Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

April 1999

The Hobart Fringe Festival was set up several summers ago as a means for performers and practitioners in the experimental and non-mainstream arts to gain greater exposure. Tasmania has a rich vein of talent, across all the arts, but rather too few opportunities for these talents to be showcased. This goes for the experimental arts in particular. The entire Fringe Festival functions on a lot of enthusiasm and goodwill and a limited budget. Happily, the organisers are able to bring together a variety of smaller arts events, some of which would be taking place in any case, giving them a wider profile by including them within the Fringe, which runs for 2 weekends and the intervening week.

One of the best resolved and most professional events within this year’s Fringe Festival was the Multimedia Mini-Festival, curated by local video and performance artist and musician Matt Warren. Warren, current recipient of a Samstag Scholarship, will soon undertake MFA studies in Canada. Over the past few years he has been very active, statewide, in presenting individual, collaborative and specially-commissioned innovative public arts events combining elements of performance, sound, video and installation.

With few film events currently being held on any regular basis in Tasmania, the Mini-Festival was a terrific opportunity for artist-exhibitors and audiences alike. We have only limited opportunities to study film and video making in any depth—and professional openings are rare—so the existence of an enthusiastic culture of film and video artmaking and appreciation is doubly impressive.

One of the highlights was Film & Video on the Fringe, a well balanced evening screening of short films and videos, by mostly local artists, held at the theatre at the Hobart School of Art. (At the School of Art itself, the popular and well equipped Video Department, run by highly regarded video artist and musician Leigh Hobba, has been for some time teetering on the brink of threatened closure, ill-advised and unpopular though such a move would be.)

The stand-out works included the video Where Sleeping Dogs Lay by Peter Creek, looking at the consequences of domestic violence. Its absorbing 2-hander dialogue format is jeopardised by a tacked-on bit of drama, designed (probably) to provide some visual variety and ‘action’, but not a total success. Tony Thorne’s amusing animation Serving Suggestion is a subversive piece about consumerism and physical stereotypes. Its humour is from the South Park bodily fluids and functions school of wit, but it manages to present its own, original take on this well-worn theme. The closing credits are amongst the most fascinating and well executed I’ve seen.

Prominent emerging local filmmaker Sean Byrne’s Love Buzz takes a familiar if far-fetched plot device and makes it fresh and credible. There is some interesting—and deliberately self-conscious—dialogue, marred, however, by the technical limitations of the soundtrack. Dianna Graf’s short (3 min) video-collage of still photographic images is a simple idea seductively brought to fruition. But perhaps the most engaging work is Matt Warren’s short video, Phonecall, another very simple concept actualised, in this case, into something Kafkaesque in its disturbing unreadability.

It is night and a pyjama-clad Warren has clearly been woken from sleep by the ringing phone. The audience then simply listens as he responds; warily, laconically, impatiently and so on, to whatever is on the other end of the phone (which is never revealed). Something a bit suspect seems to be being discussed, but we can never quite tell; nothing is spelt out or explained. As in a genuine phonecall, there is no concession made for eavesdroppers; we get this tantalising, one-sided conversation, a monologue in effect, delivered by Warren in exasperated tones that hit just the right subtle comic note. The work is at once cryptic (in its spoken content) and familiar (the scenario of being summoned to the phone at an inappropriate moment, or for an unwelcome encounter). A minor masterpiece of observation and commentary.

Another interesting festival event was the setting-up at Contemporary Art Services Tasmania of a small video/digital art space, to remain in place after the festival, with a changing program of high-tech work. For the Mini-Festival, this multimedia room presented interactives and a quicktime movie along with examples of websites, all by local artists. For artlovers less than familiar with new media, this engaging program was a good introduction to the web and to computer-generated and interactive works. It is pleasing that CAST has taken the initiative to provide permanent exhibition space for this popular artform which is rarely shown at commercial or major public galleries. In its main gallery, CAST featured a challenging group show, Transmission, with the high-tech arts represented by Matt Warren’s hypnotically atmospheric video, I Still Miss You, minimalist digital prints by Troy Ruffels and intriguing lenticular photography from Sarah Ryan.

Arc Up, a rave party featuring a multimedia presentation It felt like love (music and film projection by Stuart Thorne and Glenn Dickson, with animations by Mark Cornelius and ambient video by Matt Warren) completed the main Multimedia Mini-Festival, but a Super 8 Film Competition and the event Celluloid Wax, held at the quirky cabaret-style venue Mona Lisa’s, also helped ensure that media arts had a high profile as an important component of the Hobart Fringe Festival.
Festival curator Warren observes, “I jumped at the chance when I was asked to curate the multimedia segment of the 1999 Hobart Fringe Festival because it’s my area of expertise and I thought it would allow me to check out lots of new stuff I hadn’t seen before. This new work needs to be seen and a festival is the ideal way to draw attention to it. The Film and Video on the Fringe screening attracted a full house and the Mini-Festival at CAST had a steady stream of visitors, so I believe my area of the festival—like the Fringe overall—was a success.”

Despite the difficulties confronting new media in Tasmania, the outlook is encouraging: connoisseurs can look forward to the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s 2-week masterclass/seminar in new media curating and theory to be held in Hobart in April. A highlight will be the associated exhibition of work by up-and-coming Tasmanian multimedia artists curated by Leigh Hobba, for the Plimsoll Gallery at the Centre for the Arts.

Film and Video on the Fringe: The Fringe Multimedia Mini-Festival, curated by Matt Warren, various venues around Hobart, January 30 – February 7.

RealTime issue #30 April-May 1999 pg. 25

Action Situation, Deanne Butterworth, Kylie Walters, Jo Lloyd

photo Kate Gollings

Action Situation, Deanne Butterworth, Kylie Walters, Jo Lloyd

Ideas are multiplicities: every idea is a multiplicity or a variety…multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system.
Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference, Athlone Press, London

I cannot tell you what this piece is about. I can only write and in so doing produce another text: a re-iteration destined to become something other than the work itself. Action Situation foregrounds the fact that repetition becomes, inevitably, a moment of difference. Not only was there little replication between the 3 performing bodies, but the work itself highlighted the gap that lies between different, yet related, artforms.

Action Situation is an assemblage of music, script, movement, lighting and space. Each of these forms retained an integrity such that they did not blend into homogeneity. Not only was the music, for example, a distinct yet influential strain but the script also held its own character quite apart from the movement. In other words, Lasica does not choreograph to the ‘beat’ of the music, nor is her movement a mime of an underlying narrative. And yet, the differential participation of these elements did not lead to cacophony. There was a certain cohabitation between sound and movement. Similarly, there was a sense that some kind of narrative was manifest in the dance.

Were we archaeologists, we might be able to unearth the original script that instituted the narrative structure of the work. The ordinary viewer, however, is offered little by way of clues or references. No Rosetta stone is offered to translate from the hieroglyphs of moved interactions into some sense of the everyday. For example, there were times when one, sometimes 2, of the performers trod on the prone mass of the third. Was this a gesture of dominance, aggression, dependence or something else entirely? We will never know. Similarly, movements were performed under the watchful eye of one or other of the performers. There was a sense of bearing witness to an activity, that the performers shared a world, but what that world consists of is anybody’s guess. The only signification I can be certain of was when the 3 held hands during the curtain call. That gesture of naked camaraderie contrasted with the complex, interesting, detail of movement and interaction which comprised the substance. As far as movement is concerned, this is a very dense and satisfying work.

Although there were a variety of actions which could be interpreted as derived from some human strain of interaction, the work had an anti-humanist character, almost post-human. Rather than inhuman, it did not subscribe to any lyricism nor make reference to an instantly recognisable world. Although the audience has to work hard to take the work in (like looking at abstract painting), this is also its strength. Were there to be obvious references to ‘relationships’ or ‘communication’, the central premise would be lost, for Situation Live is about the abyss which lies between different modes. The music interacts with the movement; it does not mirror it. By the same token, narrative is not something to be illustrated by dance. Dance is able to form its own narrative, to be both inspired by the script, but not a servant to it.

Mimesis presupposes a sameness across forms. Action Situation is about difference. Even the language we use to speak of it becomes alien to the work itself. It cannot emulsify the disparate elements. Rather, the textuality of the written or spoken word can only add another layer to this already complex work.

Action Situation, directed and choreographed by Shelley Lasica, performers Deanne Butterworth, Jo Lloyd and Kylie Walters, music Francois Tetaz, script Robyn McKenzie, lighting design John Ford, costume design Kara Baker; Immigration Museum, Melbourne, February 12 – 20

RealTime issue #30 April-May 1999 pg. 32

One Extra Dance, workshop

As its contribution to the celebrations for Dance Week 99, One Extra Dance presents Inhabitation II directed by Tess de Quincey with sound design by Panos Couros. This is a work for a company of young performers, in which “the environment of the body negotiates and uncovers the structure and sensibility of the site, investigates a sensory level of existence.” It has grown from de Quincey’s investigations into the process called Body Weather which she is exploring with the group in a series of workshops organised by One Extra in partnership with the Seymour Centre. For DeQuincey, the project builds on the 12 hour performance, Epilogue and Compression with Stuart Lynch at the 1996 Copenhagen International Dance Festival and her choreography for 24 dancers on the chalk cliff coastline south of Copenhagen as part of Transform 97, a festival of site specific dance works. The performance of Inhabitation II is a free event and will be held in the Seymour Centre Courtyard, corner City Road and Cleveland Streets, Chippendale on Saturday and Sunday May 1 – 2 at 6.30 pm each evening.

Dance Week (organised each year by Ausdance) grew from a celebration of International Dance Day observed throughout the world on April 29. Other highlights of this year’s event in NSW include the outdoor dancing extravaganza Streets of Dance in which 100 tertiary dance students join professional artists in an “audacious outdoor program.” Another 200 will take to the football field for the Sydney Swans home game. There’s lunchtime dancing in Martin Place and a Festival of Dance at Darling Harbour. All the major companies will be contributing works and the ever expanding Bodies program kicks off on April 28 with work from contemporary and classical contemporary choreographers as well as a week dedicated to Youthdance. The Australian Institute of Eastern Music’s 3 day Festival of Asian Music and Dance at the Tom Mann Theatre (April 22 – 24) includes eminent South Indian dance specialist Dhamayanthy Balaraju performing for the first time in Australia.

Dance Week 99, Sydney, April 24 – May 2. For further information on Dance Week activities in your state contact Ausdance.

RealTime issue #30 April-May 1999 pg. 31

How did you define yourself when you were starting out in dance? What points of reference did you use? Who was there to help you with your next move? There can be significant turning points for young dancers which either assist to transform them into professional dance practitioners or help them to realise a life of dance may not be quite what they had expected. Ausdance responded to these issues in youth dance in 1997 with the inaugural Australian Youth Dance Festival.

Creating the right environment for the facilitation of creative development is an important emphasis of the Australian Youth Dance Festival which this year is being held in Townsville, Queensland from June 27 to July 2. The initiative brings together youth interested in or already practising dance to gain further knowledge and to formulate networks of peers across Australia. The program is based on workshops, forums, discussions and performance.

Catering for all levels of dance, the festival has 3 major strands; one for young dancers who are still students, one for new dance graduates and independent artists, and one for youth dance leaders and teachers. Youth, for the purpose of the festival, is defined as being anyone from 10 to 30 years of age.

Festival tutors have been selected firstly for their specialised knowledge in a certain field and secondly for their ability to work with people of differing age groups and dance knowledge. Students who have had little dance experience will be able to participate and enjoy the festival equally with those who have studied dance technique intensively. Technique sessions will be available every day in many different dance styles.

Some of the festival’s scheduled workshops cover dance education for teachers; skills development for young dance writers and youth dance leaders; and choreographic, film and new technology workshops for independent choreographers and dancers. Panel discussions and forums will be presented by emerging artists on such topics as the processes behind choreography; how cross cultural works fit into the landscape of Australian dance; gender in dance; the moving body in relation to film; the importance of dance research; the relationship between traditional and contemporary dance practices; and dance and meaning. As well as emerging artists, more established artists such as Chrissie Parrott will deal with topics like Motion Capture and the use of technology in dance.

To play host to a major national youth dance event is an exciting prospect for the Townsville dance community. For this reason the Festival’s performance component has been integrated into the local community as much as possible.

Local residents and the many tourists in the region will be able to enjoy free lunchtime outdoor performances presented by young people, in the centre of the town throughout the week. The Townsville Civic Centre will host 2 large public performances on June 28 and 29 featuring the Festival’s resident professional dance company, Dance North and its youth counterpart, Extensions Youth Dance Company and international and interstate dance groups like Steps Youth Dance Company from Perth. A range of new work by independent choreographers will be presented on a daily basis.

Young dance students (10 to 15) will be involved in a special component of the program, the Community Dance Project which will focus particularly on dance and art making processes. Victorian choreographer Beth Shelton and visual artist from Tracks Dance in the Northern Territory, Tim Newth, will lead this project with the participation of the Mornington Island Dancers. Beth and Tim have previously worked together on large-scale community projects with young people and are able to work with students at many skill levels. Other dancers and visual artists will assist them in making the work, which will be shown on Magnetic Island on the last afternoon of the Festival, Friday July 2.

RealTime issue #30 April-May 1999 pg. 30

Trotman and Morrish are like those old couples who have cohabited for decades—they know how to share a bed (read stage). Although they are very different performers, they slip in and out of each other’s narratives with ease, turning the tables and reversing predicaments. Each successive performance extends the work of the previous night (the season runs to 6 performances). The spoken commentary by Morrish proceeds like the automatic writing of the Surrealists, uncensored, and full of free associations. Morrish happily assumes maniacal, arch and eccentric characters and does so in this somewhat apocalyptic piece. By contrast, Trotman’s guileless persona creates trouble and amusement only indirectly. His speedy movement is light and elfin, his little looks to camera are wide-eyed and open.

Avalanche has much more ‘dancing’ than their last piece, The Charlatan’s Web, perhaps because there is greater usage of music. Trotman and Morrish are not trained dancers but they move with commitment and personal style. In fact, their lack of training produces a certain sort of critique of masculine ways of moving—they are not sporty men, they are not men ‘doing’ dance, they are happy to be laughed at, and they cover space in unusual ways, neither seeking nor rejecting grace. The effect is of seeing men work together and co-operate with a mind to the work at hand. Avalanche will be shown as part of Sydney’s antistatic dance event this year.

Avalanche, Peter Trotman and Andrew Morrish, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 5 – 14; antistatic, The Performance Space, Thursday March 25, 8pm.

When I spoke to Javier De Frutos he had just finished his season of The Hypochondriac Bird which was part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival. Our discussion covered the production itself, his career as a London-based artist with Venezuelan origins and seemed to constantly veer back to what he sees as a crisis in dance at the end of the millennium.

Geography—Community

A lot of people who see my work find it difficult to place as a product that has come out of England. Although I am an unequivocal member of the British community I am an outsider—all communities have outsiders and all immigrants, no matter how hard they try, are always outsiders. Countries need that. I don’t know if it’s an outside perspective—I never pass judgement on the things that I am experiencing. I’m very direct so I’m always at odds with ‘Englishness’, yet I think that is the very reason why I have remained in England, even while not liking it—the confrontational nature of my work and people who cannot deal with it.

I think I understand the pace of a country like Australia that has more beneficial weather. I’ve never produced my work in Venezuela, my native country—always in cold countries and I think that conflict shaped the work. The tension works because the work is so autobiographical. I’m not very happy about sharing happy things but dealing with more anguished moments. Then somehow the work becomes an outlet. Happy moments are so few I don’t know if I would share those.

In the context of Mardi Gras I’m becoming more aware of how diverse as a community we are. I had a great big sense of pride when I came—I caught the launch at the Opera House and I was surprised at how political it was and how attentive and interested those 20,000 people were. I am also surprised at how—mainstream is not the right word—it is a major festival in this city.

The Hypochondriac Bird

I’m actually sorry that it was the first example of my work here because it comes without any preparation. It’s probably the least direct work that I have produced. But there’s a line in the work that deals with the absolute boredom of a long term relationship. As Wendy Houstoun commented, it really looks like the 2 of us had different books of instructions for this relationship and suddenly, having read the books, we realise we’re not even in the same library, the same bookshop.

I think there is a threshold of pain in (the sex scene) that one has to go through because we [De Frutos and Jamie Watton], as performers, go through that in the work. The more we did the sex scene the more bored we were with it and we started to match the way the audience felt. The audience is a very contagious source of energy. Together, we had to reach that level where nothing is happening any more, which happens to relationships when they are on their way out. Someone commented on the structure of the piece where the climax of the work is not a climax, or such a long climax that it stops being a climax and becomes an anti-climax. It introduces a new sense of structure. So the work starts as representational, becomes high melodrama, then the ‘installation’, then the drama again. That meant you had to pace yourself which caused problems with the audience.

It’s also quite brutal and realistic—when you look at the vocabulary we had to go for a more realistic range and it’s tough because it doesn’t necessarily satisfy dance-goers. And it goes back to the whole question of what is dance anyway? This is probably one of the most danced works I have ever done. From beginning to end it’s non-stop dancing. It might not be recognisable as that qualified thing that we know as ‘dance’, which is frightening in itself—that we cannot move on.

I think there was a mistake in the Mardi Gras’ publicity. I never did a version of Swan Lake—it was a piece that used Swan Lake’s score because those ballet references are close to me—the sound. Music is very much like perfume. My mother used to wear Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche in the beginning of the 70s, and when I smell it my mind just goes back—I see the bottle, I see the bedroom…the music does that to me. What does it do for the audience? If you have a sound that is immediately recognisable like Swan Lake you go for the narrative you know and the layers start—you try to match what you see with what you think you know—and it becomes an interesting exercise for those who allow it to happen. The Mardi Gras adds another layer——the choreographer is gay and what you’re seeing is a gay love story. So you go to the theatre with all that information—perhaps too much.

Design

The Hypochondriac Bird was the first time I was working in a very clean, clear looking space—I always work in very black spaces. My partner, an Australian Terry Warner, is the set and costume designer and Michael Mannion is the lighting designer. They are the oldest members of the company and it was something we wanted to work on. When you work in a black space you have the possibility of making the space smaller or bigger with lights—the magic of the black box. When you work on a white space you never forget how large the space is and psychologically it gives it a grander context, emphasising how irrelevant to the order of the world the lives of these 2 people are.

The point with the design (a aquare of illuminated clear plastic pillows) was to make things that could be everything and nothing and it was up to the audience to decide what they were seeing. I realised that the works I had done in the past had a sort of half-finished architecture. (I studied architecture for about a year and abandoned it.) There are always marks on the floor that could be a laid out plan. The original design was a half-finished house—every clear plastic pillow becomes a brick.

Movement and Meaning

I’m a great believer in first of all creating an atmosphere—the movement can be quite unimportant but if the atmosphere is right then the movement can be right. In a workshop years ago this playwright got this actress to do the same scene, peeling potatoes, in many different places in the house. It became so clear. Dancers say ‘my character wouldn’t move that way’ or ‘that movement doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t signify’—like 32 fouettes signifies a lot anyway—like, ‘thank god for the 32 fouettes, now I get it, now I know what she’s feeling!’ So suddenly it was clear to me that the movement wasn’t important but the context of the movement and the intention of how you did the movement. So describing it means nothing—she’s peeling potatoes—and suddenly the physical action changes in her muscles and peeling potatoes becomes the medium to express something else—she could be stabbing someone in the stomach. I can’t bear the idea of trying to find a movement that’s going to mean something. What’s the point of looking for something that’s going to look like a kiss when the kiss is such an effective thing to do?

Dance

This piece has been a major turning point for me in regard to the effectiveness of dance. At one point we have to stop looking at the museum pieces and the function of the body. I’m so terrified now that most dancers I know are concerned about whether their lower back is aligned with their neck and there’s nothing else. Something that was only meant to be a tool for you to feel better physically suddenly became an aesthetic goal. It seems to be the only branch of the arts that doesn’t want to suffer. If you’re really worried about a healthy body and healthy mind you’re not an artist any more—just let it go. Go and teach aerobics or something, but you can’t just go on stage and tell me how aligned you are because I’m not going to connect with you at all—certainly not with my own alignment.

What happened with the underground scene—it’s just completely gone. Some of the so-called underground productions that are happening in London are frighteningly similar to commercial productions but with less money so they don’t look as good. Does anyone have anything to say for themselves any more? Who wants to be second best? Is it some kind of millennium bug that suddenly we have to go into more direct ways of communicating, that dance is starting to lose its touch? People don’t read poetry any more, they read newspapers.

The Hypochondriac Bird, choreographer, dancer and music Javier De Frutos, dancer Jamie Watton, music Eric Hine, lighting design Michael Mannion, set and costume design Terry Warner; The Seymour Theatre Centre, Sydney, February 10 – 14

Subject: etc

As I have noted elsewhere: “Screen Culture—the nomenclature is out there. A conjugation designed to expand the parameters of moving image organisations and their exhibition practices to incorporate multimedia and the digital arts and to encompass the output of all practitioners ‘working within the screen frame.’” I confess to an unhealthy predilection for creating and dissecting definitions. Seeking out ‘screen’ in a (generally less preferred) lexicon, I read: “a smooth surface, such as a canvas or a curtain, on which moving images etc may be shown.” I become obsessed with the idea that the subject of my current project is this ‘etcetera’. It troubles me, I lose sleep over it. I consider that Funk and Wagnalls may have put the etc in the wrong place. It is my goal to reposition it. So, I’ve packed up my theoretical premise and hit the road. I have named my axiom expandingscreen and I’ve just spent 30 hours on the way to Helsinki cleaving the title.

Subject: Muu, Helsinki; Date: Oct 17, 1998

Happy to discover that my visit coincides with Helsinki’s annual herring festival, I cross the marketplace each morning on my trek from Katajanokka island to Kiasma for the MuuMedia Festival.

Muu (‘other’ or ‘something else’) is staged by AV-arkki, an organisation which provides facilities for Finnish media artists and represents their work. The event began a decade ago with the Kuopio Video Festival in eastern Finland and has developed into one of the largest events of its kind in the Nordic countries. Like many organisations and festivals originally intended to represent video art, MuuMedia and AV-arkki are in the process of expanding their program in order to accommodate web art, CD-ROMs and interactive media installations. The necessity of creating appropriate exhibition environments is accentuated by the location of the festival within several spatial realms: museum space (Kiasma: Museum of Contemporary Art), gallery space (Otso), collective art space (Cable Factory) and continuously contested urban space (Mobile Zones). The special focus of MuuMedia 1998 is ‘global and indigenous’ a framework addressing issues of globalisation, indigenous culture, power and networked information.

The prominent and dynamic architectural design of the newly opened Kiasma provides the festival with its centre. A contemporary art museum, purpose-built in an age where exhibition practice is undergoing considerable transformation, Kiasma attempts to reorder art and information hierarchies by creating a responsive, anticipatory space for the reception of art in all its forms. The emphasis on communication flow and active or dynamic reception is conceptually expressed in the name itself which has its roots in chiasm: the intersection of 2 chromosomes resulting in the blending and possible crossing over at points of contact and also the X-like commissure which unites the optic nerve at the base of the brain. Despite its desire to embody these forward thinking principles, Kiasma in operation is not proving adequately equipped as the site for the screening component and the digital gallery. Dreadful acoustics (which equally impact on the media art in the permanent collection), bad projection design and handling, and an under-informed staff are resulting in loss of audience—the hundreds of visitors drawn to the building each day are not made properly aware of the festival and the committed audience are battling through a haze of interruptions and cancellations.

The Mobile Zones project is proving to be the most successful component of the festival. Curated by Heidi Tikka, the various works explore the possibilities of art as activism, examining the urban landscape and its transformations. Helsinki is busy with preparations for 2000 when it will simultaneously celebrate its 450th anniversary and its reign as European capital. Nick Crowe’s deliberately lo-fi community web project A Ten Point Plan for a Better Helsinki (find link at Kiasma site) required the participation of citizens who contributed proposals for the redesign of a controversial public space near Kiasma, while Adam Page and Eva Hertzsch investigated anxiety zones in urban space with their demonstrations of Securoprods, a transfunctional security gate/revolving door.

Subject: ZKM, Karlsruhe; Date: Nov 8, 1998

Three hours in the gardens surrounding Karlsruhe’s Schlossplatz (the only site to recommend the town aside from ZKM and a temporary beer exhibition) and I am still scrawling notes on Pavel Smetana’s The Room of Desires. Images in a darkened room are generated in response to information received from sensors bound to my wrists and forehead. Something allows me to recognise the constructedness of it, but this just serves to increase my anxiety at seeing my ‘psyche’ projected. Though private, the zone has the potential to become public, and the sense of surveillance is heightened by those white-coat clad attendants who swabbed me and taped me up.

The Room of Desires is one among many interactive installations that comprise the temporary exhibition Surrogate, the first showing in situ of work by artists in residence at ZKM’s Institute for Visual Media. The ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie | Centre for Art and Media, www.zkm.de) is the realisation of an 8-year development project whose premises in a transformed munitions factory were opened in 1997. Consisting of 2 exhibition departments (the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Media Museum), 2 production and development annexes (the Institute for Visual Media, the Institute for Music and Acoustics) and an integrated research and information facility (the Mediathek), ZKM adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the presentation, development and research of visual arts, music and electronic media. Ex-Melburnian, artist and director of the Institute for Visual Media, Jeffrey Shaw, tells me that the departmental proximity “creates an environment where the museums reflect an ongoing, inhouse creative identity”, a dynamism enhanced by the potential for “the production zone to be transformed into a public space.”

I find pleasure in the Mediathek, a veritable treasure chest for an archive rat. A centralised database establishes instant access to 1,100 video art titles, 12,000 music titles (with an emphasis on the electroacoustic) and a comprehensive collection of 20th century art and theory literature. Download from what is probably the world’s largest CD-ROM jukebox system (soon to be converted to DVD) and receive at any of the 12 viewing stations (designed by French-Canadian media artist Luc Courchesne) or the 5 historically significant listening booths designed for Documenta 8 in 1987 by Professor Dieter Mankin. After indulging myself on a self-programmed Bill Viola, Tony Oursler, Gary Hill retrospective, I took some literary time out to read Donald Crimp’s On the Museum’s Ruin. In a study of Marcel Broodthaer’s Musee d’Art Modern series of installations/exhibitions which radically investigate the position of the museum, Daniel Buren is cited as claiming, “Analysis of the art system must inevitably be undertaken in terms of the studio as the unique space of production, and the museum as the unique space of reception.” ZKM is an institution formally enacting this kind of analysis.

Subject: AEC, Linz; Date: Nov 17, 1998

Watching snow fall on the not-so-blue Danube from the offices of ARS Electronica Center in Linz (www.aec.at). Spent the train trip from Karlsruhe to Salzburg reading Derek Jarman’s (sort-of) autobiography, Kicking the Pricks (Vintage 1996). Speeding through the Black Forest on his accounts of making-out at the old Biograph watching German soft core featuring semi-clad damens running through said geographical terrain. In 1987 Jarman says: “the Cinema is finished, it’s a dodo, kissed to death by economics—the last rare examples get too much attention. The cinema is to the 20th century what the Diorama was to the 19th. Endangered species are always elevated, put in glass cases. The cinema has graduated to the museum, the archive, the collegiate theatre…”

Jarman argues the case for the cheapness and immediacy of video. What strikes me, is the degree to which the moving image has impacted on the tenets of museology in the decade since Jarman establishes the museum as a static place. Paradoxically, the contemporary art museum is precisely the location of video art and media installations, and (in most cases) instead of the museum subduing media art, the development of new technological forms has necessitated a vast rethinking of the museum as a space of reception.

ARS Electronica Center is conceived and operates as the antithesis of Jarman’s museum. It services local and global industries, artists and educational institutions in addition to presenting and maintaining a museum space designed to anticipate the future of what commentators (and I guess that includes me) like to call “the information age.” Its integrated approach, which actualises the whole concept of convergence, produces an environment where the application of everything from virtual reality through computer animation to video-conferencing is applied in all disciplines in a manner that promotes practical and theoretical discourse between commerce, media art and education. Co-director of this ‘Museum of the Future’, Gerfried Stocker, tells me that the emphasis here is on process and “how to give things a value without a history.”

This radically challenges traditional systems of value and analysis in a manner that is arguably appropriate to the rapidity with which new technologies emerge. I find it difficult to assess a lot of high-end media art, and this has never been more the case than both here and at ZKM where the technology is so impressive in itself that the core elements of a work may indeed be the science of its construction rather than its artistic endeavour. I still favour works which don’t foreground the technological achievements over content. At ARS Electronica, a work like World Skin (winner of the 1998 Golden Nica for Interactive Art in the Prix ARS Electronica) by Maurice Benayoun and Jean-Baptiste Barriere will endure the potential redundancy of the environment within which it is conceived and produced. Enter the CAVE (AEC’s permanent 3-walled virtual reality environment) armed with a stills camera and move through a virtual landscape—a photo-real collage of images from different wars. Start to ‘shoot’, take images with the camera like a ‘tourist of death’ and you (visually) tear the skin off this world. It transforms into a white void, only shadow traces like cardboard cutouts remain. The experience is strangely connected to and distant from the bloody (non-virtual) reality of war.

Subject: etc; Date: Dec 6, 1998

I am allowing myself to be in process. There are not yet conclusions to be drawn. Perhaps the etc would be better positioned after “or a curtain.” Halfway through my research tour and I am suffering from the desire to see the debate which should be surrounding the planning of 2 moving image centres in Australia (Cinemedia at Federation Square, Melbourne, and the Australian Cinematheque at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney) become more urgent and more public. In the meantime, I am expanding my waistline on gluhwien, cheese and root vegetables.

Clare Stewart is Exhibition Co-ordinator, Australian Film Institute. Expandingscreen has been enabled by funds from the Queens Trust For Young Australians, the Australian Film Commission, Cinemedia and the Australian Film Institute.

Of related interest, see “Finnish shortcuts”, Melinda Burgess, RealTime 28, December 1998 – January 1999.

Retarded Eye Team (Vikki Wilson and Cam Merton), Radium City: Harvesting the Afterlife

“The only living life is in the past and the future…the present is an interlude…[a] strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness we are living.”
Eugene O’Neill, Strange Interlude, 1928

In the 1970s, “Suture” was a popular term for procedures by means of which cinematic texts would confer subjectivity upon their viewers. Not only a medical process, it was also a way for thinking through constant audience reactivation through sequences of interlocking shots. Although no one doubts the capacity of new media art to activate an audience, that activation has all too frequently been one-dimensional: either cool data processing or hot-palmed mouse clicking. The Future Suture exhibition at PICA (Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts) for the Festival of Perth was surprisingly different. This engaging, difficult and exciting web art installation by 4 Perth artist collectives took an unexpected turn into humour. Clearly that is their bandage for the haemorrhaging hubris of our strange interlude.

Future Suture is no eye candy, but hard chew multi-grain mind cookies. Audiences had to work hard and fast to make sense of and gain enjoyment from the work that was interlocking the old into the new. With imaginative stitching all 4 installations explored ways of sewing previous subjectivities to the gash opened by the technological transformations of future horizons.

Horizons (http://www.imago. com.au/horizons – expired) was minimalist in terms of room decoration, but big on intertextuality and cultural resonances. Malcolm Riddoch, one of the artists, explained that “the site’s basically a self-reflexive boys’n’their toys kind of thing, linking militarism with a specular approach to knowing and perception through a games interface, but fully web functional.” The project works on a number of levels and has some fascinating things to say about time, indiscriminate targets and horizon theory. On one level this is a simulated geo-scopic rocket launching game resplendent with nasty voiced instructions for nose-coned views of hyper-intertextual destructive scopophilia—part Operation Desert Storm with hay-wire meteorology, and part firecracker home video—with a fair whack of Heideggerian theory as payload. Yet this rocket game also resonates with the naturalised absurdity of scud missile video playback and so-called radar targets that are in fact schools. Participants select a site on mainland Australia and launch a rocket at it gaining a view of the world from the rocket’s nose cone at 500m. The indeterminacy of the target acquisition is sublime. The program blurb proclaims, “Horizons is a non-profit public service funded by the Federal Government of Australia and freely available to all Internet citizens world-wide.” This is satanically perceptive. The Federal Government does in a sense facilitate the technology for launching attacks on Australia from anywhere in the world. But of course we can now stand proud that the attacks are self-inflicted and that our technology still calls Australia home.

In contrast, Radium City (www.imago.com.au/radium_city – expired) by the Retarded Eye collective achieved a funky juxtaposition between installation and screen. The setting was welcoming techno-boudoir baroque. In one corner sat a little Mac storyteller, the rest was dominated by an enormous Italianate bed with mirror and 2 TV monitors showing male and female soap stars getting deep, while below them the electronic bedspread pool was swelling with aerial urban images stitched through with endless binaries. The project sought to position the viewer as a sleepwalking flaneur via science fiction scenarios of the virtual future city that continually re-wrote themselves via a digital process of automatic writing. Here new technologies were mixing it with old techniques on a constantly refurbished palimpsest. The ideas were a heady mix. The pull of binaries was a buzz. The bed and the multi-plot storybook became 2 magnets. The interlude between was strange, but the text kept rewriting itself, mutating over time.

Of all the installations, Project Otto (http://www.imago.com.au/otto – expired]) was the most dependent on physical presence and manipulation of the environment. This huge and hungry hardware project was a dynamic bandaging of an unusual combination of old and new technologies. The networking interactions spiralled through radio, image, sounds, web and the tactile stimuli of a metal trolley on a rough-hewn floor. The stunning images of bodily close-ups sprawled across the wall like a Persian rug were activated by a mobile antenna trolley that picked up different radio frequency emissions from seven overhead disks that in turn generated sequences of deeply textured soundscapes. The images could be further engaged via a Dr Who-like console box. This was a good sweaty interactive space. It was damn sexy the way the installation totally activated a tactile, aural and intimate subjectivity that stimulated the imagination. The mix of radio and web, the old and the new, people in the gallery space and the site on the web, was tangible. As is the enormous potential of this project.

Tetragenia is aptly described as a “trojan web site that accumulates consumer profiles under the guise of ‘caring’. Participants are harassed in a prolonged, strategic email campaign.” Our hell is excess data, corporate-speak, dietary ethics, common sense advice for life, electronic surveillance and technological abuse. Tetragenia turns this into an art—ridiculing the new human face of corporations, the wealth of waste and electronic intrusions. At the same time, it offers eminently reasonable nutritional and ethical suggestions that loop in on themselves showing something a little less benign. It’s a call to the consumers of the world to unite to promote ethical trade practice; and it cuts a fine line between a new seriousness and a classic piss-take. This absurdist installation tests the limits of the traditional ethics of privacy and marketing with harassing emails and data-frenzy. It is exciting to finally come across web art that not only engages with the contemporary info-excess but also does so with great comic timing. However, the timing of constant server breakdowns was deeply aggravating but, as Marshall McLuhan once said, “If it works, it’s obsolete.”

When it comes to imaging future horizons, as Malcolm Riddoch ruminated, the “horizon is the rocket eye view of the world. The spatial limits of the horizon is carried with us so that the horizon can never be reached.” This can be seen as a cautionary metaphor for rocketing into future shock. But if we consider that by looking back, the past becomes another horizon—does this mean that we can never remember the point at which we were, or at which the horizons looked broad and welcoming? Or that history’s horizons are carried with us but cannot be seen from the present and can never be reached in the future? This made me wonder, what’s the big deal of getting to the horizon? Then again no one is happy to stick around in the strange interlude of the present. The problem is that if the future is not sutured to past horizons, sun-blindness is inevitable. Future Suture’s solution is to bandage these wounds with some serious humour.

Future Suture, curator Derek Kreckler, joint initiative between FTI (The Film and Television Institute) & IMAGO Multimedia Centre Arts Program, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, February 11 – March 7; links to 4 projects at http//www.imago.com.au/future_suture [expired]

A major aspect of technoculture comes from “mystical impulses behind our obsession with information technology.” That, in essence, is the central thesis of an ambitious tome entitled TechGnosis by San Francisco writer Erik Davis. Davis has written numerous snappy articles in this field for Wired, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, 21 C, Lingua Franca and The Nation. However in TechGnosis he attempts to touch upon the entire history that connects the spiritual imagination to technological development, from the printing press to the internet, from the telegraph to the world wide web.

In the process Davis discusses in detail myriad cultural and religious figures and movements, from Plato to Marshall McLuhan, from Jesus Christ and Buddhism to Timothy Leary and Scientology, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson. What is surprising is that, despite the density of ideas in this tome, it is always readable, inspiring The Hacker Crackdown author Bruce Sterling to comment that “There’s never been a more lucid analysis of the goofy, muddled, superstition-riddled human mind, struggling to come to terms with high technology.”

According to Davis, “TechGnosis is a secret history because we are not used to dealing with technology in mythological and religious terms. The stories we use to organize the history of technology are generally rationalistic and utilitarian, and even when they are cultural, they are rarely framed in terms of the religious imagination.”

On a general level, says Davis, this has to do with modernity’s “ultimately misguided habit of treating religious or spiritual forces solely in terms of the conservative tendencies of various institutions, rather than as an ongoing, irreducible, and indeed, irrepressible dimension of human cultural experience, one that has liberatory or avant-garde tendencies as well as reactionary ones.”

Davis’ ability to shift from popular culture to historical fact peppered with pop terminology fits an intriguing trend in cultural studies. TechGnosis sits comfortably alongside such books as Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, Mark Dery’s Escape Velocity, Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, Andrew Ross’ Strange Weather and Darren Tofts’ Memory Trade. In this regard TechGnosis narrowly escapes the categorisation of being a book about ‘spirituality.’

“Although I deal more sympathetically with religious material and ideas than most of those authors, I feel far more affinity with their approach than with more self-consciously ‘spiritual’ books, which tend to deny the role of historical, economic, and political forces”, says Davis. “I just happen to be drawn to that peculiar interzone between popular culture and the religious imagination.”

That interzone inevitably draws Davis towards some dangerous realms where ‘popular culture’ and ‘imagination’ are all too prevalent. While Davis carefully explores the genesis of such movements as Scientology or the Extropian movement and points out the totally bizarre substance (or lack) of both, he manages to avoid the pitfall of making harsh value judgments. “When I embarked on this project, I decided that developing a cogent critique of spirituality would add yet another layer of complication to an already dense investigation”, he says. “Confronted with a curious belief system, I am more interested in how it works than I am in criticizing it; I wanted to allow the power of the various world views to arise as fictions.

“It’s like camera filters: what does the world look like if you momentarily wear the lenses of a conspiracy theorist, a UFO fanatic, a conservative Catholic? By allowing eccentrics and extremists their own voice, I hoped to lend TechGnosis a kind of imaginative force that more explicitly critical works lack.”

In the burgeoning world of ‘secret histories’, the shadowy figure of ‘sci-fi’ author Philip K. Dick looms as a major influence. Dick’s work, riddled as it is with visionary belief systems tinged with perpetual paranoia, never sat comfortably in the cliche-ridden world of pure science fiction. “I emphasize the visionary acuity of his works, which have influenced me as much as McLuhan or Michel Serres or James Hillman”, says Davis. “I am especially drawn to his ability to treat religious ideas and experiences in the context of late capitalism and our insanely commodified social environments.”

Similarly, McLuhan is a “complex figure, full of bluster and brilliance”, says Davis. “He deserves a complex engagement, and I certainly distinguish myself from Wired’s simplistic recuperation of McLuhan, which turns on the same sort of selective sampling of his work, only in reverse. For one thing, McLuhan nursed vastly darker views about electronic civilization than most people believe—his global village is an anxious place. But unlike most of today’s media thinkers, he considered himself an exegete rather than a critic or theorist. That is, he wanted to uncover the spirit of electronic media rather than provide the kind of structural political critique that people are more comfortable with these days. To do that, he used the imagination of a profoundly literate (and religious) man, allowing analogies as much as analysis to lead him forward. He read technology, whereas most critics describe or deconstruct it. And though he said a lot of stupid stuff, and participated too willingly in his own celebrity, he laid the groundwork for our engagement with the psycho-social dimension of new media.”
The power of the word runs throughout TechGnosis—from Guttenberg’s printed Bible to the study of the Kaballah, from Gibson’s Neuromancer to the use of hypertext on the net.

“A troubling aspect of the new technologies of the word is the invasion of technological standardisation into the production of writing”, says Davis. “Behind this problem lies an even larger one: the invisibility of the technical structures that increasingly shape art and communication. As we use more computerized tools, we necessarily engage the structures and designs that programmers have invested in those tools. Then there is the issue of the internet; an immense writing machine that, for all its creative power, encourages sound-bite prose, superficial linkages, and the confusion of data and knowledge. The Gutenberg galaxy is finally imploding, and we have yet to come to terms with the psychic and cultural consequences of our new network thinking.

“Of course, invisible structures have always been shaping thought and expression, in one form or another. The trick now is to explore ways to let the creative, recombinant and poetic dimension of language express itself in an electronic environment where the monocultural logic of a Microsoft can hold such enormous sway. I still think that hypertext and collaborative writing technologies have enormous potential, but in the short term I see a rather disturbing dominance of standardisation, as American English continues to transform itself into an imperial language of pure instrumentality.

“It’s my hope that the net will enable us to move through the gaudy circus of superficial relativism into a more serious engagement with the ways that different institutions, practices, and cultural histories shape a truth that nonetheless hovers beyond all our easy frameworks”, says Davis. “The way ahead, to my mind, involves the synthesis or integration of many different, sometimes contradictory ways of looking at and experiencing the world. The endless fragmentation of (post)modernism is boring: we ourselves are compositions of the cosmos, a cosmos we share in a manner more interdependent than we can imagine, and that cosmos calls us to construct new universals. Perhaps they will be universals of practice rather than theory; if you do certain things, certain things will happen. A new pragmatism. If we need religious forces to bloom in order to feel our way through this highly networked world, so be it.”

The laugh starts somewhere deep in the body and you can hear it on its journey through the chest and throat before it bursts out of the mouth of the artist like an alien creature. Then it vanishes and you wait for it to re-appear. The famous laugh of Stelarc has a life and reputation of its own, paralleling that of the artist himself. It seems natural enough but can he produce it at will? Is it the body’s natural expression surfacing or a performative behaviour designed to counter the expectations of a contemporary audience desiring outrage, extreme technical detail, physically dangerous actions and any of the other provocations associated with Stelarc’s work over the last 20 years. These questions of the performative are repeatedly raised in his work and they surfaced again at his presentation to the recent dLuxevent at the Museum of Sydney where Stelarc presented elements of his most recent work and offered the assembled a reading of it in his offhand, almost apologetic way (maybe it’s because he knows that the laugh is imminent…).

Despite such a distinctive laugh, Stelarc always depersonalises the experience of his body; he always refers to it as “The body” rather than “My body” and this is consistent with his sense of it as an organisation of structural components infused with intelligence, a smart machine. But what separates his thesis from, say the discourse of VW Kombi owners, is the idea that the body is not simply a vehicle to transport a disembodied consciousness through space/time. As Stelarc said, “We’ve always been these zombies behaving involuntarily” and this is partly why we have such endemic fears about the discourse of the body that his work opens up as it exposes the primal fear of the zombie, bodies animated by a distant alien intelligence (Descartes for example) in our imagining of the body and its function. On the other hand he raises the anxiety of the cyborg, for instance in his most recent explorations of the physical system in his Exoskeleton project which features “a pneumatically powered six-legged walking machine actuated by arm gestures.” The clumsy but alarmingly sudden movements of the machine compose the sounds it makes with those of the body into a kind of live soundtrack. This merging of the body’s sounds with those of the mechanical milieu into an ‘accompaniment’ to the performance is a signature element of Stelarc’s aesthetics in recent years and underscores his interest in the cybernetic potentials of art and behaviour.

One of the topics raised in the panel discussion (Chris Fleming, UTS; Jane Goodall, UWS; Vicki Kirby, UNSW; Gary Warner, CDP Media) following Stelarc’s presentation centred on the anxiety his work seems to provoke in audiences. Both the figure of the zombie and that of the cyborg disturb insofar as they seem to displace our sense of the humanistic self. Stelarc relentlessly pushes this concept to the margins and the space he opens in the field of body imaging and performance is breathtaking and a little scary for humanists because it is a field of future possibility and becoming rather than being and nostalgia.

Stelarc’s ideas were presented to his usual packed house—no doubt attributable to a combination of his appeal and the dLux organisational flair—who were shown video footage of recent and projected future work including Extra Ear. Much more will be said of this extremely controversial project which involves the ‘prosthetic augmentation’ of the human head (Stelarc’s) to fit another ear which could speak as well as listen by re-broadcasting audio signals, or just “whisper sweet nothings to the other ear” as Stelarc said so disarmingly. His other work-in-progress is the Movatar project which is an attempt to extend the use of digital avatars (virtual semi-autonomous bodies) to access the physical body (Stelarc’s) to perform actions in the real world. In this event, the body itself would become the prosthetic device. Yet none of this would be the same without the presence of the artist himself, with the big charming smile and booming laugh, animating a discussion which is sometimes too close to a tech-head’s wet dream. There is a necessary embodiment here of which Stelarc, as a performer, is acutely aware: “These ideas emanate from the performances. Anyone can come up with the ideas but unless you physically realise them and go through those experiences of new interfaces and new symbioses with technology and information, then it’s not interesting for me.” For Stelarc it is the task of physical actions to authenticate the ideas.

In her excellent and encyclopaedic study of contemporary performance art in Australia, Body and Self (OUP), Anne Marsh situates Stelarc in the recent history of the body in Australian performance in terms of a deconstructive journey from the opposition of body as truth/body as artefact, based on a dichotomy separating the natural from the cultural, to the place where these boundaries blur. From catharsis to abreactive process, from technophobia to the cyborg. In fact Stelarc is emblematic in this trajectory. Yet he has been widely misunderstood and misrecognised: as an uber shaman, who talks of the end of the organic body while performing elaborate rituals of pain and transgression of pain on the body in his 25 body suspension events (“with insertions into the skin”) of the 70s and 80s; a kind of electric butoh practitioner in his Fractal Flesh and Ping Body events; and more recently a “nervous Wizard of Oz strapped into the centre of a mass of wires and moving machinery.” (The Age, January 1 1999)

Stelarc has consistently challenged the way our culture has imagined the body, whether it is seen as a sacred object, a fetish of the natural, an organic unity…and the culture hasn’t always kept pace with him. Marsh’s book is also guilty of this as it attempts to situate Stelarc in terms of an enunciation of a particular subjectivity rather than reading it in its own terms. While Stelarc is certainly of the generation of major artists who have used the body as the work of art itself (Jill Orr, Mike Parr), manipulated it as an artefact rather than as a biological given (and therefore a kind of destiny) he is more concerned with the cybernetic body than with subjectivity, and more involved with pluralising and problematising the ways we speak of bodies and imagine them, and how we get them to do things and how they might move differently.

But I wanted to ask Stelarc and the panelists about what animates us? What of the emotive as well as the locomotive? These are questions of affect and energy which this type of work cannot really address and maybe we shouldn’t insist that it does because in so many other ways it is pushing us into new territory. Instead Jane Goodall raised the notion of motivation in relation to movement and suggested that Stelarc disconnects the links between them, so that motion becomes mechanical rather than psychological and does not reflect the motivation of the mover. A manifestation, she said, of the unravelling of evolutionary thinking.

So is Stelarc a post-evolutionary thinker? Well perhaps he is a post-evolutionary artist…As he is fond of saying, Stelarc is interested in finding ways for the human system to interact more effectively with the increasingly denaturalised environment this system finds itself in, and extending the body’s capacities for useful (and useless) action. And don’t forget this latter point. It’s easy to get caught up in Stelarc’s spiel, brilliant and provocative as it is; it is nonetheless an artist’s statement and the suggestive utility of much of his thinking should not stop us enjoying the spectacle of a genuinely creative mind at work and a laugh which is so richly suggestive of Stelarc’s profoundly ambiguous view of the world.

The laugh returns us to the basic contradiction of all Stelarc’s actions in their return to the image of the artist’s body in a way which reinforces the effect of its presence and its adaptive capacities. If the body really were obsolete, Stelarc would be of no greater ongoing cultural relevance than Mr. Potato Head. Adaptivity is the real message but Stelarc knows that obsolescence is a better long term sales strategy.

Stelarc: extra ear | exoskeleton | avatars, presented by dLux media arts and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Museum of Sydney, February 20

Kirsten Krauth interviews RealTime’s new hyperfiction editorial team Teri Hoskin, Terri-ann White, Linda Carroli and Dean Kiley about defining, creating and reading hypertext.

TH If hypertext is related specifically to writing practices online, about 1996 with the Tableau project for ewre (electronic writing research ensemble). My art practise has always been text based…there has always been an interest in experimental writing that seeks to ‘worry’ given notions of how we make meaning. So this ‘hypertext’ is a word that snuck up on me. The work of some of the poststructuralists, like Derrida and Kristeva on language, Barthes on Death Of the Author, Cixous’ ‘ecriture feminine’, have signalled for some time the possibilities of deconstructive/generative writing practices. Digital environments present possible spaces for this to play out.

TW I came to hypertext with my work in an entirely opportunistic way when I was invited to apply for an ANAT (Australian Network Arts Technology) residency. That encounter helped me to move along a whole range of concerns about form in a writing project I had been immersed in for 3 years…it liberated me off the A4 white page and into extensions: ways to look at and consider my set of interests and characters and stories in the ‘family saga’ I was writing. I learnt about my original project and why I was doing it by embarking into this concertina-shaped space of hypertext.

LC Hypertext contains everything that I have done before—broadcasting, writing, conversation, visual art, video, curating, graphic design—and poses a new question or possibility in terms of my practice/s and its multi/hyper/inter/media. In 1997, an essay I wrote about online collaboration was published in leonardo and the IMA recommended me to ANAT for the *water residency. That experience consolidated my thinking and my practice, gave me the space and time and reason to interrogate in a research/writing oriented way and to do it with a writer as special as Josephine Wilson.

DK I suppose (he says, settling into the couch, trying to appear relaxed), like most such problems, it began with my Mother. She could only ever conceptualise university work as a series of breathlessly-researched high-school essays strung together on a word processor. Then there was my honours supervisor, who had roughly the equivalent view of How A Real Thesis Should Work. My thesis looked at the construction of Elizabeth Jolley and I wanted some way of analysing (& doing diagrams of) but also demonstrating (& doing working-models of) the range of media and discourses around a given writer, and lo! My early nerdy interest in HyperCard (in the baby versions bundled with early Macs) redirected me to the later versions, at once a filing/referencing system, a slide-show with special effects, a graphics program in which to stage animations of various theoretical models, a commentary toolbox for footnotes and footnotes on footnotes, a concordance for correlating quotes from Jolley and her critics/reviewers, a studio for my voice-over soundtrack, and a searchable textual database.

My supervisor delighted in playing with the end result, but thought of it as some kind of quirky bloated screen-saver, with no relevance to the thesis. It was, in fact, intrinsic to my analysis of literary criticism as a cybernetic and hypertextual process. I had to re-do and re-submit the whole bloody thesis but I had also realised the possibilities of the medium, and—more importantly—that you didn’t have to be an overtrained tech-head to allow critical understanding to be generated from a conversation with an interface (rather than the memorisation of a manual).

KK There have been many attempts to define and categorise hypertext. Mark Bernstein in “Patterns of Hypertext” says the problem is not that hypertext lacks structure but that we lack the words to describe/criticise hypertext. Do you see such definitions as crucial? What are the differences between hypertext/hyperfiction/hypermedia?

TH I have some problems with this word hypertext. It tends to collapse all forms of writing into one—as long as there are links, something is hypertext…it doesn’t acknowledge a continuum, that there has been multi-layered, fragmentary writing that resists closure, that works across mediums for quite some time. The digital environment presents fabulous opportunities to develop these forms of writing. But often ‘hypertext’ means the writer will just pop in a few links to perk up a fairly standard unchallenging narrative. To consider and acknowledge differences between writing practices on the net is crucial, perhaps then we can get rid of the ‘hyper’.

TW While I am excited by what is possible in new paradigms like the activity on the web, I always want to broaden the discussion beyond the medium. That gives me more patience for the less satisfactory attention to the text-bit, to the writing, by many hypertext writers whose work is currently available.

LC The problem with Western culture is that it demands and expects and imposes structure where none exists or is needed. Yes, our [critical] languages for chaos and complexity are ineffectual, worrisome and anxious, although we are also developing tools and modes of thinking which do accommodate that: deconstruction, feminism, postcolonialism. This fragmentation is telling us that we don’t necessarily need definitions (the meta-) and that there are myriad ways of looking at, experiencing or knowing. Personally, I don’t see such definitions as crucial or necessary, but as a critical writer they are useful and have value in terms of discourse.

DK The emphasis on definition encourages the schizoid split between the 2 main, equally-dangerous inflations of rhetorical bombast: cyberhype and cyberdebunking, which could be summarised by the catchphrases ‘The book is dead’ and ‘You can’t take a laptop to the beach’, both of which are wrong…What often gets lost in this emphasis on the product (‘what is a hypertext?’ ‘how do you know a piece of hypermedia when you see it?’) is the crux: not product but process—hypertextual ways of reading and writing, designing and experiencing. I’d agree with Bernstein about the lack of good close, focused analysis and criticism, but not because we haven’t generated a full set of Lego jargon terms, or decided on the ‘proper’ academic idiom, but because academics are generally too busy processing hypertexts through ‘legitimating’ disciplines, neologising cute new buzzwords, and constructing unsustainable, mass-produced-plastic comparisons and contrasts.

KK Carolyn Guertin comments on the ability of hypertext to privilege multiple voices. How does hyperfiction invite collaboration?

LC Working together is always going to be about having a relationship and all the things that entails. Josephine [Wilson] and I enter into our work with a real commitment to process, in the spirit of friendship and with a great respect for each other’s work, input and ideas. Everything is always open to negotiation; some of that touchy-feely stuff has to come into play because a computer can’t make a collaboration possible in an emotive sense, in a personality sense. We rely on IRC and email to talk; the computer mediates that. It requires a great deal of work. You have to compensate for what the computer can’t do—for example I don’t know if Josephine is sobbing or scowling. After a year of working together we have begun to develop a shared language; it does contain cues. I suspect it’s a mode of communication that would not work if we were face to face.

Working across distance is an interesting thing—we live in 2 time zones, 2 climates, 2 households. In a practical sense we resolve conceptual and structural issues and then set ourselves tasks and give each other enough scope to pursue tangents and be experimental and then we swap notes. It’s always hard opening your work up to scrutiny, but I believe that collaboration produces something that would not have been produced otherwise. Neither of us is so conceited that we believe in myths of creative/individual genius. Hyperfiction/text does accommodate multiple voices…voices can switch in really subtle ways…layering and texturing a work to create interest.

KK What programs do you use when constructing hypertext? StorySpace, software that allows writers to create a visual map of a story’s links and pathways, is being used by many university writing classes. Do you think such programs restrict creativity? Make output homogenous? How does technology limit/extend the writer’s imagination?

TH I use a text editor, Photoshop and Illustrator and a couple of great programmer’s references. I prefer to work this way because it gives me more control over how a page will perform/look. Writing html is meditative and as a writing practice rather odd. There are 2 results: the immediate text before your eyes and the delayed text, the objects the code builds. Like any technique one can become ‘stuck’ in a certain way of working. I guess it’s up to the writer/artist to work out a way to shift sideways, to keep the work challenging.

TW I’m a dag who has no experience of programs beyond PageMill. I’m reliably informed that I’m at the same level as early high school students.

LC We use wysiwyg software with html editors to construct pages and then plot the links and flows in our heads or on scraps of paper. We have considered storyboarding and think that would be a really useful way to construct hypertexts; my way of storyboarding is scraps of paper blu-tacked to the wall with scrawling notes. All computer technology has limitations in the sense that there are things it can’t do. Writers have to make decisions about how they use a computer for hypertext: what audiences they will cut out when they load up on special effects…I prefer a more democratic response which privileges accessibility, entails faster download, minimal plugins, text-based—it’s kinder to the reader on a chuggy little machine.

DK If it’s stand-alone hypertext I would normally work in StorySpace and if necessary export the results to html format so I can make a website. If intended for online consumption, I use a digital camera, scanner, PhotoShop, PhotoDraw and Paint Shop Pro for the imagery, CoolEdit for the sounds, WWW Gif Animator and Animagic for the simpler animations, Director for sophisticated animations and interactive components, Netscape Composer for draft web documents, and then Notepad to edit and add html code.

On the basis of 3 years of using Netscape and StorySpace in teaching, [these programs] certainly don’t result in homogenous output. Quite the reverse. StorySpace extends the writer’s imagination to the extent that a whole range of possibilities for representing, modelling and simulating reading and performance experiences are opened up; it can be an immediate aid to brainstorming, plotting, structuring, scene construction, and developing multiple voices; it encourages play, experimentation and risky writing; and—even if the final result is still a story-on-the-page—it stimulates writers into editing and re-editing and redrafting rather than placing trust in a quickly-fiddled-with second draft. It almost demands a design ethic that is more visual and focused; and enables a more intense mixture of formats, modes and genres.

KK There appears to be more critical theory on hypertext than actual examples of hyperfiction. Competitions held by Salt Hill Journal and trAce online are encouraging new works. Are Australian writers in general slow to catch on to these opening possibilities for innovative writing?

TH Australian artists/writers lead in this area. In digital environments we have to consider writing as a coalescence of image, sound, word and design. As a filterer for the trAce alt-x hypertext competition I found the entries from Australia to be on the whole the most sophisticated conceptually and technologically, the most willing to experiment with design, to move across registers/genres/discourses.

TW I don’t think it’s just a matter of Australian writers being slow. Most of the good work is in critical theory. Much of the hyperfiction is not invested well enough in the writing yet…people are dazzled by what they can make and the writing lags behind. My list of good, interesting work from Australia would be fairly small and covered already by you: Josephine Wilson, Teri Hoskin.

LC Online writing (hyperfiction and hypertext) as a defined practice (and there’s that problem of definition) is kind of marginalised and nebulous even though there is heaps of locally produced web-based artwork (eg Di Ball www.thehub.com.au/dibbles and Tracey Benson www.thehub.com.au/~traceyb – link expired) and a really positive exchange between artwork and writing. Positive things happen through events like MAAP and volt: they start to generate interest and focus and curators like Beth Jackson (who initiated and worked on wonderful projects like shoreline http://www.maap.org.au/shoreline – link expired). There’s a lot of energy and interest which is kind of diffused, sporadic and hidden; other Queensland content includes cyberpoet komninos and sound artists low key and nude (who did a beautiful sound and spoken word piece with alt x). The web and hypermedia/hypertext introduces so many possibilities that people are kind of in a bind about what to do with it: is it a tool, a medium, a genre? Is it writing, visual culture, screen culture? What all that means to me is ‘experiment’; let the work make the definitions, not the critics.

DK The short answer (to are Oz writers slow to catch on) would be: how would we ever know? The number of venues for onscreen narratives (in any format) to be published/displayed is: very small, for “official” venues with some literary legitimation; or quite small, and dispersed and hard to find, for zine-y venues. It’s mostly the latter where really-engaging-experimental hyperfiction happens, where the dimensions and capabilities of the medium are exploited rather than merely demonstrated. Writers have been slow to take up the new possibilities, but editors have been appalling, and often either conservatively repetitive or plain luddite and reactive. Some of the best hypertextual narratives being produced in Oz at the moment are in print zines and occasionally as anarchic pockets of university student magazines, and in the student galleries of Creative writing/Multimedia courses at universities…work which remains plaintively dispersed and un-findable, never further developed for, or even submitted for, publication.

KK Finally, do you enjoy reading hyperfiction? What are your favourite hypertext works?

TW I enjoy reading hyperfiction just as I enjoy reading other fiction and poetry: the writing has to engage me and will if it has a clarity…uses language in an exciting way…has an integrity to its project of making something. There are more writers following traditional modes (on paper) producing more exciting writing than I’ve found on the web. But that can change.

LC I am a regular visitor to mark amerika’s AltX and Gregory Ulmer’s site, and I really enjoy some of the works on ‘mystory’, trAce and the ewre (a really important Australian-based initiative…the work that’s been done is really defining in terms of an approach, an ethic and an interpretation; a starting point).

DK The pieces I’ve responded to most passionately are one-off works appearing in web journals, that disappear within 6 months: ones that refract every design element through the narrative, without resorting to an often-clumsy single central literal metaphor. Philip Salom and his partner Meredith Kidby have managed some terrific, compact hypertexts based around narrative poetry (http://www.netspace. com.au/~psalom/mmm.html) and Meredith has produced eclectically enjoyable material available on CD ROM [There’s also] Wishing by Gregory Ulmer and Linda Marie Walker for the startling electrical quality of the writing; and, finally, of course, mark amerika’s Grammatron opus, for its verbal exuberance, self-conscious eccentricities, sheer scope, and good ol’ yankee audacity at presuming itself the first and biggest and best.

Current projects: Teri Hoskin’s meme_shift, a consideration of how Western and Japanese cultures construct each other as Other, will be published on the trAce site; Terri-ann White is completing a novel; Linda Carroli is collaborating with Josephine Wilson on a new work cipher (work in progress http://ensemble.va.com.au/cipher) addressing the performativity of writing online; Dean Kiley is the editor of eXtra, a web journal associated with Overland.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx spoke famously of the “tradition of all the dead generations weigh[ing] like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Similarly, there is an overwhelming sense in which the video works of Peter Callas possess an electro-organic force, one so imbued with the archive of mediatised debris of geo-political and popular culture that the ecstasy of an encounter with his video works might lead to meteoric apoplexy in perception on the part of the viewer. This, if you will, is but one constellation of a dialectical imaginary that negotiates the complexities between the premodern and the (post)modern in Callas’ topo-videographic lessons on history.

Peter Callas: Initialising History is a 3-component national touring project centred around Peter Callas, electronic media artist and curator. Produced by dLux media arts, the project features Initialising History, comprising 12 of Callas’ video works 1980–1999; Peripheral Visions, a selection by Callas of contemporary international video art and computer animation; and An Eccentric Orbit, a 3-part survey of Australian video art made during the 1980s and early 90s, curated by Callas and produced by Ross Harley and touring internationally since its launch in 1994 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The short black & white video Singing Stone (1980) holds a curious pivotal position as the opening piece in the Callas retrospective. Prior to embarking into the world of video art, Callas trained at the ABC as an assistant film and then sound editor for TV news and current affairs programs. He then studied printmaking and sculpture at art school in Sydney. Singing Stone seems to translate some of the technical and ideological properties of these otherwise distinct media into the poetics of video art. For almost the entire duration of this work, we hear a harsh scraping discord as we see a hand brushing a stone in a circular motion. The image of the hand and stone literally disintegrates, recomposing as a mutable collage of imaginary terrains anchored by noise which eventually folds over the obliterated image to include a veritable murmur of voices and honking traffic intruding from the street. At least that’s how I heard it.

The layered dimensions of sound and imagery in Singing Stone are made possible by the unstable nature of magnetic tape as a recording surface, yet one assumes these layers are the result of the place of a kinaesthetic between the hand and the stone. As such, a metaphor is created on the dialectic between inscription (or representation) and the contingencies of history. In yet another way, the work can be seen to refuse the fragmented spectacle of TV news images held together in a universal order by the voice-over of a news reader or reporter. The referent seems to speak itself.

In the context of a selected retrospective, Singing Stone can perhaps more crucially be approached as anticipating some of the recurring stylistic motifs and critical concerns Callas’ later works present. First, there is a recognition of the instability of representation: Callas shows that even images unfolding in real-time—that supposedly ‘unmediated’ time not subject to the intervention of the ‘edit’—are, however, subject to the peculiarities of a communication technology and the way historicity is attributed to cultural phenomena. Secondly, is the way a grid of manga warriors or shifting troupe of dancers appears to emerge in the regenerating images of Singing Stone. (Callas himself hinted as much in his introduction to Initialising History at the Festival of Perth’s ART(iculations) symposium, and revealed in the discussion after the screenings that he sees the bearded face of a Chinese man.) An apocryphal dimension attends such a readerly desire to enact order out of chaos. Indeed, Singing Stone invites uncertainty, or rather the certainty of differentiated perception —for both operate as a dialectical trope across the Callas oeuvre.

Callas’ ‘singular style’ developed while living in Tokyo during the ‘bubble economy’ of the mid 80s. In this harmonious correlation between cultural production and imagined economies, video artists were commissioned by department stores, with electronic billboards and shop display windows operating as potential conduits out of urban environments for the passer-by. The staple icon articulating the animated brilliance of Callas’ multi-dimensional work from this period is derived or, as Scott McQuire aptly puts it, “mined” from the ubiquity of manga culture in Japan. The use of techno-hybrids of traditional and popular music as an editing strategy is predominant in these signatory video works. As Callas commented during the Perth screening of Initialising History, the structure of music dictates the editing of images; what distinguishes these works from pop music video clips is the situated resonance of history reconfigured. Callas alleviates a possibile rigidity in the dialectical image by deploying sound to create a fluid dimension for political expression.

Bilderbuch für Ernst Will (Ernst Will’s Picture Book): A Euro Rebus is one of Callas’ last works produced using the Fairlight CVI (Computer Video Instrument)—the primary tool through which Callas honed the complexity of fusing disparate cultural histories into topo-videographic arrangements. Made in Sydney and Tokyo from 1990 to 1993, Bilderbuch für Ernst Will follows Callas’ earlier work and doesn’t conform to any apparent narrative structure. Instead, as Rudolf Frieling suggests, Bilderbuch… is a work of “possible logics of construction and perception that need to be explored through multiple viewings”. Herein lies a paradox of Callas’ video art: while these texts can be seen as a highly aestheticised and at times horrific and sublime pastiche of images referencing a mass of art historical, pop culture, and what Ross Harley astutely calls “ideogrammic objects” of US mediatised culture (Art & Text 28 (1988), p. 78), his texts nonetheless resist the easy digestibility of aesthetics we often associate with recent digital and photomedia artworks. Within this tension between familiarity and abstruse syncretism, the problematic of history and memory is once again foregrounded as a politicised terrain. Moreover, Callas contributes to cultural debate the importance of reconsidering the critical place of aesthetics. And he’s been doing this for some time now.

An attempt to unravel the encyclopedic histories intricated throughout the video work by Callas can only be an interminable one. And herein lies the pleasure of his work. In any case, the program notes by Rachel Kent, read in conjunction with the essays by McQuire and Frieling in the forthcoming monograph, have to be commended for their critical acumen.

I’d like to finish by turning to Callas’ current work in progress, Lost in Translation. During the ART(iculations) symposium, Callas made frequent mention of what he observes as the institutional and commercial outmoding of video art by digital media in many contemporary art festivals. A pressing concern for Callas involves the cultural, social, and memorial implications that come with the excision of one communication technology as it is replaced by another. A fundamental question emerges: what happens when the communicative forms of cultural articulation are ‘exiled’ through instituted means? What is lost (and what is found) within new terrains of expression?

The syncopated “architectronics” emblemised in Callas’ CVI work are extended in Lost in Translation, where smooth transitions in 3-dimensional space envelop 2-dimensional planar images. A considerably slower pulse tracks a refiguring of ‘magic realism’ usually attributed to Latin American writers and photographers—the labyrinthine tales of Borges, epic parables of García Márquez and poignant images of Alvarez Bravo spring most immediately to mind. With claims nowadays that the novel is long dead, and the reality-effect of photography no longer tenable, it is perhaps no surpise that Callas’ translation of Brazillian history through and within the spatio-temporality of digital media evokes questions of ‘truth’ as it pertains to the mode of representation and the position of the observer.

Lost in Translation is by definition a work in progress, as it will always be. This is not to say this current project will remain incomplete. Rather, its purpose is the creation of a fractal universe in which the singularity of the event is registered in the multiple dimensions of a history on Latin America in which the perception of the viewer is folded into its topology.

Peter Callas: Initialising History, commissioned and produced by dLux media arts in association with Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Festival of Perth, PICA, February 10 – March 7. Program touring nationally: ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Melbourne until May 2, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from May 27.

original home is the second in a series of works by Ros Warby, exploring the possibilities that lie within (or between) music and dance.

At first there is the question of how to begin. A double question. How to begin to make the work and how to begin the work. When neither sound nor movement are privileged, nor developed separately. Right from the beginning they are allowed to interact and to cause events to happen, crossing over from one discipline to another. A kind of cross-stitching.

The rhythms and ph(r)ased collisions of sound and bodies, are both decidedly musical and intensely human. There is an interchange of impulses. We meet the body as composer in its purest sense.

There is a question of how to begin and there is a question of how to proceed. It begins quietly, or at least the space is quiet, or at least empty. There are sounds coming up from underneath the floor, underneath the seating. Instruments warming up, air being forced down a long tube. This is theatrical. Someone is waiting in the wings. We fall silent.

And then a rock rolls across the floor. This rolling stone (rock) is awkward, unsymmetrical, noisy. There is a certain rhythm. Its trajectory is unpredictable. The rolling of the rock gives us a direction as to how to enter the work. The haphazard movement of the rock suggests that anything might happen, where one sound or movement does not predict the next and cannot be fixed. A work premised very much on receptivity.

The dancers are placing objects against the side wall. These objects are treasures. They have a history, detailed histories of their own. A seed pod was found in the Queensland Botanical Gardens and brought to Melbourne. The seed pods with their promise of new life, dried and clattery on the wooden floor. There is on old drum, and the head of another old and broken drum. Some of these objects have been waiting for repair for years, broken and (apparently) of no use. They have been broken and taken apart. Other instruments have been built out of them and these bits of wood are the offcuts.

The objects (instruments) are brought in without caution. The dancers are dropping things, without reference to the sound they make. Without reference or reverence or caution.

Objects remain on the floor where they have landed, silent now. Once or twice they are kicked out of the way. The debris on the floor is never really abandoned. But it is nevertheless scattered, dropped, strewn across the empty floor. The objects are treated with a certain carelessness, something (very) difficult to achieve.

One of the dancers lies on the floor, alongside the (other) objects. She becomes one link in a chain (of objects). Bodies and objects are transferable. I remember standing next to the sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, at an exhibition in Perth. I was tempted to talk to them, such was their human presence.

Drum sticks fall like fiddlesticks onto the wooden floor. Dancers step in between the sticks, careful not to cause movement, careful not to allow a stick to move. Just as in the game, you can remove the sticks so long as others do not move. In this case if one stick were to move it would betray itself. By making a noise.

She moves along a straight line, her footsteps are marked, in time, by the sound of two pieces of wood being struck. The spinning ring, like a small miracle, grows louder as it comes closer to the floor. It makes a kind of crescendo before it lands, stops, falls silent. The whining of the bowed metal plate, reminding us of Pierre Henri’s saw. Its weary lament.

The rock is one brought back from Europe in a suitcase. “Has this got rocks in it?” There is a question of weight.

I am thinking about contact dancing, only here it is to do with things, or more exactly the sound(s) of things. Contact dancing involves the shifting of weight from one body to another, sharing the weight and moving according to the shifts between these two bodies. In original home, the sound, as body, could be imagined as the other partner, whose materiality could be trusted and lent on as the body of another. Sound as body, body as composer. This play between sound and body points to the weight of sound just as did the weight of the rock. The rock rolls for a second time. It makes a(n unintended) direct line for the back wall and crashes into it. Again it takes forever to settle. A kind of balancing and falling at the same time.

There is a stillness as one of the dancers perches on the rock. Her stillness is allowed to crack and she falls and moves on. Against the back wall she balances on a disk. This back wall is miked. She whips the wall with an electric extension cord given her by the composer. Slapping the electric cord against the wall. She lifts the rock steadily while balancing on an hour glass shaped drum. As she stands up the objects fall over, knocked over in her carelessness. There are abrupt endings and unexpected linkages. Objects, like ideas are dropped when no longer useful, and without ceremony, you move on.

The final image is one of breath. At first we hear a long drawn out blurt, a kind of Tibetan blasphemy. The breath is being forced through a long metal tube. We see the man lifting a made-up instrument of 3 pieces, almost too long to hold, almost out of reach. With the introduction of some small valve or flute into the core of the tube, the sound transforms into a fragile, wavering, sliding, musical line. We hear the frail wanderings of the breath, as the lights die down.

We are reminded (again) of the fragility of being human, of the body, of our closeness to death. We feel the frailty of the human body, with all its limitations and fallibilities.

Ros Warby, original home, performers Ros Warby, Shona Innes, Graeme Leak; sound objects, Graeme Leak; Dancehouse, Feb 5 – 14

Pink Floyd, God Flesh, The Beach Boys, Canadians David Cronenberg and comic book artists Seth, Chester Brown and Joe Matt. This strange alliance of music and cinematics is typical of the diversity of works that inspire Tasmanian video artist Matt Warren.

His most recent piece is a video installation titled I Still Miss You, which has only recently finished showing in the new gallery belonging to CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania). The work occupied a corner of the main gallery as part of the exhibition Transmission, curated by Jennifer Spinks, featuring the work of Sarah Ryan, Troy Ruffels, Leigh Burnett, Matt Calvert, Kate Warnock and Warren.

Within a screened-off section of the gallery, a suspended video projector beamed deep into a darkened 4 by 6 metre space carpeted with road metal an inch thick. A step onto the heavy gravel, and I was confronted by the amplified crunchings of my footfalls issuing from speakers in the ceiling. Here I stopped, turning my attention to the pool of flickering images on the wall.

Backed by a deep thrumming chord with an almost metallic edge which completely filled the space, the video unfolded as a series of impassioned monologues enacted by a man and a woman in a car in heavy rain. We see them from a distance at night, and yet cannot hear their dialogue. While the camera position remains stationary, the view closes in to focus on each face, sometimes pleading, sometimes ranting, while all the time washed by red and yellow sheets of light sprayed from the night traffic spilling past, periodically punctuated by a convulsive strobe that lit up the cockpit of the car like the wing of an aircraft.

A series of hypnotic sequences evolve that explore the dynamics of what seems like a relationship break down, all held in the tight confines of the steamy domestic sedan. The entire drama is seen through a foreground of luminous waves animated by the sweeping pulses of the wiper blades across an incandescent ocean that is the fish shop window of the windscreen.

A central thematic of Matt Warren’s’s work is an investigation of his own experiences of absence and loss, through a subtle and confident manipulation of his medium. Both of the characters occupy the driver’s seat in the argument (physically and metaphorically), and this device is used to explore a series of alternative developments of the conflict. The viewer realises the arbitrariness of his/her own narrative assumptions, and this results in a process of reflection upon one’s own existence, and beyond to the link between Warren’s own work and the autobiographical montage of the comic artists mentioned earlier.

Warren has been working with video and sound composition since he taught himself to edit with 2 VCRs while at Hellyer College in Burnie, and his qualifications now include a BFA in Painting and a Graduate Diploma in Video, both from the University of Tasmania. Warren has just been offered a Samstag Scholarship to undertake postgraduate study overseas, and he is currently negotiating with Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to pursue an MFA in Interdisciplinary Practice, beginning late 1999. I have no doubt the Samstag Scholarship and associated travel experience will add to Warren’s eclectic nature, and I’ll be very keen to see how new influences enhance the elegant processes of layering and synaesthesia that characterise his work.

See review of Matt Warren’s short film Phonecall which screened as part of the recent Multimedia Mini-Festival in Tasmania,

Tess de Quincey is a choreographer and dancer who has worked extensively in Europe, Japan and Australia as solo performer, teacher and director. The strongest influence on her performance came from her work over 6 years (1985-91) with Butoh dancer Min Tanaka and his Mai-Juku Company. Tanaka founded the term and philosophical basis for Body Weather, a broad-based and comprehensive training that embraces and builds on concepts of environment. Body Weather proposes a philosophical but also practical strategy to the mind and the body that is not just for ‘professional’ dancers or performance practitioners but is an open investigation that can be relevant for anyone interested in exploring the body. Drawing on elements of both eastern and western dance, sports training, martial arts and theatre practice, it is a discipline that develops a conscious relation without conforming to specific form. In solo and group works as well as her work with sculptor-dancer Stuart Lynch, Tess de Quincey proposes this practice within a contemporary western perspective as a training that can be applied as a pure body/mind research or aligned to dance and/or performance training.

De Quincey’s major solo productions, Movement on the Edge, Another Dust and is.2 have toured extensively in Europe and Australia and among her group pieces, Square of Infinity, a film and large-scale performance work, was the culmination of reflections on the specific time and space of the dry lake bed of Lake Mungo in the ACT. De Quincey/Lynch’s recent site-specific and time-based works include The Durational Trilogy, a series of pieces lasting 6, 12 and 24 hours) and Compression 100, a series of collaborative performances in and around Sydney.

Currently recipient of the Australia Council’s Choreographic Fellowship (1998-99), Tess de Quincey has initiated another large scale project focused this time in Australia’s Central Desert. The Triple Alice Project in partnership with Desart, the Centre for Performance Studies (Sydney University) and The Performance Space spans 3 years (1999-2001). It involves a forum as well as 3 live, site- and temporally-specific laboratories staged over 3 weeks of each year. The forum and laboratories are accessible through an interactive website, www.triplealice.net which is formative of and integral to the event.

Triple Alice 1 (September 20-October 10 1999) is a laboratory focusing on contemporary arts practices of the Central Desert and brings together Indigenous and non-indigenous artists from the Northern Territory and local guest speakers to contextualise the site. It includes a 3-week intensive Body Weather workshop in which participants will make sensory and experiential mappings of space—in this case, the landscape 100 kms north west of Alice Springs at Hamilton Downs in the MacDonnell Ranges. “The workshop involves some strenuous workouts to develop strength, flexibility and a strong physical grounding. The ground work provides insight into the different speeds of the body and the function of time. These practices also aim to sharpen sensorial focus, spatial awareness and coordinative perspectives”, says de Quincey. The workshop will be joined by a dance-performance unit and theorists and writers will maintain an onsite theoretical debate. The website will transmit the laboratory and invite remote participation—a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary meeting of theory and practice.

Triple Alice 2 in 2000 will involve a number of collaborative artists creating performance for web and screen. This second laboratory will build on the experience and language developed in the first and invite a wider range of responses, particularly from new media artists through physical attendance at the lab as well as remote interactive networking with it. Participation from remote sites will include live interstate linkups with art venues in the major cities. The emphasis will be on performance and art works specifically designed for electronic media.

Triple Alice 3 (2001) is an online international laboratory, seminar and festival. This event will correlate ideas of space and time in the different traditions of artistic practice and performance work with those of other disciplines including astrophysics, philosophy, astronomy, military research and navigation. In parallel with this exchange, live online performance and artworks will synthesise the results of the first 2 labs.

A trio of objects begins the piece, their arbitrary motions engendered by some offstage intentionality. An oval stone rolls onstage, wobbles, rolls, wobbles and finally rests. Quiet reigns. The passage and beauty of the stone’s journey says it all about this piece, wherein a setting was created which made space for the contemplation of this simple, moving object. We slowly meet the protagonists in this medley of objects, both animate and inanimate.

original home is improvised. It has movement, objects and sound; 3 people and many artefacts, both natural and constructed. Graeme Leak is credited with the sound objects but all the performers use them. Ros Warby stood on a weathered stone, a limpet extending her limbs against a white canvas. Shona Innes wielded enormous seed pods, ridiculous weapons in a comic duet. The objects made music but they also sang their own presence. I almost felt the plethora of objects was too much—transported on and off stage—they tended to break with the chaste atmosphere of the space. But then I decided that their transport was like a Brechtian device intended to mark the boundaries between particular sections of the work, and to allow the performers to be their ordinary selves.

The performance space had been reconstructed for the event, an interior layer of walls, gaps, pleats, and a wide rectangular window at the back from which spilled darkness and light. Warby stood against the window, not doing all that much. So much is conveyed in-between. Leak’s sense of musical timing was voluminous, allowing for an interweaving of kinaesthetic content.

The 3 performers made duets and trios, showing their year’s work together. Yet they didn’t blend into one another. At one point, Warby and Innes were bent over, each with one arm up. One arm so different from the other, animated according to 2 distinct corporealities. Innes’ opportunistic humour—lapping up the possibilities of the moment—was not mimicked by anyone else. The performers coalesced in the space of a single performance whilst listening to their own muse.

The trace of Deborah Hay’s recent visit was manifest here: no rush to get anywhere, always already there. Although it could be argued that all dance is a form of improvised movement, when you watch an ‘improvised work’ there is a sense of something over and above established choreography. Perhaps the difference lies in the observer. But the felt quality is of indeterminacy, a lack of predetermination, of multiple and not singular pathways. The point at which this is conveyed is when nothing is happening—for in that moment there is a vacillation between freedom and anticipation, between future and past, a pair of extremes which is only ever resolved in the present.

original home, (returning to it), director Ros Warby, choreography/composition /performance Ros Warby, Shona Innes and Graeme Leak, lighting design Margie Medlin, design Ros Warby, Margie Medlin; Dancehouse, Melbourne, February 5 – 14

For Chunky Move’s contribution to the Woolmark 1999 Melbourne Fashion Festival Lucy Guerin’s group work, Zero, is a sophisticated and daring piece. Made for the entire company, it is an episodic but not literal progression of large and small group and solo sections, comprising a work that makes for compelling viewing. Guerin has set up a formal but abstract structure that defies our expectations. There are continual surprises—your attention is drawn from one part of the space to another, from big movements to tiny details. Sometimes a trio in a downstage corner is mirrored in the opposite corner upstage. Sometimes the ensemble work is crisp and tight, other times it is looser.

The work subtly builds to its conclusion when Phillip Adams and Luke Smiles perform a virtuosic duet. Adams manipulates Smiles, asserting his power by containing and constricting Smiles’ movement. They remain physically connected and confined to a tight square of light centre stage. The dependency play is riveting and one of the more obvious emotionally charged moments.

It is clear in Zero that Guerin’s decision to work without a theme has actually freed her to make more potent choreographic decisions than in her last work, Heavy (1998). However, I was acutely aware of every lighting cue and change in the soundtrack tempo, which I found distracting.

In complete contrast to Guerin’s abstraction and clarity comes Gideon Obarzanek’s All The Better To Eat You With, a late 20th century panto-style presentation of Little Red Riding Hood. Dancers sporting exaggerated character costumes recreate the narrative through mime and rather hackneyed interpretive movement sequences. Given the desensitisation of us all (children included) to violence and death through accessible popular culture forms, this interpretation of what is a scary children’s story goes no further than the basic expectations of how this story could be read in current cultural context.

It is literal and simplistic in its storytelling and lacks the dynamic movement vocabulary we have seen in some of Obarzanek’s previous works eg Bonehead (1997) and C.O.R.R.U.P.T.E.D.2 (1998) The set, however, is stunning. Also designed by the choreographer, it is a series of simple, stylish aquarium-like installations, that bubble, slosh, reflect and absorb light, complemented by a large pool table-sized slab of light—sometimes used as a screen and perpendicular to the floor, sometimes horizontal, hovering above. It tilts, turns and creates a fascinating diversion to the live performances happening around it.

Obarzanek’s effective design for That’s Not My Movement, But this One Is (a short work with Guerin) also provides much of the interest for that work. Small, candle-lit perspex boxes clustering near the 2 dancers, but gently swaying, exude a warmth that does not exist in the unsatisfying solos these choreographers have created for each other. The sense of incompleteness leaves me wondering why the clarity of the design is not as apparent in the movement.

There were some breathtaking and believable performances, especially from Fiona Cameron, Luke Smiles and Phillip Adams in Zero, but I missed the worldly understanding inherent in the performances of Obarzanek’s first Chunky Move ensemble. The loss of key performers like Narelle Benjamin and Brett Daffy, who have been replaced by some technically able but less experienced performers, has created a less individualistic approach to the performers’ interpretation of the work. The strength of Chunky Move in the past has been this sense of the personal within an ensemble setting.

Chunky Move, Bodyparts, choreographers Gideon Obarzanek and Lucy Guerin; performers Luke Smiles, Lisa Griffiths, Phillip Adams, David Tyndall, Byron Perry, Fiona Cameron and Kirstie McCracken; collaborators Damien Cooper, lighting designer Audra Cornish, fashion designer Peter Haren@TDM, composer Darrin Verhagen, costume designers Laurel Frank, David Anderson; Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, February 16 – 27

New York, New York. So new, so not: thanks to our global televisual mind, Manhattan seems as familiar to me as Sydney. Just how new can my travelling eyes be?

The hugeness of America—its landscape, language, art collections. Bigness is big here. And still, a baby flirting on the underground turns smiles; or, crawling minute amongst a room of huge Hopper canvases (sole people in desolate places), she is hailed as a work of art. This big and little place.

I leave my regards in Broadway as we sprint past its success and neon signs. Winds peeling off our caps, yester-snows melting into sludge, ice-air making us cry. Head to smaller venues: the Joyce (200 seats) celebrating Altogether Different, the Danspace its 25 years. Little is big, but here too the new is so old you wonder how new new can be. This is where much modern dance kicked its own arse into gear, and the bruise of this pleasure shows. Like an echo in the bone of old sorrow, the arc of an arm splaying old joy. Do we break all the ice in new dancing? But I ask the wrong question: we move not just in the moment, but within all time. Sometimes, we glimpse the future.

Sean Curran, Irishman, older than his troupe, dancing perhaps so he and another man can kiss, dancing perhaps so that his feet and mind can talk to each other. Whose Irish jig is this? I’ve had it with you, Paddy (and Michael), the riverdance broken by a boy skitting stones across the water, water heading towards the falls. Curran is an imp, a questioner, a choreographer who in ensemble can make his dancers meet Brahmakrishna as much as Flatley (via Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane); a soloist who can strip back his mask (and fooling) to lay open the doubts of his mind: If I move like this, if I make my body thus follow my mind, what does my mind follow? A sudden vista of Tibetan calligraphy projected huge across the back wall folds him bare…whilst still, the feet patter, the torso erects, the arms fling. This is Irish, and not Irish—melded with the histories of his suffering, his addictions, his loves, his training-grounds. Eclectic, mad, tender, nuggetty and vulnerable; he is crying and laughing.

Kevin Wynn is arcing limbs, Alvin Ailey, white and black American history. His dancers wear sexy leotards and spread their thighs. He renders a 20-strong ensemble as individual yet complexly cohesive as a grand railway clock. I am tired in the complexity of the watching. I am invigorated as well, exercised as in a class. His beauties are only “viscious” [the work is titled Viscious Beauties], perhaps, if you watch from the viewpoint of classical ballet, but they’re strong, quirky, eruptive, their organs (lungs, livers, spleens) dance. To the live jazz band, their feet tamp ground. And then, in the solo, quiet—because you have to stop the music to hear old scream. The black dancer spirals out, a yearning colonial dream played out on husks of corn. Protest breaks into grace; the vigour of the body breaks a new world.

Meredith Monk’s Celebration Dance leaps back to what harvest ritual might have been before New Age sacred niceness took its hold. Extracts of songs and music from various Monk works is interspersed with an eclectic range of texts from Basho to Rumi and tribal and initiation songs. Here, and always beneath our feet, what sacredness. Sometimes I hear and see the earth splintering open, turning on its axis; at others, the performers enact a soft bowing splendour to the soil. They fidget, like mice, or horses, or children, thanking the grass and the stars. The physical movements are so simple that I actually hear people objecting to the dance. But I object to this objecting, as each performer moves with dignity, and unselfconsciously according to their means. They do, move, sing. And till the soil, with the minimal finesse but huge skill that soil-tillers use. This is sharing harvest, not watching form. And the audience adores it, adores Meredith, roars her in, because of the sheer and audacious joy with which she fills the space. She told me she wondered if she could get away with it, but she did.

In Melbourne, Russell Dumas’ brave new work Oaks Cafe/Cassandra’s Dance exhibits his characteristic virtuosity alongside the awkwardness of a new world cutting in. It’s interesting and provocative that Russell chose to work this time with actors as well as dancers from his familiar stable. What I see is a difference in their feeling about dancing, an intensity with more emotion from the actors (how grim that turn, how self-amazing that supporting action) to a kind of perspex translucency from those of dancer-background. A difference of the colour of their histories. In the moves of greater virtuosity, perhaps the dancers fare better; but Russell tells me afterwards that virtuosity requires amnesia—a forgetting of how they got there. We do not share their sweat. Perhaps for an actor it is harder to forget: memory is a part of their technique. The actor’s Method: Who is it, what is it, where is it, when is it, why is it: the quintrivium of questions that perhaps never can quite leave your dancing mind.

So, we have some re-membering, some forgetting, hearts on their sleeves or transferred to the space between limbs. But there is also another membering here: Dumas examining his own making, a history of his works in continuous enlarged projection, beyond the back of the stage visible through a door into the next room. Glimpses of old moves, echoed or ignored in the dance of bodies on the floor. This is unprecious history, giving a freedom to our looking. So, too, in the open side door and unshuttered windows, letting the late afternoon light in, letting it sink, letting our watching roll over into night. Night watching, the time of thinking about the dance, after the dance, here becoming the same moment with the dance. This is a gift of time. And the audience is full of children, perhaps watching something they already recognise. (There were no children in the New York halls. Are they risk? They might have fuzzed the edges of the made.)

In that struggle with our memory, that edge between re-membering, dis-membering, letting the past fall into death or stay honoured in the colour of how we move, lies the turning over into the terrible possible world. Being has teeth. The awesome contradiction of it: inheritance cuts its edge in every mouth and helps the young tear into new food. And words, form, quickly follow on. Like Cassandra, talking (in)to the future—but perhaps this time being heard. (“Danthing”, lisped one young one from behind, before her repetitions became more voluble and her mother took her from the room. Her futures, seeing, lisping, wriggling into other pushing pressing needs, lay here and beyond the room.)

Altogether Different Festival: Each of Both (1998), Symbolic Logic (1999), Folk Dance for the Future (1997) [ensemble]; Five Points of Articulation (1994-5) [solo excerpts], Sean Curran Company, choreography Sean Curran, visual design Mark Randall, The Joyce Theatre, Jan 5; Three World Premieres: Viscious Beauties, Black Borealis (solo: Giovanni Sollima), To Repel The Daemons, The Kevin Wynn Collection, choreography Kevin Wynn, music Peter Jones, Phillip Hamilton, lighting Roma Flowers, David Grill, Jan 7. “Silver Series”, Danspace Project, Meredith Monk and vocal ensemble, A Celebration Service, conceived, directed & composed by Meredith Monk, texts compiled by Pablo Vela, Jan 9, Joyce Theatre, Soho, NY. The Oaks Café/Cassandra’s Dance, director, principal choreographer Russell Dumas, performed & co-choreographed by Danielle von der Borch, Sally Gardner, Keith March, Trevor Patrick, Colin Sneesby, Cath Stewart and Kerry Woodward, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Feb 7

Adrienne Greenheart’s Six Sex Scenes www.altx.com/hyperx/sss/index.htm
announces itself as “a novella in hypertext” (why do online writers feel the need to state the obvious? Is it because they are insecure about the value of fiction on the internet?). It traces a woman’s brutal childhood and its effects on her current relationships. It works as a journal, the sometimes stodgy writing of personal memoir. Oral sex (a curious rendition by the Yeastie Girls), lesbianism (to be or not to be), Jewish identity, incest; they are all covered. Negotiating the spaces of most couples, and with a spiralling devotion to Sylvia Plath, the hypertext structure is simple. Links at the bottom of the page branch out, gradually sinking deeper into the character’s obsessions, building on our friendship.

Gradually her skewered reality is revealed. The family’s power struggle is brilliantly conveyed in the descriptions of game playing. Strategies of Scrabble. The art of letting your parents win. In her childhood she asks for a chair so she can sit near the window to look out on the street all afternoon. Her parents send her to a psychiatrist. In her teens she plucks her eyebrows and goes to school with bloody holes and scabs. In her 20s she attends a poetry reading and, with Dorothy Porter-esque cynicism, stabs at the “god-of-all-liberated males” who gets off on reading poems about battered women (with proceeds of his book going to a women’s shelter); he is not the only one who eroticises violence.

Like films such as Female Perversions and Welcome to the Dollhouse, Six Sex Scenes is uncompromising in its exploration of what it means to grow up female, a site worth sticking with for the complex way it treats sexual abuse and incest.

Where the Sea Stands Still www.illumin.co.uk/ica/wsss/ [link expired] is, in contrast, a minimalist hypertext based on a highly structured poetic sequence by Yang Lian (cybertext transformation by John Cayley, English translation by Brian Holton). Lian aims to translate his Chinese characters to the screen, investigating the creation of meaning through visual arts, space, and cross-cultural representation.

The mahjong tiles—blue pixellated waves, calligraphy characters, black and white rooftops—dump text deposits onto my screen, “lust’s blank water on noon’s black bed sheet/the further from blood ties the brighter it is”, a flotsam and jetsam of the shore, the contracting line between nature and city. A series of snapshots where we are constructed, erected, opened up to Peter Greenaway decay, where we become “kids sliced by long dead light.”

New River http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/newriver [link expired] continues the watery theme, an excellent hyperfiction/media journal, offering a small but innovative selection created purely for the web, and a good introduction to how hypertext has evolved in the last few years. Back issues feature Stuart Moulthrop’s Hegirascope 2 (“what if the word will not be still”) and Edward Thacker’s fleshthresholdnarrative. In the latest edition Curtis Harrell’s hypermedia poem Nightmare Wonders Father’s Song successfully takes on a “dream logic.” Sitting in the dark with a pitch black screen, there are no words, and as you move flashes of story, images, come out of the night and disappear. You are, as in dreams, attracted by the light, this night-poem delicate, childlike, grasping, feeling its way, blind at times, evoking death and dragons, fairytales and lost child(hood). At a page titled Quick I play hide and seek with words that tease and taunt (trying to catch them with my mouse) and become the predator, entering the city at night, an architecture of rhythm and fear: “In their sleek cars, people/Are migrating/from anger to homicide.”

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