Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

April 2000

In 1995 the outspoken American author Kathy Acker was taken off-line by America On-Line. Acker’s charged fiction first appeared in the 1970s in underground, alternative publications. By the mid-80s she had established a huge audience and was hitting out at the mainstream, attacking everything from government to the education system, religion to social values. Her turbo-charged writing made her a natural denizen of the net. Taking an account with AOL, Acker built a reputation as an outspoken member of the internet community. However, AOL took a dim view of her anarchistic approach and Acker’s account was deleted.

America On-Line has an extremely bad reputation amongst the culturati on the internet for its intense censorship in online forums. Now its merger with Time Warner makes it quite possibly the most powerful player on the wires.

Bruce Sterling, author of The Hacker Crackdown, points to the plethora of anti-AOL sites on the net such as AOL Watch, anti-aol.org and aoltimewarnersucks.com. Douglas Rushkoff, author of Cyberia and Media Virus, hopes that people will rapidly tire of the content offered by the gigantic merger.

“I’ve always thought of AOL as training wheels for the real Internet. But a lot of people consciously choose pre-digested media, and these people—perhaps a majority—they’ll get what they ask for.

“The size of AOL/Time Warner in itself won’t change the opportunities for alternative viewpoints. If anything does, it will be the structure and functioning of our information infrastructure. AOL and Time Warner are both entertainment companies. They are simply looking for new ways to push their content. People who are genuinely interested in communicating, organising, educating and networking, well, they can get a taste through AOL…and if they get frustrated enough, they’ll venture out onto the Internet or whatever else is around.”

If anything, says Rushkoff, “this merger promises only to limit what people might be exposed to, but not necessarily what they can get a hold of.”

“It’s pretty clear that variety ain’t gonna be the spice of life for much longer on the Web,” says the author of Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture, Darren Tofts. “There is a growing uniformity and homogeneity which is all based on free web hosting, product placement and a pervasive parasitical approach to linking; one big in-crowd really. I suspect what will happen with AOL will be an intensification and consolidation of these features.”

“The real issue in the merger is who controls broadband,” says Sydney media theorist McKenzie Wark. “The cable systems are going to get broadband up before the phone companies do, and so the Internet/TV merger will happen first on cable systems. AOL Time Warner are positioning themselves to control cable access, Internet subscribers and content. It may be the usual messy merger that bogs a company down for years, or it might provide the kind of monopolistic leverage that the shareholders want and that the rest of us should fear.”

According to RU Sirius, the founder of the cyber magazine Mondo 2000, there is a real danger of people being seduced by the giant body, but, he says, given the changing nature of media it will be a short term problem. “There is a very real chance that there will be a substantial pocket of clueless people for whom AOL will BE the Internet,” says Sirius. “They won’t know the difference between the two. But in the cultural and business environments we have now, how long can that last? Less than a single generation certainly.”

Richard Metzger, editor of the New York-based online magazine Disinformation (www.disinfo.com) believes the internet is already overly crowded with cultural detritus. “Well, look at the current state of the Internet…it’s a vast wasteland…cultural landfill.

“I think that all of the punditry chattering about the AOL Time Warner deal neglect to ask themselves: ‘Do I care about this content?’ And I think most people will answer ‘No, I pay it no mind, I only use email.’ Beyond the MGM movie catalogue and CNN, the value of this stuff, content-wise is, to my mind, fairly negligible to AOL.”

Metzger points to the failure of Time Warner’s Pathfinder site and asks why anyone would “want to look at the same exact stuff with a different URL?”

“With the amount of sheer white noise going on with all these newly minted.coms spending millions of dollars on primetime advertising campaigns where their product or service is only distinguished by whether it’s Whoopie Goldberg or Geena Davis advertising their product, what chance do these businesses have anyway?

“The Internet was always just a delivery service, a better conduit than a fanzine…Anyone thinking that they can start on the WWW now and garner an audience is dead wrong. It’s a way too crowded field and let’s face it, turn on the TV and see just how thin the talent pool has been spread! The herd has been thinned, already, and it’s all gonna be downhill from here for the foreseeable future…”

Even the technology editor for Salon.com—an AOL content partner—saw the merger as a disastrous precedent, writing that “AOL Time Warner’s interests are now aligned opposite those of a freewheeling, independent Internet.”

With its substantial music and cinema holdings Time Warner will inevitably gain greater access to new markets. The fear many express is that this will allow the mainstream to dominate the internet. Music that might be defined as alternative will be crowded out.

“I don’t fear the mainstream,” says the lead singer of US band Pere Ubu. “I fear the people who fear the mainstream. Media, politicians and generic do-gooders have dedicated themselves to retraining the ignorant mass of ordinary people. The internet is an exciting tool. History can be rewritten, science invented, political thought channelled, morality redefined. These are the people who succeed in companies like Time Warner and AOL.

“It’s hardly surprising that corporate policy is to marginalize protestantism. So the real ‘danger’ is not to pornographers and social renegades, but to the mainstream by means of a process in which the ‘authorized’ reference sources become a handful of anodyne internet sites rewriting history to tickle the market and contorting truth to avoid offense.”

Genesis P Orridge, whose bands Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle are renowned in alternative circles, is even more apocalyptic. “Financially we are in the throes of hottest passion. Everyone is doing everyone else in a corporate parody of a bacchanalian orgy, complete with intrigues and perversions. We would do well to recall the last daze of Rome when everything was possible and the sacred and profane unified in power.

“What we are witnessing is the copulation of gargantuan entities whose tendrils probe into and feed off almost every living being on earth. It should come as no surprise that these various entities occasionally absorb each other like amoeba. What once were corporations are now sentient beings a little like feudal warlords in the Middle Ages. They have their ikonagraphic banners, their heraldic crests, and they wage wars of consuming attrition until new territories succumb to their power. A great, and ironic difference from the previous Middle Ages is that in years of old, soldiers and camp followers were paid for their services. Now the grunts, serfs and strap-hangers pay their Feudal Lords for the privilege of wearing their Lord’s ikon in return for their services.

“AOL and Time Warner merging is part of this catastrophic process, as is the ethnic neo-tribalism upsurging everywhere. We are entering a New Dark Ages, where these corporate super-entities will wage Jihad upon each other until one blue micro-chip bond conglomerate is pivotally positioned to encompass omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence and digital infallibility on behalf of all remaining human beings.

“We are watching an anti-intellectual coup of a willingly servile homo-sapiens by entities we imagined we created, but which really are independently sentient at this point with their own agendas and megalomaniac cravings.”

However the internet is an inherently anarchic environment. Individuals have already claimed the domain names anti-aol.org and aoltimewarnersucks.com, and they’ve even installed a pornography page at aolwebmaster.com with the slogan “So sleazy, no wonder I’m number one.”

AOL’s power play may have met its match in Georgia resident Christopher Alan. He claimed the domain stephencase.com (Stephen Case is the chairman of the new entity) and then composed an online rockabilly song about it:

“When you bought Time-Warner we were all impressed/How come you didn’t buy your web address?/ You may be a big-shot down at AOL/but I’m the one that got your URL!”

RealTime issue #36 April-May 2000 pg. 29

Troy Innocent, Sound Form

“Generative processes have been used by artists for decades. Now, as the computer becomes the medium of choice for many artists, composers and designers, process acquires new form and meaning in the computational realm.”

So ran the blurb in the call for participation in First Iteration—Australia’s first ever conference addressing this important area of artistic research and development. Almost immediately a flame hit the recode email list with a complaint about the ‘testosterone’ orientation of the event—mainly I think due to a misunderstanding about the definition of the adjective ‘computational.’ However on the day males certainly did predominate.

Why? Women are very well represented in the arts and Brenda Laurel has put to rest the 80s chestnut that computer science is a male ‘nerd’ domain. Women can and do make excellent programmers and analysts and they make up a significant proportion of the workforce. So how come more men seem to be attracted to computer programming (or, better, computational methodology) as a “metamedium” for artistic creation? The answer is complex and I can only summarise my opinion here. The art mainstream and, in particular, the art education sector have to accept much of the blame. Although many of the arts and humanities (psychology, social science, philosophy etc) have significantly adopted the computational paradigm, the practical arts, by contrast, lag disappointingly behind.

Nationally in the visual arts there has been little attempt to address this area with the funding and staffing that it needs. Few art lecturers can do more than push a mouse around with productivity enhancers like PhotoShop. This only reinforces traditional attitudes rather than encouraging a more meaningful engagement with this new metamedium. In general, the idea of science—or a meaningful relationship between art and science—is anathema. I recently attended one research planning meeting at a tertiary institution where the visual art theorists made it clear that they had no idea what theory meant in the context of science or of the relationship between theory and practice in a quantitative discipline. For obvious reasons they were reluctant to include these concepts in their syllabi.

Music, with an established history in permutative and generative techniques, fares better. In animation too there has been a significant development over the past 20 years of tools that overcome the prescriptive and limiting methods of traditional keyframe and inbetweening methods and stop-frame claymation. So it’s not perhaps surprising that the conference keynotes reflected these areas.

Alistair Riddell, currently a researcher in the Music program at QUT’s Academy of the Arts, presented the first keynote address, “Data Culture Generation.” In it he considered how computational methods might alter the perception of music and lead to a new music aesthetic. He discussed process as “a way of thinking about music with an initial (…) absence of sound” and concluded that the “creative design of musical processes might become an art in itself.”

Kurt Fleisher is best known for his work in texture generation. His early animation Knot Reel (made with Andrew Witkin and Michael Kass) won the Grand Prix at Parigraph ‘86 and received honourable mention for Prix Ars Electronica ‘87. He now works for Pixar (Toy Story I & II and A Bug’s Life). In his keynote address, “Who’s Driving? Control Issues for Generative Media”, Fleischer discussed the dynamic relationship between computer visualisation professionals and the animators and designers in motion picture production. Fleisher and his colleagues are able to generate animations of a field of grass in a rainstorm or armies of ants. However the results have to be flexible enough so that the designers can frame and combine them with the foreground elements that the story prescribes.

James McCartney gave the last keynote. “Designing SuperCollider—a real-time audio synthesis language” was a first hand account of his development of this powerful digital synthesiser. As those who stayed for his workshop discovered, it’s also an extraordinarily difficult tool to learn and McCartney joked that he puts people off buying it. His lesson was simple—if you want to mess around and do a few interesting things get a WYSIWHG “shrink wrapped” app with some nice sliders, dials and buttons and fire it up. However if you want to achieve something a little more significant and at the bleeding edge, you’re likely to find yourself on a long and challenging learning curve.

Many artists from Europe, the USA and the Asia Pacific discussed their work and methods. I particularly enjoyed the presentations by David Chesworth and Sonia Leber about 5000 calls—their large scale sound artwork for the parklands surrounding the new Olympic Stadium. Public art too often devolves into compromised cliché as vested interests ‘negotiate’ the outcome. 5000 calls survives this process and demonstrates a role for new media arts in this area. The artists said of their work: “5000 calls can be seen as a kind of crowd made up of many individual voices which constantly combine and recombine in different ways. When new voices are introduced by visitors travelling through the space, they contribute to the ever-changing libretto, which is occasionally punctuated by the extraordinary sudden roar of the stadium crowd.”

US artist Steven Rooke described his work: “my software begins by assembling random programs in a primordial soup consisting only of mathematical functions. Over eons of simulated evolution, increasingly complex image genomes are created, occasionally merging to form new levels of organisation.” His animations, in particular, were mind boggling! They did however prompt the expected question: “yes, but is it art?”

The best answer to this ongoing debate has come from the archivist and historian Patric Prince. She has suggested that professional artworkers should consider the works of people like Rooke in comparison to ‘naives’ like Grandma Moses. Rooke, like Moses, has no formal training in the visual arts. The paradox, according to Prince is that we expect ‘primitive’ artists to have unsophisticated technique and this clearly doesn’t fit the slick finish of the new computer naives. The question is, of course, another example of the “closed door” philosophy typical of the contemporary arts mainstream. It’s an elitist attitude that belies their claims to postmodern pluralism and egalitarianism and one that many of us hope the new computational paradigm will eventually overthrow. It amazes me that such attitudes prevail some 150 years after similar prejudice was voiced against outsider artists like Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne. Doesn’t history teach us anything?

Mitchell Whitelaw, in “The Abstract Organism: Towards a Prehistory for A-Life Art”, traced the “detailed engagement with particular processes and structures” into the arts of the 20th century, offering Paul Klee and Kasimir Malevich as examples. It’s good to know that such a lucid and thoughtful theorist is creating an historical context and descriptive framework for this area of work.

First Iteration was an important event that brought together practitioners from around the world and confirmed Australia’s participation and profile in this new area. Documentation, which includes the Proceedings, a CD-ROM and CD audio, can be ordered from the conference website which also announces the not-to-be-missed Second Iteration which is planned for 2001.

First Iteration, a conference on generative systems in the electronic arts, Monash University, December 1-3 1999. For more information, go to www.csse.monash.edu.au/~iterate/

RealTime issue #36 April-May 2000 pg. 31

Helen Herbertson

photo David B Simmonds

Helen Herbertson

Helen Herbertson was Artistic Director of the Melbourne-based company Danceworks between 1989 and 1997. For the next 2 years, she received a Fellowship from the Australia Council (Dance Fund). This assisted the creation of her extraordinary new work, Delirium, which won a Green Room Award in 1999, and has recently been shown in Glasgow as part of the New Moves (new territories) dance festival.

Was your dance training here in Australia or did you go away?

All my training is Australian. Classical ballet as a little one. Then I met a couple of Sydney people, Brian Cobram and Jacqui Carroll. I got involved in the independent scene. There wasn’t a lot of funding around then and people just had ideas and did them. Eventually I moved to Adelaide where I started doing a lot more teaching in institutions. I did a lot of choreography for the Centre for the Performing Arts and that was when I really started to think about myself as a choreographer. I probably spent 10 years or so in that market making work, until Danceworks happened, where Beth Shelton and I began as co-directors. Beth left the company after a couple of years, and then I left at the end of ‘97. I made a lot of work there.

I think Danceworks was a great opportunity to deepen my work. I remember that first year where we had blocks of 10 week rehearsals, and I said, “What are we going to do, we’ll be finished in 2 or 3 weeks?” It didn’t take me long to really start to appreciate that amount of time and working with people continuously. It was fantastic.

How long did it take you to make your current work, Delirium, then?

Two years. I mean, to me, it feels like it’s part of Descansos (Danceworks, 1996). That was the beginning of this particular team of people: Trevor Patrick, Jenny Kemp, Ben Cobham and myself. Simon Barley was also there. Danceworks was about making relationships with other practitioners and finding ways to collaborate, whereas what it’s been in the last 4 years is about bringing myself as the performer back into the work. It’s a very complex thing though, directing it, choreographing it, performing it, collaborating in it.

Yes, looking at the credits for Delirium, you see all these names. It was like a sort of macrame or a plait.

Every component is integral. Often the way a work’s made is that you make the dance material and then you put the lighting on top and then you decide on the costumes and it’s made in a linear way. Whereas all through Danceworks I was moving towards another way of operating.

Could you briefly describe Delirium? When I saw it I felt I hadn’t seen anything like it. It had its own ‘little’ quality. I say little because it felt small, like looking down a telescope backwards.

Where to start, what to say? Well you’d see light and dark, you’d see 2 figures sliding between entrapment and freedom, you’d see a kind of lighting interplay that allows figures to appear and re-appear, in places you don’t quite expect because it’s so dark. Or sometimes, figures are floating as if they’re off the floor. There are elemental sounds in it, you wouldn’t say there’s any music there. The soundtrack uses things like the sound of fire or the tinkling of bells or things that are really evocative, quite pure sounds. The sound of water dripping or a landslide or birds. I imagine if you watch it, it might feel like you’re entering some kind of internal world inside these people, as if you’re travelling a time line or something with them. I was interested in the place where things slip. You slip into madness or you’re not quite awake or just asleep…sort of transformation places…it’s hard to describe but the word Delirium came well after the place that things formed.

Once Descansos had happened, the team had a meeting. One issue about that work was that we wanted to take it and show it to other places but it was so site specific, so the idea for the floor grew from that need to have the site as the rehearsal space.

So that constructed proscenium arch in the middle of the National Theatre—that was meant to be like that?

Absolutely. I chose that theatre with absolute care because of its prosceniumness. We’re not going to a space like that in Glasgow, so the void will have a whole other kind of framing. We’ve had to build the proscenium much smaller, so the whole thing has been framed down to a sort of chocolate box.

I see so much work that doesn’t adapt well. I think people just forget that the volume of space that something’s made inside of is as much a part of it as the work. That kind of history of a work, that negative space, the space around the bodies, it’s all part of it, yet it just doesn’t seem to be thought about. A lot of work doesn’t survive. You can see a work in its initial stage and it’s fantastic and then it moves on to another space and something’s not right. I’m a sucker for any space that I rehearse in—it becomes a component of the work. That’s why, in making this, we moved all over the place. What I really like about this work is that it never really lands. It just becomes visible for a little while.

In terms of the future, are you thinking of moving Delirium on or have you got ideas/energy for something else?

No, Delirium is going to keep on moving, I think. I have got some other things cooking, just on my own, for a little while, but nothing is formed as yet. Two years of time in the making is a long twist. This year feels like coming back down to reality. Last year was quite a weird year and I’m sure a lot of it had to do with the sort of states that had to be, to be inside Delirium to perform—unconsciously. That’s why I’m fascinated with Glasgow because I have to re-enter those things again but in a much more practical way. It’s going to be interesting.

–

RealTime issue #36 April-May 2000 pg. 41

How do we know where we are and what our bodies are up to? To what extent do we rely upon how our bodies feel (proprioception, kinaesthetics), and to what extent do we depend upon a sense of how they look? Whilst some dance forms privilege visual display, and others the felt experience of moving, clearly both factors are at play in the art of movement. Jude Walton’s recent exhibition, Looking for Pierre, part 1, is more than an investigation of these matters. It is an intervention, a Darwinian leap into a possible future, through which Walton is (modestly) able to play God.

It all begins with the question of perspective. Perspectival drawing systems sprang from the Renaissance drawings of Alberti, who is credited with the discovery of artificial or scientific perspective. Walton’s exhibition begins with a room lined with a series of computerised, perspectival drawings, twisted and warped in myriad ways. You begin to wonder whether the objects presented and re-presented are real or not. Are all those oblique lines of perspective how we actually see objects from various standpoints, or have we been trained to see these lines as reality?

Room 2 contains another kind of ‘discovery’ on perspective, this time our perspective upon our own bodies. Through the use of equipment (courtesy the biomechanics laboratory, Victoria University of Technology), Walton has been able to fiddle with our means of bodily perception. Room 2 is an empty space, containing a set of video goggles that can be strapped on. The headgear has little screens a few inches from the naked eye. These screens provide an external visual perspective on your own moving body (a camera linked to the goggles has been set up in the corner of the space). Visitors to the gallery are invited to experiment with these goggles.

It’s quite extraordinary to see the back of your body as you dance, to watch yourself moving from quite alien points of view. I spent some time, dancing, whilst watching myself dance, combining my feelings of movement with this external visual information. Walton moved with me to offer the experience of moving with another person, and also videotaped my activities just to offer yet another perspective on the experience.

Not everyone deals with this ‘new set of eyes’ in the same way. Some felt that they were seeing themselves from the point of view of the camera, that they were outside their own bodies. Others tried to maintain their regular field of perception. I found myself flipping between my usual feelings of movement, and this ‘other’ visual look which enveloped those feelings. Then I started to wonder what I looked like doing this, what others would see of me, yet another perceptual take. To see oneself live is different from viewing a recording; the virtual feedback is immediate, thus, there is a sense that one can respond to the information within the ambit of the event itself. The usual closure of time is absent here.

By providing a new organ of sight, as it were, Walton has been able to provoke something like a new body, a new structure of perception. I remember one of my philosophy teachers asking us whether we thought Martians would perceive the world just like humans. It’s clear that animals have different perceptual structures. What I find interesting about Walton’s experiment is that a changed perceptual structure does not lead to the same experience for all people. It just goes to show that even God cannot anticipate the quality of individual perception.

Jude Walton, Looking for Pierre, part 1, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, February 5 – 23

RealTime issue #36 April-May 2000 pg. 41

Possibility: Videogames are not yet art, but they could eventually become art. Possibility: Videogames are art already but we don’t have the right terms of reference yet to define them as art. Possibility: Videogames are a mindless diversion best left to children and backward 20-somethings without girlfriends or things to do on a Saturday night. Probability: No matter what I say in this little article most people will lean much harder toward the third option than either of the first two.

The first step in convincing anybody would be to throw away the term ‘videogame.’ There’s too much baggage attached. It gives the wrong impression of the medium in the same way that ‘comic book’ hangs like a stone around the neck of graphic art. If you want people to take you seriously, ditching the whole ‘game’ scenario is probably a good place to start. But what alternatives do we have? ‘Entertainment software’ is fine as a stop gap but is unwieldy in the long term and ‘interactive art’ (although a pretty useful definition of modern games) sounds far too much like a header in an undergrad essay. Which leaves us with nothing, nought, zero and nowhere to go without confusing most people or keeping the whole ‘game’ mess which is what we’re trying to avoid in the first place.

I am not about to invent a new term. People have been trying it for years and they rarely succeed. Harlan Ellison tried to turn science fiction into ‘speculative fiction’ and while the term is still popular in the SF scene, the mainstream will give you nothing but a blank stare. Comic books on the other hand have been trying for years to be called graphic novels but the term has been poisoned by literary critics who wish to separate the comics they read and review from the mindless crap they mistakenly assume is the comic industry’s staple diet.

We are, unfortunately, stuck with videogames for the forseeable future. I just want you to be aware of my misgivings and the idea that neither ‘video’ nor ‘game’ necessarily apply. Whenever you read the term in this piece please replace it with a term of your own devising with a version of the following definition: an interactive amalgamation of animation and/or 3D modelling and/or text and/or live acting and/or music and so on and on, all of which conspires to make videogames very difficult to pin down, explain or illustrate as art. It might be made up of artistic media but is the result itself art?

It’s probably best to look at the problem from a different angle. The one concept which both binds all these different styles of games together and sets videogames out as a different art form is interactivity. Hypermedia has already clearly demonstrated that interactivity is not an obstacle to artistic acceptance, although many people will tell you it is right out of the gate. The difference of course is that hypermedia offers you passages from one clump of traditional art to another, whereas a game offers you the ability to choose how you get there, when you get there and sometimes even why you get there as well as where you’re going.

The problems this poses in creating a traditional artistic scenario are immense. How do you create an emotive storyline or moment when you can’t even be certain players will choose to follow the path you’ve laid out for them? How can you communicate a specific idea or message when you are not certain of how much the player already knows? These are problems all evident in hypermedia, but they are magnified in videogames. Think of it as a novel where the reader doesn’t just believe s/he’s the lead character, s/he can walk the protagonist off a cliff if s/he feels like it. Whatever your intent as the creator or author, it can always be subverted by the player.

Which brings us tidily to the question of whether the creators intend to make art or simply entertainment. It’s the rather tedious art vs craft argument again and most people are ready to toss videogames in with needlecraft and be done with it, but what they don’t realise is that in an idealised sense videogames are all about creating scenarios, not describing a finished product. They are not about showing the player a scene with the aim of dictating a mood, rather they immerse the player in it and allow the process of making that choice create the mood.

Videogames are not a passive medium like novels or films. They require a fresh set of critical tools if they are to be properly understood. We cannot look at videogames and say they aren’t art under our current definitions because the honest truth of it is that they never wanted to be. Are videogames art as we know it? No. Not at all. Should they be seen as an art in their own right? I honestly believe they should. I also believe that with the evolution of better technology and an eternally growing user base, the whole concept of games-as-art will eventually become a non-issue. And it’s worth remembering that most everything which is art today wasn’t yesterday either.

Brook Andrew, level one – Reality Check, level two – Tom (video), digital print, video and sound (CD) installation, 1999

In the liner notes to retArded Eye’s 1997 film Superpermanence, Experimenta’s Keely Macarow notes that the film’s digitally rendered appearance as a hand processed experimental film “confounds the populist myth that digital = slick techno geekdom!” This aphorism neatly sums up the spirit of Experimenta’s signature program of 1999, Manifesto. The title of this film (part of Experimenta’s 1999 screening program in September) was suggestive of one of the key themes of Manifesto, longevity. Macarow’s didactic use of the film as a rejoinder to public opinion on the subject of digital art also anticipated the sense of challenge in Manifesto.

Manifesto was a series of events aimed at reviewing 20th century experimental media culture and locating this legacy in the context of contemporary digital media. Manifestos, at the best of times, smack of the rantings of the ideologue (think of Marinetti) or march to the beat of the militant avant-garde (“the plain reader be damned”). In curating this serial event, Keely Macarow astutely sidestepped the declamatory inflections of the manifesto and instead garnered its ability to capture a moment (to make it manifest). And I’m not talking about anything so facile as zeitgeists. Manifestos are really about commitments, in the dual sense of giving or bestowing and investment in a principle or policy. In using the venerable technology of the time capsule as a metaphor for embodying the relationship between the experimental history of 20th century media arts and its continuation in digital practices, Manifesto literally captured the art of the present and sealed it for posterity in a purpose-built plinth that will reside at Melbourne’s Scienceworks for 100 years. It is fitting that in its last program of the 20th century, Experimenta made a commitment to the future, a commitment to its own present.

It’s difficult to know what the late 21st century will make of the digital prints of Brook Andrew and Brenda L Croft, the video installation of BIT (Bureau of Inverse Technology), Chris Knowles’ soundscape Beam—Me—Back, or the web-based installation Greylands, produced by KIT, an international group of artists based in Australia, Canada and the US. These pieces are part of a collection of 8 works deemed representative of their time. But time present may be very different from time future; the mediating technology that (in most cases) is required to run them may be dead media in 2099. Curatorial issues of inclusion must have been a breeze compared to the archival decisions about what would actually survive for a century in a time capsule: will we include a VCR? Digital video will probably be a memory in 50 years. What about wooden boxes? Too combustible. Will the enclosed state of the art I-Book be the clay writing tablet of the 21st century?

The time capsule was designed to be more than an archaeological midden. Macarow and Louise Whiting (the project’s research co-ordinator) have tried to second-guess the future by including the technology that is least likely to be redundant for the presentation of the work. But more importantly they have retained a sense of temporality, of what was (is) required for the work to be experienced as art. In this sense the time capsule installation itself (designed by Lifford/Smith) is less an archive than a kind of memory theatre, a means of reconstructing a particular cultural event (the installation of the work as an exhibition, originally held at Span galleries) and a specific historical moment (the Australian digital arts scene in 1999). Like the mastabas of ancient Egypt, the time capsule will hopefully be more than a store of treasure for the future custodians of the past; it will be a vibrant key to understanding their own world.

Also included in the capsule were reproductions of other events in the Manifesto program, such as the outcomes of the internet media laboratory Hothouse (co-ordinated by Steve Ball). Conceived as an interactive means of exploring new media arts, Hothouse began in late October as a subscription-based discussion list and developed into a collaborative web space, in which participants could include samples of the media art they were discussing (although part of this event has been included in the time capsule, Hothouse is an ongoing project: www.experimenta.org).

Also present was a CD-ROM version of Experimenta’s first online edition of Mesh. The theme of Mesh 13 was ‘cyberbully’, described by Macarow in her editorial as an “omniscient entity that may be found lurking in the cyber corridor of the school yard, the nation state, the digitised corporation or your email discussion list.” In a very general sense, Mesh contributors set out to reveal how cyberbullies “disseminate, regulate, dictate and infiltrate digitised information, software and hardware.” Specifically, this culture of cyberbullying was evidenced in a range of online discursive practices, such as Dean Kiley’s brilliant expose of the powerplay of academic mailing lists. Using the discussion of the death of Princess Diana and JFK Junior as exemplars, Kiley constructs an hilarious and ingenious “taxonomy of the postures, gestures, rhetorical moves, subject positions, intimidatory tactics, self-characterisations, other-caricatures, disciplinary gambits, administrative threats, and plain old verbal bashing-up” that manifest when academic communities get together online.

Sam de Silva’s piece on NASA’s global surveillance system, Echelon, reveals the subtler, more insidious side of the cyberbully who intrudes into every nook and cranny of your telematic space without you ever being aware of it. Lisa Gye’s analysis of style bullying in web design questions the prescription of what is good and bad style. The presence of the style bully suggests that the arbitration of taste will continue to be a highly contested area of cultural life and anyone’s homepage runs the risk of being ridiculed in Offensive Web Site of the Month. Who said cyberspace was an egalitarian state?

The fourth component to Manifesto was Zen Cinema, a survey-celebration of defining avant-garde film and video of the 20th century. Assisted by Ian Haig and Corinne Preston, Macarow assembled an impressive salmagundi of the genre, spanning the heyday of modernist preoccupation with materiality and form (Man Ray’s Retour la Raison [1923], Marcel Duchamp and Rose Selavy’s Anemic Cinema [1926]) to postmodern appropriation (Martin Arnold’s inspired piece of pure cinema, Piece Touchee [1989], Sadie Benning’s Girlpower [1992]). In between were the pleasures of old favourites, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961), Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) and Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut’s Electronic Fables (1971); the latter a true encapsulation in time of some of the acknowledged sages of the digital age, John Cage, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.

Zen Cinema provided a real sense of the coalescence of the past with the future that Manifesto was trying to achieve. It was successful in reminding us of the synergies between historical moments of experimentation in media arts, which implicitly established the premise of projecting the digital arts scene and its avant-scene into the present of another century. Combined with Experimenta’s September screening program, which featured the work of contemporary Australian and international experimental filmmakers, Zen Cinema reinforced the convergent nature of our engagement with and critical understanding of the emergent digital arts scene (fittingly, Convergence was the title of a series of forums on art, culture and technology presented by Experimenta at OPENChannel during 1999).

Manifesto was a successful event that culminated an active and fruitful year for Experimenta Media Arts. As an event it was a commendable and memorable expression of Experimenta’s commitment to fostering an active and informed media arts culture. Manifesto’s singular contribution was its determination to see that new media art carries with it the historical signatures of media past and present. I feel confident that when that time capsule is opened in 2099, those present will feel an uncanny sense of familiarity with the past of their own present.

Conservative programming in Australia that denies us the work of major contemporary artists is tragic. One visit from Pina Bausch to the 1982 Adelaide Festival has kept us going for decades—it’s taken an Olympics to get her back. The Wooster Group—once. Mabou Mines—once. Jan Fabre—once. Jan Lauwers—once. William Forsythe—once. And all at Adelaide festivals. We’ve been waiting to see Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker for too long now. She brought her company Rosas once to Perth in the 1990s while the rest of us made do with pitifully brief dispatches. On the law of averages that should have been that, but Robyn Archer thankfully brought us de Keersmaeker in triplicate this Adelaide Festival.

It was in 1981 that de Keersmaeker collaborated with members of the Steve Reich ensemble to create Fase. Fortunately for us, de Keersmaeker believes in revivals. Watching the same two bodies who danced it then (de Keersmaeker herself and Michèle Anne De Mey) dance it 19 years down the track is pleasure indeed. In Piano Phase the dancers spin hypnotically against a wide screen. Between them is the shadow they jointly create, two nearly identical dancers making seemingly identical, seemingly simple movements. We watch as the inevitable variations of breath, blood, the velocity of hair, the kinetics and speed of singular bodies move them ever so slightly in and out of phase. As their shadows play with parallax, ergonomics, air and light, the music moves in and out of ever more complex synchronicities. The patterns of movement vary in each of the sections that follow (Come out, Violin Phase and Clapping Music) but the same geometrical attention to space, light and short choreographed sentences is repeated. What it adds up to is a synaesthetic experience of music and movement. A composer friend said she longed for live musicians—imagining that was almost too much. As it was, the beauty of this work left me breathless. VB

Drumming is like watching Chaos Theory in action as the dancers move in and out of sync with Steve Reich’s score and with each other. Dance often likes to explore the relationship between the individual and the group (de Keersmaeker’s I Said I being a potent example entering new territory), sometimes to the point of cliché, but in Drumming social complexity is evoked. The power of the work resides in the relationship between the one, the several and the many. Initially, an individual in a strip of light moves freely with the quality of improvisation, stop-starting her way into fluidity. Forward of her, in the dark we see a man enter, imitate her, slightly behind, suddenly totally in sync. Other dancers enter informally from the wings where they’ve been standing. Soon there’s a swirling cosmos of atoms, sudden pairings, and trios striding together. In the middle a woman pushes into the back of a man, the first touch, which triggers others. Dancers fly dangerously close to each other. They acknowledge each other, a smile, a touch, making space, moving fast into a huge unit (here and there sudden partnerships you might miss if looking the wrong way). But there are limits, a change in the Reichian pulse and suddenly the edge of the stage becomes an invisible wall which pushes the dancer away, suddenly another dancer is another such a wall. But the swirling never ceases, the brief duos and trios recur, this looks like chaos but it’s not, it’s chancy but meaningful, and beautiful and recognisable. KG

Peter Handke’s Self-Accusation is to dance for—the perfect text for choreographers we decide and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s I Said I the perfect spoken word dance. The 12 members of the company wear head microphones and deliver Handke’s text to perfection (allowing the words to work their way through the bodies to the audience, never over-inflecting them but allowing emotion to believably build of its own accord). The text is also projected on a screen above their heads and the production is “driven” from a desk at the front of the auditorium. Since the 90s de Keersmaeker has worked increasingly with live music. As we enter the theatre, the dancers await us on the stage flanked by musicians—on one side, a saxophonist and a scratch dj; on the other a piano trio. We’re often sold the idea of the journey in theatre and short-changed with hops to the corner shop. At the end of I Said I we feel like we’ve really been somewhere. Over two and a half hours (no interval) we re-live practically all we ever knew about getting along with other people—that vast vocabulary of interpersonal behaviours learned in all its traumatic detail, all its cultural complexity from ages nil to 7, modified from 9 to 12, rebelled against from 13 to 16 and still only occasionally perfect in adult life.

Each of the sentences is short, recited at fairly cracking pace; if someone makes a mistake, another corrects them. The music (both formally constructed and improvised) and the movement (eruptions of dance amidst patterns of everyday movement) builds step by step on the ideas embodied in the total work. Each dancer at some time becomes the individual learning to be part of the social corpus while the others team up or gang up to accept or reject. Everything is running smoothly until one of the performers decides to play ‘blind’ or accusative or demanding. Like the attention to the onstage infant in Les Ballet C de la B’s Iets Op Bach, the others peripherally guide the one who is different. There’s a revealing scene about blame and ostracism in which the many become the few and the one. It ends with everyone pointing accusingly at everyone else. The rebellious one walks into the audience to borrow a coat, eventually she’ll take up the tarquette. Though it’s rumoured to be a difficult work, we saw only 3 people walk out, leaving the rest of us to roar our appreciation.

At this year’s Sydney Festival we had one of the relatively regular visits from choreographer Jiri Kylian and the Nederlands Dans Theater. The season of 2 works attracted justifiably large audiences but troubling responses from some of the critics. In particular, The Australian’s dance writer used her appreciation of this work of ‘pure’ dance as a stick to beat Australian contemporary dance practitioners whom she believed should all go back to their studios and start again. But Kylian’s choreography, however expert its execution, has none of the communicating power of a work such as I Said I which revels in its hybridity; relishes words as well as a full repertoire of movement; is serious, yet playful. We hope the Herbertsons, Waltons, Carbees, Stewarts, Guerins, Adams, Walshes, O’Neills, Parkers, Patricks, Kohlers, Lasicas, Obarzaneks and others continue to defy antagonism to the postmodern in Australian dance. We wish them the critical climate that nurtured the perfection of a work like I Said I.

Fase, Drumming, I Said I, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Rosas, Adelaide Festival Theatre, March 14 – 18; Adelaide Festival 2000

On the Adelaide Festival plaza there’s a display of lightweight structures—light houses. Architect Glenn Murcutt in a conversational forum with Robyn Archer refers to buildings as needing to have a level of transparency allowing legibility of landscape. He cites a knowledge of morphology, typology, scale and materiality as necessary for the architect wishing to touch lightly on the land.

Bill Seaman’s Red Dice (part of Verve: The Other Writing) is installed in a cool, darkened room at the Contemporary Art Centre of SA where there are cushions to lie, look and listen. It’s a beautifully complex work. A factory loom is explored in loving detail until it practically pulses its mechanical heart. The film moves back and forth from lingering close-ups of machinery parts to languorous views through leafy windows, to waterfalls, birds in flight and eventually to a hand throwing dice. The editing a friend describes as “liquid”. The voices (Seaman’s own in English and another in French) are mellifluous. They remind me of other soft male voices of contemporary art like Robert Ashley’s. Sentences sidestep closure, dissolving into the next discrete utterance. The work is a response to a Mallarmé poem and this version part of a larger work in which sentences and images are interactively woven by the viewer to create what Bill Seaman describes in another festival forum as “fields of meaning.”

For touching lightly on the land, my feather goes to Lucy Guerin’s cap for the unforgettable Robbery Waitress on Bail. A small clipping from a newspaper has clearly caught the choreographer’s eye. A waitress who assisted her boyfriend to rob the all night restaurant where she worked is out on bail. For her part in the crime in which she pretended to be the hostage, she was sentenced to two years in jail. Now she’s out. The story of the crime is revealed in 3 small sections from the clipping on illuminated panels above the heads of the dancers (Guerin and Ros Warby). Having given us the story, Guerin (with music by Jad McAdam) proceeds to explore the material of the rest—place, character, the state of being. It’s all done economically in a set of often mirrored movements between the dancers who swagger and strut with a shifting sense of bravado, indolence and fear. It’s totally engrossing and I know I wasn’t the only one in the audience who would have traded the experience of the second piece on the program (the more densely choreographed, less successful Heavy) for an instant replay of the first.

Light/House, Adelaide Festival Centre Plaza; Red Dice, Bill Seaman, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, March 7; Conversation with the Architect, Glen Murcutt with Robyn Archer, Adelaide Festival Piano Bar, March 7; Robbery Waitress on Bail, Lucy Guerin, Space Theatre, March 5; Adelaide Festival 2000

I could be dancing with Seydou Boro right now at the Spiegeltent but no, here I am wondering what I've missed out on…Boro, who appeared in Mathilde Monnier's production, Pour Antigone, created Le Siècle Des Fous with Salia Sanou. It's a one-off within the festival, an elegant work that Boro informs me has been around for a while, and it provides a nice reference point for the Monnier work, giving an independent voice to her African collaborators.

The simple set of a wide ladder centre upstage and drums set at opposite corners downstage creates anticipation as the instruments remain unused and silent in the unfolding work, their purpose suspended. Percussion is created instead by the bodies of the dancers; they shake their hands so that their fingers slap together, hit their faces against their shoulders, smack their mouths so that they pop, stamp, hit the ground with the length of their bodies. But the rhythm is bigger than this—there is a staccato play of action and stillness that reminds me of the startling beats of Zani Diabaté's drumming in Pour Antigone, the blinks of anticipation it caused. The waiting-for-something-to-happen is diffused here beyond any dramatic function that drives toward a climax, consisting instead of micro-dramas within the rhythm of the work. The whole piece is defined by an unruly force that seems to kick it all along, stop go go go stop go, manifesting in a frenzy of swinging limbs, then a quiet moment of mouth-popping. When the drums do come to life, they too seem governed by an alien force, finally jumping out of Sanou's hands altogether.

This all amounts to an improvised feel throughout the piece, although it is simultaneously apparent that this is not how the work is structured. It is this sense of something-happening-as-we-watch, bearing witness, that gets so lost in contemporary dance, the choreography 'taking the stage' so to speak. These bodies seem to be very much in the process of doing rather than thinking 2 steps ahead or operating from a distance through muscle-memory. And this isn't a type of dramatic expressionism either. It's as if the effort to articulate through movement can be seen, witnessed, and becomes intricately tied up with what is trying to be said. These faces don't speak for the body but with it.

Le Siècle is about a century of war and the violent oscillations from action to stillness, and the visible effort to speak through the body perfectly evokes what must be a constant struggle between despair and hope for Africans. What is also striking is the interaction between the 2 performers which also evokes war, running the gamut from tenderness to slapstick; one awkwardly carries the other, wipes his brow, knocks him on the head, checks out his foot. Companionship, worthlessness, tragedy and pathos are all evoked in these moments that really make up the bulk of the action. Dancing is isolated into formal segments that suddenly burst open into joy and an undeniable life force. A very special performance…

Le Siècle Des Fous, (The Century of Fools), Company Salia Nï Seydou, Space Theatre, March 7; Adelaide Festival 2000

By all accounts, instead of a bunny some dusty roadkill was let out of the hat in the discussion of community art at the Festival Forum thanks to Scott Rankin (Big hArt works) and Malcolm McKinnon (Essential Truths Readily to Hand) taking a few blind punches at “arts wankers”. This brought on the depressingly tired argument about “elite” art versus the “art of the people.” A paragraph from an essay on Bill Seaman’s work was thrown to the crowd and duly savaged. To his credit, chair Michael Cathcart gave right of reply to Seaman who with customary courtesy made a simple plea for plurality. Harley Stumm from Urban Theatre Projects in Western Sydney urged more vehemently for community artists to embrace the new or lose touch altogether with their communities. Rumour has it that this speech earned Harley a post-forum hug from shockheaded Peter Sellars.

I’ve seen no more affecting depiction of community than in the new work by Les Ballet C de la B, Iets Op Bach. On behalf of the artists Robyn Archer dedicated the opening night performance to the late Dame Roma Mitchell who had expressed a strong desire to see this work. This is the company who rattled and seduced us at the last festival with La Tristeza Complice. In Iets Op Bach we observe a community in all its poignancy and resilience. The work mixes contemporary dance, performance and circus tricks and by juxtaposition returns the music of Bach to “the people”. The classical music is ignored, silently contemplated and occasionally blissfuly danced to. It comforts and stirs. This work about people living on the edge of heaven and hell, is in turn created from the observations and experiences of a close community of performers working with director Alain Platel. To discern the matter of this work we watch the body in its full stretch, length, see its capacity for endurance, balance, watchfulness, its peripheral consciousness. We observe edginess alongside indolence, madness and serenity, an adolescent observer watches an adult exhibitionist. A small child wanders the stage and at one time or another is calmly attended to by all the cast.

Unlike the transient population of La Tristeza, in Iets Op Bach people who live in one place gather in communal space, the roof of their apartment block. Throughout this work we hear the burble of human talk, the little girl cries, women shout slogans, musicians chat between sets. An air-conditioning duct interrupts the action and the glorious renditions of Bach by musicians and singers. There are arguments, outbursts, groups synch into choreography, some mimic moves for a time, then abandon them. What slowly unfolds is the coherence that emerges despite difference and just as often because of it. There’s no resolution and more catharsis than a fireworks night. In one sequence a girl dressed in white takes confidently to the stage and then discovers there’s blood all over her dress. At first she’s embarrassed then defiant, then she wildly flaunts her condition. The others ignore her, a couple try to hide her, to help her remove the soiled clothes eventually torn from her while a man shouts “Dirty bitch.” Like many other sequences in the work this one extends long past our sense of predictable stage time. It never really finishes; there’s no line between that and the next when something equally captivating happens. This a sublime hybrid performance. “It was worth being alive to see it,” said a friend.

As I watch La Ribot performing her Mas Distinguidas, I’m thinking about the 25 Years of Performance Art Conference at Sydney’s Performance Space in 1995, in which Noel Sheridan and Mike Parr had hissy fits about the incursion into the pure form of performance art by people with more theatrical intentions. I suspect Maria Ribot would turn their ears pink. I’ve heard her referred to as (finally!) a performance artist with a sense of humour (yeh, yeh). But it’s not that simple. Though she clearly knows her way around a port de bras (high art/classical dance) her pieces eschew expertise (postmodern performance) or obvious displays of artfulness (performance art). Performing naked with only a little dye for comfort (performance art) she sometimes looks like Buster Keaton (pop culture/high art) but without the virtuosity (performance art); one minute she’s in an intimate relationship with the audience, timing us as we successfully achieve one minute of reflection, contemplation, meditation and silence in real time (contemporary performance). “Very well done” she says. Next she is a demonstration model attempting a set of difficult instructions in her see-through suit or a grunge angel with foam rubber wings running on the spot (theatre). La Ribot also casts aside purist notions of ephemerality. In a nifty model of artistic enterprise she has hit upon the idea of selling her distinguished performances (commercial artist). Peter Sellars says money is like sausage, you shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about where it comes from, but for La Ribot her distinguished proprietors propel the work and are free to attend any performance anywhere in the world. In the end it’s the brave presence of this artist shifting across a minefield of definitions that holds my attention during her performance. She reminds me of an exotic bird caught inside the confines of the Space looking for a way to get out.

Another day, another forum on community and Robyn Archer deflects a poison dart from Michael Cathcart about artists as people in black who only talk to each other and refer to French theory. She believes in finding ways to take difficult or challenging work to the community. However, for her it is just as important for artists to talk to one another—it makes for more and maybe better art. The Adelaide Festival is, after all, a major meeting place for a community of artists. After the forum I talk to a performer/writer/community arts worker who tells me about the man who came up to her after a performance and told her he had a polaroid of her vagina on his notice board. She did vagina pieces for a while she said. He wanted her to autograph it: “To Eddie”. This festival, she’s signed up for a workshop at the Playwrights Conference. Next week she’ll be talking about working with kids at risk in her community project in Western Sydney.

Art is about “not knowing,” says Howard Barker; about “living the new life,” says Sue Thomas, who runs an online community writing project (trAce) at Nottingham University (Verve Forum). Bill Seaman “encourages us to think beyond what we know.” For photographer Bronwyn Wright, (Essential Truths Readily to Hand) “Each mark is layed over by others. My marks cross bird tracks, marks made by water, the incised paw marks of my dogs and the bare footprints of Maningrida women who walk beyond the lines of mangroves in search of crabs. Their marks will cross mine.”

In the spirit of recombination I offer my own little contribution to community improvement. What say we re-program all the poker machines along the lines of Bill Seaman’s world generator. Oranges and lemons will be replaced by small fragments from Mallarmé and Gregory Ulmer and cryptic DVD clips from Les Ballets C de la B. With all the time in the world punters become posers (pokie users) who set about mapping the patterns of human thought. Each machine will be linked to every other one in the room and jackpots will go to La Ribot to create even more distinguished pieces.

Festival Forums: Politics and Art—inspirer, inhibitor or accelerator, March 9; Cutting Edge—where community art is taking us, March 10; Essential Truths Readily to Hand, Festival Foyer; Verve: the other writing, Ngapartji Multimedia Centre, March 9; Iets Op Bach, Les Ballets C de la B, Festival Theatre, March 10; Mas Distinguidas, La Ribot, The Space, March 8; Adelaide Festival 2000

Fase (Phase): four movements to the music of Steve Reich. A work 18 years old and performed only once at this festival by the choreographer, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and Michèle Anne De Mey. A tense work, tiring to watch, in its nowhere-to-hide—precise repetitive small moves—style. Tiring because of its relentless repetition, its going over the same movement again and again, not to ‘teach’ you but to insist on its language—as Reich insists on the minimal (often hard) structure of his music. After a while you begin to doubt your understanding of what is exactly there, as one does after looking at a word for an extended time (said George).

The beauty and excitement of Fase is its making of 4 spatial scenes, as if space is produced incrementally, as if it is always (in the end) in the moving-body. There is little to look at, except the height and width of the stage, and light—and the difficult pleasure of bodies performing for the sake of dance—not for the telling of a story with dance. Dance for dance, the dance of dance.

The pleasure is dance itself, or a particular type of dance which ‘builds’ a world by geometric and sensual fragments. A spatial pleasure which opens up inside one, a presence which is personal and startling (as one returns from some stray thought to find the dancers still there, dancing in one’s absence): “Taken to its extreme, the pleasure of space leans towards the poetics of the unconscious, to the edge of madness.” (Bernard Tschumi)

The relationship between De Keersmaeker’s choreography and the music is close without being illustrative or subservient. There’s a similar strength, like a holding pattern, in both forms; they leave each other alone. This I liked, as it assisted the time (timing, as beat, rhythm) of the space-becoming (becoming an experience of strange-fates, of fateful-events). The body was machinic, yet couldn’t become robotic, it stayed too human, slightly off-balance now and then, enough to draw one’s attention to effort, work, and ‘now’. Within deliberate repetition is the dilemma of habit, or a naming of habit, as the effects of our own time alive surface, like a scent: is this how my living looks, arms flailing, head snapping, and sudden repose, like a tiny interlude of almost-sleep, then frantic action again (while sitting in a chair) doesn’t matter, up, down, same constant arrival ‘nowhere’ (or slightly over there): arrival takes its time, a long time, and then it’s over, all is changed. In real time, black stage, a few words projected large: Violin Phase, for instance.

Violin Phase, the third movement, is a solo work. A circle of light on the stage, the dancer’s domain. A circling, lyrical, phase, which edged toward abandon, only to withdraw, and fade, a kind of promise which was never going to be fulfilled. The light constant, keeping movement safe.

The final phase: Clapping Music. The sound of hands beating together, and primarily danced by the feet. The feet clapping the floor, the bodies slowly moving toward the 2 suspended lights from the second phase (Come Out). Arriving there just in time for the end of the music. Phase 4 reaching back to remember phase 2 (which was all arms). These unannounced symmetries laying quietly beneath appearances, like grammar. There were others. Like the use of light as set—the stage fully lit for the first movement (and spot-lit to make the merged shadows sharp), then moving with the dancers to the front of the stage (and back again); the rectangle of light in phase 4 a counter to the circle in phase 3. The constant use of arms in the first 3 phases, completely subdued in phase 4. Making the body appear much more hinged (making balance look like falling, and bringing the arms to the fore retrospectively).

Arrangements, like words, are orders. We arrange words, produce habits. Often with repetition we are displaced, out of our element, uncomfortable—excessive repetition is a way to make an outside (when despair turns silent, we are not happier, it’s just the beginning; noise is breathing, that sort of thing). Being out of one’s element is to recall the fact of inhabiting, we see the outside, newly arranged, and we are juxtaposed, instead of harmonised. So, we are alone, peeled off from habit-world, outside the inside of a moment.

In some way Fase was dance on the outside of an imagined inside, and to see it we had to come outside too, adrift. And, it might be that there wasn’t even an inside, imagined or real.

The 4 phases looked like this to me: Piano Phase: Dance For Plains (for the plains of Gerald Murnane: “And then word came that the plains had settled for peach.”); Come Out: Dance For Waiting (for the men of Maurice Blanchot’s infinite conversation: “This is a sentence of a somewhat enigmatic turn.”); Violin Phase: Dance For Round Things (for the things of Jean-Luc Nancy: “One and one and one.”); Clapping Music: Dance For Artists (for the music of John Cage: “One more idea and then I am through.”). The End.

Fase, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker & Rosas, Festival Theatre, March 14; Adelaide Festival 2000

Out of Cairns and off to Townsville, Brisbane and Tokyo, and from a long line of projects since 1994 focused around the body in the environment and how to transgress the romanticising of the landscape, comes Bonemap—the wild edge. It’s a site-specific exploration in collaborative art-making where audiences will enter the ‘wild edge’ between tropical Australia and urban space. Field trips across North Queensland in 1999 and a movement research stage at the Choreographic Centre in Canberra in early 2000 have allowed the artists to develop the work as a set of discrete modules of performance, dance video, photographic and object-based exhibition, audio CD and temporary sculptural treatments of different environments—the Tanks in Cairns, Magnetic Island and the Brisbane Powerhouse. Rebecca Youdell says, “We can present Bonemap in myriad situations, indoors or outdoors, responding to the environment.” Russell Milledge says, “We’ve photographed and filmed in a lot of messed up places that have been abandoned, and, through our work, tried to regenerate them as sites for cultural inscription. We can still give a place cultural relevance without having a big impact on the environment.”

Certain modules will suit some sites better than others. For example, Milledge says that The Tanks in Cairns is a round, thousand square metre theatrical space where film can work. At the Forts on Magnetic Island, power might not be available so film or projection is probably out, but a series of life size photograms along the track can engage the viewer, so time can play an important role. Individual modules will be marketed separately across art form boundaries in gallery exhibitions, film festivals, theatres, environmental/site specific events.

The principal artists are Russell Milledge—digital media, video, performance, lighting and staging design; Rebecca Youdell—choreography and performance; Glen O’Malley—photography, photograms, slides and exhibition; Michael Whiticker and Paul Lawrence—sound score and music performance. For Milledge and Youdell, “Living in tropical Australia, environment is a lifestyle choice which seriously informs our practice.” This is a work aiming “to observe Australian cultural identity through ecology.” RT

Cairns—Tanks Art Centre, Residency (Tank 3), May 13 – 21; performances May 18 – 20; Tokyo—World Dance 2000: Celebrating the Millennium Conference and Festival: Asian Next Wave, Theatre Tram, Tokyo, August 1 – 5; Townsville—Magnetic Island National Park ‘Forts’, Performance August 20; Townsville—Umbrella Studio Association inc. ‘Victoria Bridge,’ August 25; Brisbane Powerhouse, l’attitude 27.5°, Residency, September 9 – 25; performances September 22 – 24. www.bonemap.com

Erin Brannigan is strongly motivated in organising a festival of dance film for One Extra. It’s not only a form that fascinates her, it’s also the subject of her PhD-in-progress, and, as reported in the pages of RealTime, she’s visited overseas dance film festivals. Brannigan says, “I was quite overwhelmed by the amount of support for the form in Europe and America. I felt that Australia was behind the 8 ball in terms of the rest of the world.” With limited funds, Brannigan curated the Dance Lumière project for Dancehouse in 1998. This time she’s got a bit more room to move and has found a home for the festival at Sydney’s Reading Cinemas—a significant move designed to reach a wider audience for a burgeoning form. She also feels for filmmakers: “there’s not much impetus to make dance films if they’re not going to be screened. I want to provide a platform for the work to be screened and for film-makers and choreographers to get together and talk. The interdisciplinary nature of the form requires an interface between the two.”

While the transfer of plays to the screen is rare and most opera on screen is a higher form of documentation, dance and film have joined to create a hybrid where experimentation is fundamental. What is it about dance that invites filming? “I was speaking to Damien Cooper, and he talked about the kind of limitless scope for creating spaces for dancers through lighting. And I think that dance somehow offers opportunities for exploring different ways of staging that theatre doesn’t—purely because dance can be a lot more abstract and it opens up different possibilities for context. And then there’s the pure compatibility of the movement of the body and the moving camera. Dance is a challenge for film in terms of capturing the kinetic impact of human movement. But I also think it’s an archival thing. From the beginning, I think the possibilitiy of capturing dance on film was always such a boon for dancers and choreographers because there was no other appropriate way of recording or documenting their work.”

Reeldance, however, is not archivally motivated: “It’s about looking at the more successful combinations of the 2 forms rather than something that’s dictated by the dance performance.” Brannigan has decided to hold a competition. After an initally slow response, she now has 30 entries. Competition, she thinks, is a sure way to attract filmmakers, especially since “there aren’t really good networks of dance film-makers.”

Because of the cost involved, the increasingly significant nexus of screen and live dance won’t be represented by performance in Reeldance. However Margie Medlin’s film for Sandra Parker’s In the heart of the eye (see RealTime 35) will be shown. The film is “really interesting in terms of what they’re trying to do with the camera and the performer’s eye. Even just seeing the film there’s a very strong link with a particular performance. But for me, screen in performance is almost a completely other genre. What I’m interested in is a festival that is about looking at films and the way that dance operates within film. ”

To make Reeldance work, Brannigan needs to attract a hybrid audience of film fans, dance addicts, filmmakers, choreographers and dancers. “I’ve gone for quite high profile choreographers because I think that’s going to be an important drawcard. There’ll be work by Philippe Decouffle, Wim Vandekeybus and Alain Platel of Les Ballets C de la B. I think that will attract a dance audience but also dance practitioners. Most choreographers who work in film seem to have strong connections with other art forms and a lot of them have very theatrical sensibilities—such as Vandekeybus and Platel. I think there’s something about the narrative history of film which appeals to those kinds of choreographers. I think we’ll also get people who are specifically interested in those companies (especially after the 1998 and 2000 success of the Les Ballets C de la B showings at the Adelaide festival). I’m hoping we’ll get the short film crowd who are interested in the potential that dance-film offers for a different type of language. And people studying film, and of course, film-makers who are interested in the possibilities of dance on film. I’m hoping for a cross-disciplinary audience.”

Reeldance is a real live-in event, with not only numerous screenings but also forums. Brannigan’s international guests are the joint winners of the IMZ Dance Screen Festival last year in Cologne—Pascal Magnin from Switzerland and Miriam King from the UK. “Their films screen on a double bill on the Saturday night. On the same program is Mura Dehn’s The Spirit Moves, a documentation of jazz dancing in America in the 40s and 50s. Prior to that we’ll have a forum with Pascal and Miriam about the international dance film circuit. On the Sunday, we’ve got a retrospective Australian program screening some films from AFTVRS and also the Screensound collection. Then we’ll have the short-listed Australian filmmakers talking about the practicalities of making their work before we run the films on the big screen on the Sunday evening.”

Reel Dance: International Dance on Screen Festival, Reading Cinemas, Haymarket, Sydney, May 19-21

The second in a series of Digital Seminars at Metro Screen was based on the questions, “Interactive new media and electronic music have developed within the same historical zone. Will they become a hybrid? Will live music become more like an installation or an interactive performance or distributed netevent?”

It’s that same old question of computers and art, of what’s new or somehow different from what has gone before. Technology and art/music have always gone hand in hand. At the centre of all art/music is technology in some form, whether a brush/computer or a violin bow/laptop. Technology is always there. That said, the topic was rarely addressed by the speakers, but a number of interesting angles were opened up.

Toby (Kazumichi) Grime demonstrated his Electronic Sound Remixers project. He gave examples of analogue sound production equipment and the equivalent electronic interfaces available, explaining why he felt these interfaces were clumsy and difficult to use, and then demonstrating his solution in the form of his Director-based application. The interface allows Grime to play and mix his music in a more interactive way both live and in the studio. The Remixers open possibilities for a more visual and graphic interface for the non-linear creation of Grime’s audio.

Scott Horscroft spoke about his use of new 3D sound imaging systems in installation and sound works. His projects have a huge presence using the processed sound of installed wind devices like fans and airconditioners, as well as prerecorded sounds, to create the audio. Interaction within the system is limited to timing and triggers—the sound within the work is only partially live. Horsecroft’s installations sit well beyond the inhibiting term ‘hybrid.’

Wade Marynowsky talked around his Interactive Keyboard which allows for triggered images and sound at the touch of a key. Image stills flash in sequence and are attached to sounds. This combination works well when played in a live environment. Sounds converge, are joined to image and played out in real time. The piece firmly etches itself on the viewer’s brain like a scrambled MTV playback. Wade may want to infect all computers with sound bites but what he has done is infect brains with sound/image viruses.

David Rogers explained his use of a massive ex-museum earthquake machine. The links with the seminar topic were at best tenuous and Rogers had no interest in addressing them. There is noise in the quake system and the work of Triclops International is, by all accounts, extremely noisy…but electronic music? However, the audience seemed attached to Roger’s work, speaking at length with him during question time, engaging much more with him than with the other sound artists. Audio gets lost, again, when words and critical engagement are needed.

New Media and Electronic Music, Metro Screen, Sydney Film Centre, Paddington Town Hall, February 14.

Find

April 2000

realtime