For the 2025 LARGE conference, Ronan McCrea will introduce and screen a digital re-presentation of his 16mm work Film Material (2016). This is a hand made film-work splicing salvaged instructional films and drawing on tropes of 1970s avant-garde Structural Film to re-constitute the literal and figurative fragments into new formations, and affinities between pedagogy, avant-garde film and the shared desire for subject formation. This work was the most concrete artistic result of doctoral research completed five years previously.
Film Material is screened with the intention to resonate with the conference’s reflections on issue of evaluation. McCrea proposes attention also be paid to the (non-institutional) value and evaluation of doctoral and artistic research over the longer duration of artistic development, where outcomes, connections and breakthroughs have a necessarily uneven development.