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For over 20 years, RealTime has provided a space for thoughtful and constructive critical discussion of innovative and experimental contemporary art in Australia and around the world. Now we’re a creative space too: an online habitat for new video, sound, music and media art. With support for art spaces and art-making in Australia dwindling, we hope that this online gallery space will help foster the works of artists deserving of an audience.

For our first Gallery showing, we’ve commissioned four Australian video artists to respond to the provocation “Almost Doco.” One of the most interesting streams of video art today inclines to the visual language of documentary cinema. While the visual arts and cinema have long been in dialogue, the artists in Almost Doco have made works that, by letting traditional narrative fall away, both meet and deliberately fall short of the documentary form. Beyond their lateral use of conventions—dialogue, interviews, voiceover, re-creation, mise-en-scène—the artists here share an intense curiosity about the inner lives of people and the places they inhabit, seeing them through a more open-ended and impressionistic lens than narrative documentary storytelling usually allows.

Lauren Carroll Harris, curator