Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

June 2000

Random Dance Company, Aeon

photo Alan Mahon

Random Dance Company, Aeon

Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance Company has been hailed as Britain’s answer to the integration of new media into dance.

As numerous British choreographers experiment on the small scale in academic and out of the way contexts, McGregor has succeeded in bringing the technology debate onto middle scale stages across the nation. Through a trilogy of full evening productions which began in 1997, with The Millennarium, Random has explored alternative environments for dance.

Working with technology as a source of inspiration for choreography and as a filter through which to run his ideas about movement, McGregor has not ventured far into the ‘build-it-yourself’ technological experimentation which characterises much of Britain’s more experimental artists in this arena. Brief incursions into motion capture have produced stimuli for choreography on bodies, rather than leading to the construction of installation-based work explored by artists such as Susan Kozel. Collaborations with animators have led to the construction of projection-based spaces for dance rather than to the creation of CD-ROMs or online choreography, as explored by artists such as Bruno Martelli and Ruth Gibson.

Random is first and foremost a touring company, funded to create work for large audiences and to engage with them in a discourse about dance, sneaking technology in by the back door through its relation to choreography. The fact that the company has been able to scale up the level of input of technology is testimony to McGregor’s growing choreographic invention. Taking energy from his collaborators, rather than becoming lost amidst the melee of intervening media, McGregor has defined for himself a context which sits somewhere between mainstream dance innovation and esoteric new media experiment.

Random performed Aeon, the final piece in the trilogy which began in 1997 with The Millennarium, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I have seen this company at close quarters, having worked with McGregor at a time when Random was growing in ambition and scale. Now with 8 dancers and a full evening piece which is burgeoning with design input from a range of collaborators, Random is clearly on a roll.

Aeon opens with a giant amorphous image projected onto several layers of screens. This image dances eerily into shapes which ever more resemble the human form, until suddenly the section ends and tiny Claire Cunningham leaps on stage amidst an assault of projections. Timo Arnall, who produced the searing imagery of McGregor’s last production, Sulphur16, has collaborated with an architectural photographer to animate a moving environment of cityscapes with a lumbering, ominous choreography of their own. The disorientating effect of these images, surging over the angled screens and buttresses of Vicki Mortimer’s set, frames Cunningham in an alienated world.

McGregor then introduces his dancers one by one, in a series of razor sharp solos. Springing from behind screens into pools of light, the soloists battle the oppression of the environment and find inspiration and relief in their introverted movement sequences. Sharing a common vocabulary of flickering, reflexive movement with blurs of gestural activity at the extremities, each dancer is given the space to show themselves. The addition of new males to the company introduces a weightier accent to the choreography, to contrast the sparky electrical feel of seasoned Random dancers such as Odette Hughes. McGregor himself does not perform in Aeon, and although I missed seeing his dysfunctional movements fire off his attenuated limbs, I am sure it is this new perspective which has enabled McGregor to tune his choreography more finely to his dancers.

At the end of a trilogy’s worth of technology, McGregor returns to the engine of his inventiveness, the old-fashioned and enduring human body. Stripping away the technology in the final section of Aeon, McGregor focuses upon his choreography and demonstrates the intensity of his connection with the raw expressiveness of movement. The screens rise, the projections fall away and the music softens from the blare and bite of zoviet*france to classical Corelli. Ben Maher’s refined costumes are typically inventive. They sample references to historic periods in jewelled sleeves and extravagant cuffs to contrast the cyber-feel of the earlier sections. Maher’s pastel shades and the calm of Lucy Carter’s lights introduce a gentler mood to the choreography which takes the dancers into intense communion through duets, quartets, sextets and some glorious octets, where one feels McGregor flex new found muscles with admirable control.

More a beginning than an end, Aeon is the definition of context in which McGregor will now develop his choreography. While new media sneaks increasingly into the British mainstream through the use of projections, film and sound experimentation in work by established choreographers, genuine inventiveness in its use is generally still confined to the fringes. The inclusion of technology-heavy installation work, such as Carol Brown’s Shelf Life, or Kozel’s Contours in the same season as Random, nevertheless shows that the climate in the UK is changing. With Random trail-blazing an acceptable path between dance and technology the ensuing exploration of the many facets of this relationship can more readily be explored by a new generation of artists.

Wayne McGregor has taught choreographers in Australia through Chunky Move, as well as having collaborated with Company in Space.

RealTime issue #37 June-July 2000 pg. 4

The seductive power of cults frames the territory of the chalice, a collaborative work by Two Turns Dance Company. In the chalice which incorporates dance, puppetry, video, soundscape and design, Wendy McPhee and Michael O’Donoghue explore the 12 stages of an individual’s journey into the world of the cult.

Greg Methé’s design suggests the cross-cultural elements of cults through a strong, yet spacious entrance, emblematic of a Shinto shrine. Above this hangs a nine-stranded necklace. A pile of books rests either side of the central gateway.

The use of books as a symbolic device contributes to the imagistic intensity of the chalice. They signify altars, are scattered in despair, become pathways, and represent containers of tired knowledge systems. The interminable weight and demand of the word always refuses to reveal meaning to the frenzied and compliant recruits.

Puppeteer Philip Mitchell manipulates one book as a mirror for video images of a disembodied eye, mouth and fractured face. He kneads clay on a tablet of books. While his hands shape and spawn human replicas he repeats: “Do you have time for a quick chat?”

In the chalice the dancers are separated by, and converse across, a central space. It is this terrain of the middle ground where the energy of submission, conversion, denunciation and acceptance is situated. McPhee and O’Donoghue alternately climb and fall onto and across the central structure. Spinning like rejected angels, they use each other’s bodies as levers, ladders and platforms to reach imagined higher ground.

The crack, hiss, static and distortion of Poonkhin Khut’s unrelenting sound score accentuate the dancers’ spatial travails and the constant reappearance of disembodied menacing icons. At times I missed the silence that might realise my aural response to the dancers’ body score.

Ambiguity of power relations between each recruit and the charismatic cult leader emerges as a central motif of the work. A powerful sequence features a gag of rope placed across a dancer’s mouth, containing and suppressing utterance, difference, desire and question. This image inscribes the mouth as the only place where obeisance is avowed.

The dancers’ portrayal of simultaneity or contrast (for example, McPhee’s writhing body and O’Donoghue’s muscular and compact tautness) is often relieved by the intervention of the third: the third person portrayed by Phillip Mitchell, the third image of the dancers’ shadows on a blank quarry wall, and the connecting/separating third of the space between the chalice cups.

The chalice is symbolically represented by a gesture that unites thumbs and fingers in a cup shape to trace the centre line of the body passing from lips, throat and heart to the genitals, all sites of vulnerability, violence and desire.

We witness the recruit’s territory of disorientation, love and quest for stillness. These recruits are not resilient. They comfort and brutalise each other through a journey of confusion, momentary salvation and ultimate exhaustion. The high production standards of the chalice effectively exploit the unresolved contradiction of cults where surrender and conformity jostle with cruelty, denial, and loss.

the chalice, Two Turns, director Annette Downs, dance and choreography Wendy McPhee & Michael O’Donoghue, puppeteer Philip Mitchell, design Greg Methé, soundscore Poonkhin Khut, digital video design Benjamin Wright, lighting Tim Munro, multimedia visual artist Chantelle Delrue, Peacock Theatre, Hobart, April 5-7, Earl Arts Centre, Launceston, April 12-15, Cygnet Town Hall, April 19

RealTime issue #37 June-July 2000 pg. 4

Phillip Adams

Born in New Guinea, Phillip Adams learnt to dance from the white woman in the local ballet hut. He then trained at the Victorian College of the Arts, after which he moved to New York where he performed with Trisha Brown. Phillip Adams is Artistic Director of a new company called BalletLab based in Melbourne. His recent work, Amplification was shown in Melbourne, Sydney, Glasgow, and will soon be seen am in Mongolia.

I think we should start by describing the room that we’re sitting in today.

I’ve surrounded myself with mid-century, modern contemporary furniture. I have a passion for mid-century modern. I guess that comes from my fascination with the 50s. I would classify myself as a modernist in my aesthetic and my thinking. I try to come up with large things in the way that the designers of that period did with furniture and architecture.

How do you judge your own work?

First of all I try not apologise for it. I think that would be a grave error, especially for someone like me because I feel I’m out on a limb. I come from the absolute rawness of moving an audience. I’ve always wanted to make them feel an emotion. Yet I’ve been heavily criticised that I’m cutting my audience off. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s existential but there’s an apocalyptic tone in my work. It’s there in Amplification and in my newest piece, Ei Fallen.

In preparation for Amplification, I went to a hospital to interview patients for up to half a year, talking about the impact of car accidents, and seeing Crash the movie, seeing what it’s like to be in an actual situation where there is no way out but death.

Ei Fallen translates from the German, “egg fallen”, based on the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. I took Humpty as the metaphor for suicide. All the King’s horsemen arrive and discover the broken egg. And they think: how are we going to put him back together again and put him back up on the wall?

It was a metaphor for what it would feel like to be on the precipice, to be in mid-flight and then the actual smash, at the bottom with the ambulance arriving, or emergency people, seeing the dead body. What would it feel like to actually experience those 1 or 2 seconds? I’m fascinated with that, the impact of the crash, as in Amplification, Ei Fallen is about the actual fall. The performance I choreographed for Mardi Gras was inspired by a friend who was dying. He kept on attempting suicide. So I talked to him about what it felt like to do those things, drive the car off the cliff, shoot up, OD, cut his wrists, whatever, jump out of a window. When you see that work you’re not going to pick that out of it. What you’ll basically see is the usual Phillip Adams start, highly technical. Then the piece starts to turn on itself, you start to get a bit dark and a bit depressed by it, and then you realise gee, that’s really sad. You know then the egg’s left alone and in the end it’s beheaded. It’ll be performed at the Melbourne International Festival this year by Chunky Move.

I want to talk about Upholster, the next work that I’ve been working on.

Perhaps you could describe what we’re sitting on first.

We’re sitting on a pair of 60s Jetson chairs. The upholsterer and I took the sides off, washed them by hand and put them back on. Then I chose a chenille, Armani olive green, to give it that luxury hotel foyer 1960s New York feel. To top them off they are amplified with a red cushion. I made the cushions.

Upholster is about the idea of facades, covering up things, hiding or purporting to be somebody else. We are clothing. What we are underneath is the padding and stuffing. It’s what we cake around it which is the stuffing or the fabric which forms the body. With a designer I’ve been reconstructing the pleat: cutting the pleat in half, re-sewing it to the back, and then I’ve done another pleat that’s sectioned onto a poodle skirt. So we have a tapestry of deconstructed clothing.

I think there is a lack of design in contemporary dance in Australia. I see the work of Upholster as not to draw inspiration from the world of design, but to make it design. In doing that I’m building the set live as the piece goes. So the dancers are given a real job, a real project to put together, where the materials stuff it out.

We all have a cover, we all have a front that we hide behind. No matter what, who you are, we’ve all got a thing. But what’s underneath that is what’s more interesting. And I think the emotion comes from underneath—’I’m trying to find out who I am.’

Do you want to be in Australia, do you like being here making work?

I couldn’t be happier. I think like the choreographers who seem to have infiltrated themselves back nicely in Australia at the moment (Lucy Guerin, Rebecca Hilton). Without the time spent in New York and Europe where I performed for 10 years and danced and did some bits of my own work, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I was a student at VCA. To come back now and to implement my own world within that context seems to be working okay at the moment.

Do you want to show your work overseas?

It is important to me to have my work shown in an international context. I was lucky enough to go to Glasgow for New Moves (new territories) dance festival where I showed Amplification which received an excellent response. I was a little nervous, wondering how my work would stand up in an international arena. This year I’ll be going to Manchester (UK), and to Mongolia. It will be the first chance for the Mongolian people to actually see contemporary dance. I’m showing Amplification. I’m interested to see how it goes down.

This couch is Hotel Foyer 1957. Beautiful isn’t it? Your parents probably sat on this stuff. It’s been remade. You could say…“as Phillip Adams shows me around his apartment”. I’d love you to write that.

RealTime issue #37 June-July 2000 pg. 5

Rebecca Youdell & Russell Milledge, Bonemap

Bonemap’s the wild edge creates a complex, multi-layered, intrinsically real journey of the “ephemeral body” in an ongoing exploration of the contrast between the tropical North Queensland landscape and the “wild edge” of urban and built spaces that we humans inhabit. Using performance, film, exhibition, installation, sound and online art, the 3 performances of this bold, seamless multimedia presentation at the Tanks Arts Centre in Cairns (as part of Australian Dance Week) were a milestone in the project.

the wild edge is a postmodern slideshow of the ‘Deep North’, its beauty, unique man-made intrusions, and curious social and physical contrasts. Using video material documented at sites as diverse as the Chillagoe Marble Mines, the Powerhouse in Brisbane, a cattle station in Toomba and the New Parliament House in Canberra, the collaboration takes place at each juncture, and another layer is created for the evolving work.

Bonemap’s work has involved journeys to the Body Weather Farm in Japan and Australian field trips with Singapore artist Lee Wen. These investigations place the work on another wild edge—the Australian engagement with the Asia Pacific region.

A choreographer and accomplished performer, Rebecca Youdell’s classical dance background informs her current movement practice ever so subtly, while training and discipline is obvious in her total control. Her ability to imitate the spectrum of human-animal expression is boundless. Russell Milledge has made a successful transition from 2D practice into movement, finding his niche in slow-emotion expression. Together, Youdell and Milledge have found a balance in style and form.

The soundscape created by Michael Whiticker and Paul Lawrence illustrates the tension in the movement, while traditional instruments, voice, sound devices and digital editing create an evocative and emotive soundtrack. Whiticker’s dominance and focus on instruments is beautifully complemented by Lawrence’s more discreet and quirky play with various installation elements. Pre-recorded sound also contributes to what amounts to a sophisticated live film score.

Form is a key element: Glen O’Malley’s rich photography provides a classical launch pad for the human body as it traverses film, X-rays, performance, sound and installation. In the ‘round’ of the Tanks, the installation had a decidedly urbane nature, and in itself provided a perfect site to explore: the wall of X-rays dividing the dance floor, the hanging ice block (dripping water, and filled with stones ready to drop into aluminium bowls), rocks, a field of blue tutu’s. The bone, as chief icon, represents decay, the transition between life and death, the connector between ephemeral worlds. Far from being morbid, it symbolises the built presence in the ecological landscape, the natural physical decay that occurs and its inherent beauty.

With shows at the Next Wave Festival in Tokyo, Umbrella in Townsville, and the new Powerhouse in Brisbane, the wild edge will continue to develop. Its flexibility in delivery is embodied in the exploration of various built environments and our habitation of them. Each new site will add another exciting layer to the work.

Bonemap, the wild edge, Tanks Art Centre, Cairns, May 13-21; World Dance 2000, Tokyo, August 1-5, Umbrella Studio, Townsville and Forts, Magnetic Island National Park,?August 14- 27; Brisbane Powerhouse Sept 9-24. info@bonemap.com, or go to www.bonemap.com

RealTime issue #37 June-July 2000 pg. 6

At one time you see them there, a long way off, upstage in a far corner but achingly close because of the drama of the figures, their movements, the eyes that span the distance to hook you in. Their eerie skull-capped faces. Stark yellow vinyl raincoats (you can just about smell the plastic). Striped-naked bodies. These masks—in slow mo—chart moments of excruciating love and tenderness mixed with a nearly intolerable menace and violence. To a heartbeat music.

But these characters don’t hear you. None of them do. They live dangerously. Teetering near the edge, sliced up and on the edge. They tip over, reappear, disembodied, provocative and sexy. For these characters—and not just the masked innocents—love to seduce. Whether they’re kids teasing each other mercilessly, fat controllers or simpletons with plywood teeth, they suck you into a world of suspended disbelief, vulnerability.

This is a dance work that pulls you in, eyes singling you out of the crowd of the audience, tempting—oh so tempting—you onto another plane. Do you dare? Take a risk?

They play with you. Humour, laughter, followed quickly by moments that take your breath away. To leave you very nearly desolate, unnerved. It’s raw, confronting. Guaranteed to get you. And all executed with precise movements and an acute sense of timing whether the characters are synchronised swimming on highways, near-to-bursting roly-pollies on a construction site or sculptures of roadkill.

This is physical theatre that dares to do something. This is a piece of work that is screamingly simple and naive at times—its striking aesthetic of witty primary colours, circus acts, the tap tap tap of feet in lines and circles—all the while swiping at an all too familiar landscape with its searing underscore of comment and satire. And, what’s more, it’s a work that changes, a work being developed in performance (I saw 2 of 9 in Canberra).

Clearly Kate Denborough has drawn a group of dancers around her who work well together (Gerard Van Dyck, Phillip Gleeson and Tuula Roppola) as Kage physical theatre. Denborough knows what she wants. And she gets it. And judging from comments afterwards (in the post-performance forum, a feature of The Choreographic Centre) she likes to keep a tight reign, and does. Bold and confident throughout.

What remains long after the performance, are the acute visuals—just like seeing the suite of Jeffrey Smart paintings that inspired the work—coupled with snatches of music. Oh the music: the original score by Franc Tetaz holds the pieces of the work together, swimmingly. (And it seems fitting to discover the music was incorporated into No (under) Standing through express post dispatches.) From nostalgia to funk, to one of the final vignettes when a slow drawl of a piece emerges (along with sheer testosterone) with its melancholic slide guitar. It takes us to the final ecstatic, captivating and strangely private moment.

Kage physical theatre, No (under) Standing Anytime, devised/directed by Kate Denborough, The Choreographic Centre, Canberra, April 26–29 & May 2–6, Next Wave Festival, Athenaeum, Melbourne, May 18–28

I’ve had this creeping feeling over the past few years that the smartest performance work is coming not from a theatre base (physical or otherwise) or even from the visual arts.

It seems to be dance that is taking performance and turning it on its head. Somewhere along the way, some dancers have stopped being dancers or choreographers and become dance artists, much less concerned with step-making and much more with the art of performance. This is not, I stress, a move away from craft but towards it. Of course, it’s not a new move but such work seems increasingly visible, no doubt facilitated by the sophistication of work seen in Australia over the past few years of the calibre of Alain Platel, Kate Champion and Wendy Houstoun for instance. There is far less bleating from mainstream reviewers about whatever happened to ‘real’ dance and much more acceptance of contemporary dance generally. [Not on the east coast. eds.].

The shift is more apparent among more mature artists for whom just possibly the purely physical experience of being a ‘dancer’ may necessarily have had to change. Here in Perth, this shift in focus is experienced increasingly through the work of a small group of dance artists who often work together in various configurations and under different company names. In this emerging body of works, text, light, film, movement, space, sound and bodies collide. There is discernible content. There is humour. There is complexity and contradiction. There is a willingness to experiment. Gone are the vapidly sentimental and earnestly wafting performances of a couple of years back, which just goes to show that if you give artists a bit of time and money to work through stuff and keep developing their practical, conceptual and expressive skills, good work will emerge. This work has an edge and it’s pretty sharp!

A perfect example was Bill Handley’s Cats’n’Dogs, performed by Jane Diamond and presented by ID339 Dancegroup as part of a double bill at PICA earlier this year. Cats’n’Dogs was a wickedly edgy performance teetering on the smart side of madness. Jane Diamond, performing the role of Dulcie, a fanatical AFL coach, hard balled the audience (her team) as she relived her glory days on the field with “Dicko, Crawf and Simon, Mel, Chesty, Wheaties and Brim”, sex in the bunk of the Tasmanian Princess and other extraordinary moments in a life lived for football. Performed fast and hard, this monologue was not a dance piece per se but a glorious moment of vernacular performance, yet I doubt it could have been performed by anyone but a dancer and Diamond made this piece so completely her own. Whilst Dulcie is clearly a heterosexual gal, definitely a woman who loves men, with her football tucked under her shirt like a pregnant belly she conforms to no stereotype unless it is the rapidly disappearing Australian tradition of idiosyncratic characters; a rare experience for middle class Perth in the mid 90s.

Sue Peacock’s Near Enemies, performed by Paul O’Sullivan, Sete Tele, Shelly Marsden and Sue Peacock, made up the other part of the bill. This was a far less resolved and more rambling work which nevertheless tightened up dramatically over the course of the season. Performed in a cabaret set-up with a smoky late night dive atmosphere, this meticulously performed work stretched to achieve a level of theatricality that it never quite attained. Drawing on everything from stand-up to conjuring tricks to flash tango numbers and even a gangster shoot out and quieter more romantic moments, Near Enemies is much more a work in the making. Hopefully it will get the time it deserves to develop further.

Paul O’Sullivan returned to PICA in April with his most recent solo show, Anomalies, with dramaturgy by Sally Richardson and movement direction by Sue Peacock. Paul is an amazingly relaxed performer who effortlessly creates an atmosphere of intimate domesticity as he asks the really big questions: “why is the ocean so full of sea sponges?” and “are aliens real?” In Anomalies Paul stretched himself beyond what might have easily slipped into a too cosy retreat into the domestic to comment on our contemporary moment. In this case, to expand a statement made by a visiting alien that “what impressed him most about humanity was that it seemed we were at our best when things are at their worst.” Paul went on to ask whether the converse may also be true. “Can we be at our worst when we have very little to complain about?” This was a genuinely interesting piece of work, however the moment he donned a pair of black rimmed specs complete with fake fleshy nose to become a stuttering John Howard, incapable of saying sorry, it flashed into brilliance. The everyday suddenly transmogrified into an entirely more sinister experience.

Most recently, Company Loaded returned to PICA to present 3 works in progress. This company was conceived by Stefan Karlsson and Margrete Helgeby to provide a vehicle for mature dancers working with a wide range of choreographers. For Project One (their second project) the choreographers were Stefan Karlsson, Sue Peacock (working with theatre director Sally Richardson) and Lucy Guerin. Joining the choreographers were dancers Claudia Alessi, Paul O’Sullivan, Sete Tele and Margrete Helgeby who had to withdraw from the programme due to injury and was replaced by Shannon Bott.

This was an interesting programme which at times indicated that an increasing theatricality or use of text is neither necessarily nor inevitably desirable. This was particularly apparent in the work of Richardson whose use of cut-up bits of Shakespeare was infinitely literal and often naff. Mind you, it’s always tricky talking about works in progress given that what you see at such an early stage may have little or nothing to do with the end product. Karlsson’s contribution was by far his most mature choreographic effort to date. This was the most complete work on the night and was beautifully performed by the 3 male dancers. While working with a quite conventional vocabulary it was complemented by a great sound work by composer Cat Hope and lighting by Mark Howett, who did a beautiful job lighting the entire program. Lucy Guerin’s contribution made no attempt to present itself as a resolved or finished work and, perhaps perversely, I found it the most satisfying and complex. The concluding contact-inspired trio between Alessi, Tele and O’Sullivan was just extraordinary.

It would be nice to take for granted [sic] that all these artists will get the opportunity to keep working and developing. Of course, now that they’re mere ‘hobbyists’ as opposed to professional artists, life is likely to become even more difficult than it has been to date. Never mind the tall poppy syndrome, we seem to want to mow down even the modest sized daisies.

Cats’n’Dogs and Near Enemies, ID339, PICA, Perth, February 17-27; Anomalies, Paul O’Sullivan, PICA, April 6-16; Project One, Company Loaded, PICA, May 4-6

What is missing from the preoccupation with tradition…is the experience of modern Chinese people who have had to live their lives with the knowledge that it is precisely the notion of a still-intact tradition to which they cannot cling—the experience precisely of being impure, “Westernised” Chinese, and the bearing of that experience on their ways of “seeing” China.
Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: the politics of reading between West and East (University of Minnesota Press 1991)

It is a perilous path to tread. On the one side lies authenticity, on the other, the level playing field of postmodern pastiche. Wu Lin Dance Theatre (Tina Yong & Sun Ping) address issues of Chinese culture and identity. If their work is not to be placed within Chinese traditions of performance, how might it be understood? Wu Lin are themselves aware of these dilemmas, having once written a paper entitled Is it traditional or is it contemporary?

NUSHU, The Women’s Script is inspired by historical texts, written by Chinese women. It consists of a series of narrative depictions of women in China. The piece moves from male despotism to the articulation of female anger, to an envisaged sense of equality between the sexes, a familiar feminist tale. Surely the highlight of the work was Yong’s evocation of anger, a duet performed in perfect harmony with the drum player, Junko Sakamoto. This was the moment where the many incarnations of woman as object ended and women’s agency emerged. This produced the finale where the 2 sexes breathe each other’s air, moving their Chi in and out of each other’s territory, finding ground, losing ground, regaining ground.

In performative terms, it was Yong’s clarity and focus which gave depth to this piece, as well as the wonderful musical compositions of Wang Zheng-Ting. Yong was deeply immersed in the predicaments and bodily formations of the choreography. Watching Sun Ping, I wondered whether I required some literacy in Chinese acrobatic dance. The question of tradition did not arise in regard to Yong because her dance is clearly hybrid, having been successively inscribed by ballet, Indian dance and Chinese imagery.

In narrative terms, the piece was a bit jerky, consisting of episodic, staccato moments with no link between patriarchal domination, the eruption of fury, and the even-handed finale. Although some of those moments were beautiful and poignant, others looked like they needed development. I imagine that some outside direction would be of great assistance to the company. And yet, what kind of eye am I to suggest—a Western gaze, which might require that Wu Lin commodify their cultural identity as recognizably Other? If Rey Chow is to be believed, Western perspectives have already infiltrated (post)modern Chinese sensibilities. For a while I wondered where NUSHU’s final battle of the sexes was situated: in China (old or new)? In Australia? Or in Wu Lin’s own imaginary? But now I think that there are circles within circles, that we cannot sustain the old myths of China over there and Anglo-Australia over here. NUSHU is not the repetition of old texts but the emergence of a new one. If it could be clearer, it would not become a better translation but would rather move more deeply into a script of its own making.

NUSHU, The Women’s Script, Wu Lin Dance Theatre, performers Tina Yong & Sun Ping, music Wang Zheng-Ting (composer, sheng), Junko Sakamoto (drums), Dong Qiu Ming (dizi, xun), Theatreworks, Melbourne, April 12-16

A loping slinking soundtrack slides across 50s mid-West domesticities, panty-twitch desires. This Happy Valley is soap opera scrapings, crackling radio, gluey mores of a country town. A horse and prairie loping in there somewhere. If home is where the heart is, then both home and heart are struggling here: the women stretching, straining from it (and each other) as if elastic, snapping in return. Unhappy valleying: conformity versus distinction, families, neighbours trying to keep each other tame. Rebecca Hilton’s choreography is inventive, quirky, freshly detailed. Hands, limbs, torsos, pushing, pulling, softly slapping tools. Emotionally, the dancers are better informed as the performance season runs: the piece is becoming crazier, more seedy and disturbed. The mother figure is perhaps the best fleshed out, Jo Lloyd infusing her performance with muted longing, with mildly tempestuous flicks, pigruts and kicks like a chained mare.

A radio voice croons: “I went away for a while. I travelled, but not far enough. Something kept pulling me back. I gave in. I went home”, but here, the daughter does depart, after her struggles, simply walking out the door. We need to see more of her struggle, feel more her imperative to leave. The scenes, for example, where mother and daughter parallel each others’ dance needs not just mirroring, but subtle (perhaps rhythmic) distinctions between them to clarify their mutual rebellions, abandonments and griefs, to articulate the struggle forwards and backwards between generations to do with knowing and liking—or despising—where and who you are.

Sandra Parker’s Audible, too, has developed since opening into a dance that is rougher, showing more jaggedness and verve, appropriate in a piece about bodies riddled with and ridding themselves of lovers/others. But these ‘others’ are not full bodies, only things which have disturbed already shaky cores: you journey from person to person; it’s hard. What is an arm beyond pointing, or clutching at its own straws. In fact, there seems no ‘other’ in this investigation: angular bodies jump against their own edges, are dissected by their own awkward clothing, swish in introspective pain. Where there is partnering, I can’t hear or see beyond the defence-lines spoken at one point by a dancer at a microphone: “You don’t know what I’m thinking: even if you ask me I can lie.”

There is a timidity to reaching out, reflected perhaps in the piece’s relationship with spoken words. There seems a palpable distrust that breath can continue with integrity into language; thus, the projected sentences are so thin as to be easier ignored. I suspect they have been edited down—a pity, as there are elements which lead me to suspect the piece’s intention is somewhere really valuable. This could be an interesting investigation of discrepancies between interior and exterior worlds (as attempted in the miked breathing of a dance segment), but my suspicion (even after a second viewing) is that this is a work which can’t grasp its own material, generally displaying a reticence of emotion (resistance to self-reflection?) and at other times, a strange inaccuracy. “She watched herself waiting,” speaks a prone body, “she was completely still,” whilst others neither illustrate nor counterpoint her text with a jagged dance that is hard to incorporate in the watching.

Technically, as always, Parker’s choreography and spatial patterning is very capable—although those straight gyrating arms are starting to bother me—and I admire the beginnings of a relationship to text that the dancers themselves have explored. I come away retaining most from Elizabeth Drake’s soundscore, and perhaps in there lies the clearest intention: like a train, the voice and breath, sometimes husky, sometimes sharp as slicing knives, move towards another, never reaching a destination.

Audible, choreographer Sandra Parker; composer and pianist Elizabeth Drake, dancers Joanna Lloyd, Belinda Cooper, Olivia Millard, Tamara Steele, Carlee Mellow; Happy Valley, choreographer Rebecca Hilton; dancers as above, sound design Katie Symes & Rebecca Hilton, lighting Efterpi Soropos, costumes Anna Tregloan, Dance Works, North Melbourne Arts House, May 4-6, 9-13

It’s getting DIRTY in domestic land. QUICK, the housewife is hiding something under her apron. Afraid of creepy crawlies? “Domestic bliss” spray should get rid of them…for a moment.Dream Kitchen places itself between interaction and animation. While some aspects demand immediate action, other sections are watched as events evolve and mutate. The cursor is the only indication of any entry points.

The Dream Kitchen is clean. Melamine, minimal, there’s a bowl of fruit. It’s not contemporary flash but enough mod cons for the average homeowner. But the “player” is not the owner but a secret visitor, furtive, airborne and easily passed by.

There’s a quick panic tour. Like an out of control camcorder the effects are dizzily sped up. Seen from below the fridge, towering monolithic stools ascend and giant telephones ring incessantly.

First stop is under the Fridge where inanimate objects take on evil lives of their own. Here pencils turn to pens, and under militant conditions there are burnings at the stake to the chanting of the masses…

The kitchen is getting dirtier. Next stop the Sink. Down the plughole and the pipes reveal a floating dreamworld of garbage, underwater sounds, no air only the throbbing pressure against your skull. Rollovers reveal the floating rubbish transforming slowly (very slowly) into an evil garbage man…recycled scarecrow boy made from the detritus of Aussie junk, Tetra pack shoulder blade, Maccas thickshake arms…

And it gets dirtier…Don’t put your fingers in the open Socket…inside reveals a world of cables and uncut wires. Tearing electrocuted screams fry the eardrums, sexual tension between the penetrative and penetrating plugs.

Under the Oven is a cardboard world. Scuffle around it to reveal the macabre forgottens, the dead and decaying. A Frog, a mutant Bug and a decayed Rat with a secret are the specimens to be tampered with. Electrodes, clamps, razor blades and X-rays are all at your disposal. Furtively you experiment to the sounds of electro shocks and metal scraping, but someone is examining you…under the oven no-one can hear your screams…

Dirt. Dirty phone calls. Phoning incessantly finally allows you in. It reveals an Orwellian landscape of clandestine kitchen scenes. The cold metal conductor transforms into an all seeing TV drome. Twenty degraded surveillance images of the Dream Kitchen now filled with debauchery and violence. Broomstick mounted housewife looks down on bondaged victim, the sounds of crossed and interrupted lines, la la land over the airwaves, over and out kind of stuff.

The Dream Kitchen is now disgusting. Oily patches seep from the floorboards, filthy drips line the fridge, dirty phone calls, unanswered message stumps peel off the wall. There are ghosts in these machines, and they’re all ours. Play another game?

Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs, Dream Kitchen, CD-ROM, programming Adam Hinshaw, sound Panos Couros, produced and developed with the support of the Australian Film Commission and in co-production with the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, with assistance from the Australia Council.

There are a few sources for Carrier: firstly I have hepatitis C virus, and I wanted to redress the social invisibility of this serious health issue. The work also grew out of my research interests over the last 10 years; notions of identity, sexuality, attraction and repulsion, beauty and ugliness and the messy body.

Web work is of necessity international, as it lives out there on the global matrix. Yes it has been exhibited in gallery-based shows around the world including Japan, North America and Europe, and soon in South Africa and South America. The Australia Council assisted me to promote the work overseas, which has been quite effective.

It’s recently won the Faulding Award for Multimedia, a prize for writing in digital media. While there’s a lot of writing in the piece, it’s certainly not a straightforward text, or even a conventional hypertext. How do you feel about the work being treated as “writing”?

For me the distinction between text and image is minimal. As a “net.artist” I see myself more akin to a filmmaker, but this also encompasses being a “writer.” I construct a digital architecture which is in itself a text, whether the individual components contained within it are image, word, audio, quicktimes or VRML.

The work involves an unusual mixture of modes: there are game-like elements with artificial agents and interactive dialogue, and this is combined with dense layers of visual material. But there’s also a whole layer of straight “information” about Hep C. Can you talk about this mixture and your reasons for pursuing it?

I work on the web because I’m interested in reaching the widest audience possible, and this requires that “information” be structured in differently accessible ways. Some users will want the scientific and medical information, while others want to play a Shockwave game, read the personal stories, or will be interested in the seductive textual elements, which all give “information” in a different way. I think the site is successful because there is a balance of navigation, viewing and content options; it simultaneously functions as an artistic work and a public resource.

Carrier also makes a detailed exploration of viral immunobiology—and it seems that new media artists are increasingly taking on this kind of technoscientific conceptual material. What’s the attraction here?

I don’t think one can work any more in cleanly divided disciplines, everything seems to be cross-pollinating everything else…Reading and researching texts from areas like immunobiology, or more recently quantum physics for my new multi-user VRML project Empyrean, is totally fascinating. It’s science, it’s science fiction, and it’s as theatrical as soap-opera television.

The work revolves around ideas of the virus—and it’s a virus which is both biological and digital. Of course digital media have been rife with viruses for some time; the computer virus is a familiar figure. How is the virus in Carrier different, or the same?

The carrier virus sHe is of transient and multiple gender, and is posited as our lover rather than an enemy to be destroyed with antiviral software or medication. We willingly enter into the relationship with sHe, as an exploratory partner, rather than a toxic and scary alien.

And the work is very open in extending an erotic invitation; it wants to infect us, but not in a malicious way, more like a tight embrace. How do people respond to this invitation?

Some people find it totally spooky, however most respond positively—with a sense of intimacy and immersion. When you think about it, a virus penetrating your cellular core is probably the most intimate relationship you can have with another species.

In an essay on Carrier you question the romantic notion (from Roy Ascott) of the net’s “telematic embrace”. Does the work’s intimacy involve a struggle with the medium?

I work on the net and I love the net, however I am highly critical of the net as an artistic medium, and as a social mediator, and use Carrier‘s perceived intimacy as a vehicle to address what intimacy now means. Is intimacy a shared viral illness with a group of people you have never met? Is intimacy built because the site asks you personal questions to which you must respond to continue viewing? Are we more intimate with our computers than our partners?

Following that infection which the work invites, there’s a viral line here which leads towards a radically altered sense of the self—of where our borders are and what can cross them. This changes a lot of things, like ideas of “sick” and “well.” Is there a kind of radical viral identity-politics lurking under here?

Binaries like “sick” and “well” are only useful to identify points in a spectrum of possibilities. The reality is that human bodies are composed of swarms of bacteria, viruses, and other organisms that we see as agents of illness, and don’t acknowledge when we think of our bodies. Evolutionary biology posits that we only evolve with our illnesses, and that the difference and the diversity that comes from infection and contagion is what actually allows us to continue to proliferate and survive in a variety of environmental conditions on the planet. So we have to love our sicknesses, because in fact we are a conglomeration of diseases.

Parallax is a rare specimen, an anthology of locally crafted cultural criticism which tackles, among other things, digital media. Darren Tofts, correspondingly, is one of a handful of figures on the Australian scene to have established a profile as a theorist and critic of digital media. In the local context then, this slim compilation is bigger than it first appears—a too-rare indication of the emergence of a homegrown critical culture.

This is a collection of essays written between 1993 and 1999, many of which have been published in local venues such as Mesh, World Art and the sadly-missed 21C; others come from conference presentations and lectures. That the material isn’t brand new might disappoint voracious theory-junkies, though only the most avid would know all of these papers. The result is a compilation which demonstrates both the diversity and consistency of Tofts’ concerns over the last half-decade or so.

That diversity is considerable, at least in terms of critical subject matter. Tofts takes on new media art, hypertext, the historical avant-garde, Joyce, Duchamp, Beckett, Bacon, digital imaging, Andres Serrano and Troy Innocent. In the process he touches on cybernetics, indeterminacy, the notion of expressiveness in painting, Baudrillard and Star Trek (to take a random sampling). The sum is not as inconsistent as it sounds; it manifests a set of specific focii and characteristic approaches. As the names above suggest, Tofts’ work articulates the big guns of modernist literature and visual arts with a constellation of contemporary works, artists and cultural moments. This interweaving isn’t an attempt to write the postmodern, digitised present into a solid modernist lineage; rather, as Tofts puts it, it seeks “uncanny parallels, incongruous juxtapositions and surprising fusions of ideas between the old and the new, the residual and the emergent.” Tofts pitches the project as a corrective to that “digital orthodoxy” which tends to forget these historical parallels, resulting in “cultural amnesia.”

The most prominent of the parallels runs between modernist art and literature and contemporary hypermedia—spanning hypertext, the web, and interactive media. So it is that in “Un Autre Coup de Dés. Multimedia and the Game Paradigm” French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé hangs out with cybernetician Norbert Wiener, Myst and the Residents’ Bad Day on the Midway. The ways in which we wrestle narrative meaning from the indeterminate, entropic story-worlds of digital media are echoed, Tofts suggests, in the ways in which we read Mallarmé’s nonlinear poetry. In “Hyperlogic, the Avant-Garde and Other Instransitive Acts”, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce are brought together as practitioners of that interactive, nonlinear “hyperlogic” more often identified with high-tech hypermedia. The central, and well-supported assertion made in both these essays is that “hypermedia should be considered as an extension of the modernist avant-garde.” Tofts isn’t talking up new media here, in fact he’s quite clear on the point that they “have a lot of catching up to do”; lagging in the shadows of modernist monoliths like Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.

Tofts’ assured literary scholarship underpins these parallel readings, but it also gets a few essays to itself in Parallax. “Ulysses Returns” is a detailed treatment of the troubled life of Joyce’s tome; its many editions, corrections, editorial gaffes and presumptions, all striving for an authoritative, authorial master-text. Tofts good-naturedly points out the absurd contradictions here, as literary scholars scramble to tidy up, straighten out and nail down a work which is very clearly trying to resist such determination. He is more optimistic about a proposal for a hypertext Ulysses with multiple parallel versions of the text and additional multimedia ephemera—an appropriately Joycean labyrinth of interminable journeys. Ulysses returns again in “Parallatic Readings: Joyce, Duchamp and the Fourth Dimension”, a tiny but engaging essay which constructs a kind of crypto-historical wormhole between Joyce’s epic and its Duchampian equivalent: The Large Glass. What propels the essay is some fascinating literary detective work, beginning with a manuscript fragment in which Joyce’s protagonist describes a work which seems to be The Bride Stripped Bare. This thread triggers Tofts’ refiguring of Ulysses in which it comes to resemble Duchamp’s collection of notes on The Bride, The Green Box, and explodes into a million interactive pieces.

Perhaps it’s a subjective case of greener grass on the other side of the disciplinary fence, but I find Tofts’ literary studies more interesting than his writing on new media. This may also have something to do with the fact that writing in this area, like the work, dates practically overnight. Tofts’ “Your Place or Mine? Locating Digital Art” is from 1996, the year of the MCA’s Burning the Interface exhibition—but here 4 years seems like 10 (remember CD-ROMs?). Of course this absurd time-dilation should be resisted wherever possible, and Tofts’ historical perspective is valuable here. Certainly Nam June Paik, John Cage and Merce Cunningham are important precursors for the conceptual and practical concerns of contemporary digital media, and the importance of “the walk” in virtual spaces is prefigured in the ancient ars memoria. However Tofts stops short of following these historical contexts through into critical analysis. Not that he’s pulling punches, necessarily: his writing seems to reflect a genuine enthusiasm for new media practice, together with an endorsement of some of its dominant drives. “The most likely and desirable outcome of the trajectory of the desktop to immersive, virtual spaces, is the creation of something that resembles the Holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Complete immersion in a seamless “apparent reality” is the unquestioned goal here—a trajectory which seeks a kind of digital literalisation of the overwhelming plenitude of a work like Ulysses.

Nowhere is Tofts’ enthusiasm more apparent than in his writing on Troy Innocent. “Travelling to Iconica” is a glowing account of Innocent’s work; Tofts hails the artist as perhaps digital animation’s “first major exponent of the art of virtuality.” Once again Tofts cheers on the drives which propel Innocent’s work (in its quizzical way); immersive virtuality, interactivity, and artificial life. Of course enthusiastic support is preferable to the kind of muddle-headed non-engagement with which mainstream art criticism has greeted local new media work, but still, the pity is that Tofts’ writing misses a chance to make some well-informed critiques and ask some curly questions. Is the local scene simply too small, or still too tenuous, to support robust critical exchange? While I’m not suggesting that Tofts’ work falls into this category, there seems to be a kind of reverse-tall-poppy syndrome in effect, with an understanding that one just doesn’t knock the work of one’s friends and peers—at least not in public. For the health of the scene itself, I hope this changes.

Darren Tofts, Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology, an interface book, Craftsman House, 2000, ISBN 90 5704 007 7

From Stuart Moulthrop’s Hegirascope, Mark Amerika’s seminal Grammatron and recent work that continues these traditions, web-based hypertext fiction has utilised simple time-based rules to produce interactive narratives. This has generally been achieved through the use of the refresh tag, where another URL is loaded after a nominated interval, producing narratives that literally move through time. On occasion this is performed in a quite linear manner, a work containing a ‘passage’ or ‘corridor’ of time-constrained nodes without links that then opens to a richly linked series of nodes (Grammatron), though it is also routinely used with links so that the reader is invited into a game of temporal cat and mouse, following a link before another screen displaces possible choices. Generally a work might use various combinations of these, and it is the structural patterns that these produce that in many ways determine the linearity, temporality, and interactivity of any hypertext work.

This animation of screens, whether image or text-based, allows a work to have rhythms that ebb and flow with a reading, liberating the work from the author’s subjection to a reader’s whimsy, while allowing the reader that allotment of choice that guarantees the illusion of freedom. However, Moulthrop’s work in Reagan Library introduces quite a different temporal trope. Here is a work that does not utilise meta refresh tags to produce a machine-based reading time, instead it uses what is known as state information (always quite difficult to do in the stateless protocol utilised by the web) through javascript to react to an individual reading.

In Reagan Library narrative closure is produced through a duration within the work that is defined by the negotiation of entropy and redundancy performed by the reader and the work. Rather than the reader recognising cycling narrative episodes and so deciding that they know ‘enough’ to finish, or surrender—a common strategy in much hypertext fiction—this work performs this redundancy on itself. Each screen starts out as almost abstract sentence collages, with pockets of sense, and as you read they coalesce, over time, into more stable units. Here the apparent disorder that many naïve readers claim for hypertext, a disorder due to the opaqueness of the structuring rhythms within any work, is not contained within the architecture of links, but within the time of the reading transcribed into the very spaces themselves. While this time of reading is marked by this evolving text, a series of QTVR panoramas form a part of every screen, providing a topographically consistent navigational interface.

The QTVR lets Reagan Library explore the architectonics of multi-linearity through a writing with noise, entropy, and negentropy. The consistency of the landscape allows the variability of the text to become more visible, and this is why the use of a panorama with ‘hotspots’ is more than mere fancy. The panoramas provide a navigable 3 dimensional space where pages can be visited by clicking on their eponymous objects. In turn, following a text link loads a page with the panorama which is the view from that geographical location, so the reader has, in fact, 2 methods of reading. One is spatial and concrete, the other is textual and abstract. Through these panoramas Moulthrop is not only exploring spatial metaphors in narrative, but expanding the relation of image to word. There is a well formed irony between the stability of the fictional visual world and its contradistinction to the permeability of the textual universe. The images are plainly imaginary (the Bryce generated landscapes tilt their collective caps significantly towards Myst and Riven) yet retain much more stability than the text, which in its turn appears as a series of fragmentary asides, personal reminiscences, observations and self reflexive aphorisms. In other words, the text reads like a typically interstitial postmodern fiction and so manages an ironical sense of historical or diegetic truth, while the images are of an imaginary world, yet concrete in their discursive permanence.

The world defined and produced by Reagan Library is one where the reader is unable to return to a space, where hypertextual repetition becomes a play of difference, a continual question of subtle variation. Within this world Reagan Library combines history, criticism, and self reflexive irony to meld a narrative that takes well aimed bites at both the self appointed keepers of a literary heritage and those who misread the vicissitudes of hypertext as merely the opportunity to turn a trick.

This is a work that is almost Oulipean in intent, but rather than operate as a rule governed combinatorial engine, Reagan Library probes the relation of reading and game playing, and explores the boundary between image and text based diegetic worlds, demonstrating that writing’s electronic future is less about textual pyrotechnics than a refiguring of words into other narrative spaces.

Reagan Library, Stuart Moulthrop, http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/hypertexts/RL/ (link expired)

Archiving Imagination is an accumulating exhibition of online projects. On the surface, the viewer is drawn in to read both the technical nuances and literary ideas inherent in the text and imagery but these also foreground the collaborative objectives of the artists. Aside from individual works on the site, writer/web-author Diane Caney and digital media artist Robin Petterd have creatively documented both their meetings and thought processes about the nature of collaboration itself. Poetry, hypertext, sound, video, imagery, diary entries and email correspondence are mixed in a way not easily possible before the internet and this is the artists’ aim; to expose an emerging genre.

A synchronised collaboration is often sought by writers and other artists in an effort to create, extend and support new ideas. I asked Caney and Petterd if they viewed collaboration as a strength of working in digital media in comparison to conventional media forms.

RP Maybe…new media and media arts generally require collaboration as part of the process.

DC Yes, as with filmmaking, I think new media often needs people with different skill bases, and yes I see it as a strength, but I do think that people have been desiring an artform with which to collaborate (especially across media) for a long time. Musicians, poets, technicians, software developers, writers, artists, filmmakers can all now work on projects which emphasise the projects themselves rather than foregrounding any particular ‘genius’ involved.

The combination of technical and artistic/literary skills is plainly evident in Archiving Imagination. But I wondered why you choose to focus on the actual idea of collaboration as a subject in itself…

DC Working collaboratively certainly moves us away from our individual creative practice, but it also developed out of my research into Patrick White and Sidney Nolan and the ways in which their artwork enmeshed. I really became fascinated by image and words intersecting and producing transient new meanings but…it really just began with Robin taking away some hypertext I’d written and making Imaginative Reading V. After that I was hooked by the actuality of collaborating as well as the idea of it!

The site itself utilises an understated interface using white backgrounds to accentuate meanings in the text while gently inviting the viewer to interpret and make ‘sense’ of the work. I felt the artists had provided ‘space’ and had confidence in my hypertext choices. This is confirmed in the diary section which points out that the artists intended to place the viewer in a “fictive space” and “distance them.” As much of the web can be bossy in interface design, what was behind the decision to give the viewer space.

RP I looked at this the opposite way. I don’t think we set out to make things that are not bossy. What we may have set out to do is introduce ambiguity into the interactions. Ambiguity is a common way of working in the visual arts, but not as common a method in interactive media. People seem so focused on the ‘interface’ and the ease of use, that they forget that art doesn’t need to follow those rules, and perhaps the most interesting interactive art doesn’t follow the rules of interface design.

DC There was a definite decision to sometimes use non-linear navigation, which tends to give readers a sense of freedom from manipulation…I hope. As a writer I certainly began writing in a less linear fashion, although I probably didn’t develop this skill as quickly as Robin might have liked. I love fictive spaces and I always want to lure my readers away from too much analysis of the text…of what’s going on. As to the ‘distancing’, much of my writing is about personal stuff and because that can feel overwhelming and suffocating, I wanted to distance readers, but that was more from a writer’s point of view, not so much from the position of someone creating interactive media.

Irina Dunn of the NSW Writers Centre has written that “web technology will remain insubstantial until writers specialised in the artform begin to make their contribution and create an audience for the medium.” What type of audience are you seeking to create for your work?

RP The artist/writer audience is a difficult question. I often feel that it’s driven by concern to apply marketing to the process of producing the works. I think these sort of comments are also driven by people who are unsure of media and are maybe scared of technology. But as I’m working I do generally have a person in mind to whom the work talks and as an artist I know that my work online is visited by more people than it would be if it was in galleries.

DC I tend to agree with Irina. I haven’t liked a great deal of what has been labelled ‘hypertext’ on the web. And I don’t see the point of simply transcribing poems which might be published in hardcopy onto a web page and thinking that the transcription is, in itself, anything amazing. It’s legitimate. I publish my poems in that form online. But, it will be as writers embrace the possibilities of the web that substantial things in writing will emerge. A piece called SURFACE, which is a collaboration of ours, is a good example. In it, Robin makes the words ripple and sparkle, stand still and disappear, and he accompanies them with one small moving illustration, an almost whimsical reference to the fact that words do conjure images and vice versa. You can see it at: http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame/level2/petterd.html

DC Yes. All the works are in a sense unfinished. But that’s because readers will always make of them what they will. Robin and I hope to do more on the works that are still there. We’re giving a presentation at trAce’s conference, INCUBATION, and the online piece we’re making for that will add to Archiving Imagination. It will be a meta-narrative which traces the formations of our existing online stories/semi-autobiographies/fictocriticisms in innovative ways and also addressing questions about narrative, intertextuality and the blurring of text/image/sound boundaries as they occur on the web. We’re looking forward to making that. And we’d also like to rework our first ever piece, Imaginative Reading V, to make it less linear.

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June 2000

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