Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

October 1997

If popular culture has an afterlife, I imagine it would look something like Trick or Treat. Trick or Treat is a kind of spectral limbo for pop ephemera. You know, like those “where are they now” shows. Mummified daleks, kewpie dolls, backyard swimming pool accessories all suggest themselves in what at first glance appears to be a perverse discotheque of the anthropomorphously challenged. The organic, lava-lamp shapes on the walls receive the projected images of ghoulish forms, in the process becoming smears of ectoplasmic residue. The spare use of the gallery space creates the impression of a 70s minimalist sculpture, though Carl Andre never dreamed of anything like this.

At an even deeper level (the spectral world is an n-dimensional space), Trick or Treat shores up the detritus of even older, dead media. 19th century slide and magic lantern shows, automata, phantasmagoria, the gothic novel. In this Trick or Treat is a timely reminder of the historical association of projection technologies and the spectral. It subtly demonstrates the intimate links between the supernatural, the paranormal and animation technologies, such as film, which are, in every sense of the word, mediums, bridges, or conduits between the living and the dead (the ectoplasmic splatter suggests a recent paranormal irruption).

One of the main themes of this installation is animation, the breathing of life into the inanimate. The space is alive with movement and sound, yet there are no people (apart from you, the spectator), only three aloof sentinels and what appears to be their brood, all indifferent to your presence. Philip Samartzis' spooky, “granular soundscape” sustains an ongoing ambience of mechanism and process, of invisible yet immutable goings-on behind the scenes. The impression of things seen but not heard, of the order of things hidden from view, brings to mind the concept of “occultation”, which is particularly appropriate in this environment of shades and sprites.

More specifically, Trick or Treat it is a canny exploration of the ways in which new technologies are conceived and interpreted in human terms. Anthropomorphisation, animation, personification, these are the categories that have come to dominate our engagement with projection technologies from the 19th century onwards, and more recently with cybernetic and information technologies. Artificial Reality is just the latest manifestation of an urge to recognize human qualities in the technological, and a desire to witness signs of autonomy and life in the machinic. However, it would be folly to get too serious about any perceived meta-qualities in Trick or Treat, to see it as an installation-essay theorizing the techno-animus. This strange, mystifying space undoubtedly comments on dead media and on the anthropomorphic terms of reference through which we speak of them. However everything about Trick or Treat is suffused with irony. Martine Corompt's chunky, beautifully sculptural neophytes stand in virtually mute dependence, linked to the life-giving matrix by a preposterous, alarmingly high-bandwidth hose, pumping who knows what into their diminutive, pupal forms. Far from being life-like, these forms have an oppressive tactility about them; you feel their bulbous inflation visually. You need to get down close to them to hear their chirps and strains, though you can't be sure if they are noises of satisfaction or protest. Ian Haig's screaming, Munch-like effigies fly around the walls and over the bodies of spectators, looking all the time 'like' mutant, Halloweenish ghouls.

Irony morphs into satire in Philip Brophy's catalogue essay, the exhibition's screaming skull, with what's left of its tongue in its cheek. Far from being a commentary on the exhibition, just another medium, Brophy's essay is in fact an extension of the exhibition, since it interpolates a context against which Trick or Treat exerts an abrasive force. The essay's title, “Digital ArtóFour Manias,” is suggestive of its import, though any visitor to the gallery could be well forgiven for wondering what, if anything, Trick or Treat has to do with digital art. But herein lies the art of Trick or Treat. It is a space in which you have to do, literally, nothing. Except, that is, walk around, look, listen, consider, reflect etc. In other words, not a mouse in sight. This is an active, rather than interactive space, which is entirely out of the sphere of our influence. Everything happens despite you, and you'd better get used to it. Better leave your twitchy fingers at the desk.

Visually, the architecture of the work is suggestive of a matrix, a network of communications between nodes. This conceit subtly invokes the abstract nature of the digital realm, its otherworldliness (“there's no there, there”). Electrical switches, Brophy reminds us, “are so inhuman and un-interactive.” Trick or Treat plays with the idea that sound and projection technologies, like 19th century phantasmagoria, present immersive experiences which demand that the spectator gives up presumptions of interaction and succumbs to the transfixed experience of the haunting, the manifestation.

This is not to say that Trick or Treat is a reactionary work. Far from it. Trick or Treat is a humorous intervention into the ongoing artistic and critical exploration of the relationship between art and its audience in the age of digital reproduction. Digital imaging undoubtedly has its place, as does the principle of interactivity. But there are clearly types of aesthetic experience that are best encountered actively, rather than interactively. Who on earth would want to interact with a ghost train, or a splatter movie? Here comes the blood, quick, click to the next screen! Thanks, but no thanks.

Trick or Treat, fibreglass forms by Martine Corompt; digital images and rotating slide projectors by Ian Haig, Granular soundscape by Philip Samartzis, 200 Gertrude St, Melbourne August 8 -30

RealTime issue #21 Oct-Nov 1997 pg. 18

If “the purpose of good criticism is to kill bad art,” as one of the screens in Planet of Noise asserts, then the good critic faces a Herculean task—particularly now, when so much art springs from theoretical imperatives rather than love or passion, or both.

Still, I doubt that bad art needs to be killed, since most of it will die of natural causes. McKenzie Wark’s hanging judge, his killer of bad art, runs the risk of matching my favourite definition of a critic: someone who strolls around the battlefield when the war is over, slaughtering the wounded. As Anne Lamott points out in her book on writing, Bird by Bird, “you don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.”

In any case, the best art renders criticism superfluous since it performs a dual function: engaging and delighting our senses, intellect, and emotions while simultaneously laying down a rigorous critique of the medium and its possibilities. Jean-Luc Godard started out writing film criticism and in 1962, having made four films in two years (including the sublime Vivre sa Vie), he wrote: “Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form, or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them”.

Interactive media desperately needs work like this, work that blends art with critical discourse, particularly now, when CD-ROM has failed commercially and the hype machine has turned its attention to DVD-RAM (“ten times more storage must be the answer because more is necessarily better”) and Internet push channels (“we failed to make books or movies interactive but we’ll succeed in making the Net like television”). But we don’t need six or eight or ten gigabytes of storage or 50 or 500 hundred push channels. What we need right now is work that explores the nature of interactivity itself.

In Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray identifies four principal properties “which separately and collectively make (the computer) a powerful vehicle for literary creation. Digital environments are procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. The first two properties make up most of what we mean by the vaguely used word interactive; the remaining two properties help to make digital creations seem as explorable and extensive as the actual world, making up much of what we mean when we say that cyberspace is immersive.”

Using as its foundation the work of the performance artist Stelarc, Metabody explores digital self-representation and the human-machine interface by examining golems, robots, automata and cyborgs—past, present, and future. Using as its foundation the ironic moralism of the aphorism (with a particular debt to Adorno), Planet of Noise explores a world “where all things lie, in exile from their future; where stories burn, and spaceships, on re-entry jettison all desires”. That Metabody satisfies all of Murray’s criteria while Planet of Noise meets few of them goes a long way towards explaining why I prefer the former to the latter.

“The computer is not fundamentally a wire or a pathway,” says Murray, “but an engine. It was designed not to carry static information but to embody complex, contingent behaviours.” Metabody is procedural because it is, above all, besotted with the rules through which one might create a digital being.

“Procedural environments are appealing to us not just because they exhibit rule-generated behaviour,” writes Murray, “but because we can induce the behaviour. They are responsive to our input.” In other words, they invite participation. On every level Metabody invites us to participate in the ongoing creation of meaning: constructing our own 3D golems; uploading them to a web site where they are grafted onto an evolving assemblage; exploring the relationship between the sovereign individual and the collective democracy of the Internet.

“The new digital environments are characterized by their power to represent navigable space.” Metabody uses VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) to represent not just the 3D avatars or golems but the spatial relationships between avatars and the world they inhabit.

Digital environments are encyclopedic: simultaneously offering and inducing the expectation of infinite resources. Metabody is dense and coherent: its images, texts, audio, and digital video working in concert to invite us to explore the present, reflect upon the past, and attempt to imagine the future.

In all these ways, Metabody is exemplary in mapping out the territory that, inevitably, we must explore over the next few years: 3D space, the human-computer interface, digital representation via avatars, and the integration of CD-ROM with the Internet.

Planet of Noise, on the other hand, is not procedural, since it appears to embody no rules other than the one that clicking on a 3-dimensional sphere causes the next aphorism to appear. Nor is it participatory since eschews any kind of real interactivity. It is indifferent to spatial exploration, constraining the viewer to the flat plane of the computer screen. But it is however—in the range, depth, and quality both of the ideas and their (written) expression—encyclopedic. As well as maddening. And fascinating.

The graphics and audio are superb, as is the writing. And the underlying idea—to use digital media to reinvigorate the aphorism—is startling and original. But it seems, to me, that the Planet of Noise team members laboured in isolation, combining their efforts at the last moment, since the images and sounds appear to bear, at best, only a tangential relationship to the texts.

Parading these (perceived) flaws with almost reckless indifference, Planet of Noise is still—because of the quality of its ideas and its ambition—preferable to most CD-ROM titles: whether the usual commercial dreck or the earnest, well-meaning outpourings of the “Australia on CD” program.

It might be best to finish by giving McKenzie Wark the last word. In an aphorism titled Review he writes: “At least he did me the honour of taking the trouble to misunderstand me.”

Metabody: CD-ROM by Gary Zebington, Jeffrey Cook and Sam de Silva, Merlin; Planet of Noise: CD-ROM by Brad Miller and McKenzie Wark

RealTime issue #21 Oct-Nov 1997 pg. 23

Stephen Jones takes a brief look at several issues that might have arisen (had there been time allocated for debate) at the Consciousness Reframed Conference in Wales

Consciousness Reframed at the CAiiA institute of the University of Wales was convened in July of this year to open up research and discussion of issues in interactive arts and “to examine what might be described as the technoetic principle in art.” (All quotes are from the Abstracts of the conference.) That is, how the technological is changing our consciousness of the world; our perceptions and our productions, our knowledge and modeling of the world.

Setting up the framework, Carol Gigliotti (Ohio State University) suggested that consciousness of cyberspace is a function of our understanding of how navigating through our own domestic worlds informs “our involvements with contemporary interactive technologies.” She asked, “Why construct virtual environments? Why do we feel the need to create something when we have so little understanding of why the natural world exists?” This question is often asked in relation to technological activity, usually in the following way. Look, all this technology is doing terrible things to our environment, so isn't it time we stopped and let the 'natural' world have ascendency again?

I'm never sure what I think about this, being so heavily involved in technology myself. The activity of cultural production is an ancient and deeply human function in which we engage with the world in order to understand it. Even some animals make and use tools, and language and counting are technologies. We need to pay deeper attention to the impacts of our activities on other systems, and it is here that we can work multimedia towards more acceptable ends. We can use the theory behind multimedia, the notions of interactivity and feedback, complex systems and self-organisation to recast our frameworks to look carefully at and acknowledge the consequences of what we do.

Another way to change thinking is in the re-mythologisation of the technological. For many people involved with VR (Virtual Reality) it seems to have acquired characteristics of dreaming, because one is removed from the world in wearing the helmet and harness of the VR installation. Canadian VR producer Char Davies notes that one experiences her work Osmose as though removed from the everyday world and 'immersed' in some environment that doesn't behave according to known rules. One navigates Osmose by breathing; breathing in one rises through the virtual worlds and breathing out one sinks slowly into deeper realms, descending to the core machine-code world. The immersant dives into the transparency of the virtual world, breaking habitualised perception, leading to altered states of consciousness.

Davies spoke of Osmose as being a kind of poiesis, un-concealing our being in the world. Immersion brings with it a realm of the emotional. She comments that “…by re-conceiving humans as beings 'within' the world, as participants among the world's temporal becomings” we may be able to subvert the rationalist view, revealing new perceptions of our relations to the world, re-invoking the sacred. Thus response to the experience of Osmose is often one of its ineffability, its indescribable nature, “an unfathomably poetic flux of comings-into-being, lingerings and passings-away within which our own mortality is encompassed.”

Davies' discussion also opens up issues of what Cyberspace actually is. Is it a dream world or a trance space? Margaret Dolinsky (University of Illinois, Chicago) spoke of VR as being active or “lucid” dreaming. In her work Dream Grrls designed for the Cave (an immersive, stereo-graphic virtual display theatre), she provides active dreaming spaces where we can explore dream versions of our self. The cyber realm becomes differently valued, a source of experiencing substantial otherness from our regular in-the-world being.

Is the producer of cyberspaces a shaman? Kathleen Rogers has been exploring Mayan shamanism in the mythology of the snake, using multimedia to emulate and bring on these trance states. The snake represents spiritual energy in many cultures and Rogers' intention “is to re-activate this complex model of Mayan consciousness” as a kind of cognitive archeology. The snake represents spiritual energy as well as the cyclical notion of time held by the Maya. She aims get to some sort of essence of this mythology using immersion as a tool for inducing spiritual states in the VR adventurer.

The Brazilian artist Diana Domingues also spoke of the potential for shamanistic states in VR and likened the screen of VR to the desert as a device for the projection of desires and dreams. She suggested that creative production is a way of losing ourselves, offering “interactive installations for people to experience conscious propagation in an organic/inorganic life. Electronic interfaces and neural networks provide intelligent behaviours, managing signals of the human body in sensorized environments,” providing electronic ritual and trance interfaced with electronic memory as “virtual hallucination” producing a shamanic experience.

Mark Pesce (the inventor of VRML) also takes the line that cyberspace is ineffable, mythological space, “dream-time” or “faerie”, a space of magical reality. “The forms of magical reality, ancient to humanity's beginnings, shape our vision in the unbounded void of electronic potential”. It is as though cyberspace provides an hallucinatory configuration of our perception, becoming a screen for the projection of our spiritual desires and interests.

More generally, the question becomes just what is “immersion”? How do we define it and how can we distinguish it from other mental states such as being absorbed in a book or the cinema? What degree of suspension of disbelief is needed, what agreements with the artist do we make in entering “cyberspace” so that the artist can bring a version of their conceived experience to us?

Osmose in many ways provides the paradigm example of the truly immersive space; one dons the helmet and harness and enters a world where everything is translucent, floating, jungle-like—an enveloping world of the artist's imagination. For Joe Nechvatal (an American artist living in France) immersion is containment, a 360-degree surround, physical rather than cognitive, different from the absorption we have in a book or the cinema. For Nechvatal immersion in a VR work implies a unified total space, an homogeneous world without external distraction, striving to be a consummate, harmonious whole. He identifies “two grades of immersion…(1) cocooning and (2) expanding within, which, when these two directions of psychic space cooperate…we feel…our bodies becoming subliminal, immersed in an extensive topophilia…an inner immensity where we realise our limitations along with our desires for expansion”.

In the immersive world of VR we are placed at the centre of a polar dimensional realm: wherever we turn our perspective follows, the sounds of the cyber jungle exist within plain hearing, the view is only revealed as we penetrate deeper into re-calculated space.

In the jungle, hearing becomes primary, vision is downgraded. In the VR world hearing and vision are continually re-calculated placing us at the centre of polar coordinates. As art historian Suzanne Ackers suggested, renaissance perspective is displaced and we learn new ways of seeing, navigating in new kinds of conceptual space. Point of view no longer operates in its traditional manner, it now alters over time and our perception of time and space becomes a virtual knowledge, no longer fixed to the Cartesian frame, mutable, always recalculated, determined by our progress through the environment.

The suggestion is that the experience of VR is one of non-knowing, omni-perception transcending formerly known territories, launching us into dreamspace and the worlds of the shaman. As Davies amply demonstrates in Osmose the world visually perceived becomes one of multiple layers as well as one of fluid viewpoint, worlds layered as sheets of knowing through which we navigate, each sheet providing its own enveloping omni-projective space as though we had torn away at the veils of perception rumoured at in so much early western mystical literature.

But to what extent can this really be happening given that most VR work is simply re-calculated perspectives of thoroughly well defined visual productions? Shamanism and dreaming both suppose a disruption of the consciousness of the viewer wherein recombination of thoughts and images can freely occur. I don't feel that any of the work reviewed here manages this but I suspect that there is other work, for example Bill Seaman's, where the seeds of such a process are being laid.

RealTime issue #21 Oct-Nov 1997 pg. 19

“I thank the organisers of the Fulbright Symposium for the invitation to speak and I pay my respects to the Larrakia people on whose Land we meet,” stated the first speaker. This was an acknowledgment picked up and repeated by each speaker who followed, by Indigenous and non-indigenous representatives alike, from all the five continents. It characterised and set the tone for four days of entwining dialogue, exposition and revelation that celebrated the Indigenous cultures of Australia in an interconnected world. It was about Respect—respect amongst a world community of cultures who have survived the onslaughts of colonisation.

Sitting in the tranquil gardens of the Art Gallery and Museum of the Northern Territory in Darwin, breathing the pungent tropical air cooled by winter breezes, with the Arafura Sea as a backdrop to the proceedings and cultural expression happening all around as the talking continued, the sense of an eventual positive outcome for Aboriginal communities was irresistible. The political realities for Indigenous Australians however, are another matter, and were reflected within the Symposium itself—conflicts over Aboriginal representation and the professional ambitions of academics and anthropologists; conflicts over the objectivity of a session on Mining sponsored by Rio Tinto; and doubts even about the productive outcomes from such an event.

As a briefing for the non-indigenous the outcome was palpable. The complexity of describing Land and Country and its centrality to the culture—without the Land there is no culture—came from many viewpoints, and most convincingly from Indigenous speakers. Kinship and community, Law and Knowledge unify the custodians within egalitarian principles long regarded as sacred. These are principles that challenge the basis of non-indigenous society, politicians, miners, pastoralists, artists and cultural workers alike.

The flourishing of visual arts throughout the communities who have secured the stewardship of their traditional lands demonstrates these principles. The richness and variety of work not only in the Museum’s collection but also in the tourist shops in town testify to this.

The interconnectedness of the communities and the continuing embrace of technological means to develop that sense of community/communicability was the broad emphasis given to the symposium. The implications of cyberspace and digital media were only occasionally, but tantalisingly, amplified, and these I outline in this short report.

David Nathan from the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies (AIATSIS) gave a succinct but dense account of the issues and outcomes of the adoption of the Internet by many communities, in particular the innovations that have occurred. There are approximately 60 websites now related to Indigenous matters, 40% of which are run by indigenous organisations—these are all linked at www.ciolek.com/WWWVL-Aboriginal.html [expired].

Prime among these is the site run by the community at Maningrida in Arnhem Land for more than two years now, (www.peg.apc.org/~bawinanga/welcome.html – expired). The site is designed to make visible to the rest of the world the full range of public cultural tradition found in the clan estates that comprise this Country through a catalogue of visual works and essays.

Whilst this has been useful for the direct marketing to a worldwide audience of cultural artefacts, Peter Danaja and Murray Garde from the community described some of the drawbacks of being so available—even at the end of a 400-kilometre line from Darwin. For instance, electronic colonisation-by-response from New Agers seeking instruction for the purposes of establishing their individual spiritual needs through the borrowing of Indigenous cultural knowledge and skills (particularly in the playing of the didjeridu, “the mother of all flutes” amongst cult Northern Hemisphere groupings), has created demands quite impossible to meet. However, as access to the internet spreads across Arnhem Land and beyond, it is regarded in a more positive way as being like a linked kinship system, with allied projects such as the building of an oral history database being part of a long-term project for later use by families. As Kathryn Wells observed in an early session: “Indigenous art and Culture is re-shaping and re-claiming a subjective identity for Indigenous people in a global context and is thus re-defining non-indigenous cultural definitions of 'authenticity' in terms of Indigenous definitions of authorship.”

Chris ‘Bandirra’ Lee has been establishing cultural recognition, knowledge and respect for the communities of Queensland through the Indiginet project attached to QANTM Co-operative Multimedia Centre based in Brisbane (also with an office in Darwin). Digital networks are being integrated with the more traditional networks with an emphasis on access and training for these communities and with a wider access to be given to the global community when the time is right.

The network metaphor also extends to off-line formats. Moorditj, one of the DoCA funded Cultural Expressions on CD-ROM Projects is due for completion in 1998. Under the direction of Leslie Bangama Fogarty and Richard Walley (“We’re fed up with teaching without having control…”), the CD-ROM examines the work of 200 Indigenous artists through interactive linking in relation to four themes: firstly land, law and language; secondly cultural maintenance and ceremony; thirdly, the influence of other cultures; and finally, social justice and survival.

The Jurassic technologies of phone, radio, television, satellites and, more recently, the Telstra planned ISDN links were referred to by many speakers, all extolling the benefits enjoyed through the adoption of these technologies (in particular Kevin Rangi from Aotearoa National Maori Radio). Some pointed to the dangers to communities of half-resourced or incomplete projects—“Well, the cable wouldn’t quite reach…” While the symposium progressed, papers and interviews were broadcast across remote communities in Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific and Asia by third year Broadcast to Remote Area Community Services (BRACS) students of NT’s Batchelor College.

Many speakers referred to copyright reform and intellectual property rights in the digital age. Terri Janke launched Our Culture, Our Future, the principles and guidelines currently being submitted for adoption by the UN Human Rights Sub-Commission. Michael Mansell questioned the collection of genetic property from the world’s Indigenous peoples, and objected to non-indigenous notions of ownership over culture. In a later session we were reminded of the trust that had been extended to scholars when collecting artefacts 30, 50 to 100 years earlier, and making sound and image documentation of Aboriginal culture. Many compromises had since occurred to this trust and with this material, including its exploitation on websites in a form unauthorised by its traditional owners.

The symposium had much vibrant activity at the edges including a French anthropologist demonstrating a digital archive of stories and paintings based on the dreaming tracks and song cycles of a desert community. Two Indigenous artists resident in Tasmania, Harri Higgs from Nira Nina Bush Place and Julie Gough of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, resolved Palawa Aboriginal law issues in Darwin around forms of representation that had been used in works exhibited in Hobart.

The symposium emphasised the many facets that construct Respect. The final speaker Galarawuy Yunupingu spoke of the imperative in respecting the land as a living entity from which we are all born and to which Indigenous knowledge and the cultural basis of Native Title is intrinsically linked. The symposium showed that the resourcing and recognition of Indigenous skills, knowledge, place and their cultural practice within a global continuum is necessary if we are to survive in any meaningful way.

Within weeks, the Howard government's introduction of legislation based on the ‘Ten Point Plan', (rebuffing the High Court Wik decision recognising historically proven joint custodianship of pastoral leases) represents a rebuttal of shared stewardship of the land and country with Australia’s Indigenous people.

Respect for land, law and country is a lesson still to be taught to the non-indigenous policy-makers as we embrace an inter-connected world.

RealTime issue #21 Oct-Nov 1997 pg. 20

Microdance is an initiative of the Australia Council and the Australian Film Commission. Funded by these two agencies, 13 projects from a field of 62 submissions where shortlisted for further development. In August 1996, the ABC selected four projects for production. They will be screened as part of Steps#3—Intersteps at The Performance Space on November 8, followed by discussion with the artists.

Film has been fascinated with the moving body since the first “moving pictures” harnessed light through technology to give motion to images. Filmic studies of human movement such as the work of Eadweard Muybridge late last century are seminal examples of this obsession. Trevor Patrick would appear to revisit these origins of the cinema in his short film, Nine Cauldrons. Nine pools of light illuminate nine encounters between camera and body, the body becoming site and geography of the filmic journey. The notion of ‘journey’ and its narrative implications, whether explicit or implicit, is at the heart of the series of four short films that constitute Microdance.

Another significant issue became apparent in discussions with three of the choreographers, Matthew Bergan, Kate Champion and Sue Healey, along with a faxed response from Trevor Patrick—the role of the choreographer within the cinematic process. Trevor Patrick describes the historic role of the choreographer as being “functionary—someone who came in, put the steps or movement sequences together, then left the director and the producer alone to get on with realising their artistic vision.” We must go back beyond the musical genre to understand current dance/film practice or alternatively to the avant-garde film movements of the 50s and 60s when experimental film techniques escaped the trajectory of the classic fiction film genre.

Recently, dance-maker Lucy Guerin spoke of the effect that the human figure has upon performance, describing it as being “one of the most loaded sites for a narrative source.” This function of the human figure, the narrative history of the cinematic practice and the often-problematic relationship between dance and narrative, emerged as a framework for creative considerations. Matthew Bergan posed the question that we had been circling: “How do you bring movement to film and film narrative—whether it be just movement for movement’s sake, the lusciousness of it, or whether you try and present a narrative within that?” Bergan also spoke of “the linguistic matter of using dancers and bodies as opposed to the textual matter of story and narrative”. The choreographers found themselves negotiating a medium, which had its own indelible history of storytelling, a point compounded by the application process which demanded written synopses and storyboards or shot-lists. Bergan felt compelled to “make it read on paper” and Healey found she “rewrote it as if it would be a straight literary narrative”.

The challenge that Bergan articulated was met by each team in varying ways that constitute a kind of map of the interface between film and dance. Trevor Patrick chose a metaphoric journey made up of iconic moments inspired by a series of drawings by American artist Robert Longo entitled “Men in the Cities”, and Taoist mythology concerning alchemy. His simple approach to the film as “a trio for camera, sound and dancer” is reminiscent of Muybridge; in this case the science is absorbed into the expression, the relationship between body and camera becomes a storytelling mechanism, and the alchemy resonates in the mixture of body, light and film.

Sue Healey, like Trevor Patrick, indulged in the writing stage of her project Slipped and, like Patrick, moved far away from literal interpretations towards what she referred to as “a very clear physical narrative”. With the basic metaphor of a staircase and the journey of the climb being representative of “memory, ancestral past and looking back at the past”, ultimately for her “the movement is the drama”. The use of a strong and simple metaphorical image that acts as a “spine image” allows the dance to occur along and around the stairs, fulfilling a narrative-like function in elaborating upon the basic premise.

Matthew Bergan approached his film, The Father is Sleeping, from the linguistic problematics of a film/dance collaboration, stating in his proposal that his agenda for the film was to look at “narrative and developing an area that combines movement and drama”. Bergan developed a process in which “a scene happens quite naturally and out of that comes a physical gesture…a casual approach to movement.” His theme of “the symbolic father” was approached as a “realistic portrayal” complicated by the effects of memory.

The concept of memory is common to three of the four projects and offers a device for the type of magical transformation of events with which both film and dance have long been enamoured. Kate Champion’s The Changing Room is explicit in taking memory as its subject, the idea that “you can’t go forward if you are attached to your memories…until you’ve completely confronted them.” Again there is a strong visual metaphor—a room that tilts and diminishes in size, eventually filling with water and forcing Champion’s character out. As with Healey, the movement is dictated by the central physical image with the drama growing out of Champion’s desire to explore the kind of “visual effects” that only film can offer.

In Healey’s description of her project, theatre and dance are opposing forces and the struggle to insist upon the work as “a dance project” where “the actual guts of the work had to exist in movement,” required that her director Louise Curham “give over” the work. The creation of a binary opposition where theatre, drama and film came down on one side with movement/dance on the other, persisted throughout the discussions. The assumptions this promotes are odd; that dance and theatre are discrete disciplines is a point contradicted in the stage work of all four choreographers.

This opposition seems more attributable to a power struggle that developed out of disciplinary traditions. Patrick describes “the independent dance-maker who writes, performs, directs and occasionally produces his own work.” This central authority figure is in direct contrast to the teamwork that creates films, a methodology Patrick refers to as being from “another culture.” This new territory was alternatively daunting and comforting for the choreographers. There was a sense of relief when the delegatory system of film production seemed to support an artistic vision, and frustration when this same process left the choreographers feeling “out of control.” As all of the choreographers came up with the original concepts, many felt like Champion when she said that the collaborative process is “like making a cake and someone puts orange rind in, and you didn’t want to put orange rind in.”

Perhaps we must look at the notion of the film auteur, the central artistic force that first appeared in theory surrounding the avant-garde film movements. If new dance film/video practice relates more to this type of aesthetic, as opposed to the aesthetic of the classic narrative fiction film, then the auteur is an obvious role model. Problems arise then when this figure comes in two parts with two different crafts—two different cakes from two different recipes.

The technology and language of filmmakers can be alienating and the industry structure of film is ever-present in the shape of producers and financial pressure. The choreographers’ concerns seem understandable when you place the power of the film industry beside the relatively marginalised dance community. Matthew Bergan’s studies in the area of film gave him the confidence to state that he felt “100 per cent confident to direct and choreograph” next time and, with Champion in agreement, there are precedents set where a cinematographer has been a sufficient co-worker on such projects. I would like to see the choreographers in the editing suite succumbing to the “seduction” Patrick described, indulging in choreography of the image that this technology makes possible.

Matthew Bergan, The Father is Sleeping, director Robert Herbert; Trevor Patrick, Nine Cauldrons, director Paul Hampton; Sue Healey, Slipped, director Louise Curham; Kate Champion, The Changing Room, director Alyson Bell

The writer discusses a new dance and film project entitled Premonition, with choreographer-performer Sue-Ellen Kohler, writer-dramaturg William McClure and filmmaker Mahalya Middlemist.

A woman falls… slowly…her weight shifts…her naked body begins…to slip…frame by frame…she…falls…out of sight.

I thought I saw someone shake my body from a sleep of death, but I could not swear to it.

SK Premonition is about dance history. William talks about it in terms of creating a space between two moves: One move, and then the decision—what comes next? And in the gap between the moves is the premonition. Waiting for the next move. You don’t know the next move until…

SK Certainly the idea for this project has come out of the past work Mahalya and I have done together, even if it hasn’t happened in a logical way with Premonition as the next step. For instance, Mahalya couldn’t have made the film Vivarium in 1994 without the particular way that I moved my particular body. And neither would I ever have imagined Vivarium the way Mahalya did, but somehow the two visions went together well. When you put movement on film, something happens which you can’t necessarily predict. The results come through an intensely creative process, and that for me is the best thing about it.

MM We’ve been talking about the multi-screen set-up for a long time, three full-sized screens, side by side, showing simultaneous but variant images of Sue-ellen’s dancing body. The camera is straight on and fixed, so the perspective is the same as you would have of the performing body.

In the end, due to budgetary constraints, we had to shoot one screen on film, and the other two on video. So we’ll have those three different textures: two video bodies, a film body and a real body. And we’ve also got the Falling film from Hybrid, very large in space, and we’ll bring that in at the beginning.

In the daytime, I can see things very clearly. I know just the right moves for the right moment. It is as if all my training directs me down a path that I have walked before. This is a path that I know very well. So I lie down and go to sleep.

SK I’ve encountered so many different kinds of movement in my training and performing. Premonition is about past and future understandings of my body; my past body informs my future body; and those understandings can get mixed up, squashed together. Premonition is about a feeling of how things are, and on that feeling rest the possibilities for how things might be.

SK We both originally wanted the work to be all on 16mm film rather than video because of the better quality of resolution. And certainly for both of us, film in performance is actually about light. Using videos can bring in a whole lot of other things.

MM Film technology is not so laden with ideas, and it’s so accepted that you hardly think about it. And it’s more elusive, ephemeral, because it’s made out of light beams. There’s a sense of the photographic image being projected on screens but travelling further than the screen. And an important part is the way Sue-ellen is lit, floating in space, not bound to the ground, with the screens like doorway-shaped pools of light.

We worried that video might force people into reading the work in unintended ways, imagining that Sue-ellen is talking about some kind of body mediated by technology, when she’s not at all. We’re really just interested in Sue-ellen’s body and images of it, not in highlighting the technology that creates those images.

Now, in my dreams, I still keep on moving and in the same way that I have always done. I meet my balletic body and we dance together. I meet all my modern and postmodern bodies and we all dance together three times, or is it five, around in circles. I can’t be sure right now, but neither does it seem to matter.

SK I’m not a dancer who’s been totally codified and rigidly formed by some particular style. There’s a lot of slip, and within that slip I often feel quite at sea. Being at sea is not always very comfortable. It’s hard to feel authorised, confident as a creator of new dance; I often feel like I can’t do anything original. And it’s also about not being able to succeed in any kind of dance structure, because all set-ups are about not succeeding.

There is an inherent failure in being placed in Australia as a dancer. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re never the original article and your referents are always somewhere else. Your judges can never be pleased with what you do, because Australian identity is bound up in mimicry of the rest of the world. And the perceived failure lies in failure to be the real thing.

None of this seems strange, rather it all seems perfectly natural, and so I continue on in the same way as I have always done.

WM Often people look at dance in terms of where it has come from, but that way of seeing is questioned here. Premonition is engaging with the fact that its sources may lie somewhere else, but what we end up with in the here and now is what is important.

Then—but it wasn’t really a ‘then’—as if from nowhere, a flash, a disgusting premonition of my present state was given to me. And in this state, all the while, I kept on moving in precisely the same way as I have always done. But only now, my body smelt of putrid flesh and the movement itself seemed to rise up before me as tombstones.

WM Premonition is about exploding the reality of the moment, the reality in what you can pin down in an accepted format. So it tries to hollow that out, and to give access to something built of the limitless possibilities of choice. It’s a piece about many voices.

MM Yes, the vertical screens suit that constrained, frontal, upright, balletic kind of presentation that we are very much talking about.

EB The Falling film is something I remember vividly from Hybrid. How does that relate to what you’re doing in Premonition?

MM I’ve always liked the idea of starting this work with Falling. It was a good ending for Hybrid, that falling away right out of frame at the bottom of the stage so that there’s nothing there. Now we want to start again with that. It has a link with that verticality which is so balletic. The structure seems to make a lot of sense.

SK But there’s no sense of a resurrection of the fallen body. I don’t especially want to make that kind of statement, even though I know that some people will want to see that. Falling was originally set on top of the proscenium arch—the epitome of female presentation and ballet presentation. That little balletic dance that I did in Hybrid across the stage underneath Falling, I never knew what it was then. But now I can bring it back into this work, showing how so much of my training is implicated in the way I am, and how it can’t be extricated from anything that I or anyone might want to say about dance. I’m trying now to speak about that in a more conscious way.

WM There’s an uncivilised part of a person that cannot accept the seductive power of tradition and the kinds of decisions made from that stance, without testing them. So, it’s in the testing, the evolving relationship you have to those decisions and those traditions. That’s important, not the traditions themselves.

Premonition is about playfulness in and around the choices from one moment to the next. It’s an attempt to reach a non-apologetic place in the world.

There is now a convulsion and a deep agitation going on in my limbs. They are stretching—as if they want to speak in phrases not seen before. I am out of myself and running away and a body is now moving in a very dark place.

Premonition, choreographed and performed by Sue-ellen Kohler; assistant choreographer Sandra Perrin; filmmaker Mahalya Middlemist; writer-dramaturg William McClure; composer Ion Pearce. The Performance Space, Sydney, October 8-19

I once heard a colleague (Dave Sag from Virtual Artists, in fact) invent a scenario for the 2000 Olympics: thousands of people at the opening ceremony capturing the event with digital cameras hooked into their mobiles, feeding the images onto the web; people around the world, in front of their computers with access to images from anywhere within the stadium. Virtual Artists have been instrumental in creating web ‘events,’ getting Womad on-line, creating the Cyberfringe during Adelaide’s Festival of Arts. I like the context behind this story as well. We were in a meeting that included local representatives of television, an industry that has invested millions in the Games. It is economic, not technical, limitations that ensure Dave’s Olympic vision will fail to materialise by 2000 because it poses the question of just how to generate capital out of the new technology and equally importantly, who would control that capital. But 10,000 cameras? How would you find the best vantage point? What if you found it just at the point when the child with the camera grew tired and handed it back to her inept father? In other words, how do you read a medium like that?

But of course, I’m thinking of television. I love watching [Olympic] diving, as well as television’s solutions to the search for that ‘best’ camera angle, catching scant seconds of free fall; the introduction of overhead cameras; the underwater camera that stretches the brief moment of spectacle just that little bit longer; Atlanta’s addition of a tracking camera to follow the diver’s fall; the director who, by selecting angles, weaves each dive into its semi-narrative context. In other words, these are solutions to problems (what is the best angle?) posed by the medium itself. So what happens with an interactive medium where the reader, not the producer, gets to write the script; when an interactive media allows the viewer to become the director?

Perhaps this article should be titled “Towards a Critical Theory of New Media,” or something of the sort. For several reasons: we are still in an era where our ability to formulate a critical response is as much in its infancy as interactive technology itself, heavily dependent on concepts formulated for 20th century media and culture, and because our attempts in dealing with interactivity at a critical level are, to date, marked by a certain utopianism, as befits any ‘infant.’

Of course, utopias are unrealisable fantasies (and reason to distrust any essay with ‘towards’ in its title.) It is, as also befits any infant, coloured by a now traditional fear of technology, expressed through anxiety about the presence of pornography or build-your-own-bomb instructions on the web. (These anxieties are also linked to real infants, children’s access, which I’ll touch upon later).

Still, this is a hot topic. For example, research in education is onto it. The Adelaide group Rosebud and Ngapartji Multimedia Centre commissioned a brief paper on work being undertaken on audience engagement with interactive multimedia. Researcher Sal Humphries concluded the over-riding issue was still one of ‘literacy,’ with researchers monitoring user engagement (the interface between the technology and the user), in order to understand how cues are presented and how the reader’s response determines outcome. This isn’t far removed from most digital art that I’ve seen, where artists still determine the parameters of how the text is to be experienced, how its interactive content is to be ‘read,’ inviting a kind of reception theory. Regardless of the aesthetics of the new medium, we are still in the domain of ‘author’ and ‘reader.’

But other aspects are emerging, particularly on the web, and certainly on those sites which are, more rather than less, ‘written’ by their ‘readers’: chat rooms, palaces, muds and moos—all multi-user virtual environments. Perhaps these activities are better thought of as performances rather than
texts, in which case we can include Cyberfringe and Womad experiments. It may also be that the prototypes for such sites predate the web as we now know it, once accessible only to programmers or specialists exchanging information. What happens, however, when multi-user sites become accessible to a ‘popular culture?’

Some observations: As an ordinary web surfer I am struck by the way the potential for my own interactive ‘writing’ is marginalised: guest books, graffiti walls and the like. I’m invited to write, yes, but as an adjunct to the main event of the web page itself. This reflects what appears to be happening on the web generally; for example, there are ‘official’ sites and ‘unofficial’ ones (no more so than where entertainment franchises such as Star Trek are concerned). This tension serves a purpose in that it distinguishes between a product (official, copyrighted) and a fan. It can invite a kind of Derridean reading, the margins against the centre, where we write in the margins in order to circumscribe an official content, one defining the other in a symbiosis that actually structures meaning on the web despite the fact that anybody with access to the technology can participate in it.

If this is the determining structure, it is a self-determined and regulating one, not generated by conscious intent. This seems to worry conventional mass media as well as our political representatives, hence their continual carping about porn and terrorism on the web. But this stems from the fact that because the web is unfettered and its participants are happily scrawling away in the margins and back alleys, pushing gender boundaries and expounding their most loved fetishes to the world, it is in accord with Bakhtin’s concept of the Carnivalesque, that night-time revelry that suspends the daylight of social law. On several conditions: notably that the temporary suspension of these laws is a condition of their stability.

Online porn may drive the web’s technological development in interface design and financial viability. Right-wing racism may find the web a means of dissemination (never forget the Carnivalesque has a grotesque downside). But the web is actually a pretty safe place, including for children as most liberal parents have found. Its final collective face is not so much transgression but a consensus, in that what is played out, virtual utopic sex and all, manifests an underlying phantasmic structure. In other words, those 10,000 cameras could well reach a consensus on what to film, rendering the need to choose between them unnecessary because, as ‘virtual subjects,’ we will have already determined our own position within the vast exchange of digital information. I’m borrowing here from Slavoj Zizek’s conclusion to The Metastases of Enjoyment where he discusses the West’s response to Sarajevo, phantasmically bound in the figure of the victim. Victimisation is universalised, he writes, “from sexual abuse and harassment to the victims of AIDS…from the starving children of Somalia to the victims of bombardment in Sarajevo…” What has this to do with the web as a multi-user, writerly environment home of the virtual subject? Go to a search engine and type in “Diana.”

A particularly virulent strain of the New Age virus can be found spreading rapidly throughout digital media culture—from VRML 3D worlds of transcendental self-discovery to the computer animation of the digital shaman, to interactive digital mandalas. While the current fixation with the new age is rife in rave culture, digital media’s particular fascination is with mysticism. The new environments of online worlds and interactivity often go hand in hand with a new age, touchy-feely cyber-induced hype.

Devoted followers of the cyber gospel, strung out on the flakey new technological Haight Ashbury, look to the likes of Timothy Leary, Mark Pesce, Howard Rheingold and Jaron Lanier, to inform their own utopian-new age cyber sensibilities. The popular rhetoric of interactive media makes things worse, as it is viewed as opening the doors to a new paradigm, the ultimate democratic medium that truly delivers on that collective 60s dream of individual empowerment.

The Heaven's Gate cult fanatically build their web pages, seeing the internet as the delivery system to a new plane of consciousness, a new level of language with Virtual Reality, Artificial Life and 3D space as the extensions of a new realm of human experience; while magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000 tune in and drop out to a cyber-consciousness of alternate realities, avatars and 3D texture mapping of the mindscape…

Digital Art in particular picks up on the more obvious ‘transcendental’ elements of 60s mysticism in regard to notions of ‘immersive worlds’ and interactivity, but with none of its psychedelic freakishness and weirdo graphic sensibilities. Instead what we’re left with is the rehashed, predictable and clichéd new age icons of crystals, magick, the Buddha, mandalas, digital dreamscapes and never-ending Mandelbrot sets. Such graphic icons are so culturally loaded with fuzzy 60s alternative consciousness, that redefining them as models for the digital age is nothing short of depressing. The strong smell of incense hangs over new age cyberculture like a critical cloud. Just plug into the headspace and trip out.

Historically, computer graphics have always had a thing going on with the daggy elements of early 70s graphic sensibilities, from Roger Dean and Hypnosis album covers to Pink Floyd. Just look at any Siggraph animation collection from the late 80s with their computer generated images of pyramids, unicorns and strange uninhabited lands—all testament to a culture out of step with the graphic pulsations of the time. By far the worst example of new ageism in cyberculture would have to be the annual San Francisco Digital Be-in; depending on where you stand you either go with the flow and paint your face and celebrate the dawn of the new age or run screaming for the nearest exit.

This is the first of two articles on dance companies based in Adelaide as indicative of a range of dance discourses in Australia. In this issue, Anne Thompson interviews Meryl Tankard who, subsequent to this interview, won the Mobil Pegasus Award for her choreography of Inuk for the Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre at the 14th International Summer Theatre Festival in Hamburg. In RealTime #22, Anne Thompson talks to Sally Chance, artistic director of the Restless Dance Company who will be shortly working in Melbourne with Candoco, a British company which also features dancers with disabilities. Candoco are guests of the Newimages Exchange program between Australia and Great Britain.

I am interested in articulating the discourses now available to dancers and choreographers. This interest is linked to my belief that the way we live and give meaning to our work and lives as artists depends on the range and social power of the discourses to which we have access.

I want to challenge the idea that there exists a universally understood truth about the nature of dance and dancing. I believe Australian dance culture to be a plurality of competing subcultures. I want to acknowledge the range of discourses now being used by Australian dancers and choreographers. I want to encourage the view that the use of a discourse can be a strategy.

This interview with Meryl Tankard raised many questions for me: What happens to the notions of “expression” and “originality” if an individual’s dancing is understood to be marked by aesthetic and cultural codes? What use is the concept of national identity for dancers? In what ways could this be defined as linking to birthplace, as aboriginality, as a conscious representation of cultural plurality? Is the dance we recognise as a representation of a culture or inner feeling, what we classify as authentic? How can we acknowledge our fascination with “other” cultures? How is the task of promoting dance on the national and international dance market shaping the way Australian dance artists think about dance?

AT How do you understand the mix of classicism/classical ballet and expressionism/modern dance in your work? Are these two dance traditions connected for you?

MT My training as a dancer has been in both classical and modern dance as I danced in the Australian Ballet and with Pina Bausch (Tanztheater Wuppertal). In some ways they feel like the opposite extreme of each other. I always felt as a ballet dancer that there was something missing, that there was something I couldn’t get out because I was too worried about getting the technique right.

But then on the other hand there is an amazing similarity of rigour and devotion required by the ballet and Pina’s dance theatre. The ballet was a sheltered world and we never saw or thought of anything else. When I entered Pina’s company I thought, “Great! Freedom at last!” And it was freeing to do her work. Yet there was, as with classical dance, an almost religious devotion to the art of dance. There couldn’t be anything else in your life. You could never say Pina was hard. She never yelled at anybody, but we were like monks. Giving up everything for dance was expected and we lived up to that expectation.

MT Work that doesn’t have a depth that comes from within. There is something that comes from inside and goes out through the body when we dance. So much dance works the other way. Dancing can be about vanity. “I’m so cute. My body is gorgeous. Look at me.” It can become vulgar. Movement, for me, has to be honest, truthful. If people have never experienced that way of dancing, they are free to work in other ways. Sometimes I find it aggravating that I can’t just indulge in movement. It might bring something else out in me. But I can’t just go into the studio and work on movement alone.

AT How would you explain what drives the creative process when you are making a work?

MT I feel fortunate to have worked with Pina, although at times it was hard. I will never find anyone like her again. I learned from her to ask questions of the dancers, to get them to use their own creativity. They are, after all, human beings, not objects. I learnt not to get dancers to just copy a step I can do or to move the way my body does. I think those days are gone. Dancers are creative. When the dancers use that creativity there is a commitment in the performing that is different from when dancers just do steps.

AT How do you select an answer? Is it to do with a dancer connecting to the question in some way?

MT I think so. When you see honesty it touches you. Sometimes I can’t even work out why I am touched. When a response is truthful, that dancer has a special energy that communicates. This dancing has nothing to do with the toe being pointed or the leg turned out. It’s so much more interesting. The voice is also interesting. You can’t lie with the voice. I don’t really think you can lie with movement either. You are totally exposed and vulnerable.

MT It is always scary and I go in there totally empty. It’s only when I’m watching that I can say “That goes with that!” You have a feeling for form but it is something subtle. I can’t express it in words.

But I do love the space. I’ve always loved space. Loved using every bit of it. In Pina’s work I would always run around the space. In Furioso (1993) the ropes allowed me to use space in a new way. That was exciting for me.

MT Discipline and a strong foundation in a dance style are important. It doesn’t have to be classical ballet. It may be something you reject but it will still be important.

MT Just before a show opens I always think, “I am not a choreographer.” I associate choreography with steps. I think that in Australia you are called a choreographer if you keep the dancers bounding around to the music, jumping up and down, turning and twisting. If you sit in a dark corner, people ask, “What’s that?” I’m not talking about audiences. I’m talking about critics. I’m not going to move just for movement’s sake.

AT How do you understand the relationship between the choreographer and the dancer?

MT I feel like I’ve gone through what they are going through. I’ve been guided and now I can guide them, unlock their creative powers, push. Some people resist this. Once you uncover their artistry a door is opened and they go through it. You can see them become so much more confident.

MT Pina Bausch took three months to make a piece. Ideally it would be good to work, to have time to think and then complete the work.

MT I don’t mind the technique. But I see no point in doing 19th century ballets. The ballets change when the choreographers are no longer around. They just get watered down. They’ve lost the choreographer’s inner connection with the movement. Ballets should also express what is happening now. When I created Aurora (1994), I came to love and respect the story. The critics went berserk because I tap-danced to Tchaikovsky. I wasn’t sending it up. I was really trying to work out how to tell that fairy tale.

I’m in a position now where a number of dancers I have worked with for four or five years want to leave and go to Europe. We constantly lose dancers from Australia to overseas. This means we don’t have a pool of dancers to choose from. I really think that Australia should allow foreign dancers to work here. There are many dancers in Europe who want to work with me and I think it would enrich the culture here if they could. It would give Australian dancers so much to work alongside them.

MT Oh, life, love! Pina always said that all her pieces were about love. Though in the last piece I made, Inuk (1997), I felt a need to talk about the environment and Australia. Most of the critics didn’t see this and so didn’t know what the piece was about. I thought I was making a pretty obvious statement.

MT When I came back from Europe, Australia seemed…vast. I was aware of the lack of support for the arts here. I felt alone. Pauline Hanson was on the scene! There are quite a few sections in the piece that comment on this situation. I had two Aboriginal dancers and a Maori boy in the piece. The last scene shows a Maori boy wanting to know about his background and his father laughing at him. It is quite hard.

A white girl plays the Maori boy. It ends with Sean, a white Australian, and Rachel, a beautiful, tall, Aboriginal girl, singing an Italian aria, “Give Us Peace!” For me, this said everything I wanted to say.

AT What have the company’s travels taught it about dance and its identity as an Australian dance company?

MT The promoter from Brooklyn Academy of Music said, “This work is not Australian. I refuse to promote it as such. It’s universal.” But when we took Furioso to Europe it was perceived as Australian. And it is. We are all Australians who create the work. It is hard to define what that is. Our last European tour was sold out and we’ve been invited back to Hamburg. So we must offer something different from what they are used to in Europe. That’s why they are excited by it. In Australia they say the work is very European. I think that’s why I did this last piece. I had to ask, “Where is home?” “Where is my home?”

MT When I first arrived back from Europe I felt a need to understand this culture. Now I look to other cultures. They seem to have a reason for dancing. We’ve lost that.

AT You perceive there to be a connection between dance and social life in other cultures.

MT I think dance is a very natural activity and we should all be involved in it. Greek and Italian migrants brought a different relation to dance to Australia.

AT Did you feel there existed a relationship between dance and social ritual in Europe?

MT I felt it when I left Europe. These rituals don’t necessarily occur there any more. A beautiful Bulgarian artist said of Songs For Mara, “It has taken an Australian to remind us where we have come from.”

MT I think it’s a pity that more people don’t write about dance. In Europe dance has more of a connection with other art forms. Australia is young and people are starting to write. I just wish more people would write. It is only then that a history will exist. I was cleaning out my bookshelves the other day and found seven books on Pina Bausch, written from very different perspectives.

The conference component of CODE RED will take place at The Performance Space, Sydney on November 25. It is being curated by Julianne Pierce (new media artist and Project Co-ordinator at the Performance Space) and organized by the Adelaide-based Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT). CODE RED will include highly regarded specialist Australian and international speakers who will debate and discuss media power, communication and information technology. CODE RED will investigate how artists are shaping communication and the vital role that artists can play in developing the future of the new media.

Geert Lovink is an editor of nettime, which declares itself “a semi-public, collaborative text filter for net criticism, cultural politics of the net and international co-ordination of meetings, conferences and publishing projects; it started in June 1995 after a meeting at the Venice Biennale and functions as an exchange between media activists, artists, theorists, philosophers, journalists, technicians and researchers from all over the world with many European and East European subscribers.
Nettime http://mediafilter.org/nettime/ [expired]

On ‘netlish’
McKenzie Wark

You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.
Caliban, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

On the net, one is forever coming across versions of English written as a second language that are at once charming and strange. It’s a temptation, as a native speaker, to think these usages are 'wrong'. But I think there's a better way of seeing it. What the net makes possible is the circulation of the very wide range of forms of English as a second language that have existed for some time, and which are, via the net, coming more and more in contact with each other.

When non-English language speakers start writing in English, elements of their native grammar and style come into it. This can enrich English immeasurably, so long as the way in which English is being used in a given non-native context is reasonably coherent.

Take the notorious 'Japlish'. At first sight, it’s extremely strange. But after a while, it makes sense. And you can start to see it as a distinctive kind of writing. A fantastic hybrid of ways of making sense and making a self in language. A wacky footnote to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

This was the idea that each language makes possible certain conceptual structures, and makes others most unlikely. For example, ancient Greek was a language extremely rich in articles, so it lent itself to the formation of the discourse of philosophy. What is being? It’s a thought that Greek—and English—can express easily, but that can't occur in certain other languages. Those other languages, needless to say, are no doubt rich in other kinds of thought.

What happens when non-native writers use English is that the reader sees the shadow of another way of thinking, as it meets the ways of thinking that English shapes. One sees the English shape, and beyond it, the shadow of another shape. Even better, one sees a third shape, not belonging to either language, emerging at the point of contact of the two.

All of this is more obvious in netwriting than in printed matter. On the net, nobody pays too much attention to grammar and style. On the net, one sees the shape of language through the little mistakes and fissures that in printed texts editors remove. What emerges is a whole range of ways of writing 'Netlish', where non-native forms of English writing come in contact with each other, and with native forms, without being passed through a single editorial standard.

Which leads me to the question of how Netlish should be edited, when net texts are published in printed form. Perhaps editing has to be looked at from two sides. On the one hand, it helps to think about it from the point of view of kinds of native English use (of which there are several). It matters that English has conventions, so that it is clear to readers what a writer intends.

But that doesn't mean there has to be one convention of usage—be it Oxford or Webster. As a speaker and writer of a minority English, I'm all in favour of recognising distinct forms of the language. Australian-English is different. We have our own dictionary, our own style guides. So too does Indian English—and there may be more people speaking English as a first language in India than in the whole of the British Isles. I think this principle can be extended to the various emerging kinds of Netlish.

Print is the place to codify things like language usage, so print can become a device for propagating, not just writing's content, but also its forms. Including forms of Netlish once they become relatively stable and recognisable. This is not as easy as it looks. I've struck a similar problem with Aboriginal English in Australia. You can translate it into standard Australian usage, but then you lose sight of the otherness of the shape of thought behind it.

English was always a bastard language. It’s a bastard to learn—for every rule there seems to be a swarm of exceptions. But there's a reason why it is so: it’s the mix in it of everything, from Pict to Pakistani. Its prehistory in the British Isles is a small-scale model of what's happening to it now on a global scale. The Romans, the Saxons, the Normans and the Norse—everybody came and brought something to the mix. “We will fight them on the beaches”—pure Saxon. “We will never surrender”—the abstract noun is Norman. Different shapes of thought, superimposed on top of each other, making something else. As Saxon becomes Norman, Norman becomes something else—English.

Language is a machine that produces, as one of these effects, subjectivity. As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze said, “What is the self but this habit of saying 'I'?” The net makes English habits of writing one's self come in contact with other habits of self, making them become something else. And making English as it proliferates across the net—Netlish. Adding richness to the language of potentially Shakespearian proportions. That is more a blessing than a curse.

The netletters were originally written 'live' for the listserve group Nettime: http://www.Desk.nl/~nettime/ [expired]. This is the edited version.

Language? No problem
Geert Lovink: edited by McKenzie Wark

Have you tried to discuss recipes with friends, feeling socially disabled because you never learned the English names for all those kitchen garnishes, deluxe herbs and flamboyant birds? For gourmets, language can be a true obstacle in the enjoyment of the self-made haute cuisine. The careful pronunciation of the names is a crucial part of the dining pleasure. Naming is the social counterpart of tasting and a failed attempt to find the precise name of the ambitious appetiser can easily temper the mood.

McKenzie Wark has introduced the term 'Euro-English', being one of the many 'Englishes' currently spoken and written. It's a funny term, only an outsider (from Australia, in this case) could come up with it. Of course, it does not exist and Wark should have used the term in the plural, 'Euro-Englishes'. The term is also highly political. If you put it in the perspective of current Euro-politics in Great Britain. Is the UK part of Europe and if so, is their rich collection of 'Englishes' (Irish, Scottish etc.) then part of the bigger family of Euro-English 'dialects'? That would be a truly radical, utopian European perspective. Or is 'Euro-English' perhaps the 20th century Latin spoken on 'the continent'?

Continentals can only hear accents, like the extraordinary French-English, the deep, slow Russian-English or the smooth, almost British accent of the Scandinavians. It seems hard to hear and admit one's own version. One friend of mine speaks English with a heavy Cockney accent (not the Dutch one) and I never dared ask him why this was the case. Should he be disciplined and pretend to speak like they do on BBC World Service? I don't think so. What is right and wrong in those cases? Should he speak Dutch-English, like most of us? Switching to other English’s is a strange thing to do, but sometimes necessary. If you want to communicate successfully in Japan you have to adjust your English, speak slowly and constantly check if your message gets through. Mimicking Japlish is a stupid thing to do, but you have to come near to that if you want to achieve anything.

BBC World Service is my point of reference, I must admit. The BBC seems to be the only stable factor in my life. It's always there, even moreso than the Internet. In bed, I am listening carefully to the way they are building sentences, and guessing the meaning of the countless words with which I am not familiar. A couple of years ago they started to broadcast 'Europe Today' where you can hear all the variations of 'Euro-English', even from the moderator. Sometimes it's amusing, but most of the time it is just informative, like any other good radio program. Would that be the 'Euro-English' McKenzie speaks about, beyond all accents and apparent mistakes, a still not yet conscious 'Gesamtsprachwerk'?

According to McKenzie, within this 'bastard language' one can 'sometimes see the shadows of another way of thinking.' This might be true. We all agree that we should not be annoyed by mistakes, but instead look for the new forms of English that the Net is now generating. But for me, most of these shadows are like the shadows in Plato's Cave story. They are weak, distorted references to a point somebody is desperately trying to make. We will never know whether the 'charming' and 'strange' outcomes are intentional, or not. Non-native English writers (not sanctioned by editors) might have more freedom to play with the language.

Finding the right expression even makes more fun, at least for me. At this moment, I am writing three times as slow as I would do in Dutch or German. Not having dictionaries here, nor the sophisticated software to do spell checking, one feels that the libidinous streams are getting interrupted here and there. On-line text is full of those holes. At sudden moments, I feel the language barrier rising up and I am not anymore able to express myself. This is a violent, bodily experience, a very frustrating one that Wark is perhaps not aware of. He could trace those holes and ruptures later, in the text. But then again we move on and the desire to communicate removes the temporary obstacles.

How should the Euro-English e-texts be edited? At least they should go through a spell-checker. Obvious grammar mistakes should be taken out, and they should not be rewritten be a naive English or American editor. If we are in favour of 'language diversification,' this should also be implemented on the level of the printed word. 'Euro-English’s' or 'Net-English’s' are very much alive, but do they need to be formalised or even codified? I don't care, to be honest. At the moment, I am more afraid of an anthropological approach, an exotic view on Net-English that would like to document this odd language before it disappears again. But our way of expression is not cute (or rare). It is born out of a specific historical and technological circumstance: the Pax Americana, pop culture, global capitalism, Europe after 89 and the rise of the Internet.

Globalisation will further unify the English languages and will treat local variations as minor, subcultural deviations. As long as they are alive, I don't see any problem, but should we transform these e-texts onto paper, only to show the outsiders that the Net is so different, so exciting? I would propose that the Book as a medium should not be used to make propaganda for the idea of 'hyper-text' or 'multi-media'. A discussion in a news group, on a list or just through personal e-mail exchange is nothing more than building a 'discourse' and not by definition a case for sophisticated graphic design to show all the (un)necessary cross references.

McKenzie Wark didn't want to speak about the right to express yourself in your own language. He agrees with this and I guess we all do. His native language is English, the lucky boy. But we do have to speak about it. Especially US-Americans do not want to be bothered about this topic. I haven't heard one cyber-visionary ever mentioning the fact that the Net has to become multi-lingual if we ever want to reach Negroponte's famous 'one billion users by the year 2000.' It is not in their interest to develop multi-lingual networks. OK, the marketing departments of the software houses do bring out versions in other languages. But this is only done for commercial reasons. And the Internet is not going to change so quickly. Still 90% of its users are living in the USA. Rebuilding Babylon within the Net will be primarily the task of the non-natives.

Of course, many of us have found our way in dealing with the dominance of the English language and think that newbies should do likewise. But this attitude seems shortsighted, even a bit cynical. If we want the Net to grow, to be open and democratic, to have its free, public access and content zones, then sooner or later we have to face the language problem. Until now, this has been merely one's own, private problem. It depends on your cultural background, education and commitment whether you are able and willing to communicate freely in English. This 'individual' quality goes together with the emphasis on the user-as-an-individual in the slogan of cyber-visionaries about the so-called 'many to many' communication. But the language from 'all 2 all' remains unmentioned.. 'Translation bots will solve that problem,' the eternal optimist will tell you. Everything has been taken care of in the Fantasy World called Internet. But so far nothing has happened. At the moment, the number of languages used in the Net is increasing rapidly. But they exist mainly separately. It can happen that a user in Japan or Spain will never (have to) leave his or her language sphere, or is not able to…

Languages are neither global nor local. Unlike the proclaimed qualities of the Net, they are bound to the nation state and its borders, or perhaps shared by several nations or spoken in a certain region, depending on the course history took in the 19th and 20th century. Countless small languages have disappeared in this process of nation building, migration and genocide. But in Europe we still have at least 20 or 30 of them and they are not likely to disappear. So communicating effectively within Europe through the Net will need a serious effort to build a 'many to many' languages translation interface. A first step will be the implementation of unicode. Automatic translation programs will only then become more reliable. At this moment, French and Hungarian users, for example, seriously feel their language mutilated if they have to express themselves in ASCII.

But let's not complain too much. Once I saw a small paper in a shop window in Amsterdam, saying “English? No problem.” Rebuilding the Babel Tower together should be big fun and I am ready to spend a lot of time in the construction of a true multi-lingual Net.

Anyone using this awful phrase 'global communications' without mentioning the multi-lingual aspect of it, seems implausible for me. Let's change this and put the translation on the agenda. Separated, bi-lingual systems, though, remind me of 'apartheid'. The linguistic Islands on the Net should not become closed and isolated universes. Our own cute bastardised Englishes has no future either. There will never be one planet, with one people, speaking one language. 'Das Ganze ist immer das Unwahre' and this specially counts for all dreams about English becoming the one and only world language for the New Dark Age. Still many netizens unconsciously do make suggestions in the direction of 'One language or no language.' (In parallel with the eco-blackmail speech 'One planet or no planet'). The pretension to go global can be a cheap escape not to be confronted anymore with the stagnation and boredom of the local (and specially national) levels. Working together on language solutions can be one way to avoid this trap.

Editor’s note
McKenzie Wark

I was tempted to change 'flamboyant birds' in the first paragraph, by substituting in its place either 'exotic birds' or 'exotic fowl'. Flamboyant connotes showy and ornate—it’s something one would say of a Las Vegas stage show. Exotic connotes rarity of occurrence, as well as a less specific quality of unusual appearance. The justification for making the change would be that, as the editor, I am getting closer to the 'author's intention.'

It’s worth noting that 'bird' is also unusual in this context. It’s used colloquially in Australia for a fowl meant for the table—but I don't know if the expression is so used anywhere else. The OED is not enlightening on this subject. 'Fowl' is more correct, as the term fowl includes chicken, duck, geese, turkey and pheasant—but not quail. But 'fowl' sounds no more natural. So while 'exotic fowl' seems to me to be both a correct expression and closest to the author's intention, it isn't something that looks quite natural—hence I see no net gain in such a change.

I've left 'flamboyant birds' because, quite simply, there's nothing grammatically wrong with it. It’s just an unusual usage. But this often happens in Euro-English’s: neglected areas of connotation for particular words get reactivated, or extensions of connotation that don't yet quite exist in English-English come into being. I think that is, historically, how English develops and changes—just look at the remarkable richness that’s crept into standard English-English through Irish English. The example here may seem trivial—all editing decisions are in the end trivial—but I've expounded on it in order to show the kind of things that happen.

The editorial solutions can head in one of two directions—the instrumental or the formal. Geert's preference is instrumental—the text is a means to an end. I'm inclined to a slightly more formal approach—the surface of the text, as a distinct artefact in its own right, ought to be respected.

I've made minor changes elsewhere in Geert's text. With one exception, sentences ending in prepositions have been recast. Possessive apostrophes have been added. Spelling is now more or less OED, except of course the 'net-neologisms' that don't yet exist in any recognised dictionary. For example 'newbie.' Here one follows standard net-usage. If I was editing for printed publication, I'd be inclined to eliminate unnecessary net-speak—but that's another issue.

The netletters were originally written ‘live’ for the listserve group nettime.
These are edited versions.

Geert Lovink received two responses from Japan on his article, Language? No Problem. One comes from a Japanese book editor, the other from an American translator involved in video activism and documentary film. The first commented: “Japanese are always frustrated by English in Net (reading, writing, sending mail) and this situation divides people. When I sent mail to my Japanese friend in London, I used English-Japanese like ‘konnitiwa, Yano desu’; because his internet server didn’t accept 2-byte characters.” He added, “But Japanese never questions this problem There is the situation which push us not to think about that.” This was a theme explored by the second writer:

“I got your piece on the English language problem, and enjoyed reading it. We have faced with some of the same issues at Yamagata since we established our WWW site. As a rule, we put everything in English and Japanese, but we seriously realize that to fulfill our role as a promoter of Asian documentary, we have to also start putting out some of the information in Korean and Chinese (at least). For that, however, we have no money.

It was hard enough just producing everything in Japanese and English. The people who ran the site insisted we could just have Japanese volunteers translate material into English because in their own “cyber-visionary” fashion they insisted that Internet will give birth to a diversified English no longer controlled by white Anglo-Saxons. I sympathize with their goal, but at the same time, their statements can be easily co-opted within various ideologies about the Japanese language. The feeling that Japanese do not need to learn to be fluent in English, to produce it on their own in a communicative situation, but only be able to read it, has been central to state education policy and reinforces the construction of the Japanese nation through the language. Japanese have been crucially defined through their language, to the degree that Japanese children raised abroad who speak fluent Japanese and English are somehow considered “non-Japanese.” The inability or lack of necessity to produce good English then provides the insulation through which the discursive “community” of Japanese can articulate an homogeneous national identity. I sometimes then wonder what would happen if more Japanese could speak and write ‘good’ English.”

Reproduced with the permission of the authors and nettime from http://mediafilter.org/nettime/[expired]

As part of the Denmark Meets Australia program brought to us by the Royal Danish Ministry of Culture, New Danish Dance Theatre is presenting their work Tanne: Episodes from the Life of Karen Blixen choreographed by NDDT’s artistic director Warren Spears and performed by six dancers from the company with music by Jens Wilhelm Pedersen at the Newtown Theatre 16-18 October. The NDDT season dovetails into the 1997 Bodies season at the same venue from October 22 to November 9. Producer Mark Cleary’s Bodies count this year numbers around 20 dancers including Elizabeth Dalman, Susan Barling, Virginia Ferris, Rosetta Cook, Norman Hall, Paulina Quinteros, Bernadette Walong and Patrick Harding-Irmer. There’s also a special Youthworks program produced by Julianne Sanders on November 1 and 8.

The Denmark Meets Australia program also includes the stunning production of Orfeo by Hotel Pro Forma, a visit by the 20-piece Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra with jazz bassists Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson, a program of contemporary Danish cinema and a tour by Danish writers (Ib Michael, Carsten Jensen, Vagn Lundbye and Solvej Balle) with actors from the Danish People’s Theatre. Parts of the program are touring Sydney, Canberra and Barossa Valley, South Australia.

The annual independent dance showcase, Steps is an eagerly anticipated forum for new work and debate around issues of physical performance. The third Steps program (Inter-Steps) will run throughout November at The Performance Space in Sydney. There’s always a sense of performance as event in the Steps program along with serious explorations of space. As well as providing a platform for independent artists, Steps offers dancers and physical performers an opportunity to reflect a personal style as distinct from their performances within companies.

This year’s featured artists are Brett Daffy, Meredith Kitchen, Claire Hague, Trevor Patrick, Brian Carbee, Beth Kayes and Tuula Roppola. As well as the main program, Studio Steps features one-off performances by Martin del Amo, Jeff Stein, James McAllister, Lisa Ffrench, Lisa Freshwater and Brett Heath. Premiering at Steps is a new 13-minute dance on film, Touched, choreographed by Wendy Houstoun of DV8 fame. There’ll also be an intimate exhibition of images by photographer Heidrun Löhr.

A special focus of Inter-steps will be dance on video. Michelle Mahrer has curated a program of recent award winning films from Europe and North America including Vertigo Bird (33 mins) featuring Slovenia’s En-Knap Company choreographed by Iztok Kovac and from the UK, Boy (5 mins) choreographed by Rosemary Lee and directed by Peter Anderson. On November 8 following the screenings of the Microdance films, there’ll be a discussion on the vexed process of creating dance on film with film-makers Robert Herbert, Paul Hampton, Louise Curham and Alyson Bell and choreographers Matthew Bergan, Sue Healey, Kate Champion and Trevor Patrick.

Find

October 1997

On ‘netlish’ McKenzie Wark

Language? No problem Geert Lovink: edited by McKenzie Wark

Editor’s note McKenzie Wark

realtime

On ‘netlish’
McKenzie Wark

Language? No problem
Geert Lovink: edited by McKenzie Wark

Editor’s note
McKenzie Wark