October 1996
The largest festival in the world for modern and new dance, Copenhagen’s 4th International Dancin’ City was grand, eclectic and provocatively programmed. It proved to be a success despite enormous competition in a city inundated with performance (Copenhagen is European Cultural Capital for 1996). Despite mutterings about the death of European festivals, blockbuster survival tactics were replaced with a bid towards totality.
An intense spectrum moved from the pure dance of Merce Cunningham to Jérôme Bel’s ultra reflective Anti-Dance, creating a feeling of a ‘classless’ festival where obscure and risky work was presented alongside big budget quality product. The emphasis was not only on interdependence but also on the presentation of history and process— perhaps an extension of Scandinavian democracy or maybe a clear strategy for a dialogue between artists, theorists, critics and audiences and for a future multiplicity of works and forms.
The Merce Cunningham Company (US) was overwhelming. Five divergent pieces from the latest five years of Cunningham’s 50 years of work, were challenging and extremely demanding, leaving the dancers perpetually at the edge of their technique. The most recent work, Rondo (1996), is fresh, ingenious and provocative.
Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker (Belgium), with her renowned company Rosas, presented two new works. Rosas Danst Rosas is the company’s first and now famous minimalist performance from 1983. Four women confront three basic forms of lying, sitting and standing over two hours. Emotional narrative is placed within a conceptual framework that paradoxically both enhances and cuts its intent. It is a repetitive, teeth-grinding and mature tour de force that is without compromise. The second, de Keersmaeker’s latest piece, Mozart/Concert Arias, is a splendiferous homage to Mozart with a 34-piece orchestra on original instruments, three opera singers and the company’s 13 dancers. It is a beautiful, humorous and abundant work that maintains a contemporary insistence within its 90s meta-staging.
Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (US) presented three pieces. Having once epitomised the legend of the brilliantly athletic modern dancer, the reverence for youth and muscle is unfortunately still maintained. Nevertheless Bill T’s passion carries through and the company itself exudes great warmth. Unfortunately, his working around Kurt Schwitters’ UrSonata is a travesty of a pivotal work. The languages are far apart and this simplistic misconception proved their incompatibility.
With superbly technical dancers, massive high-production capability and Phillipe Guillotel as costume designer, Philippe Decouflé’s work Decodex (France) was extremely popular and a captivating success. An upstaged circus enchantment as opposed to a ‘dance piece’, it leaves one with that Andrew Lloyd Webber feeling and a sense of the baroque epitome of ‘Frenchness.’
Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara and his company Karas performed I was Real—Documents. Other than some quite beautiful suspended moments at the beginning, the work had a tendency towards a muscle-bound hyperactivity alongside its strong Japanese spatial aesthetics. Some delicate and complex choreographic patterns juxtaposed a resonant presentation of stillness—even if a deeper relation to emptiness and to space was not so forthcoming.
Non-director, non-choreographer catalyst Alain Patel and the Flemish company Les Ballets C de la B composed a brilliant, chaotic cacophony La Tristeza Complice. As the men piss in their trousers, boys beat up mental cases and young girl dancers are molested alongside the rocketing tempo of a North African break-dancer with wings and a ballet pastiche on roller-skates, what comes across is a sense of quiet, reckless but insistent observation. The piece has an animal-breathing as each vivid dancer seethes in and out of the suspended mass which is further swelled by Dick Van der Harst’s arrangement of Purcell set to a magnificent gendarmerie of 10 harmonica accordions plus a superb solo soprano.
Sasha Waltz & Guests (Germany) presented the entire Travelogue series of performances, which were very popular. The work is humorous, entertaining and well produced which, combined with a quirky if at times overriding heterosexuality, assures absolute success.
A double evening event with three solo works by José Navas (Venezuela) and a single group work by Quasar Companhia de Dança (Brazil) also drew large audiences. The youthful and sensitive ballet-defined duende of Navas combined well with the raw, humorous and temperamental choreography of the Quasar’s punk-street feel.
Wayne McGregor & Random Dance Co (UK) has been hailed as the “New English Thing.” The work is young, exuberant, fast and frantic but lacking in the weight and the coolness required to achieve clarity. When the dancers are stretched to their very best, one is reminded of Molissa Fenley’s ‘hyperdance.’ But within these repetitions there is not the same rigorous commitment to a danced continuum as presented by Fenley in her stunning solo at the ‘94 festival.
The young French choreographer Jérôme Bel presented Anti-Dance; two quiet, slow and committed one-hour works. Via the symbolic exchange of objects in the first piece and actions in the second, they confirmed, antagonised or metaphorised typical dance structures. These provocatively programmed works would normally be described as performance art. Although arguably ‘anti-dance’ they were decisively moved and powerful.
Our own work, Epilogue to Compression, was a 12-hour piece aiming at a summation of Compression 100 (Sydney, May 96). The final hour, presented within a theatre, was very definitely a hybrid piece, cutting and slicing between narrative and non-narrative, performance and dance. It received a mixed response with the durational aspect most clearly understood by the visual arts field.
Owing to our own involvement we were unable to cover the strong Latin grouping as well as a number of Scandinavian works: Tango El Gran Baile (Argentina) from Buenos Aires, and Europe’s leading flamenco group La Familia Farrucca (Spain). From Scandinavia Tero Saarinen (Finland) and Ingun BjØrnsgaard (Norway) presented well-received, disciplined postmodern works. From Denmark, a large number of local artists represented different trends within the Danish dance scene: Anders Christiansen’s intense, idiosyncratic work is predominantly butoh-inspired. Tim Feldman’s first larger-scale collaborative work, with dancers from Venezuela, Cuba and USA, integrated postmodern dance with video images. Bysteps was a showcase of short works by six independence Danish choreographers (Jens Bjerregaard, Kamilla Brekling, Lene Boel, Anne Katrine Kalmoes, Lene Østergaard and Mikala Lage) ranging over the various streams of postmodern into new dance area. The Paradox Event staged a beach ballet, while Transform is a prominent, annual event where Danish and international choreographers present site-specific group work in often fascinating environments. This third festival presented Mehmet Sander (US/Turkey), Kitt Johnson (Denmark), Motionhouse (UK) and Bo Madvig (Denmark).
In bringing together the varying trends of contemporary work from around the world, the festival showed a strong sense of commitment to a forum for dialogue rather than just to the presentation of confirmed product. This insistence is a challenge and, for dance/performance junkies, the entire festival was a solid shot in the arm.
Performers Tess de Quincey and Stuart Lynch are based in Copenhagen and Sydney. Dancin’ City, Copenhagen, August 1-18 1996
RealTime issue #15 Oct-Nov 1996 pg. 5
From the 50th Edinburgh Festival and Fringe, Benedict Andrews conjures performances by Wilson, Bausch, Stein, Chaikin, Netherlands Dance Theatre, Hakutobo, Zofia Kalinska and Teatr Podrozy
In order to celebrate the 50th birthday of Edinburgh Festival, director Brian McMasters invited a core of elite theatre and dance artists to present works. As a young director this was a rare opportunity to see my heroes in action—Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, Peter Stein and Robert LePage. With the cancellation of LePage’s Elsinore due to equipment failure and of Neil Bartlett’s Seven Sacraments due to illness, the Festival lost two of its brightest young stars. Their works promised a questioning of the boundaries of theatre and a meshing of performance with other forms—cinema and digital technology in Elsinore and the visual arts in Seven Sacraments. The Festival, instead, became a display of established auteurs.
The high priest of hi-tech aestheticism, Robert Wilson brought two productions that showed the present extremities of his work and a seeming fascination with the Modernist textuality via the high-fiction of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the playful, heavenly landscapes of the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson Four Saints in Three Acts. Both productions were abstract and mesmeric. Orlando was a minimalist chiaroscuro composition with an epic solo performance from Miranda Richardson, and Four Saints a lollipop landscape saturated with cartoon colours and filled with flying sheep, elegant giraffes, punk acrobats and a chorus of sartorial saints and vaudeville comperes.
Orlando is a fascinating exemplar of Wilson’s recent experiments with narrative showing his refusal to illustrate text or display conventional emotion. Instead he writes a parallel text with gesture, architecture and light, which forces the audience to drop below the narrative and let its dream logic unfold. Woolf’s fantastical tale about a young lord who lives through 350 years of history and finds himself transformed into a woman is perfect fodder for Wilson’s explorations of time’s passing and history’s images. Orlando is performed by Richardson with androgynous tension and physical and vocal precision. Her voice is amplified giving it a mediated resonance and an alien-like quality. As words pile on top of words in her two-hour monologue, Richardson’s voice and Woolf’s language are fused into an independent and mercurial texture. Hans Peter Kuhn’s meticulous sound design allows Orlando’s voice to shift through speakers placed throughout the auditorium further accentuating the character’s disembodiment. Wilson’s lighting design draws inspiration from German Expressionist films and early Hollywood. At the beginning the stage is black, a light picks out the back of Richardson’s head for a moment, fades to black again, then lights her hand only. Parts of her body seem to float. Wilson continues to make light a performer throughout the piece, often using it to play with appearances and disappearances central to the questionings of identity and sexuality in the text. The light is always sculptural with tight follow spots lighting Richardson’s face, making her seem like a haunted Greta Garbo.
The space is a cross between minimalist painting and magic show. Wilson flies various gauzes and curtains to change compositions, creating chambers and multiple horizon lines. He also uses the set as a sequence of indices, which play with scale and meaning. A miniature automated door pops up through the floor to represent Orlando’s suitor, opening and closing in response to her questions. When Orlando changes into a woman, s/he does so behind a giant polished metal tree trunk which has slowly flown in. This phallic joke and pun on theatrical conventions demonstrates Wilson’s oblique and playful dramaturgy. His Orlando uses form to interrogate language and subjectivity. Richardson’s performance moulded into Wilson’s statuesque choreography shows the impact of history and time on the body.
Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s cubist opera Four Saints in Three Acts provides Wilson with a language that converges with his own use of autistic text, allowing him to create hallucinatory landscapes. He calls the piece “a meditation on the joy of life.” It is a series of free-associative pictures as various saints graze in a day-glo heaven. Snow falls on white cutout palm trees, biplanes fly by, angel statues drop in and giraffes bow their heads. It is classic make-of-it-what-you-will Wilson surrealism culminating with a ‘mansion of heaven’ (a giant white architectural model suspended above the stage) bursting into flames as the saints on stage hold miniature models in their hands. These are the light and beautiful ‘souls’ reflected on by Wilson and Stein in their meditation on saintliness, or ‘genius’ if you like.
Peter Stein’s production of Uncle Vanya with the Teatro di Roma and Teatro di Parma was the closest the Festival came to a well-made play (with the exception of Botho Strauss’ wonderfully well-unmade play Time and the Room presented by Nottingham Playhouse). Uncle Vanya is a masterpiece of orchestration combining passionate realism, hyper-naturalistic design and an ever-present soundscape, which highlights Stein’s inspired use of silence. Over three and a half hours he creates a terrifying passage of time within which the characters’ gradual disintegration and painful tearing of illusions are played out. The performances from the cast of handpicked Italian actors are detailed, yet elastic. Each character proceeds blindly from an unresolvable, unknowable lack; the impossibility of resolution fused with an acute awareness of the body’s aging creates a slow dance of death. Stein sees the play as containing the embryonic symptoms of all the systems and neuroses of the twentieth century. In this way his exacting analysis and evocation of the emotional lives of Chekov’s Russian bourgeois becomes an exploration of our own fin-de-siecle malaise.
Pina Bausch’s dance-opera of Gluck’s Iphigenia auf Taurus is also embryonic in that it was one of her first works created in Wuppertal in 1973. Re-presenting this early work shows her choreography when it was less a deconstruction of dance and the economy of desire and more aligned to narrative. It is an atavistic, emotionally raw piece obsessed with machinations of history and rituals of power. The opera soloists are placed in the gilded boxes of the theatre while the chorus sings from the pit. The dancers alone occupy the stage—a cavernous post-industrial chamber of beaten metal (into which, at times, the lighting rig is flown turning the tools of the theatre into instruments of imprisonment and torture). The libretto is a complex Greek tale of exile, enslavement, human sacrifice and death’s door family reunion. The representation of the barbaric state shows the influence of Heiner Müller’s catastrophic scenographies. The ruler, Thoas, a brutal and shadowy man with a shaved head enters doing a jerky, angular dance and wearing a giant leather trench coat. He disappears behind a hanging sheet and emerges without the coat, which is revealed standing of its own accord, a heavy, oppressive symbol. He is followed everywhere by a disturbing couple, an immaculately dressed bald man who stands downstage staring into the audience (our representative?) and a small, broken woman bedecked with jewels who carries a box of dirt which she smears over her face. The man repeatedly lifts her up forcing her collapsing body into submission. In this opera, Bausch reflects the deformed audience of patriarchy, while the story of mythic exiles begs us to love.
Other dance I saw in the Festival program included the Martha Graham Company, Netherlands Dans Theatre (who will be at the Melbourne Festival in October) and Hakutobo’s Renyo. Unfortunately the Martha Graham programme of works reconstructed from between 1918 and 1944 felt like a creaky and reverential museum piece. It seems Saint Martha has been canonised and her devotees have maintained the shape of her works, but lost the soul. Netherlands Dans Theatre’s programs, however, were fresh and provocative. Jiri Kylian’s ‘black and white’ works in particular are stark and intense, full of funky geometrics, seamless movement and erotic rituals. Bella Figura is a dance about performance and the space between dream and waking.
Vast open spaces are created with corridors of light, or the proscenium height and width is enlarged and reduced by black curtains to play with our gaze and the liminal zone between performer and audience. In one sequence two women naked, except for scarlet corselettes, are imprisoned by the curtain’s frame. They shyly and exquisitely come ever so close to caressing each other, but instead set each other in motion. The dance is razor sharp: robotic jolts, twitching limbs, slides and torsos twisted into impossible contortions. Kylian creates beautiful and provocative hieroglyphics.
Hakutobo is one of my favourite butoh companies and I enjoyed seeing their work Renyo—Far from the Lotus again. It is a complex and subtle work which elaborates on the jizo: stone statues of children found throughout Japan which are carved anonymously and placed by the roadside or rice paddy, left exposed to the rain, wind and snow. The dancers perform their decay and mutation. Akeno (whose outstanding performance is the core of the work) dances the body in perpetual flux, electrified, not moving but moved. She shudders and shimmers, seems to be a tiny infant all-agog and then an impossibly old woman or even a corpse decaying into the elements: becoming an-Other body.
Amongst the whirligig of the Fringe several productions demonstrated the raw power of the best of the Festival shows. Seeing Joseph Chaikin perform Beckett’s Texts for Nothing in the gutted shell of a Gothic church is an experience I will never forget. Beckett’s texts—about the body’s struggle with itself, with articulation, with the experience of nothingness and its attempts to remember—resonated in Chaikin’s own experience of losing speech and body control due to a stroke some years ago. [The sound of] his live, stuttering, struggling tongue was interspersed with an analogue recording of the texts made pre-stroke which was clear, controlled and precise creating an unmendable schizophrenia between past and present which absolutely echoed Beckett’s writing.
A similar solo performance of burning presence was given by Polish actress Zofia Kalinska (formerly of Kantor’s Cricot Theatre) in If I am Medea. Performed in a dark, filthy, ramshackle basement with a grilled window looking out onto a patch of ultra-green weeds and sunlight, the piece was a ‘séance’ in which Kalinska compared her life with Medea’s. Howard Barker’s production of his chamber play Judith performed by the Wrestling School (a company dedicated to his work) generated the collisions of sheer beauty and cruelty that his Theatre of Catastrophe requires.
Polish performance group Teatr Podrozy’s Carmen Funebre was a haunting and violent requiem about civil war and genocide. In the sombre courtyard of the university buildings they created a deeply moving physical theatre spectacle. ‘Civilians’ are searched out amongst the crowd by menacing masked figures on stilts who strip, separate and brutalise them. The piece is most powerful when it becomes a mourning for the dead—the performers each carefully carrying a tiny paper house with a pale flame burning inside, offering words of hope to the audience in broken English until tying balloons to the houses and watching them fly away into the Edinburgh night like prayers.
It was a Festival (and if you looked hard enough, a Fringe) of virtuoso theatre artists whose works demonstrated their mastery and maturity. Their works were a distillation and vivification of their careers—idiosyncratic, technically excellent and containing beautiful, disturbing images which burned the retina. The next generation of renegades (as these artists had once been) sadly cancelled or were ignored.
RealTime issue #15 Oct-Nov 1996 pg. 6
Sound is catching up with multimedia, or rather multimedia is catching up with sound. This was one of the impressions left by the Seventh International Symposium On Electronic Art (ISEA96) held in Rotterdam in September. Although sound in multimedia was not a privileged theme at the symposium, it made its presence felt (as always, both literally and figuratively) during the week of conference discussion and artistic events.
While most attention—and funding—has so far been directed to the visual field of text and graphics, the potential of sound in the multimedia interface is becoming increasingly evident. The one conference paper to directly address this issue was presented by Sean Cubitt, from John Moores University in Liverpool. Sound, “the repressed partner in most areas of audiovisual space”, has for the most part been under-used at the interface, filling the roles of vocal instruction or musical mood-enhancer. Cubitt argued that the reliance on the visual has produced an impoverished interface, based on the office design of typewriter and monitor. The resultant emphasis on individual experience is also a limitation, Cubitt pointed out, extending the user’s sense of disappointment at the multimedia experience into the field of networked communication.
Cubitt’s paper, “Online Sound and Virtual Architecture”, posited sound as a potential remaker of the interface. In contrast to the individuated screen, sound has always constituted a social space. It is both more communal and more subversive. (This latter characteristic was attested to by audience members accustomed to working under audiovisual surveillance at high-tech research centres: workers will tolerate video surveillance but will turn off the audio, leaving them free to mutter to colleagues while preserving a dutiful facial expression.)
While Cubitt’s proposal remains idealistic due to current technical limitations to online sound, it is, as he hoped, an inspiration to move between “what we currently have and the possibilities which constitute any possible future”. Large-scale interfaces mediated through sound would be collaborative practices, stretching across actual and virtual dimensions.
If a prototype for this ideal interface exists, it would be something like Anonymous Muttering, the latest project from Knowbotic Research. This striking installation was part of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival, running concurrently with ISEA96. Built on top of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, it could be heard from many blocks away. Drawn in by the booming electronic sound, listeners could also use their visual sense to locate the site. Pulses of light were flashing around the apparatus, which could be reached by climbing up to the roof. Standing inside this large audio-visual field was an intense experience, to say the least. Intoxicating or disorientating, or both: responses depend on your reactions to strobe light, ferocious sound, and a forced disconnection between mind and body. It was like having parts of yourself separated and scattered around the force-field of sound and light.
Such a dismembering experience had its parallel in the construction of this electronic event. The Knowbotics team took sounds produced by various DJs at party events, processing them in real time into fragments of digital information. This digital material could be manipulated by visitors to the installation by means of a tactile interface: a silicon membrane. This pliable, transparent device could be bent and folded, as it was passed around like contraband at a party. The result: the sounds shooting around the apparatus were bent and folded in sympathy, and the strobe light was also triggered. As both the speakers and light-banks encircled the installation, the visitor was wrapped in an audio-visual felt of their own (partial) making.
But there’s more! There were other inputs to the sound and light show. The digital material could also be manipulated via an interface on the website, and could be followed live with RealAudio software. With so many at the controls, it’s impossible to determine who produces which effects. Anonymous Muttering is a communal interactive space, operating on both virtual and actual planes.
If the Knowbotics project was the most challenging application of virtual and audio technologies, other works exhibited in Rotterdam made more modest contributions. Anyone walking up the steps to the World Trade Centre, the central ISEA96 site, was confronted by A Music Machine Balancing at the Edge of Order and Chaos. This work by Peter Bosch and Simone Simons, otherwise entitled The Electric Swaying Orchestra, comprised six parametrically forced pendulums—that is, pendulums made to swing in unpredictable motions. Each pendulum had either a microphone or loudspeaker attached to its end; a computer controlled both the electro-motors driving the pendulums and the musical process. However, because irregularity is built into the pendulums’ movements, the musical output is also unpredictable. The computer interprets the sounds received by the three swaying microphones, playing notes through the speakers in response. As a result, the computer, as its programmers put it, is “constantly listening and responding to itself”.
This injection of chaos into the digital order of a computer-operated system is now a familiar element of the electronic arts. In defiance of the military-industrial precision expected of such systems, artists introduced a dose of anarchy which is itself now becoming predictable through overuse. The Knowbotics project at least pushed beyond the order/chaos paradigm; its multiple inputs played across the terrain of will and chance, with an unfolding audio text of unknowable authorship.
Enigmatic authorship of audio works was one of the topics pursued by Heidi Grundmann in her presentation to ISEA, “Radio The Next Century”. Austria’s Kunstradio is now on-line, vigorously promoting Internet radio through such projects as Family Auer, a sitcom on radio and internet. The writing is done by a host of “pool authors”, while the narrative is also shaped by internet users. Other telematic radio-events include the composition of a multimedia music score, with the presiding composer collecting samples offered by other composers on line. Radio The Ne(x)t Century is a project instigated by two Swiss artists whose fictional premise is of a disastrous web crash, leaving SOS TNC to webcast for surviving fragments of debris. This and other ongoing works revel in the demise of the finished work of art; bits and pieces are re-contextualised into ever-shifting amalgams.
A similar project using more modest technology was articulated by Ian Pollock and Janet Silk: phone-based art. Although it’s seldom mentioned, the phone was the first instrument of cyberspace, generating many of the effects now claimed for the internet. Its democratising network cuts across space, class and race, without excluding the poor and computer-illiterate. As well, being built on the voice, it is an extremely intimate mode of communication. As the two speakers pointed out, attempts to market “picturephones”, active in the US since 1927, have always failed: the addition of visuals would destroy all of these advantages. Pollock and Silk have instigated several phone-art projects from their San Francisco base, deploying group phone links, voice mail and other techniques. The phone, they assert, is one network guaranteed to permeate social structures.
Back in the actual world of Rotterdam, several installation works added the sense of touch to the audio-visual dimensions. The physicality of sound found a partner, in these cases, in the pleasure of getting your hands on the works. The most intriguing was Jaap de Jong’s Crystal Ball. Sticking out invitingly from a portal in the gallery wall, this glass ball responded to touch by producing a flurry of images and sounds taken from live TV channels. Mixed by computer, the images were spread across many small lenses, the sounds were shards of contemporary culture. Confusing at first, this work was an enchanting kaleidoscope in three senses.
Jill Scott’s installation Frontiers of Utopia also added the tactile sense to image and sound. Its eight female characters converse with each other, and the visitor, across time; extra interest is added by the invitation to use real, old-fashioned objects like keys to invoke certain responses. While the work is let down by the banality of some of the monologues, the interface is an engaging use of touch and sound, in particular.
There were other works on display which foregrounded sound, but these I’ve described were the most effective. The concert performances at this ISEA were disappointing, with only Mari Kimura maintaining her usual high standard in new works for violin and interactive computer. The most interesting aspect, from an audio perspective, was the impression that sound is hovering in the multimedia background, waiting to make its presence more sharply felt.
RealTime issue #15 Oct-Nov 1996 pg. 10
Jon McCormack, Turbulence
“the object is that through which we mourn ourselves”
Jean Baudrillard
The rise of the cabinet of curiosities, or wunderkammer, in 17th and 18th century Europe brought with it a keen interest in the collecting of natural history specimens and exotica. Prompted in part by colonial expansion and the establishment of trading routes into the New World, the collection and display, study and scientific classification of rare and unusual plants, seeds, shells, rocks and exotic fauna offered a microcosmic glimpse of the natural world to the viewer. Computer artist Jon McCormack’s Turbulence: an interactive museum of unnatural history likewise offers contemporary viewers a glimpse into a strange and exotic world. Unlike the traditional wunderkammer, however, Turbulence proposes a digital alternative in which computer-generated organisms inhabit the virtual space of Artificial Life.
Known as AL to its adherents, Artificial Life aims to replicate biological evolutionary patterns within the computer via simple numerical codes or algorithms, the digital equivalent of DNA. Computer scientist Christopher Langton describes this process succinctly:
“Artificial Life is the study of man-made systems that exhibit behaviours characteristic of natural living systems. It complements the traditional biological sciences concerned with the analysis of living organisms by attempting to synthesise life-like behaviours within computers and other artificial media. By extending the empirical foundation upon which biology is based beyond the carbon-chain life that has evolved on Earth, Artificial Life can contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be.” Christopher Langton, Artificial Life
Artificial Life is premised upon the notion of life as dynamic form rather than material embodiment, taking a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the modelling of its organisms. That is, it starts with simple, recursive rules out of which more complex structures can then evolve, branch out and randomly mutate. This represents an alternative strategy to that often taken in traditional biology, which works downwards from organic complexity to underlying simplicity in search of the so-called ‘building blocks’ of life.
While the study of Artificial Life is by no means new in itself and can be linked to the emergence of cybernetics in the late 1940s, the development of more recent high-end computer systems has enabled both scientists and artists to experiment with the many possibilities it offers. McCormack’s work represents one instance of this, the results of which are both conceptually rigorous and visually startlingly beautiful. Other contemporaries in the field include English computer artist William Latham and American Karl Sims.
Turbulence takes the form of a video laserdisc upon which a menagerie of synthesised organisms, exhibiting life-like behavioural patterns, are stored. Images are accessed by a touch-screen computer and projected via an overhead projector onto a large screen before the viewer. Echoing conventional systems of biological classification, life forms are grouped thematically into five imaginary realms entitled ‘Signals’, ‘Flow’, ‘Spaces’, ‘Organisms’ and ‘Metaroom’. Almost 30 minutes of computer-generated animation is accessible through these groupings, each sequence representing a particular organism and its environs. Thus we see a pulsating, translucent creature with thread-like tentacles in an aquatic garden, a strange, ant-like creature scuttling through the sands of an imaginary desert and a livid green plant splitting open in a sudden, violent burst to project its spores into the cosmos. An evocative soundtrack by the artist accompanies each sequence, adding to the overall impact of the work. Within the constructed world of Turbulence, nature is both beautiful and terrible, meditative and destructive.
Writing about Turbulence McCormack has described the work as dual lament and celebration:
A lament for things now gone. A celebration of the beauty to come, and the fact that we can appreciate and create it (Turbulence) heralds a new evolutionary landscape made possible by technology: a digital poiesis. Jon McCormack, The Beauty to Be
The rapid destruction of the natural world which we inhabit, coupled with the desire to establish alternative spaces for beauty and contemplation, is a driving force behind the creation of Turbulence. Alternatively, it is the ability to create forms so close to, yet so dissimilar from ‘nature’ as we know it that motivates the production of the work. As one recent publication suggests, we are living in an age when nature teeters on extinction yet, at the same time, its exact definition as a category of representation becomes increasingly problematic (G. Robertson et al eds, Future Natural: Nature, science, culture). Endlessly reproduced and analysed, mediated by technology, economy and politics, what constitutes nature anyway?
Created over a three-year period between 1991-94 with financial assistance from the Australian Film Commission, Turbulence is the recipient of several international multimedia and film awards. It has been exhibited at the 1995 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Montreal, the 8th Tepia Multimedia Art exhibition in Tokyo, the Berlin Interfilm Festival and at ACM Siggraph in Orlando, Florida. The work was previewed before Australian audiences in 1995 at the Australian Film Commission conference The Filmmaker and Multimedia: Narrative and Interactivity and has since been exhibited at the the Ian Potter Gallery, The University of Melbourne Museum of Art, in 1995 and at Science Works Museum. Turbulence was displayed at the Ian Potter Gallery in a large, darkened amphitheatre, next to which a room of dimly lit zoological specimens provided an eerie biological counterpoint to the synthesised creatures of the interactive.
Audiences in Sydney also have the opportunity to view Turbulence between 5-20 October at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where it is accompanied by two film screenings on the 5th and 12th. Collectively entitled Elastic Light: an international retrospective of computer animation, the screenings have been coordinated by the Sydney Intermedia Network (SIN) with individual works selected by McCormack. Many of the works included within these screenings have never been seen by Australian audiences. The seminal 1969 documentary Experiments in Motion Graphics, based upon the work of animation pioneer John Whitney Snr, forms the centrepiece around which a selection of more recent works are assembled. Animations by Australians Ian Haig and John Tonkin can be seen alongside Michelle Robinson’s When I was Six (USA), Kazuma Morino’s Stripe Box (Japan) and Ian Bird’s acclaimed Pet Shop Boys video clip, Liberation (UK).
As a philosophical meditation upon nature and its multiplex forms, Turbulence questions traditional definitions: what constitutes life and how can we define it? As ‘digital poiesis’, it represents a unique and breathtaking fusion of sound, imagery and poetry.
Jon McCormack, Turbulence, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Oct 5-20
RealTime issue #15 Oct-Nov 1996 pg. 18
Mark Dery’s perceptively written Escape Velocity is a welcome addition to the growing list of new media publications. It is unique on a number of aesthetic, cultural and technological fronts. Most significantly, it is a comprehensive overview of computer culture, incisively x-raying the myths of the many different digital subcultures that constitute techno-culture more broadly. In this critical sense, Dery’s book is a first: nowhere else (in book form) will the reader encounter the complex historical, mythic and cultural configurations of the cyber-hippies, New Agers, techno-pagans, Extropians, rogue technologists and so on—groups which have substantially contributed to our wired world of ‘terminal identity’ (Scott Bukatman). Dery has done his vital historical spadework, and this is one of the book’s more enduring accomplishments.
