Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

December 2000

The cygnets on the ornamental lake at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne were somewhat bemused. When not being enlisted by their long necked parents to drum up a little business from people throwing bread at the water’s edge, they poked about the curious floating objects which have temporarily invaded their space. These objects, which sang and chirruped exquisitely as the cygnets cavorted around them, were part of Garth Paine’s installation Reeds, for the Melbourne International Festival.

Reeds was a site-specific installation consisting of a series of reed pod sculptures (artfully designed by Christopher Langton) which transmitted and broadcast computer-generated music. The music was produced in response to data gathered by the pods on the basis of variations in the weather, light, wind speed and direction and solar activity. In this sense, the music was conducted by the natural environment with the aid of interpretive and generative software programs hooked up to the reed pods. The data collected by the pods was transmitted to a land-based computer which analysed and fed it into a sound synthesis software program designed to generate music in real time, producing 8 channels of digital audio. These channels were then broadcast back to the reed pods where Sennheiser EK300 stereo receivers, installed in 6 of the pods, received the broadcast signal. These signals were then separated into 2 mono components, fed into 2 adjacent pods and broadcast using amplifiers attached to the reed stems.

The reed pods were designed to blend almost seamlessly with the surrounding environment. Similarly, the music generated by the pods subtly mimicked the kinds of sounds you would expect to hear in this environment. You needed to constantly remind yourself that what you were seeing and hearing was, in fact, artificially constructed. The Botanic Gardens, an artificially constructed “experience” of the natural, are an apt setting for the work, highlighting an important theme of Paine’s work. Reeds allowed the viewer to negotiate a number of tenuous oppositions, such as the distinctions between the natural and the real, the artificial and the virtual.

Reeds, positioned as neither for nature nor against technology, enabled the viewer to experience the symbiosis between the two. The processes enacted by the reed pods were akin to the photosynthetic responses triggered in the surrounding plant-life when they are exposed to the same stimulus. At a time when popular representations of technology tend toward hysterical denunciation and generate fears about its dehumanising properties, Reeds reminds us that the nature/technology dichotomy is itself entirely artificial as is the concept of nature.

The question of where the sound performance of the installation takes place also highlights this blurring of boundaries between the artificial and the real. As Paine points out in the Reeds catalogue, sound literally penetrates the body. In this sense, the presence of the human audience is as necessary a condition for the performance as all of the technologies that drive the installation. We can’t separate the human from the technological—technology is, in fact, a necessary condition of humanity.

Reeds continues Paine’s explorations of the responsive, activated space that began with such works as Ghost in the Machine, Footfall and Map 1. Like these, Reeds is thoughtful, eloquent, evocative and ingeniously executed. The only disappointing aspect of the installation is that it could not remain in the Botanic Gardens permanently. I’m quite sure the swans wouldn’t mind.

Reeds, Interactive Sound Installation by Garth Paine, Melbourne International Festival, Ornamental Lake, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, October 14-November 12. www.activatedspace.com.au/installations (expired)

RealTime issue #40 Dec-Jan 2000 pg. 18

Oran Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary, Tissue Culture and Art(ificial) Wombs

“Test the power of your loins!” was the call for men to donate their semen for Sperm Race—one of the most publicised events of Next Sex: Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness, this year’s Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. The festival sought to engage electronic arts, gender studies and queer theory to highlight the mechanisms of discrimination based on sexual preference, gender or heredity. Analysing men’s semen for mobility and hence reproductive success, while giving women the opportunity to participate by placing bets on whose sperm they thought would be the fastest swimmer, seemed to reinforce rather than challenge these issues, but I tried to keep an open mind…

While the banks of the Danube resonated with To Rocco Rot from the outdoor sound stage, the very brown Bruknerhaus Concert Hall was hung with Dieter Huber’s huge vinyl prints of irritating, unerotic, morphed double vaginas and multiple penises. Wander upstairs and you’d find a pink faux fluffy viewing lounge for Natacha Merritt’s (US) web-published soft porn digital images of herself. Demonstrating the festival’s prevailing lack of critical engagement, Merritt was sure her work was really “art” as she also had a print publishing deal.

In a simulation of sleaze you could follow some gaffer taped arrows down back corridors to find Shu-Lea Cheang’s (US) The IKU Experience. The Blade Runneresque Experience has a variety of straight and queer couplings, a loose narrative of sci-fi viral cybersexual encounters, dialogue of the moaning kind, a sprinkling of sexy cinematography and 3D graphics—but I’m not sure how it ends.

The most rewarding installation was Sergio Messina’s Brave New Porn which showcases amateur (rather than industry) porn images from similar-interest-groups on the net. Perhaps you are looking for a hiccupping lover, a play pony to ride, another clog worshipper, or you just want to swap pictures with some friends that delight in “plush sex”—the arranging and photographing of cuddly toys in erotic poses. Messina illustrates with both humour and respect the variety of human desire as these otherwise marginalised consenting adults get together online.

On the gallery level clear plastic tents housed a selection of bio-art projects that manipulate nature by processes like changing the spots on butterflies by cell modification or inserting synthetic DNA into living cells. Australians Oran Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary (Israel) were showing their ongoing project Tissue Culture and Art(ificial) Wombs, now being carried out at Harvard Medical School in Boston—growing skin, muscle and bone tissue culture on degradable polymer worry dolls in the artificial womb environment of a NASA developed bioreactor. The project questions our loss of innocence in the age of technological reproduction, but is not clear on the ethical issues surrounding the seam between tissue culture and the creation of an autonomous living entity.

The Next Sex symposium covered tired material such as disembodied cyber sex, contraception, and transgender operative procedures. Sandy Stone, a pioneer in the field of virtual sexuality, had nothing new to say either as she did the same performance I saw at Digital Aesthetics in Sydney in 1996. The controversy of the festival was neo-Darwinist Randy Thornhill’s theories on rape as a natural evolutionary adaptation for survival, generating outrage from both men and women in the audience. However, there was no official platform for response.

Thankfully downstairs the independently curated electrolobby—a net event of streaming and sushi provided a haven from sex. Works included Sissy Fight, Eric Zimmerman’s (US) engaging multi-user bitchy playground game of teasing and scratching and ganging-up strategies and Icontown from Bernd Holzhausen—a network community project based on the concept of the pixel as building material. Also featured was Leonardo, with Annick Bureaud, the artistic and scientific network that has existed for more than 30 years and has been slapped with a lawsuit by a French financial firm claiming violation of its trademark rights and etoy (Switzerland) who won their legal battle against retailer E-toys in a similar name dispute, by mobilising a global army of net users to electronically engage and defeat the corporate giant.

The parallel Cyberarts 2000 exhibit in the Ars Electronic Centre and the OK.Centrum venues hosted a variety of interactive and sound works. Borderland from Laurant Hart/Julien Alma is a variation of the Streetfighter genre, a game console with a choice of about 40 disparate and amusing opponents, such as a woman with a sink plunger, a man covered in cardboard boxes, a set of twins, gasmask guy, the backpacker who swings the backpack as her weapon. You also get to choose the backgrounds, from postindustrial urban wasteland to desert terrains. The control buttons are a semi-dismantled standard computer keyboard leaving enough keys to move your player, adding to the sense of hacked genres.

On the large scale was Rafeal Lozano-Hemmer’s (Mexico/Canada) Vectorial Elevation, a stunning execution of public art with international participation facilitated by an internet site. Over a 2 week period you could design via the web a light sculpture to be made by 18 searchlights on top of buildings around Mexico City’s main square, which could be seen for a 10 mile radius. Global participants were sent back webcam documentation of their implemented design, creating a tangible sense of technologically mediated remote intervention into public spaces.

Each evening a different performance event was featured—the most enjoyable was Scribble with Golan Levin’s (US) Audio Visual Environment Suite software projected onto a massive screen in the concert hall where the mesmerising graphical interface generated soundscapes. Ars Electronica also ran a late night social club with themes of sex work, peep shows and beauty contests. These were supposed to be provocative, but hardly seemed to raise an eyebrow amongst the audience. The highlight was the wo-man gender morph night with two very differently paced acts—New Yorker Dred-Drag King Extrordinaire’s sweaty hip hop and rap sets, and Sydney’s norrie mAy-welby performing intelligent cabaret to the crowd’s delight.

The Free Speech Camp squatted outside the social club in the Ars Quarter. This motley assortment of caravans and a corrugated iron cantina provided the only mention during the festival of the current Austrian political situation where organisations such as Public Netbase in Vienna and Radio FRO may lose their funding and ability to provide independent commentary against Austria’s right wing government.

Being at Ars felt a little like playing shuffleboard on the Titanic, as eugenics and bioengineering were discussed without any reference to political contexts or social realities. Turning the ship around is unlikely as Ars Electronica is following the genetic theme again next year. Nearly everyone I spoke to expressed their dissatisfaction with this as well as the jurying process for the Prix and the lack of responsiveness to contemporary debates. In its larger context as an arts festival Ars Electronica is sponsored by global computing and telecommunications corporate entities that are perhaps unwilling to engage with these ethical issues.

Microsoft, one of Next Sex’s main sponsors, may be excited by the possibility of a “genetic upgrade of mankind”, however the rest of us may like to stay with our current bio-operating system as the hidden upgrade costs may be too high.

Ars Electronica 2000 and Cyberarts 2000, Ars Electronic Centre, Bruknerhaus Concert Hall, OK.Centrum, Linz, Austria, September 2-7, www.aec.at/festival2000

RealTime issue #40 Dec-Jan 2000 pg. 18

Jon McCormack, Eden

During that strange, sunny quiet of the Sydney Olympics, the train journey out to Casula had a tinge of the surreal. It was Spring, the natural time for New Life, the third “capsule” in the Cybercultures: Sustained Release program at the Powerhouse. Rolling through the balmy outer suburbs, you could feel the new life photosynthesising—an ongoing renewal of ancient, carbon-based forms. Inside the wonderfully cavernous gallery, the idea gets a twist; this life is new like a new car, a new TV. It’s crawling around inside ‘new media’, conjured by artists and turned loose inside the computer.

Technosphere III, by British collaborators Jane Prophet, Gordon Selley and Mark Hurry, is one of the ‘classics’ of this decade-old microgenre. The plot is simple: you create an artificial creature from a set of off-the-shelf parts (head, body, mouth, eyes, wheels or legs) and then release it into the wilds of the Technosphere, a vast artificial savanna where thousands of others roam. Life for a technocreature consists of the bare essentials: foraging, eating and procreating. Death is as close as the pointy jaws of the nearest ‘carnivore.’ In its original online incarnation, circa 1996, the Technosphere remained invisible; the system sent out regular emails detailing the artificial life of your cartoon creation. In this newer off-line version, we can follow the creature in real time, watch it shuttling around the plains meeting, eating and having sex with passers-by. This is life in 3D, with hardware acceleration; sharp-edged and fast-paced. Like a game of Quake.

Jon McCormack’s Eden is a more restrained and complex artificial ecosystem. McCormack seems to be moving away from the lush 3D aesthetic of works such as Turbulence; Eden’s visual surface is simple to the point of being diagrammatic. Flickering discs move through a flat matrix of cells, foraging on lichen-like patches of ‘food’; every now and then one of them ‘sings’ an abstract refrain. Like many such works, Eden gets interesting in the longer term, as these artificial organisms adapt to each other and their environment. Equipped with virtual hearing, their behaviour becomes linked to sound—organisms sing to attract a mate, or (altruistically) announce the presence of food. While this sounds like an experiment in cyberbiology, it’s also a manifestation of McCormack’s reflective nature philosophy—in particular a concern about the human need to experience ‘nature’, and the gradual erosion of living environments in favour of their simulations. In this sense the work’s title is highly ambiguous—this little world is complex and engaging, pleasant to see and hear, and like that fabled garden, it’s whole, contained and ordered. On the other hand it’s the merest tracing of the complexity and vitality of a real ecosystem, and it won’t grow us food or generate oxygen; it’s a kind of uninhabitable Eden.

Anita Kocsis’ Neonverte is an electronic garden in a quite different form. Clusters of flickering LEDs line the walls of a darkened space, leading towards a video-projected image. An abstract, low-fi soundtrack meshes with the stuttering 3D wireframes of the video. Layers of meshed trees and flowers scroll by, a bird is frozen on a branch; the virtual space is discontinuous, dissolving into flashing pixel–grids and chunky texture-maps. There is a kind of poetry of digital degradation at work here which sits well with the idea of the garden; Kocsis has generated an electronic mulch which folds familiar nature imagery in with the blank, abject surfaces of wireframe 3D. The technical means are simple enough—no Artifical Life programming here, or complex interactivity—but the result is remarkably poignant.

In Neonverte pixels seem to decay and sprout; so too in Kat Mew’s Muto, an interactive which plays out the fusion of biological matter and digital code. Like Neonverte, Muto does without the A-life processes of Technosphere and Eden; and this seems to leave more space for aesthetic invention. Muto runs in a circular domain, like the view down a microscope. Jittery animation loops slide through 5 elemental domains; cellular blobs fuse, clumps of code shed pixellated numerals; Steve Law’s soundtrack is all funky bleeps. While this cyber-bio mix-up is a familiar story, what marks Muto out is attention to detail: Mew’s animation in particular is intricate and energetic. Its presentation at the Powerhouse matched that level of detail, with video projected onto a weather balloon, wrapping perfectly around to push Muto’s disc-world into a gently swaying, glowing sphere.

If biodiversity is important, perhaps cyberbiodiversity is too. New Life presented an enjoyable balance of approaches, and a mixture of technical and aesthetic concerns. While this stuff is hardly “new life”, it offers imaginings, proposals, for how life and technology might come together—and in that sense diversity is crucial.

New Life. Cybercultures: Sustained Release, curator Kathy Cleland; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Casula, September 30-November 12

RealTime issue #40 Dec-Jan 2000 pg. 21

Writers and new media authors appear to be well served by 2 organisations with ambitions to foster all aspects of electronic literature—the trAce writing community based in Nottingham and the more recent Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). Recently the ELO announced 2 new $US10,000 prizes for Electronic Fiction and Poetry in the first annual Electronic Literature Awards.

While notionally housed in Chicago, the ELO (yes, they’ve heard all the jokes) has an ambitious international mission to “promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature.” Scott Rettberg is Executive Director of the ELO (www.eliterature.org) and co–author of the hypertext fiction The Unknown (www.unknownhypertext.com/), which won the first trAce international hypertext writing prize.

trAce and ELO

trAce (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/ – expired) is already well known in Australia, with Sydney writer Bernard Cohen a former writer in residence, a visit to the Adelaide Festival by trAce director Sue Thomas, and Alan Sondheim (a former trAce writer–in–residence) currently at the Australian National University. In what ways does the ELO replicate the activities of an organisation like trAce, and how does it differ?

Both trAce and ELO are focused on the expansion of the literary use of electronic media and both have an international focus. Both have very valuable web resources which are hubs for our community and for showcasing electronic literature, and both organisations are attempting to sponsor international electronic literature prizes.

One obvious difference between the two is that trAce has both an international focus and a local base in Nottingham and ELO has an international focus and more of a national base in the US. We’re as active in New York, San Francisco and Seattle as we are in Chicago, and during these early stages of our activity, we’re intensely focused on raising awareness of electronic literature in major US population centres. We’re holding a variety of readings and other events, and we’re facilitating more ongoing discussion of both the economic and artistic issues involved in electronic literature. We’re acting both on the web and in person. As wired as we are, there’s still no better way to draw people into the field than live interaction. Many of our programs are focused on facilitating that person–to–person interaction. We’re focused on making this a bigger tent, and neophytes are welcome.

The other principle difference between trAce and ELO is that we’re as interested in helping to develop new distribution models and markets for electronic literature as we are in fostering its artistic growth. So though we’re most interested in forms of literature like hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry and interactive drama—forms designed specifically for the electronic media, that use the computer to do things which can’t be done in print—we’re also focusing attention on what’s going on in electronic publishing. It’s a tremendously exciting time in that arena. As a writer, I’d ultimately like to see publishing models that enable electronic writers to support themselves through their work.

Funding and independence

Most cultural support in Australia is state funded in some manner. How is ELO funded and how you ensure your independence?

The state of public funding for the Arts in the US is quite dismal. Recently the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities have both been whittled to shadows of what they once were. I consider this a national disgrace, but regardless, to develop the kind of programs that we’re trying to pull off, we clearly couldn’t rely on public funding from the federal government here. Instead, we’re reaching out to corporations, foundations, and individuals. Many internet and technology companies in the US have done quite well in the internet boom (even after the NASDAQ crash), and we’re asking them to help fulfill the cultural responsibility that our government will not. It’s a tough pitch of course, but many of these companies were founded and are led by people who do have something of a visionary impulse, who do want to better the world through technology. Though pure greed is quite rampant in the dot com universe, individuals and companies within the internet sector have not entirely lost sight of the idea that the internet is a global village, one which should have art and culture as well as a marketplace. Even more important to our fundraising strategy is giving from individuals. More than half of our seed money came from individual gifts, and I’m hopeful that our operating budget will also reflect that kind of grass–roots support.

As the founder of the organisation, I decided early on that the ELO will remain independent of the prerogatives of any single corporate entity or government institution. Our funding comes from a variety of sources. Additionally, we have three clearly separated boards—a board of directors, of internet industry advisors and of literary advisors. When they are funded, our prizes will be judged by the international board of literary advisors, who are not beholden in their judgment to either the board of directors or to our corporate sponsors. All this has made funding the organisation more difficult than it may have otherwise been, but that integrity is worth the hassles it entails.

The prizes

The ELO has announced a series of major electronic literature prizes for 2001. Could you describe what genres of electronic literature will be eligible?

At this stage the prizes are for Fiction and Poetry but we hope to eventually include Drama, Creative Non–Fiction and Children’s Literature. The main criteria for judging the competition will be the innovative use of electronic techniques and the literary quality of the work. The fiction competition will be judged by Larry McCaffery, author of Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, and After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology. Heather McHugh, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of Hinge & Sign and The Father of the Predicaments, will judge the poetry competition.

We’re trying to focus the prizes on extending and enhancing the literary tradition, endowing them with both the monetary weight and the prestige of something like a Booker Prize or a National Book Award. We hope to raise the bar for electronic literature. We want the best writers and artists in our culture(s) working in the realm of electronic literature, and one of the best ways to do that is to sponsor a series of prizes that will in effect give the winners more time to work on new projects.

By putting together an international board of literary advisors including not only renowned experts on electronic literature, such as Sue Thomas, Michael Joyce, and Takayuki Tatsumi, but also print writers such as TC Boyle and George Plimpton, and leading critics and publishers from both the print and electronic side of things, we’re seeking a different level of engagement from the culture as a whole. The prizes should do a great deal to validate the field, and bring more people into the tent of electronic literature.

What is electronic literature?

An interesting issue being discussed in the electronic literature and hypertext communities is just what constitutes electronic literature. For example does the ELO want, or see any need, to distinguish between print based poetry, the same poetry presented electronically (for instance via a web page), or poetry that can only be presented electronically?

These distinctions are tough to make, but our focus is on aiding and publicising the development of literary works which utilise the electronic media to accomplish things that could not be done in print. I’m a big book reader, and treasure the print form, but there are already organisations working to support literature in print. Electronic literature is the babe in the woods—it’s what needs our help right now. Furthermore, it’s the way that literature is going to reach a generation of readers who are more accustomed to surfing the web than they are to picking up a book. So most of my hopes and fears for literature in general are tied up in the idea that without some particularly literary innovation in the electronic media, the internet will move ahead without a literature native to it. Such a failure would be an horrendous missed opportunity. We don’t want to see what happened to television happen to the web.

The meaning of Stephen King’s e-book

Electronic literature seems to be entering the dot com universe with the success of things like Stephen King’s recent offering. Do you see this as something good for the future of electronic literature?

Yes, I do. Even though King’s e–book was essentially just a print novella made available for download, it served as proof–of–concept for the whole field of electronic publishing. The people, in effect, have spoken, and their overwhelming message to publishers was “we will and do read off our screens.” For years, we suffered the likes of Sven Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, London, Faber & Faber, 1996) jawing on about how the electronic media is the end of literature. Then King comes along, and suddenly the nature of the discourse changes—electronic publishing just may be the future of the book, rather than its end.

The other tremendously important aspect of the King e–book is that it is actually necessitating that publishers re–examine their own publishing models and royalty structures. If we’re able to remove the costs of printing, binding, shipping, warehousing and pulping the artifact, we’re able to produce literature at a lower cost to publishers. As in King’s case, a higher percentage of the profits should go to the writers, and a great deal of savings should be passed on to the readers. Even after constructing this more equitable model and passing on the savings, publishers will be able to reap higher profits as well. In my view, even pure print publishers will benefit. With the simultaneous evolution of print–on–demand technology, more books should be available in print and electronic format, as well as the literature that is created and designed for the electronic media.

The future

In 5 years time what would you like the ELO to have achieved? What would be different?

Wow, that’s a tough one. Firstly, I hope that ELO is still around. Even accomplishing that is not going to be easy. Secondly, I hope that as many people spend as much time reading the web as they spend now playing DOOM. Thirdly, I hope that the international community of which you and I are a part will have expanded and will include many of the most talented writers and artists of our generation. Lastly, I hope that there is a sustainable market for the work that they produce.

Right now, when I mention electronic literature, people say, “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” Five years from now, I’d like people to be able to introduce themselves as electronic authors, and to have that mean that they keep bread on the table by making great art happen on the internet.

When can we expect to see the ELO and The Unknown in Australia?

We’re hoping to line up an International Day of Readings next year for ELO, and would love Australia to be represented in that. As far as The Unknown, we’re waiting by the phone. We’ve encountered many Australians on our travels, and you folks celebrate in the style to which we are accustomed. Line us up some readings, Adrian. We’d love to come out there next year to tour the continent.

This is an edited version of an email interview with Scott Rettberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Literature Organisation, Chicago, USA.

RealTime issue #40 Dec-Jan 2000 pg. 22

Debra Petrovich’s new CD-ROM Uncle Bill is an engrossing, multilayered work that explores, with thematic and formal inventiveness, questions dealing with childhood memories, sexual abuse, social class and space. Petrovich’s distinctive, foreboding soundtrack presages its Gothic narrative of sexual violence, industrial chaos and repression. Set in Wollongong in the 1960s with the ‘satanic mills’ of BHP’s steelworks, Uncle Bill’s opening macroscopic aerial focus of Petrovich’s childhood neighbourhood and its subsequent microscopic zoom into the intimidating spaces of a home, set the right frame of dramatic action for the user to navigate the work.

Uncle Bill displays a subtle use of still, moving and scrolling illuminated text images accompanied by pulsating images of a child threatened by drunken men sporting air rifles. Bored teenagers and leather-clad bikies milling around milk bars on their bicycles and motorbikes sometimes give Uncle Bill a Kenneth Anger look. Footage of crashed cars and roadside victims evoke a JG Ballard undercurrent. As we navigate the rooms and corridors of the home, the industrial sounds of Wollongong are a perfect aural metaphor for the traumas of a child in the care of sadistic, loveless people.

Uncle Bill’s powerfully raw images and sounds form a stark, resonant work with aesthetic, cultural and formal roots in various feminist video and new media traditions exemplified by artists Lynne Hershman, Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson, Dara Birnbaum, Sadie Benning and Carole Schneeman. The violent treatment of a child is acutely rendered by the recurring motifs of her playing in a tub of water and the frequent abrasive sounds of a barking dog (off-space). Both motifs underline Uncle Bill’s chilling mise-en-scene of child sexual abuse.

In a tour-de-force section of the work, a collage of structured scrolling text attests to Petrovich’s strong visual and sound instincts as an artist/narrator. Her graphic multimedia skills and unswerving motivation to create form out of chaos is ideally suited to the expressionist treatment of this subject matter. The CD-ROM genre suits Petrovich’s atmospheric collage style of techno-creativity. As we follow our own navigational instincts, we can immediately experience the overpowering sense of “no escape” from the violent domestic and industrial cacophony that surrounds Petrovich’s child protagonist.

The ugliness of the suburban-industrial landscape of the CD-ROM provides an apt metaphor for domestic violence. However, Uncle Bill is not a thesis—it does not set out to prove a point—but instead it reveals a tragic assemblage of ideas, gestures and atmospheres that vividly telegraph to us the traumatic horrors of child sexual abuse.

Ideally because of the expressionist stylistics used in Uncle Bill, it would be better exhibited as an installation (as it was at Artspace, Sydney in August). It is a large, bold and atmospheric work notable for its omnidirectional thematic and formal concerns around an issue central to our individual and social psychic lives.

Despite initial scepticism in certain quarters, CD-ROM is thriving in this country and overseas. Uncle Bill is an innovative, experimental contribution to the expanding definition of the genre.

Uncle Bill, written and directed by Debra Petrovich; interface designer Wade Marynowsky; producer Julianne Pierce, CD-ROM 2000.

Writers and ideas engaging in and with the relationship between writing and the internet came together recently at the incubation conference, organised by the trAce: online writing community at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

A text not only approaches the singularity of its writer(s) but also a community comprising each and every reader. If the reading audience inhabits the space between words, one hopes a comfortable space will be made by the text for its visitors (the writing of ambience). Considered as such, the text itself is structural, paradigmatic—a necessary and arbitrary formality whose contrivance abridges physical and ideological distances. This contraction apparent in language is a one whose design draws people together in the social space between signs.

The thread I know specifically as incubation and then generally as conference—itself a type of text—also functioned as a structural formality with its own set of social spaces. By providing opportunities for meeting or gathering—the rapture of the moment as a celebration—incubation was a success. Many delegates commented that incubation possessed a vibrancy not normally felt at conferences.

The gift to be found in conversation is perhaps to make possible in writing the passage and the place, the transient and the preserved, the singular and communal, the foreign and familiar, comfort and vulnerability without contradiction. Conversation that keeps the lines of communication open and plural, speaks of what it means for writing (language) to be interactive.

Linda Marie Walker and Michael Tawa consider the reciprocating contexts of language and structure as an endless modification and questioning of reality’s perceived formal dimensions—or the validity of a finished product—by way of an email correspondence. Conversation approaches an inclusive space in which each participant’s contribution is welcomed—“… so, to live is to live with strangeness, to approach without knowing, to touch without possessing” (Linda Carroli, speak, http://ensemble.va.com.au/speak/ featured in Salon, an exhibition of internet writing curated by Mark Amerika, http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/incubation as part of the incubation program).

How to find ways of being with others is the question approached infinitely through the practice of communication and writing. This motif recurs variously in the hypertexts of the writers featured in Salon.

incubation asked: “What is the value of the conference as a mode of communicating in the field of electronic media?” For me, its value lies with the understanding that television, telephone, mail, book, video, voice, conversation, music, song, sculpture, internet, conference and letter are all possible means of facilitating communication. There is room enough in the world for all mediums and means when one recognises that each moment of expression complements, enhances and accompanies the others.

It follows that if one considers how one writes; one will have also considered how one writes for the internet. Writing and the internet exist as social practices within a world of reciprocating contexts. Here I found the theme of writing and the internet sadly limited in scope in contrast to the experience of verve: the other writing, coordinated by Teri Hoskin for the 2000 Adelaide Festival of Arts, in which writing and writing technologies were considered expansively.

Something of the other writing was suggested in Dr Jill Seal’s discussion of the Perdita Project—a growing online compilation of manuscripts by women that not only recovers their historical contribution through writing, but also includes often overlooked writing practices such as diaries, account books, vitalogies and devotional writings.

Voice and text messaging already articulate private and transient writing practices whose relevance and joy exist purely for participants. Panelist Mike Allison suggested that we are the last generation for whom the printed word carries implicit authority, and so perhaps the revolutionary practices he feels are so lacking on the internet are already taking place in the privacy of chatrooms, through mobile phone message banks and via email.

The internet’s wider ecology of communication technologies and communicating possibilities were addressed by panelist Robin Hamman who spoke of television and mobile telephones as tools with the potential to broaden individuals’ access to information and chatrooms over the internet. The chatroom—itself a transgressive writing practice—is a series of private and public overlapping texts made by a community of individuals. Independent of the formal channels of professional literary institutions, the chatroom, or MOO environment, reminds us that writing perceived at the level of its universal practice can be a truly liberating experience.

incubation: trAce International Conference on Writing and the Internet, director Sue Thomas, web design Simon Mills, administrative assistant Jill Pollicott, web editor Helen Whitebread, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK, July 10-12.

In the 1980s the place to be and be seen was SIGGRAPH. Its first Art Show was in 1981 in Dallas and it became the essential focus for the art and technology community. By 1990 ISEA was the young kid on the block, unfettered by convention and keen to take risks. But by the late 90s it had burned out. So now, at the dawn of a new decade, century and millennium there’s Consciousness Reframed (www.caiia-star.net/production/conref-99/index.html – expired). Over its first 3 invocations (1997, 98 and 2000) Consciousness Reframed has established itself as one of the more significant international meeting places for the misfits who often slip between the cracks of conventional discipline boundaries.

The conference convenor is Roy Ascott, Founder and Director of the CAiiA-STAR postgraduate program that has attracted some of the top international talent in the arts field (www.caiia-star.net/people/RA.html). In his own plenary talks and presentation Ascott was anxious to reinforce his concept of the transdisciplinary nature of the art, science, technology and consciousness convergence. He also quoted another regular contributor, Australian Stephen Jones: “The term technoetic is the key. It refers to our use of technology in cultural production, and it also refers to the noetic, or how we understand the world and our processes of being in it. This suggests the exploration of how technology is changing our perception of the world.”

Ascott proposes “Edge Life: technoetic structures and moist media” where “between the dry world of virtuality and the wet world of biology lies a new moist domain, a new interspace of potentiality and promise. Moist media will constitute the substrate of the art of the new century, a transformative art concerned with the construction of fluid reality. This will mean the spread of intelligence to every part of the built environment coupled with recognition of the intelligence that lies within every part of the living planet.” Shades of de Chardin and Gaia as he continues: “This burgeoning awareness is technoetic: techne and gnosis combined into a new knowledge of the world, a connective mind that is spawning new realities and new definitions of life and human identity. This mind will in turn seek new forms of embodiment and articulation.”

In his own talk Stephen Jones (www.culture.com.au/brain_proj/ – expired) describes cyberspace as a system that orders information objects according to their importance to each other or via their perceived value to an observer. This geometric space is very different from the perspectival space that orders objects according to their geographical location. As such cyberspace has more of a relationship with medieval organisation, (I was reminded of Eco’s library in The Name of the Rose) than with the Renaissance systems that displaced them and have dominated our thinking since. The mind has a similar structure where myriad connections are rhizomatically made and remade allowing consciousness to emerge. He concluded that the real and the virtual are of the same nature. Fact and fiction converge. We face a continuous spectrum of experience differentiated only by the tools we use to observe this continuum.

Many of the artists speaking at Consciousness Reframed describe virtual artworks. Donna Cox (www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/cox/), the pioneer of ‘renaissance teams’ where artist and scientist work together to reveal knowledge via computational tools, has recently joined the CAiiA-STAR PhD program. Her virtual theatre is the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum in New York and she talks about the global virtual team who created their spectacular digital tour of our local Milky Way Galaxy. She compares this to her personal research which looks at the way that different civilisations have merged scientific knowledge and artistic practice in order to understand the nature of the universe and consciousness.

From the other end of the budget, Sydney-based Melinda Rackham (http://empyrean.cofa.unsw.edu.au – expired/, www.subtle.net/) demonstrates her “Empyrean—soft skinned space.” She says, “however I am the centre, I hold the axial position 0 0 0 in this space—that of the empyre builder.” Her presentation playfully mixes her own poetic insights with quotes from the VRML manual to create a fluid frame of double meaning. “My words become flesh—my statements create mythology.” Empyrean achieves a sensitivity that is unusual in the often clunky VRML world and will consolidate Rackham’s reputation for work in the network domain.

Greg Garvey describes a split brain user interface that he developed during a residency at the Banff Centre in 1999. Using a headmounted display with both stereo vision and sound, he presents the user with the emotionally charged testimony from the 1991 Supreme Court Nomination Hearings where nominee Clarence Thomas faced Anita Hill who accused him of sexual harassment. The spectator simultaneously sees and hears the two protagonists—one via the left eye/ear, the other via the right. Like most of Garvey’s work the simplicity of the concept belies the complexity of the ideas and emotions he juggles. It’s a profound and challenging piece that sadly, since C-SPAN won’t release their video rights, cannot be exhibited.

Michael Quantrill is a researcher and artist-in-residence at the Creativity and Cognition Research Studios at the University of Loughborough. He describes a system he has been developing with the centre director, Ernest Edmonds—one of the pioneers of the computational arts in the UK. It’s based on an earlier work called SoftBoard which uses a large scale whiteboard interface that allows artists to communicate with a computer process by drawing standing as if at an easel and which allows greater flexibility of movement than a mouse or graphics tablet. Their more recent work extends this to more general movement detection where “the computer can become an extension of the individual, part of us, but not always under our direct conscious control.”

The theme of human computer symbiosis continues with Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer (www.mic.atr.co.jp/~christa/ – expired) who describe their new PICO-SCAN system created for the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. The spectator faces an array of flat panel plasma screens each with an attached hand held scanner. When the scanner is picked up, artificial-life creatures come out of hibernation and the spectator can modify their behaviour and feed them by scanning in parts of their bodies. When the creatures acquire enough energy they can mate and produce offspring that inherit various characteristics from their parents, as well as minor mutations. The artists describe the work as an open system since it involves the external agency of the spectator and suggests that the creature-creature interactions coupled with the creature-spectator interactions create a complex adaptive system that links the real and the virtual.

During the 90s the Brazilian/US artist Eduardo Kac (www.ekac.org) established an impressive reputation and he has created several key works in the emergent genres of telecommunications, teleprescence and interaction. Now another member of the CAiiA program, he describes his most recent work in Transgenic Art—works that involve genetic engineering.

Genesis takes a sentence from the Bible: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The genesis gene was created by first converting the sentence into the dots and dashes of Morse code. Kac describes his decisions: “This sentence was chosen for its implications regarding the dubious notion of (divinely sanctioned) humanity’s supremacy over nature. Morse code was chosen because, as first employed in radiotelegraphy, it represents the dawn of the information age—the genesis of global communications.” (In the same month that Kac described this work at Consciousness Reframed Morse code was officially retired from the telecommunication spectrum.) The next step converted this Morse code into a DNA sequence where: dashes were represented by the letter T (thymine); dots were represented by the letter C (cytosine); word spaces were replaced by the letter A (adenine); and letter spaces were substituted by the letter G (guanine). This DNA sequence was then synthesised and inserted into the genome of a strain of E-coli. This living bacterium was exhibited and grew, reproduced and mutated. After exhibition the mutated DNA sequence was decoded to produce the modified sentence: “let aan have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that ioves ua eon the earth.”

The relatively remote location of the conference, at Caerleon in South Wales, helps make the event small and intimate with plenty of opportunity for networking and socialising. Next year Ascott intends to focus on the non-ordinary, non-local and non-linear with an emphasis on parapsychology.

Consciousness Reframed 2000, The Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts—CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport, UK, August 23-26.

Australian filmmakers and interactive media artists interested in challenging traditional forms of documentary can now apply for up to $100,000 to produce an online project. The Australian Film Commission recently established an initiative with the ABC to encourage documentary projects that “explore the online environment in innovative, challenging and original ways.” Up to 4 successful works will be selected for production and housed on ABC ONLINE.

The initiative provides a vital space for Australian cultural content at a time when the Internet is primarily a site for commercial transactions, says the manager of co-production at ABC New Media. With the online documentary genre still in its infancy, Domenic Friguglietti says it’s an opportune time to dedicate web space for the development and inclusion of Australian rather than North American cultural material.

Peter Kaufmann, project manager at the AFC, hopes this initiative will encourage filmmakers to redefine the boundaries of conventional documentary. The fund also provides a unique scope for documentaries to be instantly available to an international audience. Audiences can also have the opportunity to respond and engage in an intimate and idiosyncratic way with the content of the online works, making their own contributions. Kaufmann says the AFC definitely isn’t looking to provide conventional documentaries with an alternative delivery and marketing system via the online environment, but is interested in new and radical approaches that explore what is possible within the documentary genre.

Recent Australian examples of the form include a chronicle of the life and work of artist Russell Drysdale compiled by the ABC and the National Gallery of Australia (www.abc.net.au/arts.drysdale – link expired), a work by Carolena Helderman on personal stories of HIV (www.hivaids.webcentral.com.au – link expired) and Fools Paradise, a history of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival documented by Peter Milne and produced by the ABC and the Performing Arts Museum (www.abc.net.au/arts/fools). See also Sharkfeed by John Grech and Matthew Leonard (www.abc.net.au/sharkfeed/index.htm – link expired), an exploration of the social and cultural after-effects of Sydney’s 1960 Graeme Thorne kidnapping. (See Dean Kiley’s response to the work in Working the Screen, page 3, and the authors’ account on page 26 of OnScreen both in RealTime 38, August-September, 2000).

Kaufmann says these should not necessarily be seen as indicative of the kind of projects the AFC will produce, but rather as examples of the possibilities of the form. Filmmakers and new media artists often ask what type of online documentaries the AFC might fund, but besides limiting the content to material based on fact, Kaufmann prefers not to offer prescriptions and hopes people will design and assemble their own unique aesthetic.

Twelve months into your Artistic Directorship of the Australian Dance Theatre in Adelaide, where are you at?

I don’t know whether it was just naivete on my part or because I was so focused on the work but I didn’t really think about the history of the company when I took the job. In every interview that I’ve given, up until very recently, the situation with the previous director, has been brought up. But for me, an organisation advertised a job, I applied for it, I was the successful candidate. I’ve always wanted to have a cohesive unit of dancers and a creative team to work with on an ongoing basis. Now I find myself in this situation, I’m really doing what I’ve always wanted to do. However there has been a change in the culture here. I’ve come into a company that’s had a particular mode of operation and a particular way of presenting itself within the artistic and greater community. That’s probably been the biggest challenge—to come in and shift the culture within this company. I feel my ideas have been embraced by the Board and the management although with every new idea I come up with they don’t say, “Great! let’s do it tomorrow!” They are governing the company responsibly by asking me to bring them more information and to talk it through and I really appreciate that.

We want to push towards film and multi-media as part of our agenda. We plan to work in alternative spaces, not only virtually and digitally but also in real alternative spaces. We want to continue curating seasons of work by local, independent choreographers and support the local dance community. I want to try and open up rehearsals from time to time so that local dance practitioners and members of the public can walk into rehearsals and talk to the dancers and gain some insight into our rehearsal process. I want more sense of community ownership of the company. We want to throw open the doors and offer our studios for next to nothing to local choreographers who are underfunded. We have rehearsal studios that sit here vacant from 6pm every night and on the weekends and as far as I’m concerned they are not our property completely. They are the property of the community. Once a month I want to have showings in the Balcony Theatre and from that process works will emerge for a more formalised season that may occur once every 6 months. I’ve always felt that flagship companies should be more than just the director and the dancers and the touring of proscenium arch works. We certainly do have a charter of responsibilities and that is why we are funded to the level that we are—to maintain performance levels in particular spaces of representation. But we should also try to be dynamic and far-reaching in our relationships. I mean it’s nothing radical. It’s nothing new at all. But it hasn’t happened. When I first applied for the job I envisaged ADT, these studios, as being a real nerve centre for dance in Adelaide, a hive of activity and not always from or about myself and my dancers.

Could you talk about your interest in multimedia? Why film/video? Why dance? Why the mix?

When I create I like to manipulate a very open palette. I’m interested in projecting a contrasting semiotic layer, something that’s going to skew the image of the live dancing bodies, some other text which will create a new image and a new experience and allow a different reading of the performance. I’m interested in finding fresh aesthetics and meanings and experiences through incongruous juxtapositions of texts. If ever I employ any technology within a live performance it is there, as the platitude goes, to serve the idea of the work. Because this generation of artists is pioneering the use of new media in performance, much weight and time can be taken up by the technology at the expense of the ideas and the conceptual terrain of the work. I wonder if the artist should know what the technology can do but at the same time be separated from it when it comes to making the work, should let go of the need to have a “hands on” approach. I have. I’ve actually shied away from multimedia works because I think what you can do with technology in performance is still actually quite crude and basic. Unless the audience is armed with knowledge of what is technically occurring, they don’t have the same impression of the work as the creators of the work do. I am interested in working with film and video technology but that’s not new technology. If we’re talking new technology, we’re talking developments on the web and also digital broadcasting.

What I’m interested in and what I’m planning at the moment is doing a multi-platform work. It’s one project but its delivery is on a number of different media platforms. Its working title is Mind Game. It will have an online delivery, a digital broadcast, a separate film that’s a composite of the film within those works and perhaps a CD-ROM. although I wonder about the future of CD-ROM. It hasn’t really taken off. This work is about the mind and paranormal phenomena. It started off as an interest in Jung but from there I’ve developed an interest in telekinesis and mind reading and these strange pockets of mental phenomena that can’t be absorbed by science.

I have an interest in dance and in certain aspects of culture or civilisation so I want to bring the human body into dialogue with these. Using video and film in performance allows me to do this. I think it would be difficult to stage this dialogue with just bodies in space although I fetishise pure movement to a degree as a choreographer and uphold it as a totally valid point of view.

It’s a really strange connection between my subconscious desires and my body trying to fulfil those, which drives me into dance and hence choreography. And I don’t understand that connection and I don’t even know if biologists understand that connection. A fundamental desire of mine is to see bodies manipulate themselves through space at great velocity and in an ambiguous orientation. I remember reading an interview with Edouard Locke from the Belgian dance company La La La Human Steps about 12 years ago. He was saying when a dancer is spinning horizontally in space, like in a full twisting butterfly, it connects us to our dream state because floating in space is like dreaming. I really identify with that statement. I receive a great deal of psychic satisfaction from watching dancers perform those kind of phrases and those kind of movements. So I choreograph in this way for very individual, personal reasons. It’s not that I think because it’s spectacular and high risk that people are going to be drawn to it. It’s not about that at all. It’s a personal pursuit.

Because they’ve had an incredibly steep learning curve with regard to movement, they are hypersensitive to the complexity of constructing a move. They have a heightened sense of how to regulate their own bodies to approach a move. They have developed this awareness from having to pick up a diverse range of skills in a relatively short amount of time. It’s something they don’t get too much relief from. We have a training program that’s very constant and consistent. Not only do the dancers do release classes and ballet classes but they also do advanced yoga, and 3 training sessions per week in gymnastics, breakdance, martial arts and Capoeira manoeuvres. From these movement disciplines we have developed a vocabulary that is specific to this company over the past 12 months. There’s a misconception about my process. What the audience sees on stage is really difficult, risky work which looks really punishing on the body. There’s an assumption in the dance community that I just take dancers and force them to do these difficult movements that are way above their level of ability. That’s not the case at all. We have probably the most well thought out, well planned, training regime of any company in Australia.

That’s because I’m attracted to individuals. I get attracted to certain individuals that I meet and come across.

I feel incredibly supported in what I want to do with this company. It’s not something you can do overnight but it’s happening.

I love dance works that use bodies to depict the landscape of the mind. Lucy Guerin’s The Ends of Things swoops upon a moment in the life of a man (Trevor Patrick). This man is alone yet not alone—4 dancers populate his internal and external reality. At first they are outside. Maybe they are his thoughts, perhaps memories, metaphors, non-literal others. Then they move into his room, peopling his negative space, manipulating him, calling his agency into question. Later a party is thrown and they become people, you know, the ones who always seem to be having fun. Trevor is both visible and invisible. Hugely funny movements occur because of his flickering visibility.

There is humour despite the pathos. The man is pathetic but in the sense that he displays no self-confidence or sense of mastery over his everyday life. Yet neither is he oppressed by this fact. Patrick has a knack of moving with great simplicity. He does not need to look cool. And this creates quite a contrast with everyone else. Perhaps their skill should suggest a neutral kinaesthetic but this is just not possible. Ros Warby, Brett Daffy and Stephanie Lake are far too good, their movements too elegantly executed.

At one level, The Ends of Things deals with the abstract. The 4 dancers are aspects of the man’s internal life. Like in an Edward Albee or Harold Pinter play, we do not know exactly what these figures stand for. Perhaps they are real; perhaps they are memories, or aspects of the mind. The Ends of Things explores its themes in several ways. It is sad and beautiful. Guerin’s is a thoughtful work beyond the intricacies of her usual choreographic style. Sadly the inspiration for the work came from Jad McAdam who died suddenly this year.

Chunky Move’s latest mix, Combination #3, shown at this year’s Melbourne Festival, consists of 3 works by Phillip Adams, Gideon Obarzanek and Kim Itoh. Adams’ egg-centric, Ei Fallen, hails from Humpty Dumpty. Its fluorescent lights, square dance patch and minimalist bench make the stage look like a battery farm on acid. The costumes are bizarre, padded, white egg shapes. Later, they are replaced and fake arms flap around dancing torsos. The dancers twist and turn in a courtly dance that reminds me of the ball scene from Roman Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers. That’s because there is a formal element in Ei Fallen. Formal with a twist. Ei Fallen concerns death but it didn’t make me sad. Perhaps I’m hard-boiled.

Obarzanek’s Crumpled is distinguished by the intervention of its curtain. The red drapes rise and fall independently of the action, which continues regardless. Perhaps you think this is a Brechtian device but it isn’t because there is no particular message to be conveyed. There is a lot of physical interchange, precision, athletic strength and grace but no discernible meaning over and above the movement. Obarzanek describes this piece as “purely structural and formal.” On occasion, individuals escape the curtain’s divide. At one time, two men are in front, perhaps espousing a male gaze. They do a little comedy sketch—suburban boys trying to dance. At one point, fire breaks out. The curtain is an escape, a pathway to safety. The way in which the curtain breaks the viewer’s access is a bit like TV ad breaks; a slash right across the middle of the action.

The last piece in Combination #3 was Itoh’s Butterfly and Me. I found it difficult to view this justly after the first two works. Its style of movement was quite different, beginning with many rolls on the floor. There was also a section where people spoke, travelling pathways etched in light. One part had Luke George address the audience, incorporating elements of the here and now in his text. Although Obarzanek wrote in the program notes of an “imaginary world” shared by all three choreographers, I had a feeling that Itoh’s world was quite different—both from the other two and from mine. I think I would need to see more of that world in order to enter fully into it.

The Ends of Things (for Jad McAdam), Lucy Guerin Company, choreographer Lucy Guerin, sound (original concept) Jad McAdam, composition Franc Tetaz, design Dorotka Sapinska. Combination #3, Chunky Move, Ei Fallen, choreographer Phillip Adams, set and lighting design Gideon Obarzanek, costume and set design Dorotka Sapinska; Crumpled, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, composer Hugh Covill, costume David Anderson; Butterfly and Me, choreographer Kim Itoh, costume David Anderson, lighting Margie Medlin; National Theatre, Melbourne International Festival of Arts, Melbourne, October 19-28.

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