Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

June 1998

http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502/ [expired]
Komninos’ cyberpoetry site, “poetry that moves in time and space, poetry that requires new ways of reading” is a good introduction to his online works. Animated text poems, deceptively simple. He has written poetry for children and it shows. The words move as examples of what they are, do the actions they describe…sunrise comes up from the horizon, sunset into obscurity. Innovative and memorable, fun and playful, you are forced to consider the possibilities of words, their nature as visual building blocks. The potential of poetry that moves is exciting. I like to imagine putting all these bouncing, shooting, running, jitterbugging words together in a riotous assault. C in quick pursuit of hasing off the screen. Who says the computer means the death of literacy. Spike Milligan-esque, can you imagine what you could do with On the ning nang nong. There are other examples of cyberpoetry featured: interactive, where words change at random and you hit stop to make a poem. As interactive as pokies I guess. Spoken word heard jukebox, where you can hear Komninos reading “faster than a squirt of vinegar.” I like the sensuality of reading poems online, imagining how the poet sounds, the nuance in the work and then hearing the poet’s own voice… interpretation. Java Animated Poems. QuickTime Virtual Reality Poetry. Genres of poetry become poems themselves.

http://www.altx.com
“Black Ice—Fiction for a Wired Nation.” At first glance this section of the site seems male dominated, austere, techno-cold but not so. Good and bad short erotic fiction. Soft core, sometimes cliched and I’ve never been into magic realism. Scoops of techno, which, when it’s good, it’s very very good. According to blurb, Black Ice is modelled on avant-garde literary writing of the past and aims to publish offensive, sexy and formally adventurous works. Commendable ideals and some interesting techno-experiments but nothing really turned me on and I didn’t leave feeling violated.
Amerika Online—Mark Amerika’s column (he recently toured here to mixed reaction)—offers opinion and interviews with legendaries like Allen Ginsberg. He tends to overwrite, very I-driven, which becomes boring, first person, this-happened-then-that—perhaps the internet column format could be played with a little more? Revolutionary hype: Alt X aims to challenge contemporary writing establishments and produce electronic novellas which “experiment in narrative and language” and fight the “oppressive forces of social and literary authority.” Literary terrorism, drive-by-haiku. Yawn.

http://sysx.apana.org.au/~gashgirl/arc/index.html [expired]
Alt X needs to take some lessons from gashgirl in the offensive department. Anything you want, you got it. Feminist speakings—“saboteurs of big daddy mainframe”—lots of cunts, both literal and figurative. Gashgirl likes the smell of blood, the depth of wounds, stomach churning sickening puns. It gets a reaction but then I get bored with self-destruction; I hang around with enough artists. There’s lots of going down, down down down into dreamland, violent fairytales; Little Red Riding Hood’s revenge. Sweet success and the art of killing online. The blinking and blending of technology with words are great and gruesome. Da Rimini knows her machine and rages against it:
She weeps tears of code.
Her thoughts are classified. She has
forgotten her own password.
She is corrupt.
Unrecoverable icon.

http://www.ins.gu.edu/eda/text/journal.html [expired]
The serious site. TEXT. Articles by teachers of creative writing. For all those writing students trying to suck up, click here. Basic layout and design and no pics, hence the name. Creative pieces and writing about writing. Hypertext as bibliographical tool is utilised effectively as a way of referencing. See Susan Hawthorne’s “Topographies of Creativity: Writing and Publishing” for digital resources. For writers interested in critical theory about writing, especially on the net.

http://www.netlink.com.au/~beth [expired]
OK, it’s semi promotional but it’s an example of what the net offers to writers: a haven for their work. Produce a web page that reflects you, show off your best stuff, do a striptease but not down to bare skin. Beth Spencer’s first book How to Conceive of a Girl was published last year. Click on parts of Spencer’s cover to reveal juicy excerpts and contemporary short fiction, poetry and essays. The bitter sweet A Blue Mountains Coin-in-the-slot Telescopic Poem, full of masculinity and mud and feminist footy fever, is even better than its title.

http://www.deadreal.com.au
Online road novel. Episodic and intertextual, an idea well suited to the nowhereness of the cyberhighway. Beautifully designed, film noirish—no True-Love-and-Chaos-desert-scenes here—street signs direct the way and if you’re tired and need a driver reviver, Kit Kat and weak white coffee, meaningful messages are signposted throughout. Strong and narrative-driven, you take various roots/routes as a man and a woman hit the road, Jack, and newcomers arrive on the scene to look at the carnage. For Drifters Only: “You start the wipers’ rhythmic dirge. Lo-ner Lo-ner.”

http://writers.ngapartji.com.au [expired]
Ngapartji’s Virtual Writers in Residence: ngapartji = exchange, the act of giving or receiving (Pitjantjatjara language). The best interactive collection of fiction I’ve seen, divided by genre, which encourages the reader to submit versions, reviews and even a rating.
Electronica/multimedia with a wide range of writers/practitioners: John Crouch’s erotic babble, Gibberish, rolls on the tongue like a well-sucked Malteser, while gc beaton’s tangling with artificial intelligence introduces me to someone who I’m sure will become a lifelong friend. Eliza. At last someone who truly understands me. Talk to her—www.ai.ijs.si/eliza-cgi-bin/eliza_script [expired]—if you need some TLC.

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~rmclean/arts/liftk2.htm [expired]
The K Assignment: a serial cybernovel during a writer’s festival, a chapter per day by different writers. With the opening line by Dean Kiley, “Helen Garner’s just finished fucking Patrick White”, I’m hooked. The writing explodes off the screen and into the next millennium, into the psychology of the future. A sci-fi thriller, hilariously subversive, a world where poems only appear as computer viruses and “rhetoric was outlawed after the infamous 21st century scandal involving PP McGuiness, Ray Martin and the use of unauthorised E-motion gravitators”, full of imagination and irony, techno-savvy brilliance and belly laughs. A must for struggling writers hoping to get an arts grant. Will the Rogues Gallery of Minor Poets overpower the Niche Warriors? It’s now your assignment…

RealTime issue #25 June-July 1998 pg. 18

Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar have selected 51 essays, interviews and studies from their co-edited magazine 21.C and put them together as a book called Transit Lounge. It is hard to categorise Transit Lounge because it’s a book about everything, at least everything to do with the future, and so that means anything to do with the present and the past as well. William Gibson in his introduction indicates that the editors are willing to “fearlessly consider any futurological possibility whatever, to interrogate anything at all for its potential as fast feed into some possible future.”

So you will find essays on Sigmund Freud and Sandy Stone, William Burroughs and Marshall McLuhan, Terence McKenna and Noam Chomsky, and on subjects such as psychedelia’s influence on computer design, interactive art, stomach sculptures, and clowns in media. There comes a time when healthy pluralism can turn into a sloppy everything-is-everything melange, but ultimately this book (like the magazine) is saved by its own enthusiasm for all these weirdnesses and you kind of get swept along in the rush. It also helps that just about everything in Transit Lounge is well written.

As a collection of articles culled from a magazine, it serves primarily two functions. First, as a record of fin de millennium observations on life and the future from a range of writers and thinkers. Second, as a handy pop-future primer for those who might not have been paying attention when early issues of 21.C were available.

The editors have done a good job in compressing a mountain of words into a still hefty (and good value at $35 rrp) 192 big pages of stuff. Gone is the magazine style formatting and instead is a low-cost simplified design of black type on rough paper with silver titles and chapter graphics. Applause to art director Terence Hogan—never has the future business looked so unhyped and understated.

In 51 articles there is a range of quality, subjects and authors. Sometimes these axes align to produce gems: Mark Dery’s interview with Terence McKenna is a highlight. If you thought that Terence McKenna was just a lunatic nattering about Transcendental Objects at the End of Time, then you are only partly right. He and Dery have an energetic discussion about McKenna’s ideas, threaded through with an acknowledgment of the importance of contradiction (and the ability to hold in one’s head seemingly contradictory ideas) for the growth of the new paradigm of non-linear thinking. So you could say on one hand McKenna is intelligent and, on the other hand, mad as a meat-axe, and you would be totally right.

Dery makes another appearance (well, 7 actually—only matched by McKenzie Wark for output) with a lighter and darker think piece on the image of the clown in contemporary culture. Drawing on contemporary clowns such as Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman, John Wayne Gacy, Krusty the Clown and the slew of serial clowns in slasher movies, Dery follows the scary clown thread all the way back to medieval mystery plays where the Fool and Death were often interchangeable. Death makes a mockery of life’s joys, and life can thumb its nose at death. Either way, there is a hell of a lot of clown imagery out there—“encapsulating what Stephen King has identified as the Have-A-Nice-Day/Make-My-Day dualism that typifies contemporary culture.” Creepy.

Margaret Wertheim’s profile on Evelyn Fox Keller, “The XX Files”, provides a perfect introduction to Keller’s ideas and her increasingly shakeable faith in her ideas to effect real change. Keller has shown that prevailing masculine views clouded the judgement of those observing the role of the sperm and egg in reproduction—the idea was that all the work was done by the sperm and the egg just lay there—but now we know (or at least believe it when this generation of scientists tells us) that the egg is actively engaged in guiding the sperm by releasing chemicals. The roles ascribed to the nucleus and cytoplasm in the cell are also found to be influenced by gender-based assumptions. Keller wrote her book over 10 years ago, and this article is a re-examination of her ideas and an instructive overview of what little has changed since then.

These are just three of the better pieces in Transit Lounge. Bruce Sterling’s paean to dead media forms, Rudy Rucker’s ode to the BrainPlug, Anthony Haden-Guest’s hymn to Anime and Rosie Cross’s tribute to St Jude are some more. Every reader will have their own favourites.

Criticisms? Both profile authors and profile subjects will be familiar to many who might be considered the target market: James Joyce by Darren Tofts, William Burroughs by Kathy Acker, William Gibson by Phillip Adams, Ted Nelson by Rosie Cross, Noam Chomsky by Catharine Lumby, Stelarc by Nicholas Zurbrugg, Jean Baudrillard by Jean Baudrillard. Maybe it’s too familiar for some, and maybe the dynamic range of experiences offered in the magazine gets attenuated here by the editors’ preferences.

And then there are the quotes and counter quotes throughout: Darren Tofts in talking of Sigmund Freud quotes Greil Marcus, Greil Marcus in talking of Guy Debord quotes Sadie Plant, Rosie Cross in talking to Sadie Plant quotes Donna Haraway. Keen cultural studies students could probably play that 6 degrees of separation game—instead of Kevin Bacon you could find you are only ever 6 jumps away from McKenzie Wark.

Ultimately Transit Lounge has enough good points to overcome any objections from reviewers who think a well balanced review should have some negatives. It is a sprawling mass of ideas and opinions through which readers can pick their own path, and its darkly optimistic enthusiasm for the future is a refreshing change from overhyped commercial expectation or anti-tech hysteria.

Nothing ages slower than visions of the future. Buy a copy and bury it for future generations.

Ashley Crawford & Ray Edgar eds, Transit Lounge: Wake Up Calls and Travellers’ Tales From the Future, Craftsman House, 1998, $35 rrp

RealTime issue #25 June-July 1998 pg. 25

Markus Käch, Works

During this decade ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie/Centre for Art and Media), located at Karlsruhe in Germany, has rapidly become one of the major tertiary education centres in the world concerned with the teaching, exhibition and production of contemporary media art. It is a large, innovative and productive centre and one of its main objectives is to explore how central media technology is to art as we approach the end of this century.

Anyone who has visited ZKM will testify to its multifaceted teaching, curatorial and publishing activities. Someone who has been a pivotal figure in this context, in his capacity as Head of the Institute of Visual Media, is the Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw, who has been living in Europe since the late 60s. ZKM’s artist-in-residency program has attracted a variety of German and international artists including Australians Jill Scott and Peter Callas and American Bill Seaman. Seaman won ZKM’s prestigious International Award for Video Art a few years back.

What follows is an email interview with ZKM’s curator/critic Rudolf Frieling, who is in charge of the video collection at the centre, and is travelling to Australia and New Zealand with an exhibition program of German new media works. The program, prepared by ZKM in association with the Goethe-Institut and presented in Sydney in association with dLux media arts (formerly Sydney Intermedia Network), will be exhibited at the 45th Sydney Film Festival and at Artspace in June. This will be a rare opportunity to see some recent innovative German new media art.

JC Rudolf, what are the main underlying objectives of your visit?

RF To present not only video art but also CD-ROM and internet projects. Accompanying the current artistic practices and issues we have co-produced a CD-ROM on the historic and seminal decades of media art, the 60s and 70s in Germany. I strongly welcome the invitation since there haven’t been too many occasions to establish fruitful discussions and meetings with those who work in related fields in Australia and New Zealand.

JC What significance does ZKM play in the curatorial rationale of your presentation?

RF ZKM is not only the co-producer of this whole package but also crucial in helping to produce media art works. ZKM has hosted residencies of featured artists (eg Bill Seaman) and ZKM produced the only CD-ROM that promotes artistic projects: artintact. Then there is the historic CD-ROM media art action which was curated by Dieter Daniels and myself. Finally, ‘links’ can also be found to internet projects (for example, those by Jochen Gerz or Daniela Plewe).

JC What are some of the more important conceptual, cultural and technological directions that are foregrounded in the works you have brought with you?

RF There is sometimes a disturbing lack of political and social issues that surfaces in the average artistic production—with exceptions of course. The issues at stake seem to be either highly subjective with often supremely formal treatments or the works seem to indulge in playful scenarios (especially the multimedia works). Yet the manipulation of images and the underlying notions about the imagery that surrounds us lead to an intense examination of what an image is, how it is produced, and how it might be perceived.

JC What is your position concerning the future of video art?

RF To put it bluntly: the rise of multimedia will give ‘pure’ video artists a hard time but, on the other hand, this critical moment will help to establish a more concentrated perception of what has been produced so far and of what will be produced in the future.

JC Do you think CD-ROMs as constructed by visual artists, writers and cultural producers are heading for ‘the dustbin of history’?

RF No—the support may change, but that does not mean that the artistic work becomes obsolete. The videotape is still in use and ever more popular with artists from all different kinds of fields.

JC What vital role do media/video festivals and prizes have in the broader context of Germany’s media culture?

RF In the past they had a crucial importance—there was nothing else but festivals. The founding of centers and schools like ZKM and its adjacent Academy of Design will help to broaden this basis. Personally I feel that we need both sides—the hype of the festival and the more continuous reflection of artistic practices within the context of institutions. I have been able to consolidate and enlarge one of the most important media art prizes, the International Award for Video Art, which is a mutual initiative by ZKM and the broadcaster Sudwestfunk. For the first time in history, TV and video go hand in hand—at least for 3 weeks every year. This has become one of the major activities of ZKM and has helped to broaden the public acceptance of the notoriously difficult video art.

JC As a new media author and curator, did you have a curatorial input into ZKM’s digital media museum?

RF I am responsible for the setting up and presentation of our video collection which is united with a large collection of electronic music—in itself a unique combination worldwide. The other 2 public departments of ZKM, the Museum of Contemporary Art, directed by Heinrich Klotz, and the Media Museum, directed by Hans-Peter Schwarz, have been independently curated by their respective directors. There is, however, discussion of works and artists that certainly influences also one’s own work.

JC Finally, could you please say a few words about your collaborative work Media Art Action ?

RF Media Art Action is the first of a series of 3 editions which will eventually comprise the whole history of media art to the present day, hopefully, in Germany. The accompanying book with texts by the artists and introductory chapters by the editors is a perfect way to distribute the CD-ROM and deepen its content. This is, to my knowledge, the first historic review of media art that makes use of a congenial medium. This survey is bridging the gap between purely information oriented databases and a more playful and sensual introduction to the topics and works collected. The collaboration with Dieter Daniels (and with the editor Sybille Weber and the designer/programmer Christian Ziegler) was extremely effective and productive, leading to a ‘product’ that hopefully stimulates others to engage in complementary research and editorial work. I would be more than happy to study historical works from Australia or other countries on CD-ROM. Browsing through catalogues is just not enough when dealing with media art.

Current Media Art: Video Art, CD-ROM and Internet projects from Germany presented by the Goethe-Institut in association with dLux media arts (Sydney Intermedia Network). Video art works at 45th Sydney Film Festival, June 5-19; CD-ROMs and internet projects at Artspace, June 10-27. Rudolf Frieling will introduce the video sessions and exhibition opening. For further information contact dLux media arts tel (02) 9380 4255. ZKM website http://www.zkm.de

RealTime issue #25 June-July 1998 pg. 28

The BioTechSex heart is an empty space, traversed only by code, aching for information, haunted by memories of a fleshly existence. Or so it is understood by many new media artists asking what has happened to erotics and politics, to ethics and intimacy, to embodied subjectivity in the digital era. This is not a nostalgic longing for old media and ideologies, but rather an immersed exploration of digital subjectivity. These concerns animated the State of the Heart exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography and were explored further at BioTechSex, the New Media Forum organised to coincide with it.

State of the Heart, excellently curated by John Tonkin and Blair French, brought together diverse and thought-provoking photographic/digital media projects. As you moved from space to space in the exhibition, your own digital subjectivity shifted uneasily. In the main room, Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski presented their Diagnostic Tools for the New Millennium comprised light boxes and computer interactive stations. The artists continue their formal interrogations of interface and their ‘schizoid’ attraction/repulsion to new technology—entranced with its “flexibility and freedom” while wary of its obsessions and surveillance implications. At first sight this split was addressed by two separate works—one about love and the other, paranoia. Yet the works took on a strange life of their own with audience interaction, as Starrs noted at the forum: the Fuzzy Love Machine induced paranoia and the Paranoia Machine embraced you. The fuzzy machine photographed you and extracted intimate data before allowing you to play in the database. This activity clearly put some people on edge, making the erotica/danger edge all the sharper. And while the Paranoia Machine represented paranoia, the delight of the interface, even its intimacy, made the experience sensually pleasurable. The Diagnostic Tools in light boxes similarly refused to stay in neat conceptual categories, thus poetically conveying the contradictions and energy of the artists’ own relationship to technology.

The blown up digital photographs in Michele Barker and Anna Munster’s The Love Machine were startling. The work seemed like a straightforward re-presentation of photos from a photo booth in Hong Kong (the Love Machine), which combines features of the two ‘parents’ to re-produce their offspring. The Machine has pre-sets for race, gender, eye and hair colour that are folded into the morph, or morpheme, as Barker and Munster figured it. The elegant simplicity and power of the work emerged as you registered the strangeness of the images of Kenji Barker-Munster, the Asian son, Lissie Barker-Munster, the Afro-American first born, and Mary-Beth, the blond, blue eyed child who held pride of place (though somewhat like another Munster, Marilyn, she was, in her normality, all the more disturbing). The re-ordering of Barker and Munster’s own images on the side walls underlined their disruption of the standard heterosexual reproductive couple—who was really ‘on top’, and where was the desire to see yourself in your offspring’s face going in the digital era? By inserting themselves inappropriately into the Machine and blowing its output out of proportion, Barker and Munster refused an easy, humorous take on The Love Machine with its promise of flesh becoming code and code becoming flesh. Instead they teased out the tensions and political implications of the way normalising (pre-set) culture and power relations produce and code not just The Love Machine but genetic engineering in general—reducing difference and specificity.

The third work in State of the Heart was Francesca da Rimini’s dollspace with Michael Grimm’s soundtrack for an empty dollspace. Well placed in its own little alcove, the viewer was positioned in an extremely disturbing space, where the detailed observations of everyday life that interest da Rimini were at play. More than, different from cyberspace, it was an intimate story space which undermined narrow categories of photography, writing, web work and interactivity. The sound held you there, immersed you, and yet powerfully disturbed your position. Its visual elegance was very moving—with the carefully laid out text, haiku-like, sitting on a variety of screens composed of an eclectic assemblage of photos and drawings. Equally powerful was the writing, a strange and haunting exploration of “identity, desire, death and deception.” The poetic fragments, story segments, and electronic correspondence (written to doll yoko/da Rimini) moved between mournful reflections and pornographic imaginings. The play between these registers was abrupt and disturbing—especially disturbing to be in the same room with other people, to share your uncertainty or witness their discomfort. Inspired by a pond in Kyoto where women drowned their unwanted baby girls, the work moved beyond this focus and operated as a space of reverberation, where the lack of central or single organising narrative left you disoriented, as “haunted by…hungry ghosts” as da Rimini herself.

The artists from State of the Heart were brought together with academics at BioTechSex, one of the best of the excellent New Media Forums. One of the issues that wove through all the provocative and insightful papers was regulation. The level of argument went beyond the common technofear or instrumental reading of technology (the use/abuse debate) to raise questions about the relationship between science (in general and biology in particular), technology and culture and the implications for artists of the bio/sex/tech nexus.

Adrian Mackenzie countered the prevalent technofear that technical codes regularise and smooth out differences; he argued instead that “life introduces something that is not fully determined by codes.” For him, confusion, change, and short-livedness break the seeming totalising power of codes through their depth, their layers. Further, since codes are always embedded in (graphic) marks and must be materialised, they are “contingent”, specific and dependent on a context. Anna Munster approached regulation from a different angle, focusing on the coded regulations and nodes of power already present in (capitalist) culture and therefore already/inevitably embedded in codes and technology. As an embodiment of culture, technology is entangled with social, political, and economic relations. Munster noted the way some cyberfeminists forget this and overly sanguinely appropriate technologies to avoid the problems of humanism.

Biologist Lesley Rogers unpacked regulation and codes, a prominent issue in biology in this era of the human genome project. With stunning examples from the sex lives of chicks and rats, she argued that behaviour can affect biology and its genetic codes. Given the conservative prominence of biology and genetics in this code-obsessed digital era, including in the media, this critique of science from an insider was valuable and satisfying.

The relationship of these critical ideas for art was also raised. Adrian Mackenzie noted the way many artists’ works repeat existing problematic structures in order that they no longer do what they were meant to do. This resonated with Barker, Starrs and da Rimini’s discussion of the ways their works de-contextualise cultural practices, and how this throws into relief the implications of those practices—from net sex to digital reproduction. As Munster pointed out, new media artists are well placed to “work within existing structures and tease out implications and histories.”

State of the Heart, Australian Centre for Photography, March 27-April 25; BioTechSex New Media Forum 7, Powerhouse Museum, March 28.

RealTime issue #25 June-July 1998 pg. 29

Often the region referred to as Asia is considered as an homogeneous environment—stricken with poverty, and social and political problems. But of course there are many countries which are placed at different positions on the graph of social-economic well-being. And within each country there are also vast differences.

In the cities in the poorer regions of Asia, such as Bangkok, Hanoi, Saigon, and Phnom Penh, the internet is readily accessible. High-end internet connected Pentiums can be found in venues such as cafes where for about $10 per hour ‘Hotmailing’, telnetting and IRCing are all possible. Often there is a queue to get access—busy with tourists and travellers eager to communicate their experiences in real-time back to their friends at home, or to organise rendezvous points with other travellers. All the tourists seem to have a webmail account. The net is never too far away.

Bangkok is full of new technology and the internet infrastructure is well supported by the government. Schools and universities have access to facilities and internet computers can be found in libraries. Software and hardware are readily accessible, but only affordable to the more affluent, a complete system costing around $1200. At Chulalongkorn University and Silpakorn University, two major academies in Bangkok, media labs equipped with high-end Power Macs can be found in the Creative Arts departments. Though Apple’s marketing has seduced the academics, many of the students decide to own the low-cost high-end Pentiums which come loaded with the latest pirated software.

The images and animations produced by students are of a very high quality but mainly lean toward the advertising industry. On graduation most students will likely be employed by design houses and advertising agencies. Associate Professor Suppakorn Disatapundhu of Chulalongkorn University is very interested in developing electronic art within the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts. He is aware of the lack of student interest in art and the consequent focus on design and marketing. His hope is that the economic crisis in the region will mean that students might decide to stay longer at university and undertake research projects in the electronic art field. Unfortunately, the general attitude seems to be that if it has no commercial benefit then there is no point to digital art.

The Bangkok Post’s online division recently uploaded photographs of large billboard posters originally created by a group called Artists for Social Change in the early 1970s. The posters were created to commemorate student deaths during a political demonstration in 1973. The drive to increase the ‘creative’ content of the Post’s website wasn’t by local Thai people, but instead by Theo Den Brinker, an Australian ex-pat who is the Director of the online division. The actual photoshopping of the scanned photographs was carried out by local graphic artists—but for them, it was just another task.

A number of Thai artists are producing interesting original work—especially work that is critical of their own country. The military, the Buddhist religion, the government and the King are subjects that some artists have criticised through painting, performance and film works. But using the internet as a medium of expression is a foreign concept. In fact, most of the artists using traditional media to create political work are suspicious of technology—viewing computers and the internet as instruments of authority—and prefer to use the older media that they know cannot be controlled by the authorities and are easily accessible to their audience.

Some people I met claimed that information—such as video evidence—proving the Thai military and the King have acted against the interests of the people exists on a CD-ROM called The Truth. Thai expatriates living in the US have threatened to put this information onto the internet if the government and military acts against the people’s interest and this is apparently of major concern to authorities. China’s plans for building a (government controlled) intranet for the whole country were attractive to the Thai communications authority as they could ‘govern’ the amount of bandwidth used to overseas sites (these were paid in US dollars and at a relatively high rate to overseas companies). This provides a handy excuse to ‘regulate’ net access.

In Hanoi and Saigon, access to the internet is available from tourist cafes but, interestingly, some of the people who run these cafes don’t want to know about the content accessible from their terminals. There seems to be a fear of what this content will bring. Other owners and their families are more enthusiastic about what they can get—but of course this content is largely in English and is filtered through the ‘virtual’ grid of Microsoft, Yahoo, or CNN. It is difficult to maintain interest for culturally oriented or more complex or chaotic sites—those outside the glossy regimented mainstream. Combine this with the access speed issue and most people in these regions can only view the internet as a kind of online newspaper with ‘entertainment’ the main drawcard. On a more positive note there is also a lot of swapping of email addresses between travellers and local café owners which might hopefully be a forerunner of regional grassroots networks.

In Phnom Penh, there is a public internet and training centre which caters primarily for local Cambodians. The centre, funded by a Canadian NGO has, together with the Post and Telecommunications Ministry, set up an ISP called CamNet. Through the commercial activities of CamNet, and with some external funding, the centre provides low cost training courses on web browsing and web page design. Importantly, training is provided in the process of browsing (using search engines properly), something rarely taught here, thereby enabling people to utilise the internet more productively. However it should be noted that it most benefits those fluent in English.

The web is perceived by many in the region as a one way medium, just like a newspaper or television and overall there doesn’t seem to be much interest in setting up websites. In places like Vietnam it is very difficult to get server space, but in Cambodia the students have established free Hotmail accounts and are creating home pages and hosting it with the Geocities advertisement-supported free hosting service. It comes down to whether or not an awareness is created in how to set up and operate websites—and once it is people will generally utilise the knowledge.

The web, when viewed from a country like Vietnam, appears to be a domain of commerciality for the self-indulgent (no-one in the year 2000 will be without their own personal website). Artists in the region already have difficulties in freely expressing what they really feel through their art practice and so new media art isn’t even a consideration under these conditions. It could be that the future for this artform in this region will be determined by how much artists appreciate the marginal and privileged position of new media art and accommodate this in appropriate ways, not just in well-heeled touring exhibitions, but in developing and inspiring its use in accessible, relevant and non-paternal ways.

Layers of time, culture, pain, beauty, geology, grit, finance, taste, politics and art all come into play in the layers of imagery, media, and stories in Urban Clan, a new hour long film about the Page brothers and Bangarra Dance Theatre. Urban Clan, directed by Michelle Mahrer, is about David (composer), Stephen (choreographer) and Russell (dancer) Page. But by being about these 3 it is also about layers—layers of traditional Aboriginal and western cultural expressions, of family and its impact on art and history, of dance and why people do it.

However, even to say Urban Clan is a film ‘about’ something skips a layer of its intention—Urban Clan was devised not just as a film about art, but a film which is art. It tries, sometimes quite successfully, to push the line between documentary and artistic filmmaking. Michelle Mahrer is clear that just bunging a camera in front of a dance is actually “putting a barrier between the audience and the dance.” A barrier which can be overcome by making use of cinematic technique, and “more adventurousness.”

Her adventurousness shows itself in a layering of cinematic source material. The idea of this film, Mahrer says, “was to integrate cinema verite, performance in a cinematic style, and the poetic and spiritual feeling of the Aboriginal world by using a real and poetic interplay all the time.” And at the same time to “create a visual style capturing David, Stephen, and Russell as MTV generation young guys.”

One of Mahrer’s layers is video tape which, she says, the eye perceives as ‘real’. She videotaped interviews in a ‘verite’ documentary style and dance performances in a cinematically conscious style. Then there is archival footage—still photographs and 8mm home movies—which provide some great moments of humour and insight. Worth a few more than a thousand words, the archives show that the Page family has always been close knit, creative, funny, extroverted, and great performers.

Video and archives are then mixed with handheld film footage. Mahrer says that film is perceived by the eye as ‘artistic’ when juxtaposed with video. It is used here for landscape shots which take on a double edge as both real landscape and artistically manipulated image. When analysed at that level it is possible to see this cinematic technique as an apt metaphor for the Page brothers’ relationship to the land. As Aboriginal people they are understood to have an important connection to the land. But they are urban Aboriginals and they are in the process of reconciling that real connection which may sometimes only exist as a memory or a hope, with their own urban experience. Through their artistic practice, a process of reconciliation in itself, their feeling for the land becomes an artistically created image.

The artistry of the Page brothers on an aesthetic level is not questioned in this film. While Mahrer is aware that they have been criticised, this, she says, is “missing the point.” “Here are 3 Aboriginal people doing something positive which is resonating much beyond their career. Bangarra is not about these bits of choreography, that technique or this phrase…The film focuses on a bigger picture of what Bangarra is doing for culture, and the Pages as role models of what it is possible for a young Aboriginal person.”

Urban Clan nonetheless presents a very convincing picture of the dancing, the layer around which all this is centred. Mahrer is quick to credit cinematographer Jane Spring and editor Emma Hay who have both handled the material with sensitivity, skill, and the quality of humility which is the perfect complement to skill—their work draws attention to the dancing, not to itself. The hand held camera moves with the dancing so subtly as to be virtually imperceptible. The edits are silky and wise. The use of montage in some of the dancing scenes may be controversial to dance purists, but I appreciated the intercutting of literal images with the abstract movement. These montage sequences underline the film’s effort to focus on the Page brothers’ intentions by giving us clear visual cues as to what their intentions are.

Urban Clan with its layers of media, images and personalities crystallises the Page’s dance into a mission which comes across as important, interesting, and amazingly pure. In a key moment David Page asks his father “didn’t you fight?” referring to the massacre his father’s tribe experienced and the consequent loss of home, language, and culture. His father spreads his hands in a gesture so articulate and painful as to make a dance in itself. In one shrug he says it all: ‘We fought, we couldn’t fight, we lost, we are still fighting, we are still losing, we do the best we can with what we have, it’s over to you now’. And his sons have taken up the fight.

Urban Clan, A Portrait of the Page Brothers and Bangarra Dance Theatre will be broadcast on July 7 1998, at 8:30 pm on ABC-TV as part of the Inside Story series of documentaries. It will also be broadcast in the UK in July on the BBC as part of their Midsummer Dance Series.

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) used to be one of the most progressive live art venues in Britain, featuring international artists and nurturing national talent on the peripheries of performance culture. Inexplicably the programming department recently closed and the live art offer of this excellently resourced centre has dwindled to the ad hoc hire of space to visiting groups such as the Lust contingent who presented the multimedia festival, Strange Fruits, Nature’s Mutations, March 25-28. Links nevertheless remain between previous performance programming, current activity in the gallery, the cinematheque and media arts centre and externally curated events, for Lustfest mixed its media so thoroughly that that old ICA feeling of disorientation and sensory overload remained.

Lust are a cliquey London-based collective of multi-disciplined European artists, “umbilically linked by a network of creative relationships.” Founded in 1992, Lust has annually presented a showcase of experimental performance art with a plethora of premieres and an edgy degree of “it’ll be alright on the night” improvisation.

This year’s festival took advantage of the ICA Bar (regular host to DJs and projectionists) by presenting a series of eclectic musical partnerships to loosen up the punters for the main events in the theatre. On the opening night, Fabienne Audeoud and L’Orange screeched and swooned respectively, offering the A to Z of female vocal tactics to bewildered boozers. ICA members, in for a quick pre-commute pint, were hurried homeward by Audeoud’s operatic improvisations.

In the theatre, Malcolm Boyle’s one man Mission for the Millennium introduced the fearsome faith and fantasy of evangelical revivalist Reverend Anal Hornchurch. Bose and Ficarra’s experimental film last june-4.30am provided respite in its fuzzy evocation of fleeting internal landscapes and the German quintet, Obst Obscure, entered still shadowier realms with their ghostly Kino Concert, incorporating filmic imagery into a Kafka inspired soundscape.

This same spaced out vibe coloured Thursday’s Trance Magic set by Polish vocalist/pianist/composer Jarmilia Xymena Gorna whose wild, echoey arpeggios bewitched the urbane drinkers. In the theatre Jane Chapman’s harpsichord found startling contemporary resonances, in dialogue with Daniel Biro’s Fender, Rhodes’ piano and Peter Lockett’s percussion. Two short films failed to impress amidst these sonic assaults and it was only the concluding performance of Tweeling by Retina Dance Company which reasserted the earlier intensity. Filip van Huffel and Sacha Lee’s demotic twins were all id as they forged the naked will to separate and dance their raw new selves into life. This act of creation, to Jules Maxwell’s evocative score, drew a cohesive conclusion to an epic evening.

Friday focused on a real-time ISDN linked jam with musicians in Nice, however a shamefaced Luc Martinez communicated the first anticlimax of the festival, announcing the failure of the video link. The audio connection to audiences and artists gathered at CIRM (Centre International pour Recherche de la Musique) left much to the imagination. As Martinez manipulated photo-sensitive instruments through a jazzy improvisation, it was unclear whether the intervening noises were his distant colleagues or simply another sample from his own computer. And yet the loss of raison d’etre did not entirely deflate this event as the bilingual apologies were followed by a ghostly, obscurely enchanting exchange with the ether. It is ironic that the much fanfared New Media Centre of the ICA cannot overcome an obstacle as concrete and foreseeable as the two incompatible national ISDN networks which undermined this event. Blame lies both with the venue’s lack of support for visiting artists and with the artists themselves, inadequately prepared, as ever, for the age-old technical hitch.

In more controlled circumstances, the festival drew to a close in the safe hands of saxophonist Evan Parker, in conversation with Lawrence Casserley’s diabolical deck of sound processors. Repeating her anomalous intervention with another disappointing dance/film, Jane Turner’s company presented Hybrid, a work as uninspiring as Friday’s solo, Compost, demonstrating that multiple media can confound artists and confuse audiences, with distracting results.

The enduring value of Lustfest, like most multimedia ventures, lies in its ambition. The disjunction between rhetoric and reality, ideals and outcomes, is typical of such progressive initiatives. Artists inspired by the multiple opportunities of cross-cultural, cross artform creativity, facilitated by new technologies will never be thorough or pragmatic. The outcome of all this abundance is almost by necessity erratic. Audiences, forearmed with tolerance, tempered expectations and a capacity to spot the golden needle in the haystack, will doubtless return to the ICA for Lustfest ’99, if either organisation remains.

Strange Fruits, Nature’s Mutations, Lust, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, March 25 – 28

Moving hastily past the title Indepen/dance for this new triple-bill production, curated by One Extra at the Seymour Theatre Centre, I quickly realised that what was implied by the title had less to do with the artists’ aesthetic concerns than with their economic status.

Such a conventional format, and the equally conventional proscenium arch provided by the venue, the Everest Theatre, didn’t allow much room for the choreographers to play and presented staging problems, not least because of the load of theatrical, aesthetic and technical values and expectations that come with that territory. And if the artists are inexperienced, young, or lack cohesive artistic direction, any divergence from those expectations, intended or otherwise, is not well served. In this environment, work tends to look as if it’s aspiring to the same aesthetic values as, say, Sydney Dance Company, regardless of what the original concerns might have been, and if it fails to compare favourably on that level, then other choreographic ideas become reduced.

But the first of the 3 works was most successful, drawing for its effect on the choreographer’s colourful imagination. h.t.d.a.p.h. (or how to draw a perfect heart), is really a duet rather than a solo, choreographed by performer Lisa Ffrench, with DJ Jad McAdam’s quiet chat-style vocal design setting the ambient mood. We are invited to attend lightly to love, longing, loneliness and late-night radio, as well as Lisa’s obsession with drawing hearts and finding fate in their artistry.

Opening her heart-rending story with a fake-blood-on-the-shower-curtain Psycho routine, she describes further how she has drawn hearts on misted shower glass, on foggy windows, on telephone memo pads. Once again wearing her now infamous rubber gloves—don’t ask me why—Ffrench tells us the story of her obsession with lurve.

Surprisingly enough, before leaving for the theatre that night, a friend suddenly asked, “Do you believe in love?” Startled, I went, “Um, well, um, yes. What an odd question.” When it was revealed that she meant mainly the undying eros variety, I gave it all away by saying, “Oh, that? No, not these days. People over 40 don’t, do they?” And then, having said that, to be confronted as if with a continuation of that odd conversation in Lisa Ffrench’s material! It must be in the air. So I could have thought, oh, dear, I’m all wrong, everybody is thinking about it. Or, I might also ask, why do choreographers mostly deal with issues of interest to people predominantly under 30?

As the program unfolded, it was increasingly the second question which leapt to mind; and it’s not the material necessarily, but its treatment which creates problems. For instance, the last work, Rapture, choreographed by Rosetta Cook and performed by her company of 10 or so dancers, seemed to be a work made for young children. It opened with all the dancers carrying on tiny kiddie suitcases which they fiercely and possessively clasped to their breasts in parody of sulky 2-year olds protecting their favourite toys. While the performers are undoubtedly serious in their intent to depict various aspects of erotic rapture, in the end, the effect is unintended and unfortunate parody: the ‘drama’, the ‘passion’, the ‘pathos’ of young storybook love sends itself up with empty style, little social commentary or exploration, and little contemporary relevance.

The work itself was given depth mostly by the musical design, a collection of schmalzy classics, predominantly romantic, and violin-based, splendidly passionate and love-lorn, played at an overpowering volume. Around this hung the dance material, and some of the duets I remembered seeing in prior performances, set apart and more delicately focused than seemed possible in this longer work. Here, the ensembles and never-ending twining, lifting, pleading, sitting, sulking, running, chasing, throwing, smiling etc, developed an overall blander texture, adding little to the overwhelmingly strong imagery created firstly by the familiar and much-loved romance of the music.

The middle work, dear carrie, choreographed by Marilyn Miller, was as it said, a work in progress, again not well served by the venue. The story is ambitious and personal, dealing with the tragedy of an Aboriginal woman, Carrie, whose life was ruined by the cruelty of displacement, and the spiritual and physical oppression and degradation she experienced at the hands of religious do-gooders. The dance, while simultaneously caught in the net of 70s modern, studded with iconic 90s Aboriginal dance images, structured with its strange anti-climactic ending, and laced with a raw, histrionic soundtrack, had a straightforwardness which might have been simple naivety, but which insisted on its dignity. Even so, while such tragedy is obviously deep, compelling and passionately felt, a quieter, more understated, arm’s length realisation might have allowed space for the audience’s compassion, and communicated the choreographer’s intent better than it otherwise did.

Indepen/dance: h.t.d.a.p.h. choreographer-performer Lisa Ffrench; Rapture, choreographer Rosetta Cook; dear carrie, choreographer Marilyn Miller; curated by One Extra Dance Company, Seymour Theatre Centre, May 15

Sitting in the darkness, audience and performers alike wait for Ros Warby’s Enso to begin. We are forced to listen—to the rustles and coughs of others, whilst we open ourselves to the moment. Sometimes it is hard to identify an improvised work but listening is often one of its telltale signs. Enso moves between 3 performers, dancer (Ros Warby), cellist (Helen Mountfort) and singer (Jeannie Van de Velde). The flow of material throughout the piece is punctuated with spaces where each performer listens, waiting for each other to begin.

We are told that the structure of the work is set but that its content is open. There is a sense that the performers know who will begin a section. Eyes flicker towards Mountfort’s cello, ears strain towards Van de Velde’s voice, bodies lean to where Warby is waiting to move. But, and this is another of improvisation’s telltale signs, there is an episodic character to the flow of the piece. At one point, Warby’s movements are driven to the wall by Van de Valde’s vocal crescendo. Then a waiting for the next interaction to occur. A little later, Warby develops a most beautiful, intricate spinning motion across the room, then stops. More listening. A fan of Warby’s dancing, I want more from her. I don’t want her to wait for the others, to do nothing while allowing their contribution. But I have to accept the equity of the situation, its play between leading, listening, following, playing solo, making duets, forming trios.

There is scintillation to Warby’s movement, an exquisite attention to detail—the curlicue of her fingers, the twisted line of an arm—which speak of the moment. The attention permeating Warby’s body fills the most minute of spaces in a glorious detail; a dimly lit arm, curling and shaping itself, the length of a back spiralling into the turn of a head. One of Warby’s distinctive qualities is her ability to vary her speed with little apparent effort. Her work is textured by a subtle variety of velocities. A contemplation of fingers, wrist, and arm becomes a fast moving checkerboard of movement without notice.

Although set choreography can admit of any amount of depth and detail, there is a perceptual awareness which resonates in some improvisational work. One senses that the performer is utterly engaged in the moment, discovering and perceiving the work as it occurs. This distinguishes improvisation from set choreography, for the performer is making the work as it is being performed. Here, the performer, like audience, apprehends the unfolding of the work within the temporality of the performance itself. That makes for a certain degree of excitement.

Seasoned performers, Peter Trotman and Andrew Morrish, exploit that excitement for their own and other’s amusement. Their latest work, The Charlatan’s Web, is full of very funny moments where one performer invents a brazen complication which the other partner must incorporate. We the audience are invited to gloat over the sudden landscape which improvisation is able to thrust upon its subjects. The Charlatan’s Web was developed over 4 performances into an epic tale of character and intrigue. A man without qualities is banished from a religious cloister for the mortal sin of knowledge. He sails away to avoid execution, ultimately jumping ship in order to spin a web of chicanery and deceit. Andrew Morrish plays the hapless novice-cum-artful trickster, and Peter Trotman the feverish priest, who devours his books with a carnal lust.

The work begins with a duet, where Trotman and Morrish move simply from the back of the stage to the front. This enables them to establish a play of timing and rapport. Once established, the duo moves apart. A good deal of the tale is told by one performer moving and the other providing narrative, whether on stage or off. The work has a gem-like quality, of candle-lit cameos such as Trotman’s intense portrayal of the priest huddled over his books, sucking out their contents; the main character is himself a man of many faces; and the narrative just a series of fragments.

This is largely a play between word and movement. Neither performer exhibits a dancerly technique. Their panache comes from their energy and timing. They are utterly committed to their performance and to each other, such that the work as a whole and the contribution of each is seamless. I think the longevity of the Trotman-Morrish partnership—16 years—enables this duo to comfortably risk the narrative flow of their work for the greater good of the piece. Trotman and Morrish have just returned from the 1997 New York Improvisational Festival, where Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice described them as “two extremely wily, full throttle performers whose nutty dancing and subtle timing elevate verbal wit into inspired madness” (December 1997).

Enso and The Charlatan’s Web are ultimately distinguished by the technical skills that each performer brings to the improvisational moment. Despite the indeterminacy of improvisation, the history of people’s work inevitably speaks though their performance. Though the work itself may be fresh, the skills that make it possible are not gained so easily. It seems like a contradiction in terms to prepare for improvisation, but it takes some dexterity to produce work which surprises even the body making it.

Enso, A Choreography between Movement and Sound, Ros Warby, Helen Mountfort, and Jeannie Van de Velde, Danceworks, Melbourne, March 27 – April 5; The Charlatan’s Web, Peter Trotman and Andrew Morrish, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 29 – April 5

Philipa Rothfield is a Melbourne academic (Philosophy, La Trobe University) and sometime performer. Her next work, Logic, will be shown at Mixed Metaphor, Dancehouse, July 2 – 5

Dame Edith Cowan, Australia’s first female Parliamentarian, checks out Arts_Edge

Unusual to see an exhibition of web-based and CD-ROM work in a State collecting institution. Their particular digital obsession—not surprisingly—is digitisation of their various collections. So it was great to see Arts_Edge at the Art Gallery of WA in March, beautifully installed in the central atrium space of the gallery. It certainly found a very different kind of audience to that at your typical (sic) contemporary or screen-based art space/event: lots of school kids, families and senior citizens. The only problem I could discern, was to do with the number of stations and headsets available. It meant queues.

Arts_Edge was an integral component of Arts on the Edge, the conference on arts and education hosted by the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University. Co-ordinated by Derek Kreckler from the Academy of Performing Arts, this project was developed with a particular commitment to the necessity of creating an archive of these kinds of works before their particular techno-historical and creative 15 minutes has passed.

The exhibition came with a $5,000 cash prize and an Apple computer donated by Westech Computers. The cash was divided between Sally Pryor (AUS) for Postcard from Tunis and Perry Hoberman (USA) for The Sub-Division of Electric Light. Francesca da Rimini and Michael Grimm (AUS) are still working out how to carve up the dual processor Apple 7220 awarded for dollspace.

A much smaller exhibition than, say, Burning the Interface or techne, it was great to actually feel you could spend time with the individual works without needing an entire lifetime to do so. Aside from the excellent winning entries, I particularly enjoyed Melinda Rackham’s Line (web-based) and Dieter Kiessling’s cute CD-ROM Continue, which suggests a parodic link to Minimalism and the Fluxus wit of the 60s and 70s. Rather than attempting to fool us into accepting the ‘false infinities’ that the hype around CD-ROM would have us believe in, Continue takes us to the other end—or perhaps the beginning—to the binary code degree zero. Continue and The Sub Division of Electric Light are just 2 of the works exhibited in the witty ZKM Artintact series (See John Conomos’ report on ZKM on page 28).

Many will be familiar with Canadian Luc Courchesne’s Portrait One also screened in Burning the Interface. Portrait One is a witty virtual dialogue between the viewer and a ‘slyly amicable girl.’ Image association determines Slippery Traces: The Postcard Trail, a collaboration between George Legrady (CAN) and Rosemary Comella (USA). The viewer navigates a maze of about 200 interconnected postcards, snapping on hot spots which take you to other images through literal, semiotic, psychoanalytic, metaphoric or other links. Speaking of slippery, Brad Miller and McKenzie Wark’s Planet of Noise occupied a machine of its own and chasing the hot spots to move through the ROM provided hours of family fun. Great graphics and sound.

A coherent and enjoyable exhibition with an excellent catalogue essay by the McKenzie Wark, an important outcome from this event is the archiving—by the WA Academy of Performing Arts—of all the works exhibited: 4 web-based and 10 CD-ROM works. The archive is intended to be developed over a 10 year period.

Exhibiting Artists: web works: Line, Melinda Rackham (AUS); The Error by John Duncan (Italy); Maintenance Web by Kevin and Jennifer McCoy and Torsten Burns (AUS); dollspace by Francesca da Rimini and Michael Grimm (AUS). CD-ROMs: Shock in the Ear by Norie Neumark (AUS); Slippery traces: the postcard trail by George Legrady (USA); Portrait One by Luc Courchesne (Canada); Manuscript by Eric Lanz (GER); Troubles with Sex, Theory and History by Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid (Slovenia); Cyber Underground Poetry by Komninos Zervos, (AUS); Postcards from Tunis by Sally Pryor (AUS); The Subdivision of Electric Light by Perry Hoberman (USA); Continue by Dieter Kiessling (Germany) and Planet of Noise by Brad Miler and McKenzie Wark (AUS).

Arts_Edge, coordinated by Derek Kreckler, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and Imago Multimedia Centre at the Art Gallery of WA, March 27 – April 8.

It is an unfortunate sign of the ironic times we live in that 21.C magazine won’t be ringing in the new millennium. The magazine of the future is to be discontinued after 7 fruitful years of projection and speculation, in which the technoculture that now seems so familiar was carefully mapped out and articulated. Its last issue, “Revolting America”, edited by R.U. Sirius and prophetically subtitled “No Future”, is the magazine’s reluctant swansong, signalling, after Baudrillard, that in at least one incarnation the 3rd millennium has indeed already come and gone.

21.C had many qualities that made it distinctive. Its variety and unpredictability made it difficult to identify any singular contribution to the accelerated countdown to the future that has become so rampant in the last decade of the 20th century. However its determination to cross all checkpoints was in fact the quality that made it stand out from the crowd. 21.C was less pretentious and fashion conscious than Mondo 2000 and much broader in its scope than Wired. It recognized that the contemporary world was multi-faceted and fuzzy, a poetic body sans organs, as dependent as ever upon all areas of pre-digital cultural production. Unlike other publications attending to the trajectories of the present into the future, 21.C recognized the importance of cultural memory as well, and did its best to tease out its traces and demonstrate their propulsive force in the casting of these trajectories.

As any vigilant reader will know, 21.C fussed over its moniker as often as it changed editors: “Previews of a changing world”, “Scanning the future”, “The magazine of culture, technology and science”, “The world of ideas.” All of these missed the mark, for above all else the magazine was a preparatory guide, a concentration of reconnaissance dispatches from the future: 21.C: Mode d’emploi, a user’s manual for the world to come. On the occasion of 21.C’s passing, I spoke to publisher Ashley Crawford and editor Ray Edgar.

AC & RE 21.C has had, to say the least, a tumultuous history. In a funny way 21.C has been a bit of a who’s who of Australian publishing. It was started in 1991 by the Commission for the Future, and it’s interesting to see how it captured so many imaginations. While it was Australian everyone wanted in: Barry Jones, David Dale, Robyn Williams, Paul Davies, Margaret Whitlam, Phillip Adams, the Quantum mob, lots of savvy media folk. After Gordon and Breach took it over and approached us in 1994 it went international and changed dramatically. Our mob was more R.U. Sirius, Kathy Acker, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker and John Shirley; still big names, just in different circles. A different beastie altogether.

DT 21.C has been a focal publication for discussion of contemporary culture and technology. Why is it being discontinued?

AC & RE In effect it is being discontinued as a magazine but will live on as a series of books by regular 21.C contributors. However as a magazine in its most recent incarnation 21.C suffered from several problems. The company publishing the magazine is a successful publisher of highly specialized medical and scientific journals. 21.C was far from specialized in that respect and accordingly the company had great difficulty working out how to market a title which had broader appeal. Without marketing it was difficult to establish the nature of the magazine in the public’s eye. There was also the problem of advertising. As an editorial policy we avoided sucking up to the Bill Gateses of the world. The material was not about promoting product and when products were discussed such as Microsoft, Disneyland, Nike, software etc, it was usually with a critical tone as opposed to fawning. Most magazines rely upon press releases to inform them, we relied upon our writers and our instincts—probably a mistake.

DT In his Introduction to Transit Lounge [a recently published 21.C anthology, see review on page 25] William Gibson described 21.C as “determinedly eclectic.” What kind of audience were you attempting to reach?

AC & RE Again a problem. Given that the magazine’s brief was the future, well the future effects “everyone” and that was reflected by readers’ surveys. We had subscribers ranging from unemployed 18 year old hackers through to US Vice President Al Gore, scientists, graphic designers, architects, you name it. Given that it wasn’t being actively marketed towards any specific segment, well, Gibson got it right when he described it as eclectic.

DT 21.C provided an important space for Australian digital artists to get their work out into the international community, and looking through the catalogue of back issues, the promotion of new media arts was one of its most consistent features. How important was this to your editorial policy?

AC & RE Very important. One of the most amazing things about our work with digital artists and illustrators is that we could confidently state that Australia produced the best work in the world in this field. 21.C’s main sales ended up being in North America and we regularly received parcels from San Francisco and New York illustrators trying to get a gig in 21.C. However there was no comparison to the work being done here by Troy Innocent, Elena Popa, Murray McKeich, Ian Haig, James Widdowson and others. It was a wonderful challenge to illustrate the magazine. Given the futuristic topics we couldn’t exactly send a photographer to 2020 to take a snap. The illustrations had to reflect the content, but could rarely be literal. They were impressionistic images of a world yet to come.

DT It could also be argued that 21.C really got into discussions of multimedia art before anyone else. What’s your sense of the magazine’s contribution to multimedia criticism?

AC & RE Well naturally we would hope that it has a lasting impact. I strongly believe that the writings of McKenzie Wark, Mark Dery, Bruce Sterling and in a more quirky sense R.U. Sirius, Rudy Rucker and Margaret Wertheim stand up very strongly indeed. Really, not many other publications have delved into multimedia criticism as heavily as 21.C with the exception of MediaMatic, which definitely leads the field in terms of words, but which unfortunately doesn’t have the budget to illustrate the discussions as lavishly as we did.

DT In the final analysis, you always had a problem with categorisation, didn’t you? Do you think in the public imagination 21.C was over-identified as an internet/cyberculture publication?

AC & RE Yeah, people described it all sorts of ways. A socially aware Wired, an intelligent Mondo 2000. But it was by no means a Wired, and it was not really what you’d call an internet magazine, although as a subject area that was a regular element. But it was more what was being done creatively on the New, eg Mark Amerika’s Grammatron or Richard Metzger’s Disinformation, than it was about commercial or technological developments. 21.C was, essentially, a cultural studies magazine produced in an age of cyberbabble, trying to make sense of the creative furore in an undefined cultural era.

Darren Tofts is the author (with artist Murray McKeich) of Memory Trade. A Prehistory of Cyberculture forthcoming 1998, Craftsman House. He is also working on a collection of essays on art, culture and technology.

Part of the wonder of encounters with artworks is the juxtaposition between your own efforts to comprehend a piece, if that is what you do, and the intepretation presented in the ‘artist’s statement’. The disjuncture that can at times emerge prompts some questions. To what extent is an artwork independent of its accompanying text? (Can or should it even be thought in such terms?) Does the extra-discursive nature of experimental artwork sabotage the potential it may have to correlate with the logic of written statements of intent, flimsy as they often are? These are some of the reactions I had to two exhibitions that use decommodified and new technologies to explore both the place and use of technology in culture and society.

Electronic media are used by three of the seven artists in fresh, an annual exhibition at PICA where select emerging artists dialogue with a curator—PICA exhibitions officer Katie Major this year—as they develop their artworks for public display.

Tee Ken Ng’s installation Onto Itself makes use of reflective smoked glass to form a pane of illusion between two television monitors on which usually incommensurate subject matter converges: a running tap bubbles water over one TV surface; a suspended glass mug contains a straw of TV static; a digitally produced inanimate object contracts and expands its way into life as it passes, somewhat paradoxically, through TV static in an evolution of descent. While these arrangements do have a momentary fascination that comes with their peculiar form of presentation, they are less successful I think at communicating the counter-discourse on or critique of televisual discourses suggested in the artist’s statement.

Similarly, Neale Ricketts’ statement promises interesting things for Click, a large video projection of mostly indistinct images: “By comparing the nature of the format (film) with the essence of the subject (waste), I am hoping to encourage an exploration into notions of waste and its by-products, which thus recycled, are able to once again, be meaningfully consumed by our society.” Unfortunately, such ambition, important as it is, does not translate across to the work itself. Ricketts is also interested in issues of public surveillance by video cameras, and signifies this to a small extent by placing at the base of the video projection two video monitors with connected cameras, one of which transmits the image of the audience onto a monitor as they enter the installation space, while the other just points to the second monitor.

Part of the problem of employing new technologies in artwork as vehicles to communicate a critique of the technologies’ attendant culture, is that the capacity for dazzle tends to overwhelm the subject of critique. The artwork becomes a display of what technologies can do, rather than an articulation of, say, decommodification and cultural practices of consumption.

Across the car park divide from PICA, in the modest space of Artshouse Gallery, is an exhibition of sculptural works by visiting Melbourne artist Michael Bullock. Resting on cardboard supports poking out of one the gallery walls, are 10 cardboard scale models of obsolete technologies: TVs, a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, speakers, a tape player, an iron, a record player. Above each object is a typewritten text, usually a humorous anecdote of the artist’s habit of collecting and accumulating various mechanical and technological devices manufactured mostly in the 70s, only to then store them in a closet or back shed as a particular item fails to perform beyond its use by date.

Like Ng and Ricketts, Bullock too is interested in the kinds of peculiar things we do with technology in its stages of decommodification. Quite different though is his strategy of expression, avoiding the risk of the technology of production overwhelming its product, the artwork itself. His cardboard models, which could well have been pre-assembly line prototypes, stand somewhat pathetically as items once desired for their sheen and ‘new frontier’ domestic status. In some cases, objects like the record player or toasted sandwich maker have undergone a process of recommodification as the item attains a kitsch or cult value status. Bullock’s text and sculptures are mutually constitutive of each other, with the text situating the junk technologies in a contemporaneity that is both out of the closet and away from the ignored display shelves of manufacturer’s showrooms, if such things exist.

fresh, an exhibition of installation, time based and electronic media works, curator, Katie Major, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), March 26 – April 26. End of the Line, a project of sculptural works by Michael Bullock, Artshouse Gallery, Perth Cultural Centre, April 17 – 26

After receiving relatively small amounts of support (nominally ‘program grants’) from the Australia Council in 1996 and 1997, the Paige Gordon Company failed to receive subsequent funding towards a new work Raising the Standard. Arts ACT, the company’s main funder did support the creation of the work. However…

PG Although we didn’t receive Australia Council funding, we have been pretty well-funded by Arts ACT—the second best funded company here. However, dollars funding is one thing, support in terms of ongoing administration is another altogether. They fund you to a point and then expect you to survive. So no company in the ACT ever gets a chance to grow. In terms of a full-time dance company, $80,000 just doesn’t cut it. It’s crazy. And they have an expectation that you’ll do the work for free, and you’ll keep on doing it for free. And that’s ‘quote-unquote’ what they’ve said to me. There’s no valuing or comprehension of what a full time contemporary dance company means. It’s happened to a few companies, dance companies in particular—Meryl Tankard going, Vis a Vis going, and then Padma Menon going. So if my skills are going to be better rewarded somewhere else in the marketplace, then I’m going to seek out that opportunity. That’s exactly what I did.

PG I guess as soon as that was set up and well-funded, it was going to be knock out competition. The Centre gives little bits of support to lots of artists and so, in terms of grants, they’re actually pleasing a lot of people. And I’ve spoken to the artists who have been there and they say it’s a great opportunity. But in terms of development of their craft, I don’t know how much it contributes. And the Centre doesn’t have to build audiences—they’ve got a capacity of 60 in their theatre, and they’ll get that anyway because people are interested in dance. It is a good place to have a choreographic centre because Canberra is a transient place, everyone comes and goes. But in terms of follow-up for the artists, I’m not sure it meets a need.

Canberra’s a great place but people would love to have a dance company they could call their own. There are lots of people who don’t want The Choreographic Centre. And there are lots of people that, yes, they like seeing performances there but they don’t feel a sense of ownership. And whilst I think it is really true that The Choreographic Centre is fantastic nationally—where else could it really be other than the national capital—it’s a shame that things can’t be considered equally in funding terms. I think there is enough room for the centre and for a company and I think the funding bodies should recognise that.

JP How did you carve out your own niche in the context of bigger companies visiting more frequently and presenting work on a larger scale?

PG We’ve visited all the high schools in Canberra to help them with their rock eisteddfod performances; we do corporate gigs (like the opening of the Canberra museum and gallery); and we did the opening of Playhouse. I see dance as being a really vital part of living—not just on stage. And a place like Canberra is fantastic for that. It’s also great that Meryl Tankard and Chunky Move and the Australian Ballet and Bangarra come and do that big stuff, which then enables me to do work on the fringe and outside the mainstream.

PG Well my work is going to develop—while I’m on salary, which is wild! And the dancers will be on salary and the studio is going to be heated and we won’t have splinters in our feet and we’re going to have administrative support and a production person. And I’m going to have a chance to be in the studio every day. I’m walking in big shoes—Philippa Clarke has been there for 8 years so there is really quite a high standard. The company also does a lot of regional touring, and a lot of school work, which is important for developing the next generational audience. As well I want to bring to Buzz the national network of contacts that I have.

PG Well it’s always easier to assess your work in hindsight. I think that most of the pieces that I’ve done, I’ve been happy with. I like to put a work on and then 6 months later look at it again, that’s part of the choreographic learning process. It does take years and I’m quite happy to spend my life learning the craft. I want to be able to say when I’m 60, ‘Yeah, I think I got about five shows right.’ I really want to keep evolving.

PG The reason why I sought out the job in Perth was related to just knowing that after 7 years of going ‘please, please, please’ I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew that while we were going to be up for triennial funding next year from Arts ACT, we were also told that it was going to be the same amount of money. What did they want, my blood? So while I’m not leaving with any really negative feelings, I think Arts ACT do need to realise that if they want to nurture a professional dance company—or theatre company, or opera company—they actually need to look at how they’re structuring the grant applications for those organisations.

With the Australia Council, they funded us for 2 years running, and then they changed their policy so it was project-related funding. So, Made to Move for instance, who are quite interested in touring my work, are not going to take us on just the possibility that we may get funding for next year. So they take on the companies that have guaranteed funding for next year. So it’s a bit of a bad situation that dance has got itself into. I don’t know how, but it has.

The Paige Gordon Company production Party Party Party has received the support of Playing Australia and Health Pact and will tour in August.

If the addition of music to this the third Australia Council Performing Arts Market was welcome but predictable, the presence of new media arts came as a very pleasant surprise. Of course, an expanding number of performing artists work with the new media but expectations are usually of sound and screen works unmediated by any presence other than the viewer/interactor. As New Media Arts Fund Manager Lisa Colley reminds us later in this article, the fund is about this and much more.

Linda Wallace, director of the machine hunger company which won the tender to present new media arts at the Performing Arts Market, told me in a telephone interview she had proposed the “production of a set of useful information tools for the market.” She described the market as “an event which I viewed as an initial gateway to the Australia Council’s ongoing, long-term strategy for marketing new media arts.” She was also mindful that the market audience might not necessarily know much about the new media arts area, so the tools needed to be simple and accessible. machine hunger produced a publication, a video and organised the exhibition which also featured a range of CD-ROM works.

“The publication was cost-effective at A5 size, 24 pages, enabling space for 20 artists, companies or projects, one per page. I was project manager and editor, and Susan Charlton joined machine hunger as deputy editor of the publication, which we titled Embodying the Information Age.”

How did Linda go about selecting the artists? “From a list of New Media Arts fundees I curated the final group. I saw it as both a curatorial and a marketing project, primarily for new media arts, and secondly for the Fund and the Australia Council. So I didn’t curate on the basis of how much money different artists had received from the Fund, instead, the artists selected were diverse in their approach to new media arts, and also had a professionalism which could be relied upon to ‘deliver the goods.’ There are performance groups, digital/installation artists and crossmedia projects like Metabody. I put emphasis on the potential of the internet as both a medium for art and also as an information medium for festivals—it’s critical for festivals to understand how the internet can extend their reach, and the reach of featured art projects, to a global audience. Some of the festival directors at the market seemed to understand this.”

What was your prime aim? “To get the publication into delegates’ hands and later onto their bookshelves. It was something I felt that overseas and local delegates would want to take home with them, as it is a stylishly presented, useful object covering a number of areas and artists, and with email contacts. I was keen to avoid the paperfarm approach of stacks of ugly brochures and junk, and also the busy pop ‘multimedia’ aesthetic. In terms of design our exhibition, or stand, was minimal, with the eyecatching, jewel-like publication, a jumbo monitor showing either a CD-ROM work or the videotape which featured a larger range of new media artworks.”

I emailed Lisa Colley at the Australia Council for her account of the fund’s venture and asked, “Why New Media Arts at a performing arts market?” Lisa wrote back, “New media arts are broader than sound and screen cultures. We need to keep in mind the purpose of the fund which is based on interdisciplinary, collaborative work that crosses art form boundaries. Many of the artists supported by New Media Arts see themselves as performing artists, so we wanted to ensure a showcase for their work within the Performing Arts Market. A number of the shows, including Burn Sonata, Hungry and Masterkey in the Adelaide Festival and the market had their genesis with the current fund’s precursor, Hybrid Arts. As well, we wanted to ensure that works difficult to show as part of the Showcase [a set of half hour performances of excerpts from larger works—ed.] because of technical requirements were given an opportunity as well.

“Also, we knew that international visitors to the market were interested in looking at work that was outside of the international festival performance circuit. This could provide a broader range of opportunities for artists here in terms of residencies, exhibitions and so on. Many festivals have programs that cross over into exhibition and installation work. This proved to be true and we had substantial interest from overseas presenters who want to commission work, pick up existing work and, in longer term relationships, develop exchange opportunities.”

I asked Lisa about the value of the booklet, Embodying the Information Age. “We wanted to produce something that had a life beyond the market. It is critical that we can inform people about the work that is supported by the fund. Of course it only reveals a small number of the artists in this area, but they are representative of a much bigger movement. We have also put excerpts from the booklet up on the web pages that we developed to coincide with the recent launch of the New Media Arts Fund and we hope to add to this over time. As more work supported by the fund is created we hope we can inform people about the outcomes. This is something we are constantly being asked for, and is a way of value-adding to the grants process. The spread of information can be expanded by hyperlinking to artists’ sites as well as organisations like RealTime and exhibition sites currently being developed. As with the booklet, we’re not acting as agents for these artists—they have their own email and web sites and can be contacted directly about their work.”

What kind of response was there to the presence of New Media Arts at the market? “There was a very positive response from international delegates who thought it was a natural and timely addition to the market. I have now established contact with a small group of presenters and producers and we are in email contact and hopefully we should see some results. The artists so far have experienced a very positive response to the booklet with many of them having been contacted about work both nationally and internationally. It has proven a very useful tool for their own marketing and promotion. We have now circulated it to all our Australian diplomatic posts and have plans for further circulation nationally and internationally. It represents part of a broader advocacy and marketing strategy for the work of new media artists which we hope to develop further. The fund now having a more secure position within the Council will allow us to develop this approach more comprehensively and with a long term view.”

I asked Susan Charlton about responses to the New Media Arts fund initiative. She emailed back that, “The fact that we were tangential to the market was an advantage in that we could really fulfil an advocacy role without the same commercial pressures that a lot of other companies would have been under to make deals. In this way it was a well conceived first step—for the Fund and for delegates just beginning to think about the area. At the same time, contacts didn’t just dissolve into the ether. Lisa Colley from the Fund was also there to assist possible connections between delegates and the artists they expressed interest in.

“Also the fact that the market was associated with the Adelaide Festival, rather than being linked to the National Theatre Festival in Canberra as it was in previous years, was in our favour. The diversity and multidisciplinary nature of the festival program enhanced dialogue about the possibilities of artists of various sorts using new technologies in their work. Delegates were not just locked into a theatre mindset.

“Many were already familiar with new media arts, but there were several who weren’t. Those new to the area seemed to be propelled by forces greater than themselves. They recognised that there was a demand for new media arts from their audiences and they had to get up to speed to be able to create programs. The New Media Arts stall allowed them to take the first steps of inquiry without feeling foolish. Most attention came in the first days, but once the showcase program began everyone was very committed and focussed on that. However many purposely revisited us in the closing days to make sure they had everything they needed.”

Invariably the benefits of the Performing Arts Market are long term. It’ll be interesting to see how the new media arts figure in the next market in 2000 as more artists and performers generate more possibilities from their engagements with technology. In a forthcoming report we’ll look at the work of the various agencies involved in the promotion of new media arts.

New Media Arts at the 3rd Performing Arts Market was a project of the Audience Development and Advocacy Division of the Australia Council in association with the New Media Arts Fund, February 1998.

“The virtual attaches itself to the body to assuage its fears. The virtual is constantly reiterating: here is something, where actually there is nothing. The virtual is an appendage to life, the interface with life. The virtual belongs to the establishment of reality, not to what the virtual is accused of—unreality, immateriality.”
William Forsythe, Frankfurt Ballet

In this work dancers Hellen Sky and Louise Taube perform a series of playful meditations on the body mediated by technology. As in their earlier work The Pool is Damned, though highly sophisticated and proficient in its use of technology, there’s still some sense in the company’s work of the poignancy of early experiments.

“What does the weight of my flesh and bones have on this conversation?” the recorded voice in Mediated persistently asks.

The work is installed in Gallery 101 in Collins Street, Melbourne, an hermetic white studio with a set of experiments in progress. Aluminium frames form mirrors, frames, screens, trays. The audience moves to each of the installations as the dancers animate them. They lie in the tray of sand at the rear of the room, 2 dancers of almost identical stature, spooning, shifting as in sleep. As the bodies move, the sand makes a space for the lacy projections of bodies on the screen nearby. As often throughout the performance, the audience focus is largely on the dancers until they gradually notice the projected images. They tap one another on the shoulders and point to screens. Gradually they take in the 2 at once, the mode mostly required of them in Mediated which seems less interested with the possibilities of delays and disjunctions, occasional dominations, than the experience of simultaneity.

The dancers move to a standing frame and dance in tandem against their own captured images from the sand. The image of the bodies is amorphous, then all edge. Its shape confined to a smaller frame, the shape of the choreography blurs. We look at the real dancers, glean the shape of their dancing and compare it with its vapour trail in the virtual. There’s less sense of the technology intersecting the dance or attempts at creating a choreography of the screen.

A large central screen. On blue squares the dancers perform a mirror dance at its most interesting when their separation moves them out of synch. Their live images vie with projections of another body. A series of spots on the screen trigger lighting and Garth Paine’s interactive sound environment.

Then something quite distinctive happens. At the other end of the room suspended horizontally less than a metre above the floor is a large tray full of water, another aluminium frame but with a glass bottom. A camera underneath the tray looks up through the water at the ceiling. High above is a screen. As Hellen Sky moves over the water, Louise Taube pushes the tray from side to side. Sky’s projected image above is sharper than we’ve seen up to now, then screen and body turn to water. A filter emphasising facial planes, the live body is transformed, becomes radiant, golden. The ceiling of air conditioning ducts becomes painterly. The audience gaze goes from the real body, through the water to the ceiling. Our fears are temporarily dispelled. Suddenly the screen is a liquid space, the body breaks the membrane momentarily fulfilling our desires for something more than mediation. Soon one dancer operates the camera to look at the other and there’s a sense of the two creating something in real time, at play with the technology. The performers’ action agreeably shapes the audience’s attention.

The final sequence occurs in a corridor broken up by small red laser lights. At the end of the space a monitor relays recorded images of a dancer’s body—like architectural drawings of hips and thighs and feet. The dancers moving through the lights trigger this sensual cycle of body images on CD-ROM.

Later we go backstage to see John McCormick’s own ‘installation’. Along one wall, a set of vintage Amiga computers and the odd Apple, cords, plugs and keyboards balanced precariously. He tells us that some of the technology is so old now you can’t get it fixed. He’s had to take to it with a soldering iron.

The scale of Company in Space’s investigation is as impressive as we’ve seen in interactive dance in Australia. In concentrating on the interplay between the technology and the dancers, Company in Space are well on the way to creating a work of significance. At this moment, the projected bodies are so different from the live ones that an act of dissociation occurs, the audience giving each a different kind of focus. The technology searches for its aesthetic and we look for the live and screen bodies to begin a more equal conversation with the audience, but the sense of an emerging hybrid fascinates.

Mediated, Company in Space, Gallery 101, Collins Street, Melbourne for Next Wave Festival, May 2, 9, 16, 23

Dancehouse’s Mixed Metaphor season of multimedia movement works will launch the MAP (Movement and Performance) season of dance events across Melbourne throughout June and July. Presented annually by Dancehouse, Mixed Metaphor provides a crucial platform for experienced choreographers and artists creating works which aim to push conceptual and kinetic attitudes and blur the boundaries between dance, text, sound, image, design, physical theatre and technology. The first week of Mixed Metaphor 98 features: an internet link-up between San Francisco and Melbourne, where text and body converge through a digital dialogue in Heliograph, devised and performed by Sarah Neville with Matt Thomas, Becky Jenkin, Nic Mollison, Nik Gaffney; an exploration of suburban architecture and secrets, Blindness, choreographed and performed by Gretel Taylor with Telford Scully, Renee Whitehouse, James Welch; a surreal mapping of the myth of St Sebastian inspired by the writings of Yukio Mishima in Out of the Schoolroom Window by MIXED COMPANY directed by Tony Yap. In week two, Margaret Trail performs ‘Hi, it’s me’, an investigation of the body’s relationship with transmitted sound; Christos Linou performs his portrait of addiction and the AIDS virus, FIDDLE-DE-DIE; Philipa Rothfield, with Elizabeth Keen, creates a conversation between logic and the body in Logic, and Angie Potsch paints and dances with light in temporal. The Mixed Metaphor season also features a number of site-specific installations: a collection of red books, Red herring, by Charles Russell; photographs of urban architecture by James Welch; Kitesend, a ‘moving’ installation employing paper sculptures, by Hanna Hoyne and Lou Duckett. At an open forum entitled metaphorically speaking on Sunday July 5 at 2pm, issues and ideas arising from the works in the season will be discussed. RT

Mixed Metaphor, Dancehouse, June 25-27 at 8pm & June 28 at 5pm; July 2-4 at 8pm & July 5 at 5pm

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June 1998

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