series of interviews and creative interactions with international celebrities and grass-roots supporters of Wikileaks. The line-up included luminaries such as Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and John Pliger, TV personalities... writers and artists... the Assange family... three QCs... and some inspired activists.
“The WikiLeaks phenomenon has shown us that a new form of journalism is possible. It has also shown just how full of Western corporate propaganda the mainstream media have become. The lengths that Vogan has gone to, as a completely unfunded solo operator, to make such an important contribution to the historical continuum is a case in point that independent citizen journalism is an indispensable tool for speaking the truth.” COLIN MIRGIS, Green Left Weekly [READ MORE]
Since 2014, Vogan produces POLITICS IN THE PUB, a weekly Sydney event that features talks from local and international speakers.
In 1992, Vogan and Barbier began a 3-year collaboration with the
German playwright, Heiner Muller, for the documentary ‘I was Hamlet’ (1993); and subsequently, for a large-scale stage
production of Muller’s play: ‘HAMLET MACHINE’, where Muller was to direct the actors. The 13-screen event, with 4
stages and a mostly live musical score, took 7 years to create, and was
performed - posthumously for Muller - in Amsterdam, Lyon and Marseille over
2002 and 2003.
Back in Australia, Cathy Vogan has worked harder and produced more art
and music than ever, and she has extended her activity beyond the university sector. Beginning in 2004 as a VFX and Digital Design Tutor at AFTRS (Australian Film, TV and Radio School), in 2005 she added to that the post of Lecturer in Digital Media at the UNSW
COFA (College of Fine Arts). During this time, Vogan continued to expand her knowledgebase in editing, compositing, 3D animation, and audio engineering, to gain creative autonomy as a “one-woman production team”. From 2013 and until the end of 2019, Cathy taught at the University of Western Sydney, the Sydney Internalional Film School, SAE Institute Brisbane and Sydney Film School, after which she moved into production and journalism with Consortium News.
As a broadcast designer, Vogan has
also brought home a number of memorable products, such as the “First
Australians” educational version, a 7-box DVD edition for the SBS network.
In April 2010, Vogan saw images from an Apache helicopter gunning down civilians in the streets of Bagdad, and veered immediately towards politics and journalism, initially as a blogger and from 2019, as a professional journalist. She was accredited by MEAA and the International Federation of Journalists in 2020 and has since reported live from the Julian Assange extradition hearings for Consortium News in Washington DC.
