Australian
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performance and
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April 2003

Peretta Anggerek, another night: medea,

photo Heidrun Löhr

Peretta Anggerek, another night: medea,

Nigel Kellaway, artistic director of The opera Project, begins listing some long-term relationships. Medea and Jason clocked up 10 years before ending with a bang. George and Martha dragged themselves onward kicking and screaming for 23 years in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Kellaway and Regina Heilmann have made performance together for 13 years, and in another night: medea opening at Performance Space in April, they playfully contemplate the often vicious games that only the intimate can play. They do this by staging themselves as fictions, and restaging these classic fictions as themselves, raising the stakes as only long-term collaborators can.

These are games for consenting adults. Perhaps they’ll play Are you gonna kill the kids tonight, honey? On paper this new work looks incredibly complicated, a clash of styles and performance demands. another night: medea interweaves 3 contrasting works based on the legend of Medea—Heiner Müller’s 1983 theatre texts Despoiled Shore, Medea: Material and Landscape with Argonauts, Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Louis Nicholas Clérambault’s early 18th century French solo cantata Medée. And yet Kellaway insists that the work is simple: “My work is very straightforward. It’s not complicated…It’s not difficult work at all. It’s celebratory work. It’s celebrating our culture, our history, and everything that we recognise, things that we know.”

In the beginning, at the centre of the work, there is Medea. Jason’s there too, but he definitely plays second fiddle to the ultimate bad mother. In this work, true to the slipperiness of gender in The opera Project’s work, Medea will be played, in one of her incarnations at least, by a bodybuilding tattooed Indonesian countertenor. The striking Peretta Anggerek is back, singing Clérambault’s Medée cantata, accompanied by a baroque trio on period instruments. This will be performed in French, with surtitles. The beautiful strangeness of Anggerek’s performance presence, for Kellaway, “…personifies what Medea was. Medea has been variously described as, well certainly as a foreigner, but also as a sorceress and there is something of the sorcerer in the countertenor voice, particularly in contemporary culture. It has magical powers.”

Unfortunately Anggerek won’t get to kill the kids. Clérambault’s cantata reads the story as a revenge tragedy, but finishes before Medea murders her children. Presumably, killing her partner’s new wife was enough revenge.

In the middle there’s George and Martha. No one has written about the middle years of Medea and Jason, years in which they raised a family. Most storytellers just want to skip to the bloody end. Few writers have plumbed the depths of middle-aged dysfunction as sensationally as Edward Albee in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Kellaway draws upon Albee’s masterpiece to sketch this absent middle ground, to articulate the intimate violence of the long term relationship, and to view these mythic figures, Medea and Jason, as a savagely dysfunctional couple. On a performance level, the meeting of this naturalistic classic with multiple readings of the Medea story forces a re-engagement not only with baroque music theatre and Greek tragedy, but also with naturalism. Kellaway aims to open audiences to new ways of listening both to music and to theatrical texts, staging meetings of clashing material in which strangeness is not erased but sublimated:

“[Regina] and I are not going to be just there trying to shout down the music. It has to be like chamber music, where the spoken voice and the material that we are doing has some marriage point with the music. And so you start looking at quite naturalistic text—dialogue as sets of recitatives and arias…It’s a fresh way of looking at naturalism, at naturalistic acting. The clash forces us to use different techniques, discover different reasons to say this text…The slippage between these modes of performance is a considerable negotiation for a performer. How do they actually talk to one another rather than just being jump cuts?”

The company’s most recent performance work was Entertaining Paradise, a darkly seductive take on the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. But Kellaway innocently insists, “I’m not a dark person.” The perception of him as The Prince of Darkness is simply “because I’ve always steered against doing feel-good, pretty work. I just don’t think that’s terribly potent. Sex and violence are the mainstay of theatre.” And he wants to keep his work on that potent edge, to keep it interesting. But he also wants to have fun: “Ten, 15 years ago, you wouldn’t dare play with these kinds of things—it would be a crime against art. I’m just getting older; I don’t care that much anymore. I want to have fun, and I want audiences to have fun. I guess I’m not nearly as snobbish as I used to be. There are less rules, I think, as you get older, a lot less rules.”

After the dark territory of Entertaining Paradise Kellaway says this new work is much more playful: “It’s much funnier. Ian and Myra were not bright. They didn’t have much sense of irony at all. But Nigel and [Regina] in this piece are much brighter, much quicker, much wittier, and in a way, nastier…They’ve had a number of years experience knowing how to rip strips off each other…but also how to maintain the relationship. And I think that’s the important thing—not every long-term relationship has to finish. Medea chooses to finish her relationship with Jason. That doesn’t always happen…[for us] there will always be another night.”

The restless ghosts of Medea and Jason, George and Martha will be moaning and rattling their chains as Kellaway, Heilmann and an all-star early music cast present a dark night of fun and games. Witness the thrilling spectacle of virtuosic performers taking on huge challenges. Be prepared for something rich and strange.

another night: medea, The opera Project, performers Nigel Kellaway, Regina Heilmann, countertenor Peretta Anggerek, pianist Michael Bell, harpsichord Nigel Ubrihien, baroque violin Margaret Howard, bass violin Catherine Tabrett, Performance Space, April 30-May 10.

RealTime issue #54 April-May 2003 pg. 39

Jo Darbyshire, The Gay Museum

Stick-thin, willowy figures emerging stark black from the white radiance and intense heat of midsummer, like Lowry’s matchstick Londoners suddenly stripped of their winter clothing and transplanted to the Australian desert. This is the mental image I have of British sculptor Anthony Gormley’s Inside Australia, currently installed on a remote salt lake, several kilometres outside the nearest town and appoximately 750kms east of Perth. It is only an imagining because I haven’t seen the work—I couldn’t afford the cost of travelling to the site. Inside Australia was certainly the main game for Perth International Arts Festival publicity, and a grand parting gesture from Festival Director Sean Doran. Enigmatic, distant, and beyond the reach of most, Inside Australia was an expensive project to realise ($650,000) and obvious questions have been raised about the relevance or appropriateness of a British sculptor creating work for a landscape inside Australia. However, the work was a hit with those mostly from outside the metro area. The community of Menzies is rallying support to retain the work permanently.

Patricia Piccinini’s MCA Travelling Exhibition Call of the Wild aside, the rest of the visual arts events registered as mere blips in the festival program. The decline in numbers of high-profile international art stars this year, however, allowed local work to shine through. Two curatorial projects focussing on marginalised practices and local histories in WA emerged as the most important exhibitions to be staged in recent years: The Gay Museum, curated by artist and historian Jo Darbyshire; and South West Central: Indigenous Art from South Western Australia 1833-2002, curated by Brenda L Croft with Janda Gooding for the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

In The Gay Museum Darbyshire used the design logic of contemporary museums by splitting the exhibition into sub-headings including, STEREOTYPES, INVISIBILITY, UNNATURAL PASSIONS, AIDS, BEATS, WOMEN’S LIBERATION, VICE, DRAG and CHANGE. Street language, colloquialisms, slang and insults were intermingled with the language of taxonomy, provenance and arcane museum-speak to discuss the fluid histories of gay, lesbian and transgender activity in WA over the past 100 years. This borderless approach to language was carried into the presentation of collected material in traditional museum cases. Darbyshire gathered costumes, photographs, quotes, magazines, videos, club and personal memorabilia from members of Perth’s gay and lesbian community and married these with clothing, artefacts, newspaper articles, wildlife and mineral specimens from museum and library collections. The placement of objects created often humorous (and painful) visual and symbolic narratives from these disparate and multiple sources. Through her appropriation and re-contextualisation, Darbyshire identified the absence of a strong material history, and the manifest tendency of a community towards “self-censorship” as a survival tactic.

The first museum case, placed beneath the title SODOMY, provided a bold and unflinching entrance statement to the exhibition. It contained a Squid and Arca floating in formaldehyde, an antiquated Spirit Level, a Police Truncheon c. 1842-77, a 2001 Letter from Peter Foss (then Shadow Attorney General) and 2 Mirror Balls, specimens of pyrite, irondisulphate. The Letter, an official response to a community member lobbying the repeal of sodomy legislation contained 2 lines that were so unbelievable, I had to read them again (and again) to fully comprehend their meaning: “We do have a duty to recognise vulnerability and take reasonable measures to protect it. We do not consider it appropriate that law should permit sodomising of our young people.”

Even with the looming shadow of ignorance acknowledged as ever present, The Gay Museum was above all celebratory and profoundly moving. I was particularly intrigued to read about the 1940s murder-suicide of two ill-fated lesbian lovers on Perth’s foreshore, and their passion for motorbikes. News articles were presented beside a 1920s Harley Davidson and an enlarged photograph of one of Pride Festival’s immensely popular Dykes on Bikes who lead the parade down the Northbridge streets each year.

South West Central is such a significant survey of Nyoongar art from the South West of WA that it is impossible to do justice here to the work of its artists and curators. Fortunately there is an extensive catalogue including an interview with filmmaker and family archivist Steve Kinnane, curatorial essays and a map of the Nyoongar area. South West Central traces a history of practice from the first recorded representation made by an Aboriginal in contact with government officials in King George Sound, through the Carrolup tradition of painting, to contemporary works in digital media, photography, textiles, weaving, fashion design and painting by leading Nyoongar artists.

While I found the exhibition quite difficult to navigate, it was clear that design played a somewhat secondary role to the presentation of diverse works. Chris Pease’s Monnop (1999) re-presented an archival photograph held in the Battye Library of “one of the last Victoria Plains Natives” as a large-scale painting of strength and endurance. Lance Chad/Tjilyungoo’s searingly beautiful landscapes, including Morning (2000), shone from the walls like portals onto dawn and dusk in carefully observed light-filled scapes of gum trees, forests and clearings. The prints of Byron Pickett, Bevan Hayward/Pooaraar, Dianne Jones and Sandra Hill also emphasised the growing prominence of print media in contemporary Nyoongar practice. My favourite work was by the recently deceased Joyce Winsley, The Storyteller (1999), a small, half-reclining figure made of Guildford grass and cordiline, her fingers languidly pointing toward the earth.

Still on the theme of Australian landscapes, British-based artists Tim Maslen and Jennifer Mehra’s Phoenix at the Holmes à Court Gallery purported to deal with the positive, regenerative effects of fire. The result was a bitsy collection of collaged prints, drawings, resin casts of burnt logs and an oversized mobile of resin seeds floating from the gallery ceiling to the floor. Certainly this is a difficult subject to broach considering recent events, and I was reminded of this while travelling through the charred landscape to Jenny Watson’s Dolls House at the International Arts Space Kellerberrin (IASKA) 200kms from Perth. In the relative cool of IASKA, Watson’s 5 large-scale paintings on Belgian linen, especially Gulliver’s Drought (2003), symbolically evoked some of the scenes I’d passed. A blonde girl in a red skirt stands tall in a big, brown, barren landscape beside a cow no bigger than a puppy, a wilting flower in her hand.

Call of the Wild at the John Curtin Gallery presented several major works by Patricia Piccinini in super-slick, seamless fashion. While the video, Swell (2000-2002), was mesmeric and pristinely installed, and Breathing Room (2000) unbearably creepy in its vibrating, womb-like claustrophobia, the installation of photographic works felt somewhat overpowered by the exhibition design. Too many Dulux feature walls in ‘now’ colours swamped Protein lattice (1997) and the hilarious love story/operating theatre melodrama-in-pictures, Science Story (2001-2002). While Piccinini’s work invariably reproduces well in publications, the bogan in me was grateful for the opportunity to finally see the undulating curves of her Car Nuggets and Panelwork en masse in the very shiny flesh.

Perth International Arts Festival, Jan 25-Feb 17: Inside Australia, Anthony Gormley, Lake Ballard, Menzies, Jan 16-Mar 31; Call of the Wild, Patricia Piccinini, John Curtin Gallery, Jan 24-Apr 6; The Gay Museum, curator Jo Darbyshire, WA Museum, Jan 23-May 31; South West Central Indigenous Art from South Western Australia, Brenda L. Croft with Janda Gooding (curators), Art Gallery of Western Australia, Jan 30-Mar 30; Dolls House, Jenny Watson, International Arts Space Kellerberrin, Jan 20-Feb 24; Phoenix, Tim Maslen & Jennifer Mehra, The Holmes à Court Gallery, Feb 2-Mar 23

RealTime issue #54 April-May 2003 pg. 30

Ali, Nat

photo Jennie Groom

Ali, Nat

When Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn and his boys came gunning for ‘Bugs’ Moran and his gang in a downtown Chicago garage 74 years ago, a soliton wave of loud, strange virtual particles began to reverberate down through the years, eventually passing through Darwin in 2003. Riding the crest of this virtual white-cap were 2 gals, armed with chainsaws.

The Arafura Sea doesn’t witness many breakers, nor does the local art scene play host to many art divas from the South, but on St Valentine’s Day, Nat & Ali stormed into the height of the Wet Season with a retrospective and a series of media spots that had the whole town agog, and asking, seemingly in one voice (in typical Darwin posh-art speak): “Who the fuck are these two?”

Well, Nat & Ali are 2 Melbourne symbiotes with decades of work behind them (telescoped into a couple of years, naturally—who has time for decades of work?) and enough pages to tear from their journals to cover at least part of a couple of walls in the 24HR Art Gallery. On the other side of the gallery is part of their 2000 installation, A Face in the Life of Nat & Ali and in the centre sit Nat & Ali Jnrs, 2 ventriloquist dummies who often take part in the proceedings (although since Nat & Ali-in-the-flesh have left, Nat & Ali Jnrs’ participation has been minimal, except to present a Zen-like air of intense perturbation).

While the makeover of A Face in the Life of Nat & Ali is undoubtedly impressive (are Nat’s cheekbones really that high?), it’s the carefully composed journal pages arranged on the walls that have the punters most intrigued. Immediately noticeable is the fact that Nat & Ali’s journals make no clear distinction between the rockstars, internationally famous artists, television talk-show hosts and TV stars whose images checker the pages, and the images drawn from Nat & Ali’s own career and lives. No hierarchical arrangement of text or image, no narrative derived from the contiguous placement of page or element, no difference between the Nat and the Ali (to artificially separate them for a moment, until the magnetic field that unites them becomes too distorted and they are crashing back together like 2 horseshoe magnets, pole to pole) and the famous—just-because—who smile glibly from the pictures torn from women’s magazines and newspapers. It used to be the case that artists only became really famous after they were dead, but as Nat & Ali ruefully acknowledge, who the fuck wants to wait that long? We want fame and art now! And…maybe they’re the…same thing. Cool.

This simple raison d’etre, the making of Nat & Ali’s career as artists into the subject of the artwork itself—the old serpent eating its own tail schtick—has been done before of course and the cultural trajectory that leads from dandy to rock star has been equally well documented, but there is a poignancy to this show that is entirely absent from the Big Players of this game (Jeff Koons, Madonna etc). Above all, Nat & Ali seem to be championing something a little greater than themselves: the art scene itself. Nat & Ali’s The Art Bar, represented here by an audio CD created for the show, fetishises one of the central activities of the gallery scene—drinking—in an affectionate homage to all their friends (and future friends) who gather for this ritual. It’s a sometimes pretentious scene, for sure; and sometimes frustratingly dull, but when it works, when a small community of artists and gallery patrons starts to generate those complexity vibes, well, interesting things start to happen. Nat & Ali recognise this and their work seems to be a gesture towards assuring its continuation.

The laws of complexity are invoked in Nat & Ali’s journal collage where strange telegraphic messages are formed through the simple device of underlining various passages in texts cut from popular journals and newspapers. We read disconnected passages, words and phrases—sex advice, a bit of a write-up about a Nat & Ali exhibition, a TV star’s appearance at a charity—and one gradually gets the sense that Nat & Ali are not so much makers of their own artistic destiny as conduits and condensers for the myriad random messages and images of the contemporary cultural labyrinth. We observe that while The Best of is about Nat & Ali, Art Divas to the Masses, Nat & Ali themselves become shimmering ciphers for the entangled web of popular culture, media celebrity and the art dance that somehow still manages to keep us entertained.

The Best of… Nat & Ali, 24HR Art Gallery, Darwin, Feb 14-Mar7.

RealTime issue #54 April-May 2003 pg. 31

Tasmania is often viewed as an environment particularly suited to artists and many interstate and international practitioners have chosen to relocate here. Their reasons range from the ease of networking, exhibition opportunities, the ‘clean, green image’ and a School of Art that, before cutbacks and closures, was regarded as one of Australia’s foremost.

All the artists in Hiding Places have moved from interstate and the show aims to reflect their responses to Tasmania’s physical and cultural environment and the impact of relocation on their work. Hiding Places “looks at ways in which we experience a ‘place’ where themes of disorientation, dislocation, artificiality, the subterranean and sublimity are referenced in all their complexity” (catalogue). Though this somewhat overstates the achievement, the works, in varied media, are innovative and thought provoking, providing a stimulating, memorable experience.

Entering the Carnegie Gallery, Hobart City Council’s contemporary artspace, the viewer is confronted with a balanced mix of installation, digital prints, photography and painting, sympathetically arranged within the space.

Maria MacDermott’s 2 very different pieces are “drawn from experience where nature takes [her] far…from petty cares…Repetitive processes [are] a means of distilling these recollections” (artist’s statement). While the idea of referencing nature (read Tasmanian wilderness) is tangential to the show’s theme, the works are strong. Moment from the lake of light is a giant floor-based light box of MDF, perspex, wax, acrylic and oils. Comprising 21 x 10 painted perspex panels, each is subtly different in tones of golds and browns; their swirling patterns evoke water as much as modernist patterning.

The purity of this strangely tactile work is echoed in MacDermott’s hypnotic wall-based installation of 16 small acrylics, Skeletal structures of loss. All are variations on tree-branch structures in a vast yet understated range of colours.

Sarah Elliott addresses dislocation and how culture is preserved within foreign environments. Her process of cutting and reconstituting patterning—in this case, wallpaper—evokes the home. Suspended perspex panels are covered with the blue flock of an elaborate wall covering or with background beige cutout elements, painstakingly adhered. This dissection does speak of “dislocation, stasis and loss” (artist’s statement). The piece is labour-intensive in execution and aesthetically striking.

Ben Booth’s sculptural installations metaphorically reference the lifeboat. Vicissitude is a large hollow sassafras and pine cocoon, seductively shaped and meticulously crafted. Unit is a vaguely boat-shaped construction made of dozens of small, sickly-blue pool siding panels.

The 3 medium scale oil paintings by Susan Robson, Pods of Memory, are quasi-abstract, alluring in lilacs and blue-greens. Her brushwork is vigorous and the deliberately repetitive works, with just discernible figurative elements taken from nature, are otherworldly and suggest “longing and the solitary…” (artist’s statement).

Kim Portlock’s night crossing series—12 digital prints—feature close-up elements of the human body; eerie orange body parts under green or black water. Most images in isolation would be unreadable, but in series their subject emerges. Again, the work only tenuously addresses the wider themes of Tasmania’s physical and cultural environment or of relocation, but the artist’s explanation about “alienation and the dissolution of losing oneself” can be read into the work.

I found the miniature-scale paintings by Waratah Lahy, Untitled 1-7, fascinating. Painted on flattened, sanded beer cans, with touches of their original logos retained, they document street scenes during a nationally significant event in Hobart, the funeral of the last surviving Anzac. The artist’s renditions of small moments of this occasion—policemen at-ease, floral tributes with an out-of-focus close-up face mimicking the photographic, a group of deftly rendered onlookers—are like quick paint sketches and capture her topic with a vibrancy and immediacy reminiscent of popular culture imagery. Lahy relocated from Canberra, however these seductive works do not particularly address a change of physical environment—they explore something universal.

The show is co-curated by 2 participants, Robson and Portlock; this is something generally frowned upon, but the overall standard of Hiding Places, its visual impact and rationale are strong enough to overcome suggestions of self-approbation.

Booth is also the latest member of the artist-run exhibition space, Inflight, the first such venture in Hobart for several years, aiming to facilitate both the presentation and discourses of innovative, experimental art. Housed in a former school in North Hobart and administered by 6 or 7 artists, its opening show in February did not live up to the hype, but it could be an initiative to watch.

Hiding Places, Ben Booth, Sarah Elliot, Waratah Lahy, Maria MacDermott, Kim Portlock & Susan Robson, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, Feb 7-Mar 9.

RealTime issue #54 April-May 2003 pg. 31

A group of elders from Sydney’s Palestinian community gathered recently to share their memories of Al Nakba (The Catastrophe) of 1948 when Palestinians were forced to leave their homeland. Inspired by their stories, a number of Arab Australian film, new media and visual artists (Sohail Dahdal, Fadia Abboud, Soraya Asmar, Maissa Alameddine), community workers (Alissar Chidiac, Antoinette Abboud) and activists (Rihab Charida, Nicole Barakat) are collaborating on an exhibition that will serve as “testimony to an organic process between the keepers of these memories and those of us who choose to engage,” says film-maker Sohail Dahdal.

In May, on the 55th anniversary of Al Nakba, the Performance Space gallery will become a space in which the sentiments of Al Nakba are voiced: “The feelings of 1948 may materialise through sounds, moving images, objects, aromas, sights and performance installations.”

As well as displaying artworks inspired by the storytelling day, the exhibition will house a collection of historic works and contemporary pieces including photography, street art, posters and sound pieces. “These creations will come together to communicate the survival and determination of the Palestinian people,” says Sohail.

You can listen to the stories of Mahmoud Youssef, Fouad Charida and Soliman Al-Hawani on www.iremember1948.org

Noel Tovey’s CV from 1953 to the present is really something to read and the following are just “some of his favourite productions.” Starting with Anthony and Cleopatra at the Princess in Melbourne, it ranges through musical comedy (Paint Your Wagon, The Music Man) and revue, detours into drama (Witness for the Prosecution), ballet and, inevitably, TV (Beauty and the Beast, Sunny Side Up). Making the necessary pilgrimage to the UK in the late 60s, Tovey lands no less than a principal dancer’s role with Saddler’s Wells Opera Ballet and an acting debut on the West End in Stella Adler’s production of Oh Dad, Poor Dad…” He sings, choreographs, creates musical staging with Diane Cilento, does Oh Calcutta in Paris and Hamburg and Charley’s Aunt on BBC2, teaches and co-founds London Theatre for Children, and ducks back to Australia in 1971 to direct Anything Goes. Meanwhile, he juggles performances in Butley and Henry IV, runs a gallery specialising in 20th Century decorative art and dabbles in the fashion scene.

In 1991 he returns to Australia and puts his considerable talents to work developing and implementing performing arts courses at Eora Aboriginal College in Sydney and, later, in Wagga Wagga and Darwin. In 1995 he directs The Aboriginal Protestors…, a controversial take on Heiner Müller that travels from Performance Space to the Weimar Arts Festival. Of late, he has been involved in the development of new plays by Indigenous writers; guest lecturing in Aboriginal art and in drama and movement; curating art exhibitions; lecturing on creative writing; designing and directing ceremonial events for the Adelaide Festival, Sydney Olympics and Mardi Gras and dashing off an autobiography to be published later this year.

Taking a closer look at “the formative years that set this life on its remarkable course”, Noel Tovey decided, while he was at it, to develop an excerpt from the autobiography into a narrated performance. Little Black Bastard premiered in March this year at the Carlton Courthouse Theatre, the same courthouse where 62 years before, the magistrate signed the papers that sent his father to gaol and Tovey and his sister and brothers to the Royal Park Welfare Depot.

Little Black Bastard, narrated by Noel Tovey, Darlinghurst Theatre, Sydney, 23 April-10 May.

Tim Newth and David McMicken are co-artistic directors of Tracks Inc, a contemporary performance and dance company known for its innovative, large scale outdoor performances and work with Indigenous communities. The company’s working methods have developed over a decade as a response to their home in the Northern Territory.

David It is the melding of the differences between 2 directors, our backgrounds, personal beliefs, working methods, and multiple artform skills base, that creates our unique working environment. We work with diverse communities, making human connections, ignoring boundaries of professional and amateur, community and other. We promote quality in output and experience. Sometimes we focus on individuals; sometimes on specific communities, on the rubbing points between cultures and the meeting points; sometimes on ourselves as artists.

Tim October 1995. I am informed that we have received funding from the Australia Council to produce and present Ngapa. This project involves a group of white and Indigenous artists travelling the rain storm Jukurrpa, a dreaming path about 2000 kms long which lies between Alice Springs and Darwin; then creating a performance from the journey. We arrive in the remote Aboriginal community of Lajamanu to meet with Freddy Jangala Patrick, who jointly conceived the project. On that same day he is flown sick to Katherine Hospital 600 kilometres away and later that week we are informed he has cancer.

Late October, I’m back in Darwin and a phone call from a family member advises Jangala is still keen to do the project and wants to start it now. The Australia Council moves quickly to release the money and we move the starting date forward. I arrange permits for the non-indigenous artists to travel across Aboriginal land, book 4WD transport, hire a satellite telephone, make arrangements with a helicopter company for an emergency air lift (if required due to accident, illness or snakebite), search out a gadget that will pinpoint our position in such a case, arrange sound equipment to record stories on the trip and liaise with the other Tracks artists to revise the schedule.

David Our methods reflect where we live. Although we are part of Australia, there are key differences: a culture spanning tropics to desert—a very arid time and a huge wet season; vast distances between population centres; 30% Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations with many language groups; a long history of pre-white trade with South East Asia.

Darwin Harbour is almost twice the size of Sydney Harbour but there is no beach culture, no surf here and the seas are home to crocodiles, box jellyfish and other tropical dangers. We are a major stepping stone into and from Asia—Dili is our closest capital city and Indonesia on our doorstep. We are constantly aware of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘multicultural’ issues.

Darwin has no tertiary performing arts training, no resultant graduates and no facilities for re-training. We do not have full-time employed professional performers.

We’re over 3000 kilometres from any large Australian population centre and acutely aware of an unusual phenomenon—the perceived distance between a Southern population centre and Darwin is greater than the distance between Darwin and down South.

Tim November, one week before we are due to leave, I have been feeling a strong need to speak to Jangala in person and instinctively make the 12-hour journey to Lajamanu. The night I arrive, he looks much sicker but his spirits are strong and I take him to visit 2 other old men who spend the evening singing into his cancer-swollen belly. I soon realise we won’t be leaving next week. Two weeks later, I am still in Lajamanu. During this time Jangala draws Ngapa dreaming designs with me and I record his stories of this country in the Warlpiri language. In broken English I also record his life story, how he travelled the country as a child with his family from one water hole to the next, the sacred sites of the Ngapa dreaming.

David As a result of different history and culture, our expressions also differ. Different ways of being have developed as a result of the Indigenous and South-East Asian links (people, trade, visits, family, food, etc). There is always something on the boil when you overlap the various cultural calendars.

Our current work practices have been researched and refined for over a decade leading to the discovery of many ‘truths.’ One core truth is that “the collective or community way of thinking as opposed to the individual, is an integral part of our culture.”

The Western construct places emphasis on independence and less on a need for social involvement. This often entails paying less attention to the meta-messages of communication—the levels that comment on relationships—focussing instead on information as the only level that counts. It is what allows us to secret ourselves away in a studio and to work independently, separately from the rest of the world (the stage becomes the intellect and the inner workings of the body).

Tim December. Jangala dies in Lajamanu on an open patch of ground surrounded by over 100 family members. His body simply stops working. I return to Lajamanu where a sorry camp is set up in the bush just outside the settlement and all the family are there. It is respectful not to speak until after sunset and at night the women paint themselves white and howl. We spend 2 weeks living like this, waiting for the appropriate people to travel from other communities to perform the major ceremonial business.

David As the world becomes more ‘global’, it is being matched with a new approach to community, evidenced by the increase and success of community banks or the proliferation of the new ‘virtual’ communities such as the multitude of e-chat groups. In his book, The Spike; How our lives are being transferred by rapidly advancing technologies, Damien Broderick states that the faster technology changes and the more global and singular the big interests become, the more important it is to truly encourage and celebrate diversity in all its forms. This is the role of artists and philosophers—to show the way forward.

Tim Steve, one of Jangala’s sons comes with me at Christmas time to visit my family just outside of Wangaratta in Victoria. It’s his first time out of the Territory.

Traditionally, when a person dies, your respect is shown by not mentioning their name and I am not sure now to negotiate with the community now. A water tank that the 2 of us had painted with dreaming designs is moved from the centre of the settlement. I am relieved to receive a message from the Lajamanu women saying they are now ready. Steve negotiates with the men as to who should be travelling with us.

Shortly after this, I get a letter from the Australia Council to say the money had been withdrawn due to the death of the key artist. In a Western individualistic way of thinking, if the key artist dies then the project cannot go on. In Aboriginal culture, there is collective ownership. It was just a matter of following the right protocols and waiting to be told who was the next right person or people. Even-tually, the money is reinstated.

David Our predominant process is collaboration and establishing relationships that highlight connections. In order to produce quality work, we work with the kind of experts a regular artist might not approach. For example, when doing a project about the young at risk or about mothers and daughters then it is these people who are the experts; how much dance training they have had is very much a secondary issue. The many realities of our situation, often seen by others as negatives (ie isolation, small population, vast distances between population centres, highest incidences of many social ills, unbearable weather, small Western-trained base, limited performance opportunities etc) we seize upon as opportunities.

Tim Late April. David and I finally head to Lajamanu to start the project, with an archivist following a few days later with the other vehicle. Three hours out of Lajamanu it starts to rain. The dirt road of dust and corrugations turns into a river. We are one of the last vehicles to make it in. Like everyone else we are stuck in Lajamanu for 2 weeks, the phone lines are down and the mail plane and food trucks can’t get through.

David It has been important for us to discard old ways of seeing and to learn from those who understand the differences.

Tim Mid-May. We head in to Lajamanu for another attempt—artists, archivist, 4WDs and gear including the magic satellite phone. It’s dark now and we are just a few kms out of the settlement when a car stops to tell us someone has just died and the people we plan to travel with are involved in the sorry business. It could take anything from a week to a month to complete.

The next day we are called in to have a meeting with the men. They are able to leave and want to get going without the women who are heavily involved in the sorry business. We meet with the women who are not able to talk, half naked and painted white, waving their hands and shaking their heads, trying to convince us not to leave. With the men in the background yelling “let’s get going”, we wait.

Over the next few days there are several community meetings. A ceremony takes place where we are required to provide tins of flour and blankets as payment and then the women are released early. Three days after our third attempt to begin the project, we are loaded up with men, women and equipment ready to go.

As we head out of the settlement, the men and women start to argue. Do we now take the soft sand road which means we will spend a lot of time digging ourselves out of being bogged, or do we travel through the stick country which means many punctured tyres? I guess the project has begun…

David Our processes challenge established Western methods. We place the new in the context of the old. We question the inexorable chasing of the new, the modern, and question who benefits from this. Where does old wisdom (as often held within traditional cultures) fit into the new?

The structuring of contemporary form often removes the artist from the community and creates a situation where they have to insist on deserving respect and earning a reputation. Then they are constantly chasing and building an audience, a market that will eventually come to an understanding and then continue to support the artist in their endeavour to “make new and innovative” art.

Who makes up the audience? Who is showing what and to whom? Imagined and imaginary—unidentifiable, dreamed, the great potential throng, an infinitude without faces, anonymous, the entire world, applauding and invisible? Or is it identifiable faces, watching everything, admiring, approving, owning?

This dialogue is an edited excerpt from a paper delivered at Groundswell, Regional Arts Australia’s national conference held in Albury-Wodonga, October 10-13, 2002 sponsored by the Commonwealth Regional Arts Fund and NSW Ministry for the Arts. This and other papers delivered at the conference are available on www.regionalartsnsw.com/groundswell. The paper is reproduced with the kind permission of Regional Arts NSW and the writers.

Patrick Thaiday first appeared with Bangarra Dance Theatre in Walkabout (2002) and his solo in Frances Rings’ piece for that work (Rations) was a standout performance. Having grown up in a culturally diverse family of traditional dancers, Thaiday’s technique—his speed, fluidity and grace—is impressive. I spoke to him at the beginning of rehearsals for Stephen Page’s new full-length work, Bush, which is inspired by Arnhem Land. Thaiday describes learning from his family, training at NAISDA and working within the culture of Bangarra Dance Theatre.

I’ve found out more about my background in the last couple of years, especially from my dad’s side of the family. He’s from Lifu in the South Sea Islands. I went away on one of the cultural camps with the NAISDA College up to Yam Island last year. My dad’s family is from there and I spoke to his brother or cousin-brother and he told me a bit about where the family came from which was great ‘cause my dad has passed away. My mother told me when I was 12 or 13 about my ancestors from her side. They originally came from Jamaica.

Definitely. I blame my mum and dad for that. [Both were] pretty much involved in traditional Torres Strait Island dancing.

It’s a gift I’ve been blessed with. My brothers and sisters dance as well. I was choreographing when I was about 14 and had my brothers and sisters, cousins and friends perform with me. That was contemporary dance but I’m also a traditional dancer. I never really had anyone teach me contemporary styles. It was all through watching different dancers who were in Mackay at the time. I did see a few performances by Theatre Arts Mackay, the dance school up there, and other mediums like television, video clips…this was the 80s. But with the traditional side of things, I had my family, my uncles, my father, they all taught me about my culture and our way of dancing.

Is choreography something you’d like to pursue or is it dancing that interests you most?

I’d like to do both. But I would like to steer towards choreography ‘cause I’m gettin’ on a bit! [Laughs]…It’s something I really enjoy.

You know, dance in its purest form for me would be traditional. To try and fuse the two, I didn’t really agree with it. But at NAISDA they deal with the mixture of both. It opened my eyes a bit. NAISDA has given me the strength and the courage to pursue a career in contemporary dance. And it’s what Bangarra’s all about—putting the two together. I still have a love for the jazz style. That’s something I want to look into more. Bangarra’s a stepping stone for me.

The dance you were exposed to at NAISDA, could you click into it fairly easily?

Actually, yeah. The teachers there were former students at the school and, being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, there were certain styles and techniques they would use in their choreography that I had witnessed in the traditional Aboriginal communities. After a while, it was like I was at home practicing traditional dances [but] in a different environment.

I like the dances that use props. The bow and arrow dance, kulap dance—that’s a traditional Torres Strait Island instrument that’s made out of shells or a seed, it’s like a rattler. I’ve learned so many different dances—not only from my dad’s island, Yam Island, which is the central island in the Torres Strait, but from Murray Island which is on the eastern side. There are different styles of dance on each of the islands. A lot of the dances are based on the lifestyle up there. We’ve got the ocean around us and a lot of the elders sing about the ocean and about hunting, gathering food.

You had 6 weeks on secondment to Leigh Warren & Dancers when you finished at NAISDA. How would you compare the way a company like that operates to Bangarra?

The standard of dance was oh-my-god! I felt really intimidated at first. I couldn’t pick up the movements—especially the ballet because I only got exposed to ballet when I went to NAISDA and I was like 29! But [experiencing] that sort of work and that style of dance and seeing the strength they had in their technique really pushed me to try harder.

I feel a lot more at home in Bangarra. The company is very sensitive and supportive of my needs on the cultural side of things. It has the involvement of the elders and they have input into Stephen’s choreography and production. I feel a lot safer at Bangarra and my biggest inspiration was here—Russell Page who has recently passed on—just watching him dance and seeing that he was diverse in his dance…

Being in Bangarra for me is more grounded and it answers a lot of questions I have about dance [and] my identity, where I’m from. Stephen incorporates all that in his productions. I love that. Whenever I dance about my culture, about my people, you know the traditional style of things, it makes me feel really proud of who I am. Stephen manages to bring that out of me.

It must be demanding having to learn so many other styles and to maintain your traditional technique as well.

It’s full of challenges for me. If I get too comfortable in myself, there’s no oomph to go forward.

It’s called Bush and there’s a traditional elder, Kathy Marika, from Yirrkala who’s giving cultural input into the production. And I’ve been lucky enough to learn a lot of the dances from Yirrkala. Kathy was teaching at NAISDA when I was there.

I first noticed you in Rations, the work Frances Rings choreographed for Walkabout last year.

That was my first work with Bangarra. I just loved working with Frances. She’s one of the senior dancers in the company and I look up to her…I didn’t know I was to be given a solo to do. I really loved the movements she used for Ash, the piece that I performed. She seemed to know a lot about my body and she helped me use that to the best of my ability.

It will be interesting to see what she does in the future. Stephen’s always been very open to encouraging other people within the company to experiment choreographically. He doesn’t seem to be intimidated by letting other artists have that space.

That’s true. He allows us to express the way that we feel through movement. Bangarra’s about sharing. He really builds up the rapport between the dancers and himself.

Which presumably gives you the confidence to say, “well maybe I could choreograph something for the company”?

He’s given us those opportunities in the past. I’d so love to choreograph here at this company. But I don’t know how long it’s gonna take for me to get to that level. Bit by bit.

You’ve obviously had a lifetime of experience with traditional dance. A lot of Australians don’t have that experience of dance as something with deep cultural meaning.

Traditional dance will always be…number one priority for me. Stephen’s managed to combine this with contemporary influences in a way that allows me and future generations to get out there and show the rest of this nation and this world what our culture is about. His dance tells stories of old times. He brings it together and carries it forth. And I believe there’s a strong culture here within Bangarra. It’s really a family thing.

You’ve talked about your desire to choreograph. Where do you see your future as a dancer?

I definitely hope to stay with Bangarra for a few more years. Then I’d like to go out and experience other styles of dance. I’m interested in the work that Albert David is doing—contemporary/ Torres Strait Island style of dancing. Maybe a bit further down the line I’d like to start my own company. I’m not so sure whether I want to get into the style that Stephen and Albert are into. I’ve always had a love for the jazz style of dance. But for the time being my heart is set on this.

Bush, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Optus Playhouse, Brisbane, May 21-24; Playhouse, Melbourne, Jun 12-21; Theatre Royal, Sydney, Jul 23-26. The Giz, Albert David and Dancers, Performance Space, Sydney April 9-13

The contention that our sense of self is not unified, but rather radically split and divided, has a long history in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy. After World War 2, this idea became particularly associated with theories about memory and sensation. Put simply, our concept of the self is an illusion which, upon closer examination, is revealed to consist of nothing more than a blizzard of free-floating sensations, memories, fragments and moments, a shattered pattern of pieces hanging in a corrosive sea of time—“like tears in the rain” as the replicants of Blade Runner tell us.

Though this is an evocative proposition, it has become a cliché of contemporary avant-garde art, underpinning operatic performances as varied as Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela, Company In Space’s The Light Room and the Philip Glass, Robert Wilson masterpiece Einstein on the Beach. The overwhelming mastery of the latter work especially means that it is a brave artist who draws upon such models today.

At first glance, choreographer Simon Ellis’ Indelible seems to rest on this much-tilled soil. Fragments of recalled memories are replayed as video and sound. Furtive resting-places are briefly established within the gallery, while the audience cautiously moves about, trying to capture these elusive moments. Smoky pools of light bounce off the white walls as the performers write on surfaces in a failed attempt to diarise their thoughts. Even the movement seems to come and go, to suggest and glance off firmer shapes and emotions, without actually capturing any entirely established world or event. It’s all shards and pieces, scraps and patches, in which even the possibility of actually seeing every moment of the performance is deliberately denied the audience in the absence of a stage, defined seating area or other formal certainty.

The effect is entirely consonant with the idea of the divided self, but somewhere something darker, more ecstatic and more imponderable occurs. Moments recur, touches and elements are evoked and return in a deferred sense, but a kind of gentle chaos intrudes. Where Jenny Kemp paints characters who finally become resolved to their expanded, multiple sense of self, Ellis produces something closer to a mnemonic auto-da-fé. The pieces represented are not so much knitted back together to form a collage as they are broken, erased and pushed even further into a propulsive, unarrested formlessness. With only the barest temporal and emotional rises, Ellis creates a sense of an increasing trajectory of shattering and division. The final image is of a woman dressed in white, prone, mouth open as water (white with the light upon it and the walls behind it) drips into her throat, an absent, almost sadomasochistically-consumed blankness written on her face and body. As one of the texts inscribed on the walls during the show reads: “She sat on the bank and drank oblivion of her former life.” What is left remains blurred even within the memories of the spectators.

Indelible, Choreography & video Simon Ellis, dramaturgy Tamara Saulmick, sound Lydia Teychenne, lighting Alycia Hevey, design/installation Elizabeth Boyce, costume Marion Boyce, performers Natalie Cursio, Suzannah Edwards, Marion Jenkins, West Space Gallery, Melbourne, Feb 1-15.

She moves like a sprite (imperceptibly quick) a signature traced in haste. The movement flows from her own body, though Swift, Fairytales of the Heart and Mind is about something more than the individual. Swift is an extension of Eve which was originally part of the trilogy, Solos, performed at the North Melbourne Town Hall in 2001. Swift opens with a new section, danced in red. It is full of human character. Ros Warby does not move with grace but uses her fine kinesthetic knowledge to shape something quite different.

In doing so, she brings a comic-tragic edge to the movement. Perhaps it is human to be ungainly. The foibles and sheer fallibility of this moving person generated laughter from some and pity from others. My own thoughts turned to Warby’s training in Alexander technique. I wondered whether the strong sense of character in the movement was meant to imply some kind of interiority. A sort of acting from the outside-in, where the dance suggests an internal state of being.

There is certainly an intensity to the movement. It is carried out with a quirkiness that is very particular to Warby but there is also an attempt to move beyond that into a realm of generality. Eve alluded to various archetypes of femininity. I presume that Swift attempts something similar. What do I feel when I watch this ‘woman’ dancing? There is a poignancy to her predicament, the suggestion that she is not fully in control, but has to find her way through the viscera of life.

Margie Medlin’s use of screen, film, projectors and light added wonderful depth and texture to the topography of Swift. That, and Helen Mountford’s truly exquisite cello, enabled the work to exceed itself. The variety of projections of movement (face and body on curved and flat surfaces) and the interpolation of sound allowed for a more variegated gaze upon what is otherwise a solo dance work.

The second part of Swift recalled familiar elaborations. A frilled hip oscillating waves in a most feminine manner. Arm gestures, facial transmogrification, created in the flesh and by virtual means. The detail made visible in Warby’s body, and its native sense of timing is pleasurable to watch.

There is a sense that Ros Warby is moving towards voice, face, character and thought, without abandoning dance/the body as her basic medium. Swift suggests something of a transformation to me, a movement between genres, on the way to finding something new. If Swift is a daughter of Eve, one wonders where she will go next.

Swift, Fairytales of the Heart and Mind, choreographer, dancer Ros Warby, composer, cellist Helen Mountfort, designer Margie Medlin, North Melbourne Town Hall Arts House, Feb 7-16.

In an occurrence so rare it could almost be called a ‘disturbance’, Sydney Dance Company is opening its doors, its dancers and its coffers to a new work involving new media collaborations and creative forces far beyond its usual range. Underland promises to be an auspicious disturbance by New York-based choreographer Stephen Petronio, with music by Nick Cave, and visual design and costumes by Ken Tabachnik and Tara Subkoff respectively. The other key collaborator in the work is Australian filmmaker and digital media artist Mike Daly whose role is to imagine and create the video visuals for the work.

Mike has an impressive list of screenings for his short films binary and in transit including festivals such as Clermont-Ferrand, Cameraimage and Electronica. These films, both of which favour movement and image over dialogue and foreground a relationship between the body and the digital, resulted in his selection for the project. He also provided SDC with some of his work that is, he says, “less final result oriented, not intended to have an audience and more about experimenting with process and form.” These experiments, along with his films and his discussions with Stephen Petronio revealed “similar concerns about working with these media and similar approaches to our processes.”

The creative process on Underland is currently occurring digitally across various continents and will soon come together for a 2-month intensive rehearsal period. “I brought this project over to Berlin because I was coming here anyway to attend the Berlinale Film Talent Campus and since Stephen and Ken are in New York, I’m just as remote from them in Sydney as I am anywhere.

“Being over here has been really inspiring. Almost everything seems to have its roots in concept and politics yet also seems to really care about aesthetic…It frustrates me when I attend Australian film and electronic arts festivals and the only issues being discussed are about technology or how people got their funding…Stephen, Ken and I discuss (often by email) concepts behind the work a lot and in great detail. All of us like to allow the process of creating something to be that of exploration so that to a certain degree you are working out what you are trying to achieve while you are achieving it.”

This approach, while familiar in dance, contemporary performance and visual arts is less common in filmmaking. “Within traditional filmmaking the high cost of production means that this way of working is often looked upon as being wasteful. Since everything must be worked out before shooting, it can make the process of actually creating the images and sounds a bit more like just executing something technical. This can be inhibitive as there is less opportunity to respond and make changes.”

So far the collaboration has been “a very open and free process, we all bring up ideas and there is no sense of power or ego being thrown around which I tend to find a lot on really commercial projects I have worked on. We discuss ideas and then I create images that work with those ideas.”

These ideas are certainly contemporary fascinations. Underland is based on concepts of the “post-post-human, post-war, post-apocalypse, post-civilisation…It all seems very relevant when you turn on the news night after night and see your country’s government locking up refugees and spinelessly supporting the world’s super-power in a war on a small country for the control of oil. One wonders if we are already post-civilisation, the most powerful people in the world racing to the apocalypse.”

The fascination with the post-apocalyptic is deeper than this current dash toward the end of civilisation for Australian and those observing us. It is a world frequently grafted onto the Australian terrain in, for example, the Mad Max films and the classic On the Beach.

But Underland is not just post-apocalyptic, it promises to be something of a seismic event itself. “One of the main themes we are using to explore the ideas behind Underland is disturbance—the occurrences that take place after one subject/force meets with another. What I like about this is that you realise that you are actually thinking about everything…environments, politics, relationships, psychology, everything. I find this thought very warming and feel it is in great opposition to George Bush and CNN’s obsession with trying to define the world as having polar opposites—most notably good and bad. I was pleased that Stephen is interested in exploring the complexities of subjects and occurrences rather than looking to classify them into categories.

“We are taking these ideas into our approach to the aesthetic, which is multi-layered and mostly seamless. So you are often looking at more than one image on top of another and almost never aware of any sort of temporal or spatial transition from one image to another…an image may take several minutes to appear or disappear. This approach revels in the complexity of images interacting with and disturbing other images.”

For example, “In one section we’ll be digitally capturing the motion of the dancers. We’ll then use that data to create 3D animations using fluid and particle simulations. So you will see the dancers moving on the stage and on the projected video you will see particles (such as dust) or fluid (under the surface level) moving in sync and in the same manner as the dancers, as if the dancers are dancing within the substance but are invisible.”

The working process of Underland also seems to be melding seamlessly, overlapping without spatial or temporal transitions as thoughts and images fly across continents and dancers prepare to fly, visibly or invisibly, across the stage. This disturbance promises to invigorate the collaborators, the dancers, Sydney Dance Company, and certainly the audiences who experience it.

Filmmaker and digital artist Mike Daly is a graduate of the Australian Film Television and Radio School. He has worked as a director, visual effects compositor and editor. He won an award to attend the 2002 Berlin Film Festival Talent Campus with filmmakers from 72 countries.

Underland, Sydney Dance Company, choreographer Stephen Petronio, music Nick Cave, visual design Ken Tabachnik, costumes Tara Subkoff, film Mike Daly; Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House, May 27-Jun 14; Optus Playhouse, QPAC, Brisbane, Jun 18-28; State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, Jul 3-12

Morganics might rap that “in the land of the mosh and the ecky, it’s hard to rocksteady”, but I doubt any forces of national resistance could ever impede his advance on the vanguard of hip hop’s ‘glocal’ culture. Last year he released a solo album, invisible forces…, as well as producing the album All You Mob! Recordings of young Aboriginal hip hop from around Australia, which includes the track Down River by the Wilcannia Mob (www.morganics.info). Down River exemplifies hip hop’s geographic focus, the 3 young boys rapping over sparse didge and beatboxing to celebrate and situate their experience of the everyday and local landscape. Morganics [Morgan Lewis] is also fresh from a bodypoppin’ underground tour of the US in 2002. His new hip hop theatre show, Crouching Bboy, Hidden Dreadlocks, opens at Sydney’s Performance Space in April.

It was about 2 years since the last Hot Banana Morgan show and I’d just done a series of workshops and the whole Wilcannia Mob stuff was welling up. I was home one night and—it’s really corny—but at 2am I woke up in a fever and I had all these ideas going round my head and so I just got up and went into my lounge room and wrote out 29 monologues in about 2 and a half hours and that’s pretty much going to be the show.

Yes, definitely. The show will reflect the character of people I’ve met in workshops around Australia. Like I did a project out at Long Bay Gaol, working with violent offenders down there as part of an anti-violence program—and talking to some of those guys and hanging out with them for 6 weeks and then bumping into them up at [Kings] Cross afterwards—it is just classic material and pretty amazing stuff I’ve been privy to. I’ve also travelled to the Pitjanjatjarra communities and Uluru and remote Aboriginal communities teaching hip hop, and from that I went to the States last year for 5 weeks performing—going to San Francisco and the Rock Steady Crew Anniversary in New York—just getting that sort of national/international perspective on it all and working with people from a lot of different backgrounds. A lot of people from pretty rough backgrounds generally. It definitely pulls some heartstrings from time to time. There are a lot of different little stories and stuff and I feel like they need to be told.

This show is going to be more specifically hip hop theatre—there’ll be more of a dedicated focus on the elements of hip hop-beatboxing, freestyling, breaking and stuff. I’m also hoping to take it to a hip hop theatre festival in New York in June. I attended it in Washington DC last year and it was really inspiring to see, so fingers crossed I’ll be able to tour this over there.

Is there a genre in the US called hip hop theatre as well as the forms that are exclusively associated with hip hop, like battles?

Yeah, it’s a festival organised by Danny Hock, who was out here and organised Jails, Hospitals and Hip Hop for the Sydney Festival. It’s a pioneering thing, though it’s always what I’ve been doing from the get go I think—not very different from [the performance persona] Hot Banana Morgan.

So it’s a show reflecting on the different interactions that you’ve had working in community contexts and also performing as an MC?

Yeah, with the Wilcannia Mob thing there’s been a lot of bandwagon elements, a lot of people jumping on it and freaking out about it. It’s been a very interesting experience to go through that—so I’m going to have a whole section of just crazy questions that you get asked, emails that I get sent, things that people yell at you at gigs. To a degree it is quite autobiographical: in this one I might be talking about performing on the Gold Coast when a guy in the crowd tries to attack me because I’m from Sydney…A bouncer gets him in a headlock and smashes a beer glass all over me and clears the whole crowd out and I have to keep rapping. Then the crowd comes back and the show keeps going: so Aussie hip hop. The craziness of gigs—I’ve been touring a lot, not just doing the community workshops.

You’ve got community work, your own recordings and performances and now the hip hop theatre works across it and produces something in a different language?

I don’t find it that different—I did a gig on Sunday night at the Bat and Ball, a small pub on South Dowling Steet [Surry Hills, Sydney]. I was up for about 40 minutes, did about 5 or 6 songs, a lot of it I was just freestyling and talking to the audience; it is almost like stand-up. Hip hop is a very old tradition anyway—though with the show at Performance Space it’ll be nice to be able to stretch beyond the normal concentration span that you get at a hip hop gig and go into a bit more depth.

You obviously do a lot of work with people whose voices aren’t usually heard, even in hip hop—there’s been a sense that there’s an Anglo male voice in Australian hip hop that speaks with an Aussie accent…Do you think local hip hop is also speaking with Indigenous, Asian, Arabic and other accents?

Yeah, I don’t work with many white people when I do workshops. I did one workshop on [Sydney’s] northern beaches and it was weird because they were all so quiet, when I’d just been in Kempsey for 2 weeks going “shut up, shut up.” In the northern beaches I’m going, “Make some noise.”

Aussie hip hop is a predominantly white thing, you know I’m a white fella too. Though my next album will be a double CD, it will be my album and the sequel to All You Mob—with all the tracks done by Aboriginal MCs. I’m sitting on 60 tracks to choose from.

Oh yeah. Hip hop is traditionally male dominated like most music. Though I’ve got a great track by young women in Broken Hill called “Desert Sky,” done by young mums with some beautiful lyrics.

Hip hop originally came from the streets and is a voice of the people—people who can’t afford to get into a recording studio—but they are living extreme and interesting lives in their own way. It’s both political and also delightfully non-political—I’m not trying to push any agenda, just record what they want to say.

My biggest agenda to push is that I have to put my foot down and say I’m not going to record that if you sound totally American—you’re going to have to change it—I’m sorry I don’t want you talking about “niggers” if you’re a Koori.

Crouching Bboy, Hidden Dreadlocks, Morganics, Performance Space Studio, April 16-26 ; www.morganics.info

Coming from Nicholas Jones, this seemingly innocent question struck terror in my soul. Jones carves books. A book to Jones is not a respected repository of knowledge, it is a raw substance ready to be transformed into a 3-dimensional work of art—a thing in itself. Using a scalpel (his father was a surgeon), Jones cuts through the raw pages to expose the stippled texture of the print. It’s a craft that Jones has largely invented for himself.

Jones was resident in a program called Open Bench, staged so the public could witness the theatre of craft process. Visitors could be seen pleading with Jones to save certain books that were lined up for his scalpel. Now he’d come into my office to “borrow” a dictionary.

Reducing books to their physical substance has the consequence of objectifying words as things to be possessed rather than shared. In a literal fashion, Jones is threatening what appears to be happening linguistically around the country. A word is being systematically removed from our official lexicon. That word is ‘craft.’

In titles of courses, exhibitions and magazines the word ‘craft’ has mysteriously disappeared. In its place is the much more happening word, ‘design.’ To an extent, this seems to be a natural evolution—design is the provision of objects for personal use in ways that reflect contemporary scale of manufacturing; design is simply an opportunity to capitalise on good craft. Isn’t ‘design’ just an updated form of ‘craft’?

But one suspects a sleight of hand. Take the case of a recent name change at the National Gallery of Victoria. With its move into Federation Square, the prestigious triennial prize exhibition titled Cicely & Colin Rigg Craft Award was renamed the Cicely & Colin Rigg Contemporary Design Award. It’s a neo-modern title for an ultra-contemporary building. But it doesn’t quite fit. In fact, designers themselves were excluded from the original selection process. Calling what is produced by weavers, textile printers and artists who featured in the exhibition ‘design’ takes our attention away from the process of construction. We are led instead to think about function, style, networks and product. The expressive capacity of these works is disabled.

Why is this happening? Some might see it as a sign of the creeping commercialisation of our cultural institutions. ‘Design’ provides a cover by which resources can be channelled away from the ‘drain’ of culture into the ‘investment’ of business. More apocalyptically, it may be seen as part of the escapist consumer culture that is seeking to transcend the physical world, whether through speed, screen or 4 wheel drives. This kind of ‘design’ is the ever-expanding monoculture of global elites. Don’t get me wrong. As far as monocultures go, design is wonderfully exciting—but it is perfectly able to stand in its own Nike runners without government assistance.

Whatever the reasons for the design push, it is for many a matter of concern. While arts funding has remained relatively true to its cultural mission, there is always the threat of commercial imperative.

But panic would be the wrong response. It is within exactly this kind of adversity that the craft ethic flourishes. In New South Wales, the Craft Advocacy Group has been militating against the decline of services for craft practitioners. In Victoria, anonymous missives called ‘squirts’ have been circulating with enigmatic demands such as “10% for craft.” But these ventures have limited success. While fuelled with a defiant spirit, such attempts sometimes become too absorbed in a righteous opposition and miss the opportunity to win minds as well as hearts. They play to the stereotype of craft as a reactionary movement, initiated by those clinging to the 1970s.

The fact is that craft is growing in new directions. In addition to the core of dedicated professional craft practitioners who maintain the skills and creativity of their medium, there are new energies coalescing around the applied arts. Craft has been embraced by the emergent ‘no logo’ generation, sceptical of the pre-packaged meaning of branded objects. Clothes are deliberately badly made—hems are skewed, sewing is wonky and edges are frayed. Hand-made is a sign of liberation. In Melbourne, the Stitches & Bitches nightclub knitting circle has become a legendary way for women to exert their gender in a testy environment.

In the new ‘hand-made’ push, craft is more about expression than skill. In the case of ceramics, a new generation has eschewed traditional pottery skills such as wheel-throwing and developed new forms of idiosyncratic expression. Sydney ceramicist Nicole Lister uses casting to give disposable objects a solid form. Melbourne ‘mud-maker’ David Ray gives the suburban table a Dresden-like ornateness. These makers shadow consumer culture, giving it a meaningfulness it would otherwise lack. Some go so far outside traditional skills that they end up inventing new crafts themselves, like Jones. The fascination with making will continue even in the absence of tradition.

The place of craft in the context of visual arts is also evolving. As a material art, craft becomes pivotal in the dialectic between the screen-based practice of artists like Susan Norrie and Patricia Piccinini, and the physical expression of painting or sculpture. These days painting has more in common with ceramics than it does with the ubiquitous video installation. Already in England, ‘craft’ has become a code for reaction against the celebrity YBAs famous more for their lifestyles than their art.

In the case of photography, the digital processes have inherited the mission of reproduction, leaving the darkroom with the alchemic remnants. We are beginning to see crossovers between craft and darkroom photography. Janie Matthews uses darkroom-like processes to print rust. Kirsten Haydon has produced a wonderful bridge printed on a grid of old metal slide containers. As the emergence of photography led to impressionism in painting, so the introduction of PhotoShop is generating a new craft of photography.

This does not put craft at odds with the digital world. Collaborations where the physical process of making incorporates the digital in a more intimate form are beginning to emerge. Also emerging is the use of craft as a lingua franca between indigenous and modern worlds. Contemporary visual art and design takes us further away from where we are. In Australia, the moral responsibility of place has been passed on to Aboriginal culture, leaving global classes the freedom to belong elsewhere. Your average minimalist urban living room is beautifully offset by the rough edges of an Indigenous basket. This ‘enlightened’ regard is merely another version of primitivism, where the remote culture is made exotic and dialogue avoided. It realises the ironic bargain invoked after the fall of apartheid: “You can have the crown, but we’ll keep the jewels.”

By contrast, craft is one of the few opportunities for reciprocal exchange between Aboriginal and Balanda (non-indigenous) people. The ever-growing Alice Springs Beanie Festival demonstrates how the humble craft object can bridge cultural divides. This festival has inspired others, such as the Melbourne Scarf Festival, which includes workshops in Islamic scarf-wearing.

So, even if they have stolen the ‘craft’ word, it’s only a matter of time before we find it again. The ‘design’ word is becoming so over-used that it is losing any reference beyond a short-term political kudos. The new ‘craft’ will be discovered as harbinger of a future utopia beyond the screen, promising a new existence of responsibility and enjoyment—a place they call the ‘real world.’

The old Melbourne International Festival of Organ and Harpsichord changed its name a few years ago to Melbourne Autumn Music Festival and took on young virtuoso recorder player Genevieve Lacey as Artistic Director. Not surprisingly, contemporary performance works and installations have begun to creep into the program, along with some radical interpretations of early music repertoire.

Among the highlights of this year’s festival (May 2-11) will be performances by Australians Christopher Field, Paul Wright, Steve (Stelios) Adams, Marshall Maguire various Elision soloists and Genevieve Lacey herself. Scandinavian pipe and tabor duo ESK are among the international guests. There’s also a new series of lunchtime concerts by young artists playing a combination of recent and early music in the new BMW Edge auditorium in Federation Square.

One of the featured works sure to grab RealTime readers demonstrates MAMF’s new focus. Aelfgyva is a performance work for 2 actors and 3 musicians, a contemporary exploration of medieval material through the elements of text sound and music created with hurdy gurdy, harp and voice. Written and directed by Jane Woollard, Aelfgyva is the second part of a larger work, NEEDLESWORLD, exploring the Norman invasion of England.

With music/soundscape by Stevie Wishart and performed by Margaret Mills, Colin James, singer Carolyn Connors and harpist Natalia Mann, Aelfgyva is a meditative pilgrimage that follows the journey of an 11th century woman—one of 3 depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. Amanda Johson’s design plays with scale, incorporating oversized spools, needles and embroidery. The work uses the language and imagery of embroidery as well as a vocabulary of gestures constructed from the tapestry to explore “the way a cultural takeover was sewn into history.”

The endless mix of sound bytes—a music concrete of numbers, letters, call signs? A symphony of booming voices, jingles, ads, station IDs, news flashes on the hour, competitions…numbers to ring? You can hear them can’t you? all too clearly—and the midnight DJ whispering into your REM sleep; his music a soundtrack to your interior cinema; his voice seductive in the dark. There is the news too, the latest information and analysis…the traffic, voices from the world’s hotspots…the stockmarket, a riot in Seoul, a killing on the Paris Metro, sport, impresarios with noises to cover all the uneasy gaps…gardening tips for the season. You can hear these voices in your head, some distant as quasars, others so familiar they’ve become, for all intents and purposes, part of your extended family…talk-show hosts, bombastic and opinionated or concerned, inquiring…committed commentators ready to tackle life’s problems or assassinate your already strangled and gated voice at the other end of a line. You remember radio stories so compelling you were brought to tears.

This is the parallel universe opened up by the radio, but it might surprise you more if you stopped for a moment, stepped out of the noise, and really listened. Although entirely naturalised in the everyday world, the radio is much more than this non-stop rolling mega-mix of messengers loved and hated. It is more than the sum of its music, news, information, DJs, opinions and sadomasochism.

What else is the radio? What else ‘on’ the radio? What of the genuinely exploratory; what pleasures for the ears beyond the blinding, deafening lights of the more commercial and politically dominant media? What is there right now ‘on air’ that is compelling and yet might perform beyond the frames of information, light entertainment, therapy or even mass communication?

As if to answer these questions, independent radio producer Jackie Randles and the creative team behind Radio National’s audacious and exploratory The Night Air (Sundays 8.30pm), have stepped beyond Ultimo to bring radio to a live audience at the Sydney Opera House. In April, The Studio, best known for its innovative programming of contemporary musics and edgy performance, will host Audiotheque—a program of radio pieces and features, some from radio’s earliest days of experimentation and others from recent forays into what might be termed an ‘art of the radio.’ Audiotheque’s curators call it “cinema for the ears.”

These works defy easy categorisation. Certain selections could be considered etudes, others follow the ‘acoustic-film’ tradition. To use radio jargon, some are ‘features’ distinguished by dealing with a reality (in the form of recorded actuality) that constantly glides towards fiction. Audiotheque also includes auteur works, less interested in the art of instruction or information than in creating and revealing distinct universes that can be intimately woven through and implicated with the real.

Listen to German filmmaker Hans Richter’s description of Walter Ruttmann’s first acoustic film—300 feet of optical sound-film montage broadcast as Wochenende (Weekend) in 1930 on Berlin radio: “There was no picture, just sound. It was the story of a weekend, from the moment the train leaves the city until the whispering lovers are separated by the approaching-home struggling crowd. It was a symphony of sound, speech-fragments and silence woven into a poem.” Few critics since seem to know of this unexposed film’s existence, which Richter believes is Ruttmann’s most inspired. It has never been ‘screened’ before in Australia.

In Weekend, hundreds of sound sources are woven together. Ruttmann understood that radio could offer a space par excellence for conjuring mental images. Thus this ‘film’ of a city ready to exchange the rigours of work time for the promised ‘time-out’ of the weekend, was arguably the first attempt to think and make radio in terms of filmic montage and authorship. (Ruttmann’s grafting of film techniques onto radio using optical sound film to montage produced a new moment in radio history, but also marked a lost opportunity. The technique, using the best available recording system, the Triergon process, was briefly used before 1933 but abandoned under the Nazis. Flesch and other young radio-film directors were arrested by the SS and Ruttmann left the brief weekend of his radio exploration forever.)

If we read this apparently ‘innocent’ piece only in relation to its form, and if we allow the many singular voices recorded here—children, workers, lovers chattering, singing, laughing, sighing, murmuring—to be tainted by an easy nostalgia, we risk suppressing other readings. We may hear in these hörbilder, these ‘sound pictures’ or portraits, the sonic death mask of daily life under the Nazis recorded in all its ‘innocence’ by Ruttmann.

The works in Audiotheque’s program lie somewhere between reality and fiction, and like documentary photography, carry an analogue imprint, or trace left by the real that punctures us. I can hear and feel a kind of wound opening in the (accidental?) juxtaposition of Weekend and Natalie Kestecher’s strangely unsettling contemporary German odyssey, The Silver Umbrella, about missed connections; a lost umbrella—did it ever exist?—a lost childhood, a lost father, and an unrecoverable body of work in the form of Hemingway’s mislaid manuscripts.

The radio feature has the ability to powerfully engage actuality, and yet it’s never stable. There is something at stake in these works that lie between documentary and fiction. There is what fiction makes of the real (storytelling, scenes, worlds, characters…) and then there is what reality does to these fictions—threading itself throughout, complicating our relationship as listeners and authors. This action of reality on fiction in The Night Air has the disturbing effect of raising the stakes for author and audience. Even if we are unsure of what’s real and what’s fabricated, like the narrator in The Silver Umbrella telling us of her father’s lost childhood, lost family, lost life during the unspeakable years of the Holocaust, the traces of the real—the actual voice of the narrator’s father stopped dead in his tracks—have all the power to disturb us. For me, they even have the effect of breaking the author’s hold over her own story. Kestecher’s autobiographical journey into loss and forgone opportunity offers us one trajectory at one end of the radio feature ‘film’s’ history.

Also on the Audiotheque program are: Roz Cheney and John Jacobs’ deceptively simple The Listening Room, a piece of contemporary concrete first broadcast on ABC FM’s The Listening Room and American raconteur Joe Frank’s story of an operation performed ‘in the dark.’ Riveting but real scary, Hawaii (excerpt) musters the power of storytelling, pure and simple with the voice and nothing else except a little thread of a tale. Then there’s Stan Zemanek from his 2UE talkback show reminding us of radio’s darker sadomasochistic aspects; German Ferdinand Kriwet’s remarkable journey through the ionosphere of radio in Hortext 16—3,400 recordings from around the world, 10,000 edits (and when Kriwet made this it was nothing but tape and razorblades). There’s a live performance from a Sydney institution, The Loop Orchestra—yes, tape machines on stage; Russell Stapleton’s Radio Alive or Dead, to remind you that there is something to all this talk about radio and death (why is it a recurring trope?). And to end, a composition of extraordinary beauty and sensitivity from an accomplished radio and audio artist on the theme of birth, death and rebirth: Sherre DeLys’ Jarman’s Garden. In the bleak expanse of shingle, facing a nuclear power station in Dungeness, Kent, artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman made a garden and final home. After his death, the garden remains to conjure its magic, returning it seems at last to the fishermen who live there—an epiphany in sound, with music by Sherre DeLys and Chris Abrahams. Writer Barbara Blackman will introduce this array of unexplored sonic constellations in a night sky ever illuminated by the spark of radio.

Audiotheque, presented by The Night Air, Radio National, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Apr 14.

In perspective…

This year’s 50th anniversary festival—the Festival of Fire—marks the end of Sean Doran’s 4-year reign as Director of the Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF). Not surprisingly, it has been a difficult period for the festival. Previous director, David Blenkinsop, had been in the job for 23 years and Doran sought to manage and promote a more dynamic artistic direction. In 2004, the Festival will have its first Australian director, Lindy Hume. The fact that Hume is young and female suggests not only a new confidence but also a new direction for future festivals.

Doran’s departure allows the distance required to put the programming of Blenkinsop and then General Manager, Henry Boston into clearer perspective. They provided many memorable performance moments. Think of Ballet C de la B, Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker and Maguy Marin; Ong Keng Sen’s adventurous Lear and Robert Lepage’s Seven Streams of the River Ota; the fabulous Royal de Lux and the ever inventive Vis à Vis. This regime also provided essential support for the establishment of the internationally acclaimed Marrugeku Company and underwrote 2 experimental/experiential music theatre works by Elision, as well as commissioning projects for the development of local theatre. Of course Blenkinsop had the advantage of time, experience and consequently depth on his side.

Doran was always keen to distinguish his role from his predecessor. While this has perhaps resulted in the loss of a strong contemporary dance, circus and street theatre presence, it has led to a greater emphasis on chamber music, opera and contemporary music. Doran’s focus was on what he calls “a festival of festivals.” This year’s festival included the Midland Festival Theatre; the weekend Jazz Festival in Fremantle; the Opera Festival in Mandurah, an international chamber music festival; the Lotteries Film Festival; the Writers’ Festival; The Johnnie Walker Watershed and Celestial City (aka Perth Cultural Centre). Punters have apparently greeted these new directions with enthusiasm; but it remains to be seen whether this more decentralised approach to festival activities will extend or fragment audiences.

Another Doran innovation was to provide programming across the state. Not a new festival concept per se, but the regions certainly received a higher profile under his leadership. The Goldfields was host to events such as Anthony Gormley’s sculpture, Inside Australia, at Lake Ballard northeast of Kalgoorlie. Programming in the Kimberley, Albany and the Great Southern and nearby regional centres meant that the dispersed population in WA’s ‘one third’ got a piece of the action. Doran tried to broaden the audience base through contemporary and world music programs at the Watershed. Laurie Anderson’s marvellous performance, Happiness, was a hit in this year’s program. While Irish born Doran knew little about Indigenous art when he arrived in WA, he increasingly embraced the presence of Aboriginal artists. An arts market style event with a gala opening at The Watershed which showcased musical acts, this year’s Indigenous Showcase was a stunningly successful event.

Doran’s interest in opera on a big scale brought us the truly wonderful Peony Pavilion in 2000. There is no doubt, however, over the years that big ticket numbers from shows such as this and Robert Wilson’s Dream Play, Romeo Castelluci’s Giulio Cesare and Deborah Warner’s The Angel Project, all undertaken by an inexperienced management, left a legacy of financial problems for Doran’s next 3 festivals.

It’s hoped that Hume will maintain support for local initiatives. An appropriate level of support for contemporary visual arts programming is long overdue. It would be wonderful to see her commit to developing work, perhaps through reinvigorated WA theatre commissions (a Blenkinsop initiative). This well-intentioned venture had appalling outcomes over its 2 years, but it did seek a means of putting real money into local theatre and performance. Perth-based theatre companies are included in the festival but without any financial assistance. This fuels an underlying tension between the perception of the festival as a funding body and as an organisation that curates its own program. Given this, it was fabulous to see local contemporary dance organisation STRUT present 2 programs this year. Five local choreographers/groups strutted their stuff to excellent houses at the Playhouse and PICA.

STRUT

The relative absence of ‘dance’ from the STRUT program was interesting. In Point of Entry Claudia Alessi used spoken word, circus skills, slides and puppetry; Kompany Kido’s Pivot and Enter drew on an eclectic mix of Aikido, contact improvisation and live and recorded video; Paul Gazolla’s work was a classic piece of performance art; while Paul O’Sullivan’s solo narrative and Shannon Bott’s So…do you come here often? drew a more theatrical bow.

This laudable hybridity brought several problems. A mixed bag of stylistic and generic references can sometimes muddy the integrity of individual works. This was most sharply felt in Claudia Alessi’s work, where a poor script and an earnestly dated thematic undermined the power of her physical presence. Despite input from 2 directors, the work suffered from a lack of dramaturgical clarity and an indiscriminate overabundance—a mixed bag of tricks.

On the other hand, while overly long and sometimes shambolic, Kompany Kido’s comedic framework allowed a succession of generic leaps, referencing cinema (particularly Chinese action films), slapstick and contemporary dance. Their appealing sense of the ridiculous and the ensemble’s generosity and enthusiasm meant the work was resoundingly applauded.

Gazolla’s Bird Talk #1-7 was a highly self-reflexive yet disciplined live art piece that bemused and even angered much of the audience. Gazolla presented a complex and funny treatise that mocked the idea of dance as a purely expressive medium. The work employed a series of ‘real-life’ moments (juxtaposed with sound and video), in which the artist impersonated, replaced or copied somebody or some thing else. The work moved from opaque to profound, ultimately suggesting it might be impossible for the artist to find a pure moment of originality. Gazolla was reduced to bouncing up and down on the spot, a choreography he tells us he discovered as a child. Dance is revealed as pure pleasure, neither an academic nor learned space, but rather a space of play.

Shannon Bott’s work was the most stylistically coherent of the STRUT program. So…Do You Come Here Often? drew on experimental (non-realist) theatre to create a cool gestural space referencing transitory bar-based relationships. Despite strong performances—particularly by actor Karen Roberts and dancer Rachel Whitworth—the work felt unresolved and its impressionistic but cool design stymied the piece’s potential to resonate beyond its clipped frame. However, it certainly deserves revisiting and developing.

Conversely, Paul O’Sullivan’s Shopping, fashion, travel and…Genocide risked didacticism in a passionate and witty exploration of current issues, ranging across Australia’s policy on refugees, the war in Iraq, consumerism and blind self-interest. This witty monologue was performed in O’Sullivan’s characteristic relaxed and loose-limbed mode. Scripted yet nonetheless improvisational, his performance avoided the self-righteousness that mars so much issue-based work. O’Sullivan has been invited to present this work at the 2004 Grahamstown Festival in South Africa, where its unabashed politic and humour are sure to resonate. The opportunity to extend the life of the work through touring should result in a tighter, more precise structure.

STRUT frees up independent dance artists to focus on artistic development by providing administrative and marketing support. For this great initiative to grow within the context of an international arts festival, more financial support and dramaturgical input are needed. Once more, we look to Lindy Hume to recognise and reward such deserving local initiatives.

Incognita

Stalker Theatre’s Incognita was one of the festival highlights. Located in the Australian outback and involving a small group of men and women isolated by distance and drought, its outdoor setting at the old Midland Railway Yards perfectly complemented the Australian Gothic style of Andrew Carter’s design. The serendipitous full moon rising on a stinking hot night made this a visceral and physical experience.

Incognita sparked heated debate and undeniably the show had some structural weaknesses. The opening scenes locate the work within recognisable visual and narrative traditions drawn from Australian theatre, cinema and literature (Randolph Stowe, Nick Enright, Karen Mainwaring, Tracey Moffatt). Unfortunately the strong narrative potential of these scenes (the stranger/outsider comes to town, sexual tension, rising temperatures…) is quickly abandoned as the piece drifts into a more impressionistic and dancerly work.

There are great risks in jettisoning such a strongly marked character-based narrative. Your audience has already entered into the narrative contract—they have begun to make connections, invest in story. Once character is abandoned, relationships become a matter of proximity. While the audience is certainly left with strong impressions from individual performances and scenes, the overall sense of the work is compromised. The development of an Australian vernacular choreography was compelling—however the absence of a strong script and rigorous dramaturgy diminished the work. On the drive home from Midland it struck the 2 of us that Incognita’s producers would benefit from looking at the ways American narrative dance and musical cinema have struggled in the 20th century to negotiate theatre, movement, song and story.

Three Tales

Steve Reich and Beryl Korot might also want to observe these traditions! Their Three Tales was actually 2 tales and one lecture. Both the first and second tale, “Hindenburg” and “Bikini,” drew on powerful black and white archival footage to underscore the tragic, ambiguous, even mythic story of technological advancement in the 20th century. In “Hindenburg”, the 1937 explosion and crash of the airship signals the end of a failed technology. “Bikini” presents the clash between the atomic bomb tests by the American Government and the people most immediately affected and generally ignored—those displaced from Bikini Atoll in the Solomon Islands. (These tests, carried out between 1946 and 1952, marked the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War.) In the third tale “Dolly” (after the cloned sheep), we are brought to the end of the 20th century and invited to explore a post-human, genetically warped future.

The performance meshes orchestra, large format video, and singers who act as a kind of chorus reflecting on the action on screen. While the music was haunting and insistent, the integration of digital video often undercut the power of the score. Lacking the grain and texture of film, the video was frequently overburdened with digital after-effects. While this made a point about the imbrication of technology and the image, the focus on digital ‘effect’ was at the cost of human ‘affect’; human tragedy—particularly in the Bikini Atoll story—was largely effaced.

While “Hindenburg” and “Bikini” relied on real historical events to provide coherence and force, the significance of human cloning and virtual reality is still under debate. This lessened the formal coherence of the last section of Three Tales. In “Dolly”, the potential for ambiguity present in the music (and a stated artistic ambition of the work) gives way to a one-dimensional and often morally hectoring tone, delivered in cut-up by edited ‘talking head’ scientists and religious leaders. In this context, the application of Reich’s familiar compositional elements to the spoken score diminished the work’s poetics and tragic resonance. In his program notes Reich describes the “double edged sword of the gains and losses of each new technology as it is incorporated into our lives;” however, in “Dolly” the subtext seemed less ambivalent and rather more apocalyptic and dogmatic.

Three Tales was constantly interesting, engaging and at times brilliant (if brutal). However, despite Reich and Korot’s mutual fascination with multiple registers and ambiguity, the sublimation of music to video ultimately closed down the work and left the audience with less space than is humanly needed.

Beasty Grrrl

Scott Rankin’s festival commission Beasty Grrrl, took the story of young Tasmanian Errol Flynn and tracked not so much his rise to Hollywood fame as his appalling record as abuser (alleged statutory rapist, paedophile, gun enthusiast, Nazi sympathiser and possibly spy for the Japanese). An unlikely parallel between Flynn and the extinct Tasmanian Thylacine sought to establish some sympathy for the actor who was the product of an abusive childhood. Solo performer Paula Arundell struggled with live sound and video mix in a hugely wordy monologue on a large and clunky set. Ultimately, neither the writer nor performer could summon up much sympathy or enthusiasm for the daredevil actor and star of 23 Hollywood movies.

On the fringe

Two Fringe Festival projects were arguably much more successful. The surprise hit (with capacity houses every night) was 18 year old Matthew Lutton’s production of Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna, at the suffocatingly hot Rechabites Hall. This truly exciting theatre was presented with the kind of wit and artistic risktaking generally absent from many more highly resourced mainstage productions. Working with Associate Director Eamon Flack, Lutton elicited excellent performances from his actors and a dancerly chorus. Self-devised works in the past have shown that his instincts are good, and his influences avant-garde. This work clearly benefited from the structure imposed by Ionesco’s script.

Tony Osborne’s Rest in Silence at the Blue Room Theatre showcased his idiosyncratic and improvisatory performative style. While Osborne is a skilled and often very funny performer, this work would have benefited from extended development time. As with so much contemporary performance and theatre, the fundamental concept was let down by writing that skittered across the surface. This was a pity, as the stage, lighting and sound design created by Virginia Ward, Mike Nanning and Rob Muir respectively was extraordinary and impeccably integrated.

Exit

And so, as the sun set on another Perth International Arts Festival, we found ourselves driving with the windows down, wondering if summer was ever going to end. We took deep swigs on our water bottles and remarked on the almost universal misunderstanding about narrative and character and on that outmoded and pointless distinction between acting and performing. As we pulled into Kentucky Fried and took out our water pistols, we wondered why nobody wants to play the bad guy no more. It’s such fun.

“I’m not really a robber,” I told the woman as I pocketed the pistol and paid for the Bucket. “Honey,” she said, “this ain’t really a chicken.”

Perth International Arts Festival, Jan 25-Feb 17: Point of Entry, choreographer, performer Claudia Alessi; Pivot and Enter, Kompany Kido, choreographers Rob Griffin & Sete Tele; Bird Talk #1-7; choreographer, performer Paul Gazzola; Shopping, fashion, travel and…Genocide, choreographer, performer Paul O’Sullivan; Shott Dance Theatre, So… do you come here often?, director, choreographer Shannon Bott; 3 programs at Playhouse Theatre and PICA, Jan 29-Feb 8 25; Stalker Theatre Company, Incognita, conceived & co-directed by Rachael Swain; co-director: Koen Augustijnen, Midland Festival Theatre, Feb 9-16; Three Tales, composer Steve Reich, video Beryl Korot, Board Walk Theatre, Mandurah Performing Arts Centre, Feb 14 & 18; Beasty Grrrl, writer, director Scott Rankin, performer Paula Arundell, Regal Theatre, Feb 6-15; WA Fringe Festival: Thin Ice Productions, The Bald Prima Donna, writer Eugene Ionesco, director Matthew Lutton, Rechabites Hall; Rest in Silence, writer, performer Tony Osborne, Blue Room Theatre, Jan 29-Feb 8

Twenty-four hours drive north of Brisbane and 70km north west of Cairns, is Emerald End, homebase for interdisciplinary new media performance group Bonemap. As an urban individual it’s hard not to be fascinated by this choice of location; by the fact that you can drive that far north of Brisbane and still be on land, but more importantly by the implications and resonances of such remoteness for a contemporary arts practice. For Bonemap it’s the perfect situation for developing work that is interconnected, informed, and in itself an interpretive embodiment of place and environment.

Bonemap is Rebecca Youdell and Russell Milledge. Youdell is a choreographer and performer with a background in ballet, contemporary dance and movement practices such as Body Weather; Milledge, a new media designer and director, has a fine arts background. They formed Bonemap in 1999 to be a “hybrid mesh of live art, installation and new media.” Since its inception Bonemap has had residencies at Brisbane Powerhouse, The Australian Choreographic Centre, Tanks Arts Centre, Cairns and The Substation, Singapore 2001 (receiving the first interdisciplinary residency from the visual arts and performing arts panels of Asialink). Their work has appeared at festivals such as Experimentica 02 (Chapter Arts Centre, Wales), Worms Festival II (Plastique Kinetic Worms, Singapore), New Criteria (The Substation Singapore) and L’attitude 27.5 (Brisbane Powerhouse). They were also part of the first Time_Place_Space cross-disciplinary investigations at Charles Sturt University in 2002 (see RT 53). I met them in Brisbane where they’re working on their current investigation, Bridge Song.

Inspired by Brisbane’s legendary Story Bridge, this work is an exploration of interconnectedness, of the impact of the environment on flesh. Milledge describes it as an intimate work for solo musician, dancer and projection design. Much of Bonemap’s work has a site-specific outcome, but Bridge Song will take place in the Judith Wright Centre theatre. Milledge says this is a conscious move to develop a stronger audience base in Brisbane. However they have conducted extensive research on the bridge through site-based performative explorations, filming and sampling of the bridge and its environs. The work has grown from their urban/rural spatial dislocations and an investigation of architectural iconography. Milledge says, “the transition from a kind of remote rural working environment to an urban environment is about the different sense of space and it’s not something easily put into words. It’s a perceptive, cognitive thing. There’s an awareness developed in open space that’s compressed in an urban environment. One thing we were wanting to do was look at an urban location and overlay our perception of space.”

This layering of non-urban time/space perception and industrialised environment indicates an ongoing preoccupation with what Milledge and Youdell term ‘decentring.’ Working so far from the supposed creative hubs of urban environments means that they have been very active in encouraging an expansion of arts culture within the local community, both with Bonemap and through their involvement with Kick Arts in Cairns. It also offers more opportunities for cross-cultural pollination. Milledge says there is such “a diversity of cultural types in Northern Australia…there’s more reference to closer neighbours [in PNG and the Asia Pacific] that you don’t really get in southern cities…We like to collaborate with artists from those backgrounds. We want to engage with a practice that’s land based, grounded in the geography of where we are. It’s not about something that is imagined—that old Australian mythology of imagining the geography of another place.”

With Body Weather as foundation in both artists’ practice, it is not surprising that environment plays such a vital role in their work as site, in new media manipulations or as the basis for experiential body-memory choreography and improvisation. Bonemap has incorporated these elements into a notion of ecology that extends beyond simplistic notions of the natural environment, to incorporate a performance ecology. This is ecology as a “spatial reference” with inter-relationships and connectedness as the central principles. Milledge says, “Although we are seemingly based in this flesh-against-earth paradigm, we’re also interested in this imagining of ecology as virtual systems” which can come about through the relationship of live and mediated performance.

So how does the new media content function within this performance ecology? Youdell states, “It’s had different modes really. We have tended to create work that’s modular. There would be some cinematic component, as well as performative and some sort of exhibition. It’s been quite separate in the past so we’re just beginning to look at integrating this more closely in a performance context. You always see the performer in front of the screen and we’d like to go beyond that and integrate it.” Milledge adds that projection is “convenient and almost too easy. The idea of engaging with a remote location, like a marble mine or a lava tube is, obviously, that you can film that location and it can be transposed into a theatrical setting. I guess there [are] other ways at looking at the relationship between environments and performance which are to do with internal body nerve memory kind of stuff. There’s an incredibly obvious element to cinematic projection in performance, and I think the kinds of performer interaction with projection turns cold on an audience unless it’s the audience manipulating it in some way.”

The guiding principles of ecology and decentring also create a practice that is collaborative and interdisciplinary. The Bridge Song project will be an interplay between body, image and sound with Youdell and Milledge working with Brisbane-based musicians Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson (Clocked Out Duo). In 2004 they plan to continue a collaboration with improvisational musician Jim Denley and work with Singapore’s Lee Wen, who performed the Yellow Man at APT3 (Asia Pacific Triennial) in 2000 and Simon Whitehead from Wales, both of whom have “walking practices”—performative journeys through public spaces. Planned for the Brisbane Powerhouse, they envisage this work will be durationally oriented, though its form—theatre or media based or both—hangs enticingly in the air.

Bridge Song, Bonemap, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, Jun 12-14. www.bonemap.com

Based in Bankstown in Sydney’s west, Urban Theatre Projects has been a distinctive and highly purposeful venture, now rewarded for its courage and adventurousness with a prestigious Sidney Myer Group Award for $35,000.

Death Defying Theatre, UTP’s famous precursor, was formed in 1981 and in the 90s decided to create a base in the suburban west. Following the DDT directorship of Fiona Winning and, later, a triumvirate of Winning, Monica Barone and Gail Kelly, the appointment of ex-Sydney Front player John Baylis as Artistic Director in 1997 established a new name and firmly set the agenda for works that fused community collaborations with open-ended, experimental and often site-based approaches to performance.

The sites—railway stations, a prison, a variety club, residential streets, a town plaza—have provided not only performance and design challenges but also a means to work with communities and with a range of strategies for engaging audiences. You always leave home for a UTP show with an open mind. The company is equally at ease at Performance Space or in a warehouse adapted for performance, as in The Longest Night (2002).

The range of often unusual and surprising subject matter has been similarly impressive. In 1991, the company presented Cafe Hakawati, an Arabic community show in Auburn about the impact of the first Gulf War. Noroc (Performance Space, 1996) explored cultural difference in a dynamic news/talkshow format. In 2000, the company toured Alicia Talbot’s tough-minded show about homelessness, Cement Garage, through Sydney suburbs and developed the sequel, The Longest Night, for a 2002 Adelaide Festival commission. Brian Fuata’s solo performance, Fa’afafine (2001) lyrically explored cross gender sexuality from a migrant Samoan perspective. The company’s new show Mechanix (from April 2) is a spectacle of machinic and sculptural inventions performed in the Old Town Plaza, Bankstown.

Executive Producer Harley Stumm, who started out as administrator with the company in 1995, has been integral to the company’s life for 8 years, helping shape its conceptual development and programming. He’s proud of UTP’s sizeable list of productions and achievements, especially of its “politically contentious work, its queer work, the range from community-based to straight professional work, and all with a strong commitment to social justice and cultural diversity…”

On behalf of the company, Artistic Director Alicia Talbot and Stumm received the Sidney Myer Award for outstanding achievement in the Performing Arts from veteran actor Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell at the awards ceremony in Melbourne—yet another UTP cross cultural moment.

The Myer Awards, established in 1984, celebrate outstanding achievement by Australians in drama, dance, music, opera, circus and puppetry. Other recipients this year included Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre which (WA) won a $10,000 Indigenous Facilitator’s Prize and actor Aaron Pedersen (Wildside, Water Rats) won the Indigenous Individual Award.

“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect…; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfit for action.”
Thucydides, 455-400BC

When we put this edition of RealTime to bed, the war against Iraq had just commenced and there was no early indication of which way it might go. Coalition governments were exercising the double bind of ‘Yes, oppose the war but support our troops’, the hyprocisy of calling for Iraq to stand by the rules of the Geneva convention for POWs while in flagrant breach of it, and the opportunism of invoking a new sovereignity for Iraq while planning to profit maximally from its restructure. And, as those polled in the West appeared to increasingly support the war (presumably unable to imagine its reversal and hoping for a quick finish), the spectres of the un-American, the un-Australian, the anti-war coward and the violent protester were being conjured. We hope, at the very least, that by the time you read these words that the bombing will have stopped and that we can unravel ourselves from the knots of government duplicity. It’s a lot to hope for.

One way to battle the distortion of language is to assault hypocrisy and propaganda with creativity. The massive international protests against the war were typified by a plethora of banners, cut outs, costumes and puppets with a rude vigour and wit not seen since the Yippees in the years of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Our Featured Artists in this edition are the anonymous makers of these images which appeared at the protest in Sydney on February 16 (p13).

As you’ll see, RealTime 54 is bookish, but not at all retiring. Our BOOK-ish feature celebrates the achievement of Australian authors writing on new media, film and cultural and psychological phenomena, for the most part in international imprints.

I refer to Mick Broderick’s article in last month’s RealTime, “Screen culture: be alert, be alarmed” (OnScreen p15). Mr Broderick states that the AFC has “devolved many screen culture responsibilities onto state agencies, particularly those emanating from Victoria.”

The AFC has not devolved any of its responsibilities to state agencies. Where the AFC provides funding to events or activities that are now coordinated by a State agency, such as the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Victoria (ACMI), now coordinating the National Cinematheque, this is a funding partnership, not a devolution of responsibility. This partnership came about because the AFC wanted to save the national tour of the Cinematheque.

The funding that the AFC provided to ACMI for the National Cinematheque tour was not “earmarked for the AFI’s national exhibition program”, but was offered specifically to the AFI for the Cinematheque national tour. It was only offered to ACMI once the AFI decided not to run the tour. AFC screen culture funding is not generalist organisational funding, but is for specific programs and outcomes.

The AFC was aware of the very low audiences for the National Cinematheque achieved by the AFI and FTI in WA and the consequent decision by the FTI not to continue with the Cinematheque program. ACMI have reinstated the WA tour for this year and are confident that audiences will improve.

Mr Broderick states that “for nearly a decade the AFI has been suffering death by a thousand cuts.” This is not factual. The AFC’s funding of the AFI has steadily increased for the past decade, from an initial funding of $379,878 in 1979 to a peak of $1,000,734 in 1991 and throughout the 1990s averaging $871,147 annually. Fluctuations in AFI funding have been due to the AFI applying for different projects each year. In 1999, the AFI’s request to the AFC was for $994,400 representing 38.5% of the AFC’s screen culture budget.

In 1999, the AFC provided the AFI with $803,000 and gave the AFI 2 years notice that it would no longer support Research and Information and Distribution specifically. The AFC provided transitional funding for these services until 2002, thereby giving the AFI 2 years to pursue alternative strategies for funding them. This is not a picture of “death by a thousand cuts over a decade.”

Also to clarify, the AFC did not withdraw funding from the AFI’s exhibition infrastructure as stated by Deb Verhoeven in the article. AFC funding cuts to the AFI were for Research and Information and Distribution only. The AFC stated to the AFI and publicly that it would continue to fund Exhibition and the Awards. In 2000, the AFI received $157,000 for Exhibition, which increased in 2001 to $244,899. In 2002, the opportunity existed for the AFI to receive at least the same allocation for Exhibition as it had in 2001. However, the AFI chose not to continue with it’s exhibition program, including the Cinémathèque tour.

Since 2000, the AFC has increased its funding support to the AFI for the AFI Awards by 63%.

Yours faithfully,
Sabina Wynn
Manager Industry and Cultural Development
Australian Film Commission

Reply from Mick Broderick

I’m heartened to learn from the AFC’s Sabina Wynn that ACMI have “reinstated” the WA Cinémathèque tour. Things were looking grim when I first contacted the AFC in late November of 2001, having learned that the Cinémathèque would not run in Perth the following year. At that time the AFC expressed concern at the loss of Perth from the national tour, but flicked the problem/explanation to the AFI and FTI. It is reassuring to see that the situation has now been salvaged.

In her letter Ms Wynn provides financial statistics in an attempt to refute my suggestion that the AFI was subjected to a series of cuts over the past decade. Curiously, though, her own figures clearly validate my assertion.

According to Ms Wynn the AFI’s “peak” funding was more than a million dollars just over a decade ago in 1991. Since then the funding decreased to just over $800,000 in 1999. But the consistently diminishing appropriation in real terms is further evidenced if one considers the diminishing dollar value from the 1991 peak in funding to what the AFI receives today. The metaphor I invoked spoke not to a massive pecuniary blow (which came later with the AFC’s withdrawal of support for Research & Information and Distribution) but a series of smaller funding attritions which left the AFI greatly compromised in its capacity to remain viable, except for running the annual national Awards. Regardless of the AFC’s motivation and rationale (some of which I’m deeply sympathetic to in this instance) the facts speak for themselves. Interested parties can visit the financial appendices of the AFC’s Annual Reports at the AFC website for details.

As for the issue of discriminating between “devolution” and the professed move to a “funding partnership”, I’ll leave the semantics of such euphemisms to the RealTime readers to adjudicate upon.

Yes, there is an ACMI

News has leaked from the tight ship that is Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) of a couple of exhibitions that might be well worth the journey for eager digital culture vultures outside Melbourne. But expect to be confronted.

Persistence of Vision (March 21-May 5) is the first part of ACMI’s major exhibition Remembrance + the Moving Image. Encompassing some 30 installations, the exhibition offers viewers a series of memory jogging experiences from a variety of vantage points: “eavesdropping on the anonymous lives and restless spirits that haunt the phonelines, televisions and sleepless nights of the city” (Jem Cohen, Black Hole Radio, US); “alone in a room with 9 naked figures…pale forms without identity or voice”(Gina Zcarnedki, Versifier, UK); playing visual detective to an eyeful of silent exchanges, glances and tiny clues gathered from home movie footage (Traces, Naomi Bishops and Richard Raber, UK).

Curator Ross Gibson (see his new book reviewed, p4) writes in the show’s press release, “Remembrance is about activating memory. When visitors encounter installations such as Ivan Sen’s Blood, Sadie Benning’s Jollies or Bill Viola’s The Passing, they will feel the artworks infiltrating their nervous systems, tangling with their moods…Visitors are encouraged to plunge into the imaginary worlds the works conjure: these works move through the visitor as the visitor moves amongst them, feeling the power of memory-in-action coursing through them.”

The impressive list of participating artists—a not at all predictable new media arts lineup—includes: Mona Hartoum (Lebanon/UK), Sue Ford (Australia), Geshe Sonam Thargye (Tibet/Australia), Alexander Sokurov (Russia), Andrea Lange (Norway), Joyce Hinterding (Australia), David Haines (Australia/UK), Scott Horscroft (Australia), Peter Forgacs (Hungary), Robert Arnold (US), Emily Weil (US), Frank Scheffer (Netherlands), Les LeVeque (US), Andrish Saint-Clare (Australia), Steve Reinker (Canada), Big hART (Australia), Chris Marker (France), Tehching Hsieh (Taiwan), Dennis del Favero (Australia), Kate Murphy (US), Bill Seaman (US), Debra Petrovich (Australia) and Mary Lucier (US).

Jeffrey Shaw

Place Urbanity, Jeffrey Shaw’s new interactive installation (read the interview with the artist in RT41, p18) surrounds the viewer in a large projected images of Melbourne suburbs and is also showing at ACMI. A robotic platform mounted with camera and video projector allows the visitor to rotate the projected image within a surrounding 9 metre diameter projection screen while they navigate virtual space. As the platform rotates, so does the projection, allowing the viewer to explore a 360 degree panorama. And as you immerse yourself in any of the 15 suburban locations—the predominantly Vietnamese strip of Victoria Street in Richmond, the Jewish community in Balaclava—you encounter a member of that community who tells you a joke. Shaw is the current Director for Visual Media at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. With another Australian new media artist, Dennis del Favero, he is heading up the new I-Cinema at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts, another significant new media venture. Watch these pages.

In an informal meeting last month, Victoria Lynn, Director of Creative Develpoment of ACMI, wowed the RealTime Editors with a preview of what the centre will spring on audiences over the next year and beyond. At long last, it looks like new media arts in its many manifestations, national and international, will reach the audiences it warrants in ACMI and beyond.

Electrofringe 03

October 1-6 will see the 6th Electrofringe in Newcastle NSW gathering together new media artists, sound and noise makers, gamers and activists for a hands on, all in talk-tech-play fest. Co-ordinators Gail Priest and Vicky Clare are now calling for expressions of interest from new media artists, curators, producers and people interetsed being state consultants. See www.electrofringe.net for more details.

There is no denying the self-confessed artistic ‘eclecticism’ of composer Irine Vela. Aside from working with the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre since its inception in 1987 and being a founding member of the Melbourne-based choral group Canto Coro, Vela is even credited on Phillip Brophy’s latest warping of cinema scores, Film Music (Sound Punch, 1997-2002). “With Head On [directed by Anna Kokkinos], Phillip and I worked together on a few things,” she explains, “I was the Greek music consultant for that, so maybe he has used some of those pieces—but I didn’t know that until now! If he has, I’m rapt!”

Vela is about to go into rehearsal for her second major operatic composition, 1975, which she describes as a kind of prologue to her successful 1996 production with the Melbourne Workers Theatre and Canto Coro, Little City. “If you put those 2 works beside each other, then you could say Little City is set in the near future,” Vela claims.

“What precedes Little City is this story of 1975, in which…the only political party that the disenfranchised and the vulnerable have in Australia [the Labor Party], dies in a sense. That is when the rights of the people and the visionary idea of what is possible in politics begin to erode. So then you get the situation one finds in Little City [composed during the height of the Thatcherite Liberal regime of Jeff Kennett in Victoria] where there is nothing. There are no health care services, there is no after-school program, there is nothing. And so people are spurred on to revolt. But 1975 is more character-based, while in Little City it was the choir itself [which represented the populace in general and the working classes in particular] which was the protagonist. 1975 will still have the force of the mass singing, but they are more like a traditional opera chorus…”

Vela notes that in composing her new political opera, she has been inspired by the popular US artist Leonard Bernstein, who drew upon jazz, American folk and popular idioms, as well as classical and romantic music. “I use anything that works for the dramatic and musical problems I encounter.”

1975 deals with the years 1972-5, in which Gough Whitlam led the ALP to victory in the national polls, only to be ignominiously ousted 3 years later; the whiff of scandal, incompetence and betrayal strong in the air. This has been a popular theatrical subject ever since David Williamson’s Don’s Party (1971). Vela’s take on these events is very different however.

Whitlam’s term in office signified Labor’s first national government after 20 years in opposition, and it is traditionally seen as “the high water mark of social democracy” and progressive government in Australia (Graeme Davison et al, eds, Oxford Companion to Australian History, 2001). However a growing number of contemporary commentators point out that, for all of the ALP’s high principles, it also initiated the policy of studious non-intervention and tacit support for Indonesia’s military occupation of East Timor.

Vela has therefore sketched a figure to embody this shift in Labor policy: the character of senior ALP member and mother, Paula. “She represents that part of the Labor party which you later see in Bob Hawke, who argued that we have to get pragmatic and do everything we can to ensure that our party gets into office. So we can’t be idealistic any more. We can’t be worried about workers and unions. We can’t ‘give over’ to them. We have to manage them.”

Vela characterises 1975 as a “popular opera,” partly to distinguish it from more didactic, Brechtian-influenced styles (including her own Little City). The character-based nature of the work means that ideology is explored through the old adage of “the personal is political.” Vela has “set 2 pieces of a requiem mass”—a choral form composed to honour the dead.

“The notion of the requiem is both literal and metaphorical here, expressing the genocide of East Timor as well as the grief and loss of Paula for her journalist son, who has died there. The piece begins with a burial in Indonesia and then we go back 3 years, and return again to the funeral at the end of the performance.” In this scene, the idealistic son, like Australia’s role in the East Timor invasion, is buried within political and emotional memory, thus giving the tragic tale of political disillusionment a palpable emotional charge.

The Melbourne Workers’ Theatre and Canto Coro, 1975, composer Irine Vela, director Wesley Enoch, musical director Peter Mousaferiadis, performers include Melita Jurisic, Cidalia Pires, Grant Smith, Lisa-Marie Charalambous, Jeanie Marsh, Michael Lindner, Jenny Vanderbilt, North Melbourne Town Hall, May 21-Jun 7.

There are several Melbourne companies whose relatively young membership is committed to that which eludes spoken language and generates novel onstage worlds. Aside from the Gertrude Stein Project, there is the Well Theatre, currently headed by Dario VaCirca (ex-5 Angry Men), Ben Cittadini, Wendy Stevens and Ania Reynolds. The most perversely engaging aspect of their inaugural production, One Night in the Well, is the excess and disparate quality of the performances. No specific company aesthetic has been established, so the show consists of 3 very different short works collared together and punctuated by a meal break.

The first piece is a tango mime, relating a doomed love affair between an artist and an Argentinian gangster’s moll. Tango dance theatre is not in itself novel, but it’s rare in Australia, and director VaCirca and choreographer Stevens have expanded the form by adding highly gestural choreographic asides (based on Auslan signing) and some beautifully produced video projection. However, the modest venue is unsuited to showing this eye candy at its best (the visuals are everyday objects given symbolic potency), and the performers have not fully mastered the quicksilver kicks of tango; though music from the accomplished live quintet helps ensure that this slightly raw curio entrances even in its current state.

The second piece is a kind of neo-Dadaist, Futurist or Fluxus performance game in which 2 endlessly curious, childlike figures play at gesticulating, moving, wriggling, playing a piano, poking and prodding each other. Performers Reynolds and Renato VaCirca have a predominantly musical background (though Renato’s movement has a touch of Butoh’s formlessness) and this short study is a jewel of surprises, gentle melancholy and quietly suspended musical and physical moments.

The third work is the most textually demanding, a bizarre solo performed by a constantly amazed, ripplingly mobile Dario VaCirca, while an equally strange monologue is read out and an abstract, largely electronic soundscape linked in, producing an effect that has much in common with the solos of theatre maker Angus Cerini. Dario’s movement has none of the choreographic forms or even rhythmic structures of what is normally described as dance. Sheer athleticism and an eternally vigilant focus shape the physicality. Similarly, his text has a disarming sense of the everyday that gradually spills over into a surreal, almost LSD-induced road trip in which our hero describes hitchhiking from central Australia over a radioactive River Styx, while a roadside concrete Big Lobster cracks the lid on his vehicle to claw him and force him to acknowledge an expanded sense of self.

It’s crazy, more than a bit silly, but wildly inventive and great fun. Moreover, the incongruity of seeing these works as part of a ‘unified’ program sparks some interesting reflections. Well Theatre has yet to arrive, wherever it’s going, but even this rough, careening manifestation is hugely engaging. Perhaps their biggest concern is whether in weeding out some of the stray elements, the company’s practice will remain so wonderfully surprising and novel.

Well Theatre, One Night in the Well, directors Dario VaCirca, Ben Cittadini, performers Willow Conway, Peat Moss, Ryan Schofield, Nik Garcia, Renato VaCirca, Dario VaCirca, projection Matt Gingold, Auslan signing/translation Mark Sandon, design Entelechy Industries, Carlton Courthouse, Melbourne, Jan 27-Feb 7

The Project

Brink’s latest work, The Rope Project, had the air of a trial—exemplified in the shape of its staging and exposition. Before an audience of representatives of the city-state of Adelaide, the players put their case. It was a case not only for the right to continue their project with the approval and advice of the demos, but a presentation of the nature of power and crime in the audience’s own picket-fenced backyard. The Rope Project was also a trial in the sense of being a try-out: the first public showing of several month’s work.

Director Sam Haren took the floor as orator, giving his introduction and interpretation. His subject was the representation of deviance on stage and film. His particular topos linked 3 sequences of multiple murders that occurred in Adelaide: the 7 girls at Truro in the 70s, the 5 boys in the parklands and beyond, and the gruesome discoveries still emerging from the Snowtown bank vault. They were preceded by the murder of Dr George Duncan in the River Torrens by 3 police officers, and connected by the figure of Bevan Von Einem as potential victim and witness, and subsequently killer.

The company, including designer Mary Moore, video and sound artists Sophie Hyde, Bryan Mason, Andrew Russ and Andrew Howard then demonstrated the exhibits and forensic events presented by the actors. The audience responded with their doubts, sarcasm, fears, contradictions and encouragement. It was an admirable vindication of the value of live theatre.

The Film

Brink’s project takes its title from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, itself adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s 1924 London stage play. Hitchcock changed the original characters—Oxford undergraduates and their professor—into 2 Manhattan penthouse peacocks, Phillip and Brandon (coded as homosexual by Hitchcock’s elegant direction of Farley Granger and the mise-en-scène of the apartment), and their mentor Rupert (James Stewart). They have just strangled their friend David in an acte gratuit, and are about to tease their guests and us by throwing a party. Hitchcock wanted to increase the tension by giving the Stewart role to the openly bisexual Cary Grant and Brandon to another gay actor, Montgomery Clift, who backed off. Even in Hamilton’s play, much of the public fascination was with the reverberations of the real Leopold/Loeb affair. Though Hamilton denied it, there were certainly striking similarities between his Nietzschean thrill-killers and the wealthy Chicago students who murdered a 14-year old boy. Hitchcock, on the other hand, certainly knew the connection. Several other powerful films have been made on the subject, notably Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion (1959). From prison, the convicted Nathan Leopold threatened to sue at the implication of a homosexual motive for the murder. Loeb was himself murdered in 1936. But it’s Hitchcock’s Rope that remains the archetypal dramatisation, not least because of its bold experiment with real time and a single location. In his version, with the camera changing rolls behind moveable furniture and apparently filming in one continuous take, the insolent killers serve their guests dinner on a chest containing the body.

Adelaide

It was Salman Rushdie, an Adelaide Festival guest, who first made global, in an article (published in 1984), the creepy feeling he experienced behind the facade of colonial buildings and bluestone suburbs in this Athens of the South. But it was the British tabloids’ characterisation of the city as the murder capital of the world that really had backpackers looking over their shoulders and Old Adelaide Families snuffling in their shiraz. Firstly, is it true? No, in both number or proportion it is ridiculous in comparison with cities such as Washington or Sao Paolo. But what about ‘weird’ murders? Brink’s audience was quick to respond: “Aren’t all murders weird?” No, it appeared, some were weirder than others. Because they were serial, for instance. Or, in this city at least, so many could be linked to homosexuality. But wasn’t that merely media sensationalism? In a place where the next most notable event is Woomera and the newspapers are the worst outside Rangoon, wouldn’t grisly horror stories about perverts make more people snap up the front page? Yes, but even if it’s only a myth, doesn’t that in itself say something about the city? Some questioners, like Myk Mykyta, father of one of the victims, wondered about the purpose of dragging it all up again—for the sake of mere sensationalism.

Lawyers in the audience pointed out the specious nature of the revised statements from murderers still in prison. Should they be countenanced? No, this was not Brink’s intention. But the whole creation of the “Family” [a term coined by Adelaide reporters for the Parklands murderers] served the interesting function of hinting that Adelaide’s rulers, judges, highest functionaries and identities were themselves a gang of secret killers. It’s this, I think, that the company must explore further. Don Dunstan created an Athens of the South all right. But had anyone considered what Periclean Athens was actually like? Even under reformed legislation, half its male population, including Sophocles, Aristophanes and most of its poets would be considered paedophiles. Had a member of the “Family”, perhaps in some hidden Chair of Classics, actually read The Greek Anthology [a famous collection of Hellenic poetry, including inter-male love poems, many of them pederastic]? The confusion surrounding the entire notion of history and deviance was enough to bring down Dunstan himself; even in a city where he was responsible for the decriminalisation of an act for which he was fatally vilified.

Brink’s situating of the origins of both myth and reality in the still reactionary media of the 3 periods is an act of tightrope walking. The choice of director or dramaturg is crucial. The company also needs to understand more clearly the language of cinema, particularly given the fact that Hitchcock is complicit with his killers, and must evolve a more sophisticated apparatus of switch-on/off points for actor, image and text. The company was trying a technique in which character and text were signified by switching on or off (a) an image, video morph or projection from which the actor emerged or disappeared, and (b) an accent. In this case all the actors used Jimmy Stewart’s voice to indicate the fictive murder of the film and their own voices to read various texts and newspapers describing the real murders in Adelaide. The audience suggested the technique be clarified. But even at this stage what we saw was a courageous and necessary piece of action.

The Rope Project, Brink Company, Inspace program, The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, Feb 8.

James Middleton has long been a resident of Tasmania’s more remote locations. The filmmaker initially moved to Tasmania’s Bruny Island after 1997 to write and research a screenplay on the Black War of the 1830s and has been coming and going ever since.

His short film Lunnawanna Kiss emerged from its primary setting of Bruny Island’s lighthouse, and a desire to make a light and joyful antidote to his initial research. The Black War project is still in the pipeline, as is a feature length screenplay of Lunnawanna Kiss called The Lightkeeper’s Wife.

In 2000, after Lunnawanna Kiss, Middleton researched his first documentary, Return to Port Davey, which he shot in 2001. The film premiered at Hobart’s State Cinema and Sydney’s Chauvel in February this year.

Middleton grew up in New Guinea and suggests his connection with Tasmania lies partly in the similarity between their mountains and cloud and weather patterns. Living on Bruny Island—a small island off a larger one—gives him a heightened sense of vulnerability to environmental factors. He also developed an acute awareness of water from catching ferries home, an experience that’s all the more potent for someone who did not see water until he was 7. Middleton’s first view of the ocean was a striking experience, which may explain the prevalence of water and nautical themes in his 2 Tasmanian films.

Set in 1931, the silent Lunnawanna Kiss is a story of a seemingly impossible affection between a local boy, Billy Shearwater, and the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, Elizabeth Cross. Working against them are their geographical isolation and her father’s distaste for Catholics. When a storm floods the roads, Billy must take the family to church by boat.

As Middleton intended, the film has a delicacy about it: the feathery, staccato violin and piano is in keeping with the silent film genre. There are the skimming glances; the couple’s wordless flight to kiss between gums and grasses; and perhaps even more delightfully intimate, the post-kiss smiles exchanged beneath hat-brims on their journey back to the lighthouse.

Lunnawanna Kiss, like Port Davey, is primarily concerned with the ways the environment effects our social worlds. In keeping with this, nature is often present as a still, enveloping protagonist effectively conveyed in the short’s main promotional shot: a dinghy with its prominent yet slight mast and the lighthouse keeper by its side on a small part of a water-mountain canvas. The vessel and its occupants cause only a ripple in the foreground of their immense setting.

The film evolved into its silent format through luck and instinct. Upon its ‘completion’, Middleton sensed there was something missing. The film had failed to attract support from the AFC or Arts Tasmania so he kept playing with it, finally doing an edit without dialogue. The important lesson he learned from this was to look for the essential truth in a project, even if dramatically different from your original intentions.

Introducing music in lieu of dialogue, Middleton was faced with several decisions about format and economics. He finally transferred the footage to Digital Beta, to do all the effects he wanted, then kine-ed it back to 35mm, with the generous help of SOS Digital. The kine was surprisingly good and most importantly allowed for a quality soundtrack. The resulting film has been shown at numerous festivals, received Exploding Cinema, Woodford and ASC awards and was Screen Tasmania’s first screened project.

The seed for Middleton’s most recent project, Return to Port Davey, came from organising the Lunnawanna Kiss shoot. He contacted Des Weyman about oysters for catering on set and they were still talking 2 hours later. Des’ ability to spin a good yarn and to evoke a fisherman’s life at Port Davey tweaked the filmmaker’s instinct for a good story.

Weyman had been a crayfisherman in the sheltered waters of Port Davey, on the southwest coast, and Middleton eventually persuaded him and 3 others—Mike, Monty and Clyde—to return to their old haunt and tell stories to the camera. The men recall a time when a haul of 2,000 cray was not unusual, and when regulations on sizing were introduced in the 1940s. The film is full of anecdotes shared between men (up to 50 years apart in age) who knew each other for decades in often harsh elements.

Mike recounts poking dreamily about a beach at the age of 14 and waking a Tasmanian devil. Fearing probable disembowelment, he made his terrified escape across soft sand that sucked his footsteps backwards. Mike’s account is deadpan and hilarious; as is his litany of bad smells in a time before iceboxes.

For many years Middleton considered documentary to be the poor cousin of drama, an opinion he has completely relinquished after experiencing the freedom of documentary making and discovering that people’s lives can be more fascinating than fiction. He believes that documentary is just another form of storytelling, with its own set of rules, constructing its own sort of truth.

Middleton incorporated into the documentary black and white stills from the 1920s and beautiful faded 8mm home-movie footage from the 50s. With ABC purchase of the Australian broadcasting rights came the condition of rigorous editing from 57 to 27 minutes. This was a difficult process, though he is happy with the result—a rich, authentic portrait of working lives in what he calls a “primal and epic” setting.

While James Middleton feels defined as an artist by the work he is making at the time, funding bodies often see things differently. Making work consistently about a place, and residing there for most of the year, does not guarantee support. He did not understand Screen Tasmania’s failure to fund the authentic Tasmanian stories conveyed in Port Davey and feels there should be more feedback to filmmakers about tenders, and the reasoning behind funding body decisions. When asked whether this essential aspect of filmmaking has become easier, Middleton marvels that it hasn’t. Despite ultimate support—by the ABC for Port Davey and Screen Tasmania for Lunnawanna Kiss—Middleton has never received production funding, only post-production; testimony to his tenacity.

Middleton has an ability to tell quiet, authentic stories; their power is perhaps hard to sell unseen. Hopefully this will change with a growing canon of recognised work. With The Lightkeeper’s Wife doing the rounds and another documentary idea at the ABC, he has a potentially busy and supported couple of years.

Christos Tsiolkas
The Devil’s Playground
Currency Press & ScreenSound Australia, 2002
ISBN: 0868196711

Christos Tsiolkas’ introduction to film came while acting as a translator for his movie-fan Greek mother. But it didn’t take long for the precocious inner-city Melbourne boy to fix his tastes and branch out on his own, frequenting the inner-city art house circuit, under-age, undercapitalised but addicted to cinema.

He first saw Fred Schepisi’s The Devil’s Playground at the age of 12, during its 1978 theatrical release, and somewhere between the opening titles, water shots, Simon Burke, the wanking scene, Nick Tate, and Bruce Smeaton’s closing score—Tsiolkas’ life turned on its heel.

Tsiolkas’ entertaining account of his initial and subsequent viewings of this classic Australian film is the first release in a new series from Currency Press and ScreenSound Australia. At each sitting he sifts through the context of the experience, teasing out meaning and looking deeper and harder at exactly what went off in his head 24 years ago.

I don’t believe that past experiences can be recalled and remain true to the original—the act of remembering unavoidably alters recollections. We change history daily to form our own narratives and Tsiolkas’ book is as much about this as anything Schepisi intended. I don’t say this facetiously. To discover how The Devil’s Playground unfolded in the mind of 12-year Greek Australian boy, then a 20-year old gay man, then a 30-something professional writer, is to dip into another’s life in a very engaging way. It’s as truthful a reading of a film as I could hope for.

It begins in 1978 with Tsiolkas regularly trekking off to the movies with his mother, in a pact of mutual benefit. She gets a translator and regular movie companion, and he gets access to adult films and a newfound enthusiasm for Clark Gable. Then one summer’s day, lured by a trailer for The Devil’s Playground depicting boys having showers and a craggy Nick Tate, the young Tsiolkas enters the cinema on his own.

In the darkness, Tom Allen—a bed wetting, masturbatory, 13-year old schoolboy with a smile that will take him halfway around the world (played by Burke with such immediacy it’s almost documentary)—looks back at Tsiolkas. This is where it all changed. Movies, for Tsiolkas, would never again be limited to mere fantasy or entertainment. In the raw gaze levelled from one boy to the other, cinema was promoted from an interest to a passion and Tsiolkas experienced an elevated expectation of what it should deliver.

It’s now 1989 and Tsiolkas’ second viewing of The Devil’s Playground involves a dinner party conversation, a rented video and a cigarette afterwards. Was it as good as the first time? Well the focus has shifted. The boy is now a man, living with his lover and, having inherited some of his father’s political urgency and a raft of his own generation’s causes, taking on the world.

This time it’s the film’s adult priests that draw the 20-year old’s eye. Who are they? The film is set in 1957 in Victoria, so what do they think about the split in the ALP, the rise of the Democratic Labor Party, Doc Evatt and that prick, Bob Santamaria. Their silence is a void in the story.

The film is still good (even though it’s on video) but he thinks Schepisi’s 1978 film of Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith is better, harder, braver.

Tsiolkas’ third viewing happens on a cold day in 2000, back in a Melbourne cinema. He leaves troubled by Waite’s (Tom’s friend) lack of resolution in the final act but this is forgotten on overhearing a conversation between 2 young men who’ve also seen the film. Sitting in close proximity to Tsiolkas in the pub they dismiss The Devil’s Playground as plotless, private school rubbish. Tsiolkas has to fight an urge not to scream at them.

By this time Tsiolkas has seen his novel Loaded made into a movie [directed by Anna Kokkinos]. As an accomplished storyteller and an industry player, he knows enough to lament a national cinema that has fallen short of his expectations.

He began his journey with the wide-eyed Tom Allen. Has he now become the Teutonic Brother Victor? Tsiolkas refrains from calling the men in the pub “Lara Croft loving cock-suckers” and instead catches the tram home.

In conclusion, Tsiolkas writes the scenes he’s imagined into The Devil’s Playground over the years. This is my favourite part of the book, especially where Tom gets to fuck Nick Tate.

I sat through 3 years of cinema studies where every Thursday night we would gather for a screening of an important or significant film and discuss it afterwards. The human brain is a wonderful thing, weighing on average just over 2 pounds, wrinkled like a walnut, with the colour and consistency of porridge. Yet somehow the interactions of its ten billion cells produce all that we call the mind—our capacity to think, hope, believe, imagine and speak lyrically about films for longer than the time it took to watch them. In this task Christos Tsiolkas is funny, smart, insightful and occasionally crude (usually with Nick Tate in mind). I find myself turned on afresh to Padre Padrone, Pasolini, Pauline Kael, Iranian cinema, the evils of the DLP and most of all the potential of cinema to excite. Tsiolkas would make a great dinner-movie date but if he can’t make it, read the book and rent the video.

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of novels The Jesus Man and Loaded, adapted into the screenplay Head On. His plays include Dead Caucasians, and he edits the journal Refo with George Papaellinas.

Michael James Rowlands’ films, The Existentialist Cowboy’s Last Stand (also a book) and Flying Over Mother, were both nominated for AFI awards. He is the author of Ten Drawings of the Jungle, and his new work Life Advice for High Plains Drifters will be published by Cowboy Books in October.

The Australian Screen Classics series is edited by Jane Mills. Next are Adrian Martin on the Mad Max films and Louis Nowra on Walkabout.

Paul Carter
Repressed Spaces, The Poetics of Agoraphobia
Reaktion Books, London, 2002
ISBN: 1861891288

It is impossible to tell of all the issues (about living and making the world) that Paul Carter’s book Repressed Spaces, The Poetics of Agoraphobia approaches, but what he makes clear, in a twisting, turning, rising, falling way, through subtle attention, is that our thinking toward and building of public spaces is crucial to people’s sense of themselves and others in the world—their relationships with the outside of their lives, in terms of structures and subjects; the potential for meetings and unforeseen arrangements or groupings is endlessly effected by the concept of ‘the approach’ itself, or as Carter writes, “…the spatialisation of approaches.”

Carter seems to work/write ‘in the gap between 2 strides’, or in the suspended moment of the leap—a leap ashore, as in Maupassant’s La Mouche that brings about her miscarriage, or the jangled leaps, skips and jumps of Rilke’s man in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge trying to do the simple thing of walking on the city street, but with a worn will that can no longer keep agoraphobia at bay.

It could be that each of us is an agoraphobe, if not chronically, then from time to time, momentarily. Faced with the spaces made in our name (the public) we are paralysed by them, or convulsed, confused, repelled, afraid, and not by their chaos or undulations, but by their smooth geometries made for always moving ‘traffic.’ As street-walkers we twitch, inwardly, we stutter and stammer—we act as solitary singular crowds, as if dreaming of ‘the festival’, or ‘the march’—of the fact that urban spaces are where ‘people take to the streets’, and are places for encounter—where people show-off, walk, run, pause, act-up, etc.

Carter’s writing is like watching flashes of light, like driving in a car on a bright day through an avenue of trees; he moves like the agoraphobic, with a trembling, hovering gait, touching the surfaces of others’ writings about the agoraphobe like an impressionistic painter wanting to show the strange beauty and instability of the street, its abstract and infinite appearance—whether recognised or not. This making of the work comes about slowly, within the speedy mood, and is of a complex texture (psychoanalytic, philosophic, literary, cinematic, cultural, architectural) that slips between and across shades and tones of ‘agora’ (assembly and place of assembly); glances and glimmers accumulate, dissipate, and return like hauntings to ‘impress’ themselves a little sharper on the reader.

The agoraphobe, as she/he attempts to negotiate the built environment, makes the horror or danger (or even the painful pleasure) of ‘the street’ show itself (come alive)—whether as a real body moving in space, or as a photograph, painting, print, cartoon, or as writing (Rilke’s man on the street), or as architecture (“…the ‘blindingly intense light’ of the first void in the Berlin Jewish Museum was [says Daniel Libeskind, its architect] ‘inspired by the tale of a woman. Confined in a railway wagon, on her way to Auschwitz, she saw a light through the grating. That was all she could see. Maybe it was no more than lamps in a tunnel, but she believed it to be clouds, stars, sunshine’.”)

The agoraphobe’s (suffering) role in society is rich and crucial; essential, in a sense, to the shape of how things are, in their fleetingness, or in their persistence, like Freud’s (repressed) agoraphobia (not only a space, but a whole world; millions of words about why we are what we are). This gives Carter reason to revisit the Oedipus complex; Oedipus becomes the limping agoraphobe feeling his way in the dark, Hermes at his side; and Freud takes the whole journey to the end of the book, strolling and striding and making-up stories, sort of banging his stick on the ground so to speak.

What Carter does, as he ducks and weaves and plunges like so many of his agoraphobic examples, is draw you toward the amazing myriad possibilities of the surfaces of the street as witnessed by the agoraphobe, and as potentially there for the agoraphobe in us, if we follow-the-lead. Carter writes:

He shows the follower timely openings unnoticed before. The man in the street, relieved of the phantasmagoria of shop windows and the cinema of passing vehicles, attends to surfaces, textures, slopes and their coefficients of friction. …If the one following feels that he is moving as if in a trance or that he is blindfolded, it is all the better. In the blinding, as he becomes in touch with his surrounding, he measures space differently.

The straight geometries block our dreaming rather than opening out our need to dream—they regulate by the razed laws of our repressed convolutions, which restrict our possibilities to be otherwise, to be multiple and porous.

The idea that one is continually on the edge of falling, of being off-balance, of losing one’s footing out there on the street, the fact that it takes a great energy to be upright, to keep walking, to keep oneself out of the cracks and crevasses, away from the beautiful smashed windows and rusting grates, is unnerving. Carter cites Le Corbusier: “…one risks one’s life at every step. If you happened to slip, if sudden giddiness made you fall…” And yet it is the ragged edges of cracks and holes, their very details, that evoke the associations and threads (where time appears) that make urban spaces other than they seem; it’s these which can stop one’s headlong rush, and like Freud’s long winding night walks, thought might move, however slightly, toward “Benjamin’s ‘art of straying’.”

It’s hard to hold this book together; it’s a book which speaks an ‘agora’ condition, it is an assembly, it produces a dazzling, difficult space where one can trip into the gutter, or spend untimely time with a blue arrow on a footpath; it honours the suffering of the agoraphobe, the disorientation; the agora condition though opens up onto another orientation, another way to be with the world:

Agoraphobia, it seems, can be a characteristic of speaking and writing. Smoothing over discontinuities implies a dread of gaps opening up in the chain of logic, a fear perhaps of thinking and acting freely. This dread arises because those gaps are imagined as abysses or voids. But they are not: they are simply where the ground is rough, over-tracked, ambiguously delineated, humid or mist-streaked. It is a mistake to step over them without taking notice of what is there.

Paul Carter is Professorial Research Fellow at The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne and author of The Road to Botany Bay and The Lie of the Land.

Tofts, Jonson and Cavallaro eds, Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History

Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro eds
Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History
Power Publications, Sydney; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2000
ISBN 1864874910

In the words of senior editor Darren Tofts, “cyberculture has been a long time coming.” That’s the premise of this anthology, in which texts from philosophy, literature and computer science are reread as premonitions of our contemporary “becoming informatic.” The authors constitute a star-studded lineup of cybercultural theorists and commentators, with a substantial Australian contingent that reflects both the origins of this collection and the prominence of local thought in this scene. We have, to name a few, Evelyn Fox Keller, Gregory Ulmer, Margaret Wertheim and Mark Dery, as well as McKenzie Wark, Scott McQuire, Zoë Sofoulis and Damien Broderick.

The result is a very substantial volume in both quantity and quality, with 18 chapters, split into 4 sections. The first takes on cyborg subjectivity, AI and a-life; the second addresses virtuality and cyberspace; the final section turns to utopias, dystopias, and the future. The penultimate section is a collection of images and statements from high profile new media artists, which though perfectly readable (and good-looking), seems out of place. It’s poorly integrated with the surrounding arguments, and the material from the artists is not new or substantial. It might be that this section exists partly to acquit the support of the Australia Council and the AFC, who helped fund the project; still, it doesn’t work.

The wordy substance of the book, on the other hand, is engaging, challenging, and rewarding. Section One, I Robot: AI, A-life and Cyborgs, works through texts from sources as diverse as Mary Shelley, Alan Turing, and Philip K Dick, yet emerges with a multifaceted consensus on life and subjectivity as complex, dynamic, and machinic. Following N Katherine Hayles’ lead, this is the posthuman, according to cybercultural studies. Catherine Waldby’s account of Shelley’s Frankenstein sets aside the familiar “apocalyptic or phobic” readings to argue that this early 19th century tale is an examination of the confronting ethics of machinic life. Victor Frankenstein is faced not only with the horrifying, non-human autonomy of his creation, but by “his potential resemblance to an invention.” Rather than a fable on the perils of the technologies of life, the more fundamental issue is life as, somehow, technology: living being as machine. Waldby runs Donna Haraway’s cyborg alongside Frankenstein to suggest the productivity of a non-oppositional, connective, posthuman conception of the relations of subjects and objects, and the embracing of our shared, foundational “monstrosity.” This material machinics is historically grounded in Evelyn Fox Keller’s chapter on Norbert Weiner and Cybernetics, which in fact leads us through early biology and embryology, and the central problem of the organisation of the organism. Keller shows how cybernetics drew on the dynamic, organicist models of a biology that was entirely out of fashion in the postwar years of its emergence. Despite its limited successes at the time, the dynamic systems of second-order cybernetics are now very much in favour; and the organism now is, as Keller says, “a nonlinear, far-from-equilibrium system.” Machinic life and Haraway’s cyborg return in Zoë Sofoulis’ chapter, which makes a very clear survey of the impact of Haraway’s “Manifesto” in the humanities and the arts, while giving a useful gloss on this “cult text.”

Other subjectivities emerge here too, besides the ubiquitous cyborg. Elisabeth Wilson makes a close and very learned reading of Alan Turing, in person and text. She seeks to counter interpretations of Turing’s conceptions of machine intelligence as disembodied, asocial, and “emotionally puerile.” Instead, Turing emphasised imagination, surprise and affect, aspects which crystallise around the figure of the child, a self-forming subjectivity which is once again the focus of contemporary AI research (in particular that of Rodney Brooks and the MIT Robot Lab). A more radical departure from the material dynamics of the cyborg is Erik Davis’ opening chapter on Descartes’ Meditations. “Synthetic Meditations: Cogito in the Matrix” argues that despite Descartes now resembling a “punching bag”, assaulted from all sides for his dualistic model of subjectivity, the cogito, the incorporeal “I” who thinks, remains as a splinter, lodged in our cultural consciousness. Davis rereads Descartes to point out that the cogito is not only a reified “I”, but a procedure for reflexively interrogating the self, opening an “epistemological void” which has a particular currency. Davis’ argument escapes summation but it draws in The Matrix, Slavoj Zizek and mystical gnosticism, and ultimately returns us to the subject as “a void, a not-knowing.”

Most dazzling in this section however is a sprawling, audacious tract from Samuel J Umland and Karl Wessel, which takes as its source text Philip K Dick’s 1976 essay “Man, Android and Machine.” Setting excerpts from the essay against contemporary neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and AI, the authors show Dick’s prescience, but also make some striking and unsettling arguments. In short: that technoscience manifests a kind of autistic turn in human thought, biased towards objects, universal knowledge, specialisation and regularity; yet ironically the postmodern terrain that it has generated is illegible for the majority, with an evolved-in bias towards over-ascribing agency, and explanatory storytelling on that basis. This gap, they warn, may be apocalyptic.

In the section on virtual space the source texts are largely the usual suspects—Plato’s Cave, the Renaissance Ars Memoria, De Chardin’s noosphere, Gibson’s Neuromancer—though one of the most striking and enjoyable chapters is McKenzie Wark’s take on a lesser known source, Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt.” Wark uses Bradbury’s dark fable to propose a notion of the virtual as post-representational, the “too real”, a generative code engine which doesn’t mimic the real, but works on its own terms. While Wark makes a close reading, others use the texts as departure points for various trajectories, which ultimately destabilise the thematic of the section. Gregory Ulmer’s “Reality Tables: Virtual Furniture” leaves Plato behind early on in a dense and, for this reader, incoherent play on textual tables, language, literacy, and Elvis’ pelvis. Similarly Donald Theall springs off De Chardin and into his influence on McLuhan and especially James Joyce; Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari are also prominent. In another intricate paper Theall figures Joyce as a visionary of a polysemic “chaosmos” of media convergence, and the human becoming-machinic.

Australian philosopher John Sutton is more straightforward in setting the memory techniques of the Renaissance in the wider context of the exogram, or controlled, externalised and objective memory, and thus “the cognitive life of things.” Sutton’s ultimate argument is that a study of memory must ultimately acknowledge its cyborg-like transversality, its involvement in material things and lived time, as well as its interior spaces. Sutton references generously, providing an excellent resource for anyone with an interest in theories of memory. Scott McQuire sticks close, comparatively, to Gibson’s Neuromancer, and the crucial role of the modern metropolis (or in fact its luminous image) in anchoring Gibson’s overquoted coinage. Rather than a slippery non-place, this seminal cyberspace is in fact a way of grasping the informational reality which underpins the ungraspable excess of mega-urban experience: it offers the adept user the city as a legible “field of data.” McQuire is ultimately critical of Gibson’s return to the comfort of heroic, transcendent agency, in an era where the social relations that shape that agency are being radically altered by networked media technologies.

In the final section, a succession of past futures are examined, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, which Margaret Wertheim uses to mirror the 2 dominant versions of cyberspace utopia: the democratic virtual community (Rheingold and Esther Dyson), and the age of the “dot.com barons”, who are echoed by the technoscientific patriarchy ruling Bacon’s Atlantis. In a similar manner John Potts considers Marinetti’s hyperactive visions of a machine future, and sees them coming true in the non-place of cyberspace, which shares Marinetti’s ideals of speed, progress, intelligence, and anarchic individualism. In a more conventionally historical piece, Bruce Mazlish makes a fascinating study of Samuel Butler, in particular the projection of mechanical evolution in his Erewhon and other texts. Mazlish explains the genesis of these ideas through a detailed account of Butler’s connections with other intellects of his time, in particular Charles Darwin.

Finally this section turns towards more modern futures from Arthur C Clarke, Alvin Toffler, and Vernor Vinge. Russell Blackford gives a sympathetic account of Clarke’s influential futurism, and Australian sci-fi author Damien Broderick compresses his book on an accelerating technofuture he calls “the Spike” down to essay length (in the guise of a reading of Vernor Vinge’s notion of the “singularity”). Most contentious here is probably “futures studies” scholar Richard Slaughter, who tackles Toffler’s Future Shock, analyses its practical failings, and makes the case for futures studies as a discipline. Most striking in this context is his sidelining of cyberculture as a useful way to think about the future: he argues that it overplays technology, while tending towards nihilism. Of course nihilism can be fun, especially the clever, irony-soaked variety proffered by Mark Dery in the book’s retrofuturist “Coda”, which takes on that icon of the Jet Age, Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at New York’s JFK airport. For Dery this is a symbol of lost or failed futures, but it also suggests modern air travel as a metaphor for contemporary society—anxious, dangerous, and comprising a mixture of increasingly autonomous machines with all-too-fallible humans.

This collection is a considerable achievement. To be parochial for a moment, it will boost the already high profile of Australian thinkers in this area, and with MIT Press as a co-publisher it will be distributed widely. Yet while its editorial premise has been successful in amassing high quality material, I came away with one general reservation. The focus on “prefiguring” cyberculture is fine, yet what is too often taken for granted here is exactly what that “cyberculture” is. It seems to have coalesced around a handful of familiar tropes: the cyborg or machinic organism, cyberspace, the virtual, the posthuman, the future. The most interesting material here finds new ways through these notions, yet only very occasionally is there a glimpse of what cyberculture might be becoming, what its emergent properties are; and if cyberculture is, as Tofts argues, about a becoming informatic in the “perpetual present tense”, then this is a significant omission. I may be asking something that this volume never promised. In any case, more pragmatically, we must not allow cybercultural theory to divert our attention from the myriad actual cultural practices (gaming, browsing, blogging, SMSing…) which are technoculture itself.

Darren Tofts is Chair of Media Communications at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His publications include Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Interface Books, 1998). Writer and lecturer Annemarie Jonson’s book on Artificial Life is due to be published by Routledge in 2003. Alessio Cavallaro is Producer and Curator of New Media Projects at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne.

Andrew Murphie and John Potts
Culture and Technology
Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2003
ISBN: 0333929276

Over the past 5 years, the Federal government has released a number of key policy documents relating to Australia’s place in a global information economy. The Strategic Framework for the Information Economy is one important example. This document outlines the Federal Government’s vision of a “wired Australia” and paves the way for billions of dollars to be spent on infrastructure and services that the Government hopes will secure Australia’s place in the global information revolution. Unfortunately, what’s missing from many of these ‘visionary’ documents is any analysis of how the significant changes in our work and play wrought by new communications technologies impact on individuals and communities. The rhetoric of ‘revolution’ used by governments and policy advisors seems to suggest a profound and sudden shift in our relationship to technology, ignoring the effects that changes in technologies produced within and by culture have on cultural formations.

One key difficulty faced by analysts, critics, academics and the public when thinking through the relationship between culture and technology in our current circumstances is that it also seems to exceed the current moment. As critic Peter Lunenfeld says, we seem to be living in a state of future present. That is, the future appears to be alive in the present moment, happening simultaneously. We are always arriving too late. Every time we stop to learn a new version of the software, a new version is released that exceeds our knowledge of the first. While a great deal is written on the subject of culture and technology, there always seems to be more being written as we speak. Andrew Murphie and John Potts’ Culture and Technology comes as a timely incursion into this somewhat fluid and ephemeral field. Primarily a survey of key issues relating to culture and technology, this book operates as a kind of pause in the flow of information about information and new technologies, reminding us that much in the past is illuminating in relation to the present and the future.

Culture and Technology begins with several useful and clear definitions of its key themes—technology and technique, culture and the intersection between these. The authors then canvass a number of important theoretical frameworks. These are often contradictory and discontinuous, ranging from what the authors describe as the technologically deterministic approaches of Baudrillard and McLuhan, to the cultural materialism of Raymond Williams and on to Deleuze, Guattari and Virilio. The breadth of the frameworks allows the reader to get a sense of the very multidisciplinary nature of the field of inquiry.

Having established a ‘scene’ in which the discussion of culture and technology can occur, the authors then examine key topics. These include the relationship between art and technology; digital aesthetics; science fiction; the cyborg; artificial intelligence; war, commerce and the nation-state; and machine ecologies. Much of the material presented will be familiar to readers interested in any of these subjects. For example, the chapter on the body and technology, “Cyborgs: the Body, Information and Technology”, examines Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, Manual De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Sadie Plant’s Zeroes + Ones and N Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, standard texts for anyone critically interested in the cyborg. What distinguishes Culture and Technology however is the straightforward manner in which the authors present these important ideas to the reader without simplifying what are often complex arguments. Though not overtly didactic in tone, the authors have produced an excellent textbook while still maintaining a scholarly and critical edge to their writing.

In the final chapter Murphie and Potts provide the most explicit sense of their position on the subject. While they ostensibly relate accounts of how we might live with the virtual in an increasingly networked society, their process of selection is telling and offers an almost unconscious invocation of how to read the book. Discussing Guattari’s machine ecologies, the authors note that the “regular way of differentiating between technologies and life is that technologies are ‘allopoietic’…[and that] living things are normally considered as ‘autopoietic’.” [The former are dependent systems, the latter autonomous. Eds] They go on to note that in Guattari’s formulation of the machinic assemblage, there is always a relation between these states. Like the internet, our communities, and even ourselves, “we…are all autopoietic and allopoietic machines.” As an assemblage, then, Culture and Technology is an autopoietic and allopoietic machine. It is a book that deals in a focused and lucid way with many complex ideas, however it’s also interactive in the sense of being woven together from ideas outside of itself.

Given the multidisciplinary nature of the material the authors explore, Culture and Technology should be very much at home on the required reading lists of courses in philosophy, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, new media and political economy. However, it’s a pity that it is, like much scholarly publishing today, overpriced. Potts’ and Murphie’s prose is clean and user-friendly, as all good code should be. As such, it should also provide the general reader with an accessible and intelligent introduction to these fields as they relate to culture and technology.

Andrew Murphie is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of New South Wales. John Potts is Senior Lecturer in Media at Macquarie University.

Geert Lovink
Uncanny Networks. Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002
ISBN: 0262122510

Have you ever been to a party where every conversation was interesting? Didn’t think so, but as host, Geert Lovink, the founder of Nettime, might just pull it off. Lovink’s latest book, Uncanny Networks, is a rollercoaster ride of discussion that ranges from art to politics, techno tribes to dotcom IPOs, radical politics to futuristic fantasy.

What’s even more intriguing about Lovink’s compendium is its geographic range. Although several interviews were conducted via e-mail, a stunning number were face to face experiences in various corners of the globe. (I’d love to see this guy’s frequent flier account.) Lovink leaps from Sydney to Linz, Finland to Kassel, Taiwan to Amsterdam, powerfully linking the virtual to the actual with serious discussions about political and cultural scenarios in Los Angeles, Taiwan, Albania, Bulgaria, India and other parts of the world. This is almost a Lonely Planet guide for media thinkers and practitioners.

Naturally, as with any party, not every conversation will be to your taste. In fact there are a few that are rather dull, but even those have high points, if only by raising issues to disagree with. Writer Susan George describes herself as “alarmist” and proves it when she says, “For the first time in history, we do not have much time ahead of us.” In his introduction to a rather laborious discourse on cinema and politics in which Slavoj Zizek goes so far as to compare David Lynch with Leni Riefenstahl, Lovink accurately points out that Zizek “seemed to be criticising film without ever having seen one.”

Lovink rather cheekily introduces his book by conducting an interview with himself and asking the intriguing question, “Wouldn’t time be better spent writing original pieces? You are not a journalist. Shouldn’t a media theorist stick to theory?” That actually sounds like a question a journalist would ask, but it’s difficult to imagine any journalist as well-read, curious and intelligent as Geert Lovink.

Of course the answer is that interviews are by nature far more reader-friendly than the average essay. They also allow what Lovink describes as “the beauty of digital discord” to shine through. This is most obvious in the discussions with Mark Dery, Mike Davis, Paulina Borsook and McKenzie Wark. Dery, as always, delivers a blistering diatribe, suggesting that “we take a flamethrower to Newt Gingrich cum Alvin Toffler style laissez-faire futurism” and takes down Douglas Rushkoff, Arthur Kroker and John Perry Barlow while he’s at it. This is a particularly lively encounter that takes no prisoners.

Wark on a “third class”—the intellectuals and theorists who “qualify and interpret the actions of the others”—takes a fresh look at the role of academics in contemporary society (though if Wark trots out his old “we no longer have roots, we have aerials” quote once more I’ll strangle him); Davis on gated communities, and Borsook on the new economy are all riveting reads. Sadly, the Borsook discussion seems a tad dated: let’s face it, talking about Wired magazine is, well, tired—especially when the fate of dotcom boom publications like Red Herring and The Industry Standard are so much more intriguing. Borsook’s observations on the pollutants created from Silicon Valley output are sobering reading.

To a certain degree, being ‘dated’ is inevitable. Lovink began his interviews in the early 1990s, and between 1995 and 2000 posted many on Nettime. Despite their vintage, they give us a snapshot of specific periods and modes of thought, some highly prescient.

Beyond the Western style thinkers interrogated here, Lovink’s compendium is refreshing for giving equal space to other cultures. The interview with Ravi Sundaram is jam-packed with insightful information on historical and contemporary culture in India. Similarly Toshiya Ueno on Japanese subcultures, Finland’s Marita Liula on “art in the age of the mobile phone” and Kuan-Hsing Chen on contemporary media in Taiwan are full of first hand observations from cultures that tend to be sidelined in contemporary media studies. Sadly, this is the fate of many figures collected in Uncanny Networks. Lovink observes in his own interview: “I don’t think I have selected any interview partners because of their alleged subcultural, pop theory ‘celebrity’ status. I only wish they had it…The scenes these people are operating in are small, in fact way too small if you compare them to the hypergrowth of the IT sector as a whole.”

But Lovink’s selection is refreshing for this reason alone. Although there are high profile names here, Mike Davis, Arthur Kroker, Mark Dery and Gayatri Spivak, for example, Lovink has avoided the usual futurist figures; no Virilio or Baudrillard or Gibson or Sterling (although any of those would have been preferable to Kroker).

As Bruce Sterling says in his blurb, “If you want to know what media theory will say five years from now, then read Uncanny Networks to see what Geert Lovink said five years ago.” This is a dizzying ride, not always successful, but the odd clunkers make the more powerful discussions all the more delightful. If I have one major, and horrified, criticism of Uncanny Networks, it is the absence of an index—a major and silly oversight for a book so dense with references.

Uncanny Networks appears almost simultaneously with another MIT tome, Prefiguring Cyberculture. An Intellectual History, edited by Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro (see page 7). Together these books will give any aspiring media theorist and cultural commentator almost too much food for thought—if that were possible.

Geert Lovink is a founder of Nettime and fibreculture listservs. His previous book is Dark Fiber. Tracking Critical Internet Culture (The MIT Press, 2002).

Adrian Mackenzie
Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed
Continuum, New York/London, 2002
ISBN: 0826458831

Joanna Zylinska ed.
The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age
Continuum, New York/London, 2002
ISBN: 0826459021

It’s at least 20 years since Stelarc first claimed the body obsolete. The phrase belongs to an ongoing experiment in discourse, a way of writing that is actually the transcription of the artist’s talk, a form of thinking aloud. As an accompaniment to his performance work, Stelarc has produced a running commentary, a spontaneous poetics of remarkably succinct and cogent sound bytes. Somehow, though, amid all the improvisatory richness of Stelarc’s talk, this phrase about the obsolete body has stuck, like some misaligned spool in the machine of cultural conversation, so that every track gets fed back through it, including those he continues to introduce himself.

Adrian Mackenzie takes this phrase from the 1997 CD on which Stelarc’s Ping Body performance is archived, and takes it as a warning light in his approach to the analysis of that work. Mackenzie, author of Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed is especially interested in the temporal aspects of the work. The term “transductions” is taken from French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, for whom it denotes a process of emergence and propagation. Thus, writes Mackenzie, a transductive approach in criticism promises “a more nuanced grasp of how living and non-living processes differentiate and develop.”

Ping Body (“ping” being a measure of the time it takes for a message on the net to reach its destination and return) provides a focus for considering the relative speeds and delays in a process of human-technical involvement whose complexity is belied by the collapsing of bios and technos. This is a subtle and potentially revealing way to approach Stelarc’s work, but Mackenzie puts his own commentary under stress by taking the obsolete body dictum as a summary of what Stelarc sets out to demonstrate, thus assuming a need to write in defence of the body. Mackenzie takes elaborate routes through the arguments of Heidegger and Virilio to circumvent the traps of simplification and flatness in our understanding of human-technological relations. A better acquaintance with Stelarc’s work and the talk that accompanies it might have helped dispel the anxiety about such traps, and enabled the discussion to take new directions, over less embroiled terrain.

Certainly Stelarc likes to issue dicta, and he has been entirely unapologetic about his most controversial statement. But in the context of an extensive oeuvre, unfolding over 2 and a half decades, he’s maintained an edge of provocation that never settles into dogma, even though some of his statements may sound like it. It is important to remember that his commentary is also a performance, and that he is prone to making statements like, “the more and more performances I do, the less and less I think I have a mind of my own—nor any mind at all in the traditional metaphysical sense.” Stelarc says this in an interview with Joanna Zylinska and Gary Hall for The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. Edited by Zylinska, this collection of writings focuses on the work of Stelarc and Orlan [the French performance artist who has undergone a series of cosmetic surgery procedures referencing classic figures of female beauty. Eds]. In conversation, Stelarc tends to move away from the topic of technology, turning direct questions about it around to discuss specific technical difficulties, such as how it’s possible to grow muscle cells in a laboratory but not muscle fibre.

If Stelarc’s work remains relevant as a cultural practice, this is because it can help move us away from the rather obsessive and now stale dialogues about technology in the abstract that were so fashionable in the early 90s. Surely all this talk about obsolete bodies is becoming obsolete. It is not a conversation likely to produce useful insights at a time when we are being taken to war, not steered by abstract technology but via the good old traditional route of the propaganda campaign, in which twisted arguments and spun rhetorics are deployed as the first weapons of mass destruction. When “the question concerning technology” is whether the water supply is going to be restored, or how you are going to be able to rebuild your house from a heap of rubble, the discussion needs to be on a different footing. The most resonant questions raised in Stelarc’s work are those concerning the human being and its communicative operations.

Contributor Edward Scheer places himself in dialogue with Stelarc in his essay “Stelarc’s E-motions.” Scheer pushes the exploration of how emotion functions interactively and what this has to do with motion. “What moves us?” asks Scheer. He considers Stelarc’s interactions with the unmotivated choreography of the avatar in relation to Karen Finley’s overtly abreactive performances. Both, he writes, “are driven to perform rituals that transcribe the crisis of time, embody it and make it liveable.” In this process, the avatar will have to learn from its human models, drawing from the modelling work on emotion performed by 19th century researchers like Darwin, Delsarte and Duchenne de Boulogne.

Another refreshing shift from the habitual focus on the future-orientation of Stelarc’s work is provided by contributors Meredith Jones and Zoë Sofia, who are interested in “the varied ways in which people of European cultures have inhabited and owned bodies” from the Middle Ages to the present. Stelarc and Orlan, they emphasise, are engaged in carnal practices that necessarily involve the witnessing of pain, but this need not imply masochism. It may be more relevant to see their performances in relation to medieval views about the relationship between extreme carnal practices and the embodiment of higher values. These “higher values” have to do with ways of challenging incarnation itself, as a moribund condition, and with the revelation of the body as at once “cavernous and infinitely extended.”

Zylinska offers a complementary account of the 2 artists’ work as an opening up of the body that raises “issues of hospitality and welcome, of embracing incalculable difference.” The prosthetic relationship can thus be seen as a radical negotiation between self and other, that requires “otherwise complacent selves” to face up to the unspeakable and be challenged in their self-knowledge and self-sufficiency. This makes particular sense in terms of Stelarc’s ironic references to the imagery and terminology of paranoia. (Increasingly, he talks tongue-in-cheek about aliens, parasites and doubles.) In these times of paranoid nationalism, the urgent ground for investigation lies here, surely, in questions about boundaries—corporeal, metaphysical and political—and strategies for avoiding violently hysterical measures of self protection.

Adrian Mackenzie is a Researcher in Information Cultures, Department of Computing, Lancaster University. Joanna Zylinska is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of Surrey Roehampton, and author of On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime.

Madeline Gins & Arakawa
Architectural Body
University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2002
ISBN: 081731168

In Architectural Body, the latest book from the think tank of Madeline Gins and Arakawa, the authors bring their 35-year collaboration to the subject of sustaining and improving life. Abandoning their initial practices of painting and poetry, they now work on numerous sites of production including gallery and museum installations, site-specific works, houses, small communities and cities.

Architectural Body sets out the stakes of sustainability. For the authors this means coordinating every “scale of action”—from the smallest noticing of things to the co-construction of the body and environment. To accomplish sustainability we must figure out what we are capable of and put all our resources in service of the body. The book contextualises architecture that enables “all that a person can rally to the cause of being a person.” Arakawa and Gins concur our most important puzzle is how we are connected to the reservoir of regenerative possibility; the rest is technique.

Their books often appear in tandem with built environment projects: Reversible Destiny accompanied their 1997 retrospective at the Soho Guggenheim in New York and The Mechanism of Meaning charted the 15-year exhibition trajectory of that living-puzzle. (A series of installation-painting-objects made as cognitive perceptual puzzles, critiquing those puzzles found in psychology departments by highlighting the paradoxes and contradictions in our linguistic, perceptual and physical understanding.) Architectural Body addresses the critical, practical and theoretical aspects of their work and is concurrent with several projects: the Bioscleave house in East Hampton, New York, a Reversible Destiny Eco-housing community and a proposal for the Museum of the Living Body in New York City.

Arakawa and Gins’ assertion is straightforward: we cannot study the organism separate from its surrounds. This approach to “what operates as the world” is the basis of research that will help us to understand “how a re-envisioned architecture will stimulate a re-configured person.” The book’s premise is to make available a notion of daily research by providing procedures, hypotheses and scenarios that lead to observation, learning and potential reconfiguration (transformation).

In the first pages they outline the challenge, describing an “ethics crisis” that tests the logic of our resolve as living beings by suggesting that mortality is not an essential condition of our species. For if we remain open to all possibilities as a condition of our research, then we cannot allow “some categories of events to have special treatment, even mortality.” They argue for an ethic that would consider mortality unethical because it requires our compliance and sets an absolute limit on possibility. This has led them to rewrite Maurice Blanchot’s dictum “writing so as not to die” to read as a practice of personal choice, “we have decided not to die.” They push this line of inquiry along its logic-crushing trajectory, constantly questioning the disembodiment that enforces a separation between person and environment as well as body and mind.

The architectural body is not a specialist project. It focuses on a perceptual approach to attention, decision and action. This is a transdisciplinary approach which does not reduce the terms of one discourse or experience to that of another and always works “on-site where living happens.” As a result, the architectural body as a practice will have resonance with practitioners of all kinds—from writers, artists and architects to live-art performers, collaborative artists and practitioners of community and cultural development. Arakawa and Gins’ “landing sites” and “coordinology” are readily usable by anyone because they are not prescriptions for making, but procedures to enable new connections and relationships.

There are many historical affinities with Arakawa and Gins’ work—most notably William James’ radical empiricism where experience is the direct basis of knowing, Merleau-Ponty’s bodily oriented phenomenology of perception, and James J Gibson’s ecological approach to perception—as well as others who extend the study of person beyond the isolated mechanisms examined in their respective fields. Their extensive applicability is evident in the range of people who write on their work, including Jean-François Lyotard (philosophy), Arthur Danto (art theory), Italo Calvino (writing), Hans-Georg Gadamer (hermeneutics) and George Lakoff (linguistics). Arakawa and Gins’ work represents one of the most important contemporary research practices precisely because it is one of the few that addresses convergence and complexity across the arts and sciences on the “scales of action” relevant to human experience.

Many contemporary projects are focused on disassembling culturally inherited systems and structures. They are as important as they are widespread. What makes Arakawa and Gins’ project different is their goal of reassembly, because a terrible historical problem arises after everything has been dismantled: on what plan, model or concept is reassembly carried out? Architectural Body does not provide the answer—that is, the image of an outcome—but offers a mode of inquiry, a constant questioning from the point of view of the organism-person focused by “tactically posed surrounds.” This constitutes “daily research through architecture” that begins with our inclination to notice, specify and search the use of features in the environment. To put the body back into living history is to form a relationship with the environment that allows us to observe, learn and reconfigure (transform) the persistent and habitual world we have inherited.

Reading this book is a visceral experience, as the procedures discussed are meant to be used by the body. You laugh, you are puzzled, you don’t cry, but as a reader you do feel the roller coaster of thinking and feeling enacted on the pages. As with good novels, you are transported to other situations and places, but unlike most novels you bring your body with you and it all happens where you are—not in some utopian “elsewhere.” Although Architectural Body is published in a “poetics” series, it extends its discussion well beyond “making” in poetry to all domains of activity, inviting everyone to become a researcher and practitioner of the realisation of living.

Terry Flew
New Media. An Introduction
Oxford University Press, 2003
ISBN: 0195508599

Terry Flew manages to reinvent the much derided term, ‘new media’, in his recent work, New Media. An Introduction, propelling the reader into the maelstrom of manifestations, evidence and issues that are the contemporary technology of things computer-mediated (CMT), or related to information and communications technology (ICT). If RealTime readers have associated ‘new media’ with the ‘hybrid arts’, then New Media. An Introduction provides a flue for disavowal. As Flew gives little, if any, acknowledgement of the ‘unstructured’ research performed over the last decade, new media then is what business, government and tertiary education have invented from scratch.

Flew’s survey of literature and websites, with expert discussion, explores and analyzes the impact of recent digital technologies on society. Presented from an Australian perspective, it addresses structural issues in an OECD if not international context, cyberspace and real politik. The scope is far broader than an industry study, combining the informational and analytical needs of education, government and ‘the general reader.’

Chapter design and a consistent presentational style in each of the 9 sections combine overview with detail. Once the reader grows familiar with this series of files, highly compressed in content, created out of the convergence (or collision) of established academic empirical disciplines (whether social and political history/science, economics, philosophy, cultural studies, etc), then the density of the text becomes ‘weightless.’ It becomes the point from which to conduct further investigation using suggested websites or the large bibliography of some 200 other titles on the subject.

This will be an invaluable reader for undergraduates and postgraduates contemplating a future with the ‘creative industries’ (like new media, a term full of redundant meaning but timely arrival). British Prime Minister, Tony Blair is curiously foregrounded here, credited with establishing the term, but it’s not acknowledged that Blair’s many meetings with Paul Keating (whose Creative Nation policy document of 1994 surprised everyone with its scope) played a significant role in the invention of New Labor and its success at the British polls in 1997.

If ‘creative industries’ are the postmodern version of the arts and industry of the last century (extending the realm of ‘the creative’ beyond cultural industries to acknowledge ‘the creative act’ as an essential component of other fields of entrepreneurship, for example, commercial sound design and CD production in music studies), will there be sufficient resources for the unstructured production of ideas and critical spaces afforded by exchanges based on the less tangible and the ineffable?

Dr Terry Flew is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the Queensland University of Technology and largely responsible for establishing the world’s first Creative Industries Faculty.

It seems obvious, if there are 17 million people in Australia and 500 million in the UK, the proportion of culture vultures in Europe must represent audiences that Australian ensembles working exclusively in Australia can only dream of. Demand is there, talent is here. The only thing standing in the way is the price of an airline ticket. What are you waiting for? Get out your credit card, pack your bags, let’s go on tour!

But while everyone’s doing it, for some arts organisations international touring is an intrinsic part of their strategy for survival. Take for example 4 classical music organisations, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, The Song Company, Synergy Percussion and Elision. Their artistic agendas and audiences differ, but touring is a key part of all their annual programs.

The ACO and The Song Company

The Australian Chamber Orchestra calls itself “Australia’s most travelled cultural organisation.” Since its inception in 1975 it has toured frequently throughout Europe, Asia, North and South America and the Pacific. In 2002, as a result of the Nugent report, the orchestra was reclassified, along with Circus Oz and Sydney Dance Company, as an ‘international’ touring organisation. With this new categorisation came kudos, funding and strings: the company was to present no less than 20% of all performances overseas.

For General Manager of the ACO, Bill Gillespie, that quota has been quite a challenge. On a practical level, the company is committed to limiting the amount of time players spend away from home to 3 weeks at a time. However, the fixed costs of getting the orchestra to Europe means they need to pack as much as possible into those 3 weeks to make it worth leaving home. Simultaneously, they must balance overseas work with their domestic commitments; namely a loyal subscription base in 9 population centres across Australia.

The new funding classification has also driven an expansion of the subscription series across the Tasman. “New Zealand counts as an overseas destination, which helps our quota,” says Gillespie. The orchestra is trialing concerts in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch for 2 of their subscription concerts.

Gillespie sees many advantages to the touring model, not least for the musicians: “The players love it. It makes life more interesting. It is intrinsic to the company.” More importantly, a company operating at the level of the ACO must travel, “not just to compare against the best in the world, but to participate.”

This view is echoed by Roland Peelman, Artistic Director of The Song Company. “Simply put, audiences [outside Australia] are larger—there’s more room for diversity. The alternative [to international touring] is you become complacent, bored or stale.”

So, international touring brings kudos, artistic challenge and boosts musicians’ morale. Gillespie and Peelman say it also makes financial sense. Both ensembles employ their musicians full-time, so artists’ fees are already covered in annual running costs. If the flights and accommodation can be covered, the rest is gravy. Peelman says, “A tour that breaks even is not really good enough. Bringing money home—that is what we strive for.”

Both ensembles perform repertoire that qualifies them for some mainstream and therefore well-paid classical music gigs. Invitations from the Wigmore Hall or Amsterdam Concertgebouw generate healthy fees, which make it economically viable for the groups to be represented by an agent. It’s no guarantee of work, but it all helps overcome the huge barriers Australians face in organising tours 10,000 miles from home.

The bottom line for both The Song Company and the ACO is that Australia is not big enough to support the scale of their organisations. While both Peelman and Gillespie emphasise the sheer hard work of international touring, they also conclude that it is indispensable. Peelman says, “The reality is we are a fulltime ensemble. There are not enough concerts we can do in Sydney to stay alive.” And Gillespie says, “There’s not enough audience in any one area. Even Sydney and Melbourne are not sufficient.”

International touring spreads the burden of the fixed costs and, hopefully, generates additional revenue through substantial fees and government funding.

Synergy

But what of the part-time, non-mainstream groups, the new music ensembles that do not fit the Wigmore Hall mould? Can the same strategic model apply to ensembles that struggle to fill a concert hall 3 times a year in Australia?

Synergy Percussion and Elision, like the ACO and The Song Company, have received significant funding to develop their international touring strategy. Both are critically acclaimed ensembles with strong artistic agendas, and heavily committed to overseas touring. But they are also playing to niche audiences and offering their core group of players work on a project-by-project basis.

For Greg Johns, Manager of Synergy, the primary motivation for international tours is not financial, but personal: “It’s the interaction, meeting others who are struggling to keep the flame alive. It’s always a struggle, so it’s good for morale to meet with others and artistically very inspirational…the motivation for touring is more to do with getting the unique Australian voice out into the international market, and getting Australian composers out there. It essentially doesn’t make money. It’s more to do with proactive interaction with international community.”

Like everyone I spoke to, Johns emphasises 2 keys to building an international touring strategy: being good, and being there. Synergy, he explains, sits comfortably among European ensembles in terms of artistic excellence, with a unique sound not found there. “Everyone says what Synergy does is really different. It’s the concept of ensemble playing…not just muscular technique.”

The ensemble finds most of its opportunities at specialist festivals—percussion and/or new music—and these are the best places to network for future opportunities. “Percussionists are pretty unique in that they like to gather together as a unified body…They have a lot of percussion festivals—there’s a community aspect, a tremendous camaraderie,” Johns says. The process of securing gigs sounds less like a strategy than an organic development.

Elision

Daryl Buckley, founder and Artistic Director of Elision, calls the process “serendipity…I liken it to throwing stones into water—the ripples interact in a completely unpredictable way.” However, it’s clear that for Elision, unlike Synergy, serendipity is a highly strategic process.

The Elision Ensemble was founded in Melbourne in 1989 and is now based at the Judith Wright Arts Centre in Brisbane. But geographies are irrelevant because the ensemble performs regularly all over the world. In 2002 they staged concerts in Perth, Brisbane and Paris and also presented Liza Lim’s opera, Yue Ling Jie in Berlin, Zurich and Saitama, Japan. For a part-time new music ensemble with one full-time artistic director/administrator, the scope of its activity is huge.

Of the ensembles I surveyed, Elision is the only one that makes no distinction between its domestic and international agenda. Not even the “international touring organisation”, ACO, operates with such blatant and cheerful disregard for political boundaries.

Buckley says, “Art doesn’t recognise geographical borders. Why impose them?…In order for Australian performing ensembles to reach the standards of highly funded European ensembles, with access to rich cultural resources, the only way to compete is to focus work on aesthetics, to have a consistent artistic direction and look at dissolving the notion of domestic and international as 2 separate things.”

Extending that logic, the notion of distinguishing between ‘Australian’ and ‘foreign’ artists and creators is equally irrelevant. Hence Buckley’s decision, early on, not to seek funding from the Australia Council alone, but to concentrate instead on developing relationships with overseas artists, audiences and agencies. “Even before Elision toured we had a strong presence in Italy and particularly Milan. We commissioned 15-16 major Italian composers. We accessed strong assistance for frequent international travel from the Arts Council of Canada, Arts Council of Great Britain and other international agencies supportive of work by their nationals in Australia.”

In effect they turned the mercantile model on its head by investing in partnerships with overseas artists rather than imposing an existing Australian product on an unenlightened Europe. Buckley says, “Integral to this was to produce high quality performances, which could then be broadcast on classical radio stations. When people went back to various festivals and lectures, it was a recording of Elision being played. With the publishers, Elision was being mentioned frequently.”

So while Elision was not in a position to fly a representative around the world to generate gigs, it was already making its presence felt through impressive recordings and creative partnerships. Partnerships are key, not only for financial and administrative security, but for long term benefits, Buckley says. “Co-production is a principal strategy. You have a virtual office in Europe, access to funding and forward planning. You can be part of other people’s histories.”

But, support from within Australia is equally critical. Buckley says, “The Audience and Market Development unit of the Australia Council has been absolutely pivotal to recent Elision sucesses in Europe and North-East Asia. Their support has enabled crucial and direct face to face negotiations on major contracts and the international realisation of Elision activity in highly competitive and constantly changing environments.”

Elision is just back from Berlin, giving concerts with the Norwegian ensemble, Cikada, and presenting Dark Matter, a major work/installation by UK composer Richard Barrett and Norwegian artist Per Inge Bjørlo [premiered Brisbane 2001]. But even as the notes ring out, Buckley is throwing more stones and watching more ripples develop. Has this Australian artist cracked the tyranny of distance once and for all?

One suspects Buckley’s visionary strategy would not work for everyone. “It’s mad, constant production,” he says, with a crazy glint in his eye. “Insane. We are the Australian new music group.” Such conviction is infectious, but also rare. And while the group is increasingly in demand, will its expansion be limited by the stamina of its artistic director?

This is the second of RealTime’s reports on the international marketing of Australia’s performing arts. The first can be found in RT 53, Feb-March 2003. Our next report in the series will survey the work of Australia’s performing arts producers.

The photographs on these pages were taken at the protest held in Sydney on Sunday February 16 against the then impending war against Iraq. All photographs are by Moz except Bush pull out, by Isabel McIntosh. Moz is a Sydney-based photographer who is a regular contributor to www.indymedia.org and operates www.moz.net.nz. A committed environmentalist, he creates cycle art and appears at street theatre events like Reclaim The Streets and Critical Mass.
Anti-war protests, 2003

Reader response to part one of “Visions, illusions and delusions”, film producer Peter Sainsbury’s address to the 2002 Australian Screen Directors Association [ASDA] Conference, was appreciative and passionate. A few said that Sainsbury’s account of the tensions between vision and pragmatism in filmmaking apply equally well to other artforms. In Part II, Sainsbury discusses recent Australian films, The Tracker, Lantana and Dirty Deeds, and defines what he sees as the constraints on visionary Australian filmmaking. Part I appeared in RT53

The priority of vision

I want [to discuss] a recently released Australian film, which is unusual for a number of reasons. The Tracker, written and directed by Rolf de Heer, is a beautifully structured and measured piece of filmmaking with a deceptively simple narrative line. What is achieved here is a truly elegiac account of the collision of Indigenous and European cultures and a magical insight into the nature of their difference. And of course to see that difference is to glimpse the possibility, at least, of reconciliation. To this extent, The Tracker is a visionary film reminding us how effective humour, irony and integrity can be in the face of murderous violence, and how racism is but a prison of the mind. The desire in play here is no less than the desire for freedom from that internal prison.

The Tracker also reminds us that the visionary is not necessarily complex or pretentious, though it is probably metaphorical. It also demonstrates that within a visionary enterprise all sorts of pragmatic decisions can be made to solve problems in reconciling intentions and resources. So long as the vision comes before and has priority over the choice of solutions, constructive solutions that enhance rather than detract from that vision can be found. But what’s particularly interesting about this film is that it reversed the 2 major terms of almost every Australian project development—the film was financed before the script was written. The Tracker was not so much invested in as commissioned.

I spoke to de Heer and executive producer Brigit Ikin about this process. When SBS Independent and the Adelaide Festival decided, with extraordinary bravura, to commission a number of films, the South Australian Government made its financial support conditional upon a South Australian director being among those chosen. De Heer took a gamble and declared that if the commissioning bodies wanted his film, for which he had a 10-page treatment, they would have to guarantee funding. He would then write the script and deliver the movie. Which is pretty much what happened.

Now this was a low budget production, less than $2m. And de Heer is a particular kind of operator within the industry and unique in many ways, having put years of work into becoming the filmmaker who could reverse the dominant process in this way and obviously he had a great story. But I don’t think the importance of the way in which his film was financed can be over estimated.

In this case a director’s vision was the driving force of the project, rather than the director or the writer having to prove his or her credentials with draft after draft of a script, each put through a number of arbitrarily designed tests, chasing deals around the world in an often fruitless and always pragmatic search, often entailing compromise after compromise, for a final deal to put to the FFC. This teaches us a lesson about the relationship and the difference between visions, illusions and delusions.

The values of funding bodies

I have argued the proposition before—that the films emerging from a given funding system largely reflect the values and processes at the heart of their funding organisations, whatever they may be, and that films produced in any given cultural zone in any given period reflect the diversity of the funding systems that existed then and there, or a lack of diversity as the case may be.

I think this can be proven in the relationship between industry structures and movies made in the UK during the 1980s, in Germany in the 1970s, in France in the 1960s or under the American studio system in the 1950s. And you could certainly add to the weight of that proof what’s happened in Australia since the 1990s. Let’s look at the relationship between funding methods and creative outcomes in Australia.

An industry held hostage?

When film funding in Australia was effectively removed from the anarchy of deals driven by tax incentives toward the end of the 1980s, it was brought into the safe haven of the public service. What kind of safety is this and for whom was it provided? Sociologists know that bureaucratic imperatives place the safety of the funding agency and the unimpeachable position of its executives before all else. So it was and is in the Australian film industry. Film financing became hostage to the 3 principles of bureaucracy—prudence, objectivity and blamelessness.

Prudence and blamelessness were served by the building of a buffer between the bureaucratic funding decision and the result of that decision. This buffer was the market. FFC funding cannot be triggered unless the project in question has already attracted the imprimatur of the market through distribution deals, presales, distribution advances and equity investment in various combinations. When it does, the FFC may invest. The justification for this lies, of course, in the belief that films so financed will oblige committed distributors and sales agents to get them to an audience so that revenue will follow and top up the fund. And so that the films financed will have a self-justifying public profile. This is prudence. Where this formula fails to produce satisfactory results, the funding body cannot be faulted for the market had spoken and the rules had been followed. This is blamelessness.

A market or an audience?

Unfortunately, satisfactory results have been rare and are getting rarer. I believe this is because the market and the audience are not the same. A market is a display of produce. An audience is that which favours one product over another. A good distributor earns our respect by knowing how to pick a movie from the market place and sell it to an audience that he or she knows well, and may even have in some degree created. Very few, if any distributors and sales agents, however, know much about the process by which a script becomes a film, or even what it is about a script that would promise a memorable film. As a result they frequently find themselves less than pleased with the outcome of their commitment. They often find themselves handling a film they never would have picked, had it been a film rather than a script with some names attached, when they chose it. They often find themselves handling a film to which they cannot deliver an audience. And every time this happens, we are all in trouble. The major flaw in the safety mechanism between the bureaucratic decision and the resulting film is enormous. And it becomes self-perpetuating as well as self-defeating.

As any producer will tell you, it’s becoming harder to get the commitments that the rules of the game require because distributors too frequently find backing a script, rather than a film, a bad risk or at very best an additional risk. This applies not only to the domestic market attachment that every project needs but also to the international ones. And on the international level other difficulties arise. Key organisations in the marketplace can undergo sudden re-alignments as did Canal Plus [in 2001], or can simply disappear, as Film Four did [in 2002]. Other economic factors intrude such as the collapse of the European Pay-TV market…All of these factors make it less likely that sales agents will provide advances to any but the safest properties. Or to properties which appear to carry the safest bet. This, of course, usually means the most pragmatically conceived ones.

Objective criteria: one size fits all

The pressures of this situation give rise to a universal hope. Can there be a set of criteria by which some of this risk is mitigated? This is where objectivity comes in, or at least a kind of pseudo objectivity. When getting a movie financed is always a matter of cracking the market before the film is made, and never the other way around, the script becomes by far the most important consideration in the risk business and its value is increasingly measured by quasi-objective criteria. As such, it has to promise a degree of safety. It has to look and feel familiar. It has to cover all the bases in telling a conventionally intelligible story. It has to comply with certain given rules of the writer’s craft. And above all, it has to entirely determine the film that is made from it. Thus we are back in a cinema in which the job of the director is simply to translate the written into the visual, rather than using the written as a means to discovering the world which the written can only imply.

Most problematic, is that the same kinds of tests are applied to all projects seeking the support of public funds. We allow no variety in the relationships that might otherwise come between financial inputs and creative outcomes. It follows that there is little variety in the kinds of films we can make. Of course different stories will be told involving different story values with different sensibilities and different kinds of appeal. But these are narrow differences in the context of world cinema today. In Australia, markedly different kinds of filmmaking, markedly different uses of film language and markedly different visions of the world do not and will not flourish.

Thus, in the context in which an overwhelming majority of Australian films are made, the development of individual projects is a reductive rather than expansive creative process. The more clearly a given script complies with limited, quasi-objective criteria, the less likely the vision it carries will be questioned. In other words, we have institutionalised pragmatism. For very few of the qualities I have identified as having to do with the visionary can thrive under these conditions. That which may be disturbing; that which may be tragic; that which may be fascinatingly bewildering; that which may risk the pretentiousness of speaking in terms of desire, or of what we don’t know about ourselves, of that which is not literal, will all be considered marginal, esoteric and unduly risky. That which is playful or surreal in its use of the medium itself simply does not exist. It is almost as though the use of the human imagination as a means of escape from our fears, our habits and our everyday reality has been banned. And it’s almost as if (to borrow a pithy phrase of Mike Thornhill’s) the modern cinema has passed Australia by. And by modern cinema I don’t just mean that which comes into my own definition of the visionary, but any cinema that concerns itself with anything that lies beyond ordinary perceptions, as in popular films like Being John Malkovitch, The Sixth Sense and American Beauty as well as Mulholland Drive.

It is tempting to find something sweetly ironic in the fact that The Tracker, a film that speaks eloquently of the power we have to escape the prisons of our mind, was financed through a reversal of the usual process and all the damaging limitations that process puts on the imagination. But it is not as easy as that. The FFC and the AFC and the SAFC all assisted, in one way or another, to get de Heer’s film on screen. There is no way that the argument I am advancing here can be reduced to a simple ‘us and them’ critique of the funding bodies. In fact I should put it on record that when I have managed to satisfy the FFC’s criteria for investment I have enjoyed a great deal of help and support from its staff and have had, and am currently getting, a great deal of support, sometimes creative support, from both the NSW FTO and from the AFC. This is not an attack on these organisations, or on the people who work in them. One of whom I once was.

So long as the rules are applied…

These organisations are symptoms of the culture and society that created them, a society in which there exists an almost craven desire for consensus. It is a society in which pretentiousness is a cultural crime, so that we rarely dare speak of anything that is not literally self evident or comfortably in conformity with abiding and accepted Australian myths, or entirely dependent on taken for granted ideas about human motivation and individual identity. Above all, it is a culture in which an extraordinarily paternalistic form of liberalism rules our lives. It is one in which we are happy to allow a complex, risky and highly skilled activity to be managed within the prudent, blameless, pseudo-objective and counter-productive rules and parameters of the public service.

I was brought up against this phenomenon quite forcibly when, while working as Head of Film Development for the AFC, I enraged an audience of filmmakers by suggesting that they should not ask us bureaucrats to spell out for them how funding processes and priorities should be organised, but rather tell us. Not only was the audience nonplussed and angry, but my colleagues in the organisation were visibly embarrassed. It was as if I had delivered a calculated insult. In the pub after the meeting I felt like a leper in a foreign land. So I drove home and decided I would not seek a renewal of my contract. For that was the moment at which it became clear to me that what we most want from our funding bodies is a set of rules. We want guidelines, within which we can be defined, organised and managed. We want transparent mechanisms by which our creative endeavours can be blamelessly rejected or benignly accepted. Just so long as the rules are applied.

This seems a travesty of creative work, as much for those who work within funding bodies as for those who need to work with them. Throughout the processes of script development and production financing, funding body staff, executives and board members do of course make value judgements. But their roles as members of properly conducted bureaucracies preclude them from pro-active intervention. My own time at the AFC was a battle between my desire to seek out and support the creative work that I considered excellent and important, and my obligation to passively follow the rules of assessment and submit to the consensus of a committee. In fact, this usually entailed several committees. A committee of assessors, of my colleagues, of board members and the parallel committees of any other organisation needed to get a project financed. Despite my willingness to take responsibility for creative decisions and my naïve belief that this was what I was paid for, I was forever obliged not to; but rather, to submit to consensus. And as we all know, consensus coheres around what is familiar rather than what is not. The procedural rules encourage the ordinary.

Sometimes this obedience to established rules even seems perverse. However poorly our films are performing and however obviously market attachments mean nothing to the audience and however hard market attachments are to attract and however far the vicissitudes of international financing structures work against us, we agree when the bureaucrats protest that not only is it not their fault, but we wouldn’t want it any other way, would we? We wouldn’t want funding body executives to play God and decide what films should be made. No, we say. God forbid that anyone be held responsible for what goes wrong or fails to achieve what our delusions told us might be. And as soon as we collude with the lack of responsibility we allow our institutions, we have of course surrendered responsibility for ourselves. That means we will just have to live without the visionary, without what it might inject into our film culture, and without what it would do for us internationally. We’ll just keep chasing our pragmatic tales.

Chasing our pragmatic tales

This chasing of tales occurs as we conceive, develop, market and finance our projects and even as we execute them. A lot of the time, it’s not at all clear that this is what we’re doing. After all, the Australian industry contains a great deal of people with world class skills, despite their tendency to export themselves. Most of our films are models of technical and craft expertise and we often admire the performances turned in by Australian actors. When we deploy these considerable assets we do so with pleasure and confidence. But we delude ourselves if we think we can rely on these elements of our industry. Because there is no lasting value in doing something well if we discover nothing. Only the imaginative journey of discovery produces a successful cinema of lasting value, while the way we have structured our work militates against that journey being undertaken. As I have argued, we are hopelessly caught up in a pragmatic complicity with a cautious, conservative and consensus driven practice that we have imposed on ourselves, cementing it in place with rules, structures and processes that all but guarantee pragmatism and the superficiality it breeds.

Our creative relationships are often under developed, with producers, writers and directors working together in market-driven rather than discovery-driven enterprises. In doing so they are unlikely to discover what it is about each other that may or may not enhance the project. The project-by-project nature of the process and the fraught nature of life between projects denies us the time and space to discover what and with whom, best works as collaboration. Frequently, filmmaking teams come together in relationships of pure convenience, just because employment is on offer. The abiding ethos is that of getting the job done rather than discovering what is being done, why and how. We continue to rely on the taken for granted, skill driven aspects of our profession, badly neglecting the inner substance.

A job to be done

As a result, even our most widely praised and successful movies have something fundamental missing. When I saw Dirty Deeds, it had already lost its evening slots in city cinemas. At 5pm on a Saturday I was one of only a dozen people in the cinema. This seemed surprising for a film released with enormous publicity and a fair amount of critical endorsement only a few weeks previously. By the film’s end, I was no longer surprised.

An avowed attempt to make a commercial Australian movie, Dirty Deeds is in many ways a bravura piece of work, suffused with high production values and carried along by plenty of high octane yet ironic intrigue, action and cultural observation. But what is missing is a heart and soul. Nothing leads us to care about its characters. None of the incessant conflict causes a significant change in any of the characters nor provokes character-bending decisions. We may idly wonder what will happen next, but our curiosity is never heightened into a caring about anything. No amount of work by its actors can overcome the lack of anything more than the odd nod in the direction of character development. The film feels, for all its energy and skill, empty and gratuitous. If you are going to make a movie so obviously dependent on showmanship you need blockbuster resources. A car chase, a few beatings and shootings and a massacre of pigs doesn’t do the job, however acute the cinematography and the editing, however sharp the production design, however sophisticated the soundtrack. If you don’t have access to blockbuster resources, you have to dig deeper into the imagination and produce another set of entertainment values.

But pragmatism seems to have become a self-justifying ethos. Despite this film being a long time in development and the enormous commitment that went into getting it financed, it was always a job to be done rather than a truth to be discovered. It seems you can start with a pragmatic plan rather than an imaginative idea. You can slave away at a determined effort to establish yourself as something other than what has disparagingly been called a boutique filmmaker, and given the right mix of track record, credibility, collaborators and effort you can get over the financial line. Once there is confidence that the market is onside, you are able to do without what the audience desires. And this is never apparent until the audience withers and prematurely disappears. I don’t think I can overstate what damage this conflation of market and audience has done.

Success without vision

Sometimes pragmatism can be distressing. The Rabbit Proof Fence addresses an issue of fundamental and deeply troubling significance to Australians, but in a misguided fashion. Striving to create a credible story from a remarkable event, it was levered toward market endorsement by involving high profile creative collaborators. But in truth this was a vain attempt to give substance to a story of one dimensional characters, episodic encounters and almost negligible dramatic power. Only in a heart rending moment at the end of the film, when we hear from those whose experiences were used in the story, do we glimpse the deeply moving and important drama documentary struggling to emerge from inside the material. The bearing of witness and the power of testament have been forsaken, but for what? Not for the audience, but for the market.

Lantana has been much praised and much awarded and sold something like 10 million dollars worth of tickets at the domestic box office. I wish that either of the Australian features I have produced had sold half as many. With the exception of Adrian Martin, everyone seemed to like it. But despite the film’s success, I agree with Martin. The film really is glorified television, a middle class soap opera. In a cultural context where adult television of any interest comes with a foreign accent, it’s not surprising that Lantana got an audience. It obviously met the needs that most of its audience brought to it. But not everyone found that the prodigious work of its actors, its cinematographer, its editor and brilliant composer could overcome its dialogue driven, coincidence-riven narrative. Again, an opportunity seemed to have gone missing. Although praised for its adult themes and mature observations, Lantana seemed to be content with the most superficial investigations into its subject. It never crossed over into the visionary. It told us only what is already known and taken for granted in everyday discourse and in ordinary behaviour about the frailties of marriage. It never dared enter the more risky and demanding terrain of desire. Characters struggling with what they knew about themselves and each other were never more than that. What they did not know about themselves, the structure of their identities and the source of their compulsions, remained hidden and the importance of the film was to that extent reduced.

It’s important to say that my criticism of Lantana is not a criticism of this film’s success. It was a success we all in a sense needed. It’s more an attempt to demonstrate how half-baked is the discourse of ideas that runs through Australian filmmaking generally.

I hope my contribution to this conference has been more than negative. What I am offering is an imperfect but I believe important analysis of how mediocrity has been institutionalised. Only when we fully understand the relationship between what we do and how and why we do it can we hope to understand what kind of changes we need to make.

“Visions, Illusions and Delusions”, Peter Sainsbury; The Persistence of Vision: ASDA Conference, Sept 2002.

Ross Gibson
Seven Versions of an Australian Badland,
University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2002
ISBN: 0702233498

Seven Versions of an Australian Badland is a creative non-fiction that’s easy to read, and painful to think about. The book is a mixed platter, that superimposes 7 takes on the collective badlands of the colonial psyche generated by the jagged road from Rockhampton to Mackay in Central Queensland, known as ‘The Horror Stretch.’ Queensland’s mixture of sunny availability and dark desperation provides a telling backdrop. It’s both an advertiser’s daydream and a sinkhole where unassimilable events of white settler history congeal like fat in a pan.

No stonehearted sociologist, Gibson throws together the skill of the historian, the forensic detail of the crime reporter, the narrative hooks of the filmmaker and the rich resources and dark wonder of childhood memory. The analysis of this historical crime scene joins a growing body of work that could be labelled psychogeography, a form of study that makes a Möbius strip of fact and myth, real and unreal, place and the unconscious. What Iain Sinclair does for London in Lights Out for the Territory, Gibson does for the blitzed out brigalow country of Central Queensland. The visible country or city could be the object of sociological enquiry: population shifts, consumption patterns, and economic reconstructions. Much of psychogeography addresses the invisible and to understand it requires a suspension of the literal and routine. To advance on it requires the imagination, rather than surveyor’s poles or trigonometric equations.

For example, Germany’s psychogeography might be found in Anselm Kiefer’s paintings in which eighteenth century optimism is buried in lead and sand and propellers, where the landscapes are set alight, and the letters of the German past burn back to ground zero in order to make ‘Germanness’ available again to the post-World War II imagination.

To this genre you could add the images found in Tracey Moffatt’s Up in the Sky series. Overqualified as protest art, there’s something powerful in these distantly lyrical photos set in the rural hinterlands of Australia—the submerged narrative of the Stolen Generation told sideways, like wisps of songs on a desert wind. Then there’s Gordon Bennett’s Inland Sea. The mismatched representational categories of the Indigenous and non-indigenous territories colliding to expose the hauntedness widely sensed in the pictorial spaces of Australia’s image field.

Likewise beneath the sparkling facades of bank lobbies and tizzed-up heritage sites, lie Juan Davila’s infernal portraits of corporate and sexual follies, or Adam Cullen’s ringbarking of conventional painting where no material is too dumb (marker pens, biros, aerosol cans), no image too mean (a tree stump, a pair of underpants), and no notion too fucked up (an extraterrestrial black being sodomised by a clownish member of the Ku Klux Klan with a ‘spiritual petrol bowser’) to be beyond further debasement on canvas.

But here, written in a prose to savour, Gibson picks apart the bones of Capricornia where local landmarks include names like the Styx River, Charon Point, Grave Gully and the Berserkers Range. While it’s pitilessly there as a physical place, it’s also this floating thing in the unconscious. It’s both mileage on the odometer and a nightmarish idea. It can be seen with the eyes as well as the hackles of the neck.

Brisbane-born, Gibson begins by evoking childhood memories of holiday trips through the terrain staring from the car’s rear-window: “Each time the road bent at a special angle, the slanted sun showed me columns of steam twisting up, man-sized in pursuit of the car. Five or six of them stalking us for a few heartbeats…” At the blurred edges of consciousness you dream a little bit of the road, and this bit of scrubby floodplain remains a haunted place, a site where white man’s hubris has grown way out of hand. In trying to figure out why, Gibson’s “quest becomes an inquest.”

With each of the 7 ‘versions’ Gibson uncovers buried historical layers. Violently gutted by colonialism, and scorched by successive generations of settlers and migrants, this malevolent landscape conjures Old Testament ferocities. (“Static seared the preacher’s voice occasionally as the transmission bounced and scrambled off the distant ridges.”) The grotesque extremes of climate—convulsive cyclones, apocalyptic floods and droughts—seem to be the meteorological correlative of the greed, brutal homicides, nonchalant racism, suspicion and betrayal that boils away there. There are dead bodies everywhere, not least the 1869 massacre of an estimated 300 Aborigines in the so-called Goulbolba dispersal.

Gibson’s account reminds us that the way we explain ourselves, our favourite story, is a passion play where the European confronts the ‘savage’ in the desert. Injun, outlaw, black, heathen, infidel. Hence the appeal of the classic Western: Who makes the law? What is the order? Where is the frontier? Who are the good guys? We like to conjure the celebrated and enlightened gentlemen of the colonies solemnly composing a constitution and a nation (Sir Robert Garran, Henry Parkes) in Canberra. When really it was the rogues, the adventurers, missionaries, landboomers, traders, hunters and Aborigine-fighters—like Frederick Wheeler who Gibson anatomises in this book—who killed and were killed until they mastered the bush or desert. The blacks always personifying the demonic aspects of the wilderness in the white imagination.

Along the way Gibson trawls documents and oral histories and traces acts of random desperation in a spooky echo chamber: Disappearing hitchhikers. Travellers shot by the roadside in their sleeping bags. A missing 14-year-old girl. A couple of English holidaymakers shot at by snipers. A 26-year-old Aboriginal woman sexually assaulted, murdered and dumped in the Fitzroy River. A man found slumped, still seatbelted, in the front seat of his Toyota Celica shot dead through the head with a .22 calibre rifle. Two weeks later his wife, also shot through the head, is found in a creek, bloated and sun-broiled.

“Rootlessness and poverty-stricken itinerancy; the imposition of imported law; the geography of vastness, deluge, heat and erosion; the rural culture of firearms; the mind-altering pressures of isolation; nervous, nocturnal predation.” More than a report card on vexing societal malaise, and more than just a roadmap to his own neuroses, Gibson’s investigation is a stairwell to the basement in the Australian psyche. The urge to explain and explore those feelings shaped by the apprehension of the darkness in that basement counters our New World tendency to forget and numb out. Even though we tear through The Horror Stretch in our shiny dentless cars, it remains a metaphysical antiplace where memory is boundless and a sense of loss never quite disappears. Gibson revisits the unremembered dead in the basement in order to learn from them.

Death creates problems for society. On the one hand we need to push the dead away. On the other, we need to keep them alive. Conventionally we console ourselves with a hundredweight of Victorian statuary and bad calendar mottos. At the level of the national psyche though, there needs to be reparation if we are to grow beyond the trauma. The abnegations (the Prime Minister’s inability to apologise to our Indigenous populations) deny information about ourselves, our own arcane culture: savage nobles at the heart of whiteness. Many other cultures seem to have useful ways of dealing with the afterlife. On which point, Paolo Portoghesi notes, “It is the loss of memory, not the cult of memory that will make us prisoners of the past.”

Again some contemporary examples reveal the strange homoeopathy of dealing with the afterlife: Ramangining artist Jimmy Wululu’s entry for a recent Biennale of Sydney was plain white sand for cleansing rituals after the death of a member of the community. The sand is sung over, danced on and destroyed at the end of the ceremony. Ximena Zomosa marked the absence of her dead mother with oversized skirts and furniture outlined in human hair. Colombian-born Doris Salcedo’s Altrabiliaros marked the absence of the disappeared in their family member’s donation of a shoe put in an altar and covered with translucent animal skin held to the plaster by surgical sutures. Here wounding and healing are one.

When asked whom he wrote for, the German playwright Heiner Müller claimed he wrote for the dead. The dead are in the majority. It is probably unwise to mention this to the marketing departments of our publishers or gallery dealers or theatre boards. But the figures are persuasive. Number of human beings = 6 billion. Number of human beings ever alive = 100 billion. Writing for the dead is writing for the majority.

The dead are all around. Dead times and places return to life; the dead walk again. Gibson’s Seven Versions… is a riveting read, and another way of learning from, listening and writing to the dead. It’s a book that reminds us that artists and writers can’t change the world. They can give you an inkling of how and why and where things might change. They tell us how, by creating the imaginative space—the space of desire—we can reclaim in psychic terms what we’ve done to ourselves in the West.

Ross Gibson is currently Research Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Technology Sydney. He has curated the Remembrance program (Mar 21-Aug 31) for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image where he was Creative Director until 2002.

Our story so far: 4 years ago in a land called South Australia, there emerged an exciting new initiative to encourage emerging filmmakers—the Filmmaker of the Future (FOTF) prize and it involved giving all the development money to one lucky bugger. We now move forward to 2003. The FOTF award is an old initiative, the young filmmakers are still as emergent as they ever were, and the FOTF is now history.

The ZOOM! craft awards for short filmmaking have continued on a more modest basis, augmented by a Best Film Award, and ensconced in the Adelaide International Film Festival.

While the FOTF failed to launch anyone into the feature film firmament during its 3 years of existence, the presence of follow-up films by 2 of its 3 recipients showed that these filmmakers still had a future, even if it wasn’t The Future.

The best news among the films was the continued good work from Tamsyn Lewis and Shalom Almond, who took out the FOTF 2 years ago. Their follow-up, Brushstrokes, was the strongest film in the competition. The fact that it was the most expensive to produce seems encouraging to me. These young women have shown that they know how to find money and spend it so that it shows onscreen. This is an achievement that needs to be praised in an Australian cinema too full of moral victories that no one ever watches.

Admittedly, the film has a story from 1965 (should the emerging artist stay in Oz or leave for the Big Time in London?), but the resolution of this theme is handled with both force and intelligence. The filmmakers know how to work with professional actors, cinematographers and designers: a true sign of emergence.

Matthew Phipps, winner of the inaugural FOTF, scooped the pool with 4 awards (including Best Film) for Quarter Mile. Its narrative is staged across several planes, juxtaposing the romantic attachment of a man with an intellectual disability to a prostitute, with his fantasy reworking of events and a symbolic transformation of his desires to his favoured arena—the drag strip.

Alice Teasdale’s Still Life, awarded Best Screenplay, had a similar feel, as it centred on the bathos of its protagonist’s life. While very handsome, it’s another in a line of films about how deadly boring it is to work in an office. This is starting to look a bit elitist now (“I’m an artist, surely Centrelink can’t expect me to do this?”).

Jessica Asz’ Kylie Divine is also built around a rather generic story, this time concerning the misadventures of a young woman meeting her boyfriend’s parents. Throwing enthusiasm and well-crafted energy at the viewer, it manages to stave off our awareness that it lacks ambition. You can see the punchline coming a mile off, but somehow that adds to its charm.

Perhaps because the awards were positioned in the middle of a festival full of bold and diverse international films, I left ZOOM! with a renewed sense of the conservatism of local filmmaking. The previous issue of RealTime (53) contained the first half of Peter Sainsbury’s critique of a deeply internalised lack of daring in Australian cinema [see p15 for part 2]. For all the achievements of young local filmmakers shown at these awards, there was nothing to prove Sainsbury wrong. Perhaps the future belongs to those who can get their plot points in a row.

Finally, these occasions which try to reposition the makers of short films as “emergent filmmakers” are affairs of fleeting self-congratulation. It’s nice to eat the little spring rolls and see people you know get some acknowledgment, but it’s also a bit like trying to build the house from the roof down.

Emerging filmmakers will have little or nothing to emerge into, unless there is a sound industrial structure to sustain an industry. The first question isn’t “how do we get films made?” but rather “how do we create a sustainable distribution infrastructure so that a need for films exists?” Perhaps we should introduce arts administrators to people in the Australian Wool Board so they can have a conversation about a history of schemes that ignore demand and address only supply.

Arriving from the east coast in 2001, I was intrigued by several disparaging comments from local cineastes and filmmakers who suggested that it was often hard getting WA (read Perth) punters to attend screenings. After a few months it seemed to me that Perth had a cornucopia of screen activities in readily identifiable clusters all around the city. I’m not quite sure what yardstick the jaded critics had applied other than perhaps their own previous attempts to float and sustain festivals or screenings, but my early immersion in Perth’s film scene suggested a robust and vibrant sector.

Many of these extraordinary screenings take place throughout the long hot months from October to April, when climate is everything, consistently offering mild, rain-free evenings across the city and suburbs. There are outdoor screenings aplenty, many have become Perth institutions. In Kings Park, not far from the Botanic Gardens, a mixed program of contemporary films and classics has Crackerjack screening with Casablanca. On special nights, local bands (often jazz) accompany the screenings. It’s a program repeated with variation in other inner-city locales and suburban parks. For the annual Festival of Perth, the Lotteries Film Season shows international cinema outdoors at the UWA and northern suburbs Joondalup campuses of Edith Cowan University. Around Fremantle, regular summer screenings take place in a central public park. A few kilometres away in Spearwood’s Manning Park, the local council helped arrange an outdoor festival that ran over 3 months and screenings are planned for near the Swan River in East Fremantle.

In keeping with this al fresco exhibition practice, this year’s 16th WA Screen Awards gala evening was preceded by the Fremantle Outdoor Film Festival (FOFF), a 2-week program of screenings showcasing the state’s emerging and established filmmakers. Before staging the event, the Film and Television Institute (FTI) Marketing Manager Jon Cope looked for a new way to present the awards while building on the momentum from earlier incarnations. Cope’s marketing brief was to address the divergent and peripatetic history of the WASAs. “When they started they pretty much focussed on early career filmmakers. There were genre awards and craft awards and there was the WA Young Filmmaker of the Year award, which was the pinnacle of achievement. Over the years there have been different coordinators but there was no continuity, changing venues and style with expensive sit-down affairs.”

This year FTI deliberately set out to reposition the awards. Part of the strategy was to centre them around Fremantle, with the ceremony in the Town Hall and a post awards supper at the same venue where the industry and early career filmmakers would “have the opportunity to interact in the same room.” Also the previous year’s festival collaboration with Sunset Cinemas was retitled as the Fremantle Outdoor Film Festival, an FTI coordinated 2-week event which kicked-off with Tropfest and ended with the WASAs. The rationale, according to Cope, was to complement the single evening awards ceremony with a festival “to improve the accessibility of products coming out of early career filmmakers to the public.” The free opening night saw nearly 2000 attend Fremantle’s Princess May Park for Tropfest. “It was extraordinary,” says Cope. “People brought their kids, their dogs; it was a real family celebration, and that’s what we were after.” Similarly on consecutive Wednesday nights FOFF showcased the early career nominees in well patronised free screenings.

Somewhat disingenuously Cope admits “there’s the old adage that Freo people don’t travel north of the river,” adding with a laugh, “I guess I’ve sort of been relying on that to boost our audience.” Fortunately, Cope says Luna and Sunset Cinemas have been helpful and supportive. There hasn’t been a ruthless demarcation where FOFF has been regarded as a commercial competitor taking market share from established venues.

The awards night ran remarkably smoothly without the ostentatious razzle-dazzle associated with the national awards (AFI and IF). The welcoming address by FTI Chief Executive Graeme Sward was interrupted briefly when Sward removed his tuxedo jacket to reveal a second layer of clothing bearing the new Institute logo, launched that evening. This was no mean feat considering the sweltering temperature. The day’s 40+ degree heat and unusually high humidity no doubt dissuaded many from donning black tie or formal apparel. Yet as former WASA event director and current awards judge, Richard Sowada, said, “I thought the level of production was pretty good, pretty slick, and people are starting to embrace the sense of occasion. They made an effort, particularly the young people.”

However there is an undercurrent of dissent and some dissatisfaction within the film community over the judging criteria and rationale since it’s not always obvious why some films and filmmakers are eligible and others not. But the history of such ceremonies, as witnessed in the AFI Awards over the years, demonstrates competing interests from constituents, which frequently leads to changes in voting and awards criteria.

Local Australian Screen Directors Association (ASDA) head, academic and filmmaker Melanie Rodriga (Teesh & Trude), judged industry and early career sections. “There’s always been lively discussion and lively debate about the best format for the awards and how the awards are being judged.” But Rodriga recognises that competing voices will always lobby in their own interest.

As for perceptions that the WASAs are a strange, and perhaps incompatible mix of established and emerging talent, Cope is pragmatic. “It’s an evolving thing. We sent out a proposal to industry for comment and we’ve tried to respond.” One response to the client base was the inclusion of more documentaries in the screenings. “The industry understands…what we’re trying to do here and we’re trying to accommodate them,” says Cope. “There are 5 Outstanding Achievement Awards, so it’s not so competitive. We see the industry as working within a national context. The AFIs are the main awards for the WA industry. WASA is about encouraging early career filmmakers and showing their achievements.”

Regardless of any perceived shortcomings in the event’s identity or process, most seem to agree the unifying and celebratory focus of the WASAs is essential, particularly for an industry that’s so ephemeral. A case in point was filmmaker John Beaton’s recollection on receiving his Outstanding Contribution to the WA Screen Industry award. After his impressive CV was read, duly noting the odd jobs, gigs and teaching needed to sustain his career, Beaton echoed the industry advice he had heard many years ago. It’s important to prevail, despite the obstacles and adversity, to “just keep breathing…”

Given the record number of entries to this year’s WASA (160 including about 30 from established players), the pulse out west seems strong and vital.

16th WA Screen Awards, Fremantle Town Hall, Mar 8. Winners included: Early Career Genre Awards: Best Short Film, Francesca Strano, Jack; Best Documentary Production, Glen Stasiuk, The Forgotten; Best Animation/Mixed Media Production, The Davison Bros, Medusa; Best Experimental Production, Diana Ford, Edit; Early Career Craft Awards: Directing, Matty Limpus, Jack; Writing, Tim Maricic, John ‘Rocky’ Robinson—Roll With the Punches; Cinematography, Peter Finkle, Fixing a Hole; Sound Design, Christopher Trappe & Vincenzo Perrella, An Evening with Robert Valentine; Editing, Christopher Trappe, An Evening with Robert Valentine; Acting, Deanna Cooney, Men’s Room; Animation/Mixed Media, Timothy Merks, Mr Gough. Industry Awards: Outstanding Achievement Awards: Outstanding Television Series, Goolarri Media (Dot West & Joan Peters), The Mary G Show; Outstanding Screenplay, Vanessa Lomma, Teesh & Trude; Outstanding Editing, Frank Rijavec, A Million Acres a Year; Outstanding Cinematography, Torstein Dyrting, Gifted Thumbs, Alley Kat Productions; Outstanding Documentary Filmmaking, Alan Carter, The Accused. For a complete list of winners go to www.fti.asn.au

Let me get this straight, the talk of New York is Matthew Barney and George W Bush. A curious mix of hyper-masculinity perhaps, with Barney’s Cremaster Cycle (1994-2003) currently at the Guggenheim museum and Bush constantly playing on CNN. Anyhow, the picture is clear: men are in.

Except for the odd glimpse of Condoleezza Rice and Nicole Kidman: the talk is about the guys. A 20-something New York photographer, Ryan McGinley, is also in the mix due to his solo show at the Whitney which documents his friends doing the sex, drugs and bad kid trip à la Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. Luckily for McGinley, the controversy about his work is due to the word around Manhattan that his kiddy pics have had adult genitals (super-)imposed on them (you get the picture). Whether it’s true or not, McGinley’s work is in essence an affront to US moral guardians and Photoshop puritans, and as a consequence, generates much discussion. A welcome diversion from Barney’s particular brand of testicular phantasy and Bush’s war on terror. Or maybe it all adds up to the same thing.

I was in the US during late January/early February for screenings in New York and Chicago of Another Planet, a program of Australian video. The Video Data Bank invited me to curate and present the screening as part of their Conversations at the Edge series, which is billed as bringing to Chicago “media makers, critics, scholars and theorists in dialogue around the most provocative and daring works being produced in media today.” The program was first screened in New York, hence my interest in Manhattan gallery gossip. The 2 venues that screened Another Planet couldn’t have been more different. New York’s Robert Beck Memorial Cinema reminded me of the old London Filmmaker’s Co-op Cinema in Camden, but with better projection facilities and no evident leaks in the roof. The Chicago screening on the other hand, was in a state of the art cinema run by the Art Institute of Chicago.

For the Video Data Bank, staff and students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and some local video art fans, the diverse selection of Australian video in Another Planet was of great interest—even on a night with a -30Þ wind chill factor. While a range of Australian work from 1999 to 2002 was included, I was careful not to stitch together a survey of ‘seminal’ Australian video. Instead, I was interested in presenting a bastardised, glitched, self-reflexive and neo-materialist digital practice which countered the notion of the seminal, and was at odds with the generic and cyberish polish invested in much ‘new’ media art. After all, my interest is in the emerging gritty backlash to over purposed, under developed, high-end digital art.

Part ghost story, part pop video, Martine Corompt’s Spell on You was the perfect vehicle to open the show. Except for Philip Brophy’s video, Evaporated Music Part 1 (a-c), which amused audiences with its wry swipe at aging rock jocks, New York and Chicago audience interest lay in the work of Mandy Morgan, sue k, John Billan and Jennifer Sochackyj, who are all concerned with the symbiosis between photography, cinema and electronic art. The nexus between analogue and digital media was also present in Justine Cooper and Joey Stein’s video, Reduction, which contained all the hallmarks of 1970s performative split screen black and white video, but was shot on infra-red.

Ironically, the curatorial impulse that aimed to draw connections between old and new media underscored my learning curve as curator in this new world order of DVD. If you are going to show DVD in the United States remember that multi region DVD formatting and decks do not apply there. This seems to resonate with current world politics and could very easily link with Paul Virilio’s discussion of vision machines and polar inertia. I advise you to back yourself up with a variety of formats if you’re screening video internationally. Reports from the Rotterdam Film Festival described numerous DVD nightmares, and no-shows when discs didn’t play. This was not a problem at the New York screening, courtesy of an old-fashioned NTSC VHS tape, or at the Chicago cinema kitted up to screen multi region DVDs.

The Video Data Bank holds the major collection of artists and independent video in the United States. For a video art fiend like myself, accessing the VDB collection in Chicago was a phenomenal treat. I was shown the most radical video I’ve seen for some time—Walid Ra’ad/The Atlas Group’s Hostage, The Bachar Tapes (English Version), (2001). Ra’ad’s video narrates the story of Souheil Bachar, the sole Arabic hostage to be held in a Beirut cell with westerners Terry Anderson and Terry Waite in the mid 1980s. An exercise in deceit, conceit and the West’s fetishisation of ‘the Arab’, Hostage is confronting viewing in these politically murky times.

Interestingly, the video installation that most interested me in New York was produced by Egyptian artist Wael Shawky and exhibited at the Greene Street Gallery Artists’ Space. Simple in its presentation, but highly evocative, Shawky’s projection-based Sidi El Asphalt’s Mulid (2002) consisted of slowed down footage of people swaying in a mosque to the Cypress Hill track, (Rap) Superstar. Like Walid Ra’ad’s Hostage, the installation’s intellectual currency and ambivalence far outweighs the governing rhetoric of good versus evil. Maybe I was overly sensitive to the mainstream political diatribe, but anything could be considered intellectually invigorating when compared to a President who confused “Hitlerism” with fascism in his State of the Union address. However, what really surprised me in the US was not the fascist DVD systems, the mantra of war or the fascination with the iconic boys of the New York art scene. It was the prevalence of Joy Division in bars and artists’ video and digital work. So forget Bush, Barney and McGinley after all. They may not last. But Ian Curtis is back. Big time.

Another Planet, Australian video, Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, New York City, Feb 4; Gene Siskel Film Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, Feb 6

The 2003 exhibition program at Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation began with a double bill, Francesca da Rimini and John Tonkin, whose work is aesthetically quite different. Where Tonkin’s practice is data mapping (slow time, clean graphics), da Rimini’s is hypermedia (fast time, cut and paste, samples and remixes). What they share is a desire to engage the viewer as participant in the work/play of making the world, though in quite different ways.

Both artists hail from Adelaide and have received Australia Council New Media Arts Fellowships enabling them to consistently develop their practices towards creating large, complex and ongoing projects. Their work continues to be highly influential in the discourses of new media art. Yet it has taken a long time for their work to be exhibited in the visual arts arena.

Net art/writing is da Rimini’s medium. Considered immaterial, net art (alongside other digital art practices), has little chance of entering the cultural discourses generated by galleries and museums that have yet to develop the resources necessary to archive electronic/digital art practices. Added to this difficulty is the fact that the visual arts are uncomfortable with media politics. Usually considered more ‘activist’ than art, didactic and lacking rigour, the praxis that engages with current issues is considered unfashionable and even modernist. Yet if you engage with net art it soon becomes apparent that this art makes a politics, poetics and aesthetics that sidesteps the critical discourse that is so fond of interpretation. It’s impossible and banal to interpret something constantly changing, whose terms of reference are borne from fragments, and whose materialisation is less knowable than the objects we so love to hold, own and trade upon. Net art demands an experiential engagement—where spacetime and body intersect. Perhaps this can be called e-motion, the re-turn of feeling with thinking intact.

da Rimini’s LOS DIAS Y LAS NOCHES DE LOS MUERTOS (the days and nights of the dead) (1998-present), is as fast and invasive as the forces of media saturated techno-capital. The work was triggered by an encounter with Ricardo Dominguez and the struggle of the Mexican Zapatistas with their powerful northern neighbour, USA, more than “a nation amongst nations.” LOS DIAS catalogues, with no archival claim, the excesses of global capitalism. It was made initially for the web. In her EAF talk da Rimini called it, “a container that is constantly changing.” In the EAF gallery, the one-to-one engagement of small screen and dial-up connection becomes one-to-many. Here it is generated from the in-house network and projected large in the back half of the gallery. You need emotional, physical and intellectual strength to stay beyond the initial ‘already known’ of the media saturated imagery (which includes the dead body of a boy killed by a member of the military sent to “quell” the G8 activists in Genoa, a plethora of terrible statements on the “art” of war, the sounds of men and women crying). It is a looped work—5 frames ‘house’ meta-refreshed html files with differently timed sequences. Bottom right turns over the architectural remainders of global capital’s move from the burbs of the west to offshore low rent, low pay, non-unionised labour. da Rimini calls it the “material hyper-decay of the industrial age.” That’s pretty succinct. Lounge chairs, headsets and, a low round white table littered with Space Dolls Zine, go someway toward making this hard work easier. At least there’s a soft landing. The excellent audio remix by Michael Grimm extends the work. I am bombarded by images and enveloped by multiple threads of sampled sound: stretched-pulled-slowed. The work uses the ICQ log as a fictional device to relay a series of statements—war cries from the cabinets of power. My favourite, a curious fragment from Microsoft, reads “tentative gestures ruin everything.” A poetic acknowledgment that poetics has the power to ruin.

There is no possibility of a singular subject here. Rather fractured selves, distributed selves as distributed texts. What remains is the unsayable, the thing that remains unlocatable. This un-nameable thing functions not in a psychoanalytic sense of loss or lack, but rather (I want to think) as the evolutionary obstacle that must be overcome. In this way it’s a call to action, a wake-up. How do we figure inscription in a hyper-tech world? On what rests my comfort and yours?

The theoretical (actual) disappearance of women as an ontological force is a persistent cipher in da Rimini’s work. The first line from Dominguez’ catalogue essay reads; “a spectre haunts capital—the spectre is women.” And the first line of “Softly from the ruins…” (in the Space Dolls Zine I’ve brought home) reads, “efemera> she breathes the uncertainty of her time.” There is an intuitive and pragmatic rigour to da Rimini’s thinking and making. Snippets of this and this and this make seemingly endless serialisations—lines that become bundles.

John Tonkin is a software artist—he uses the computer as a programming device. He works in the area of database visualisation of the small and inconsequential at the scale of the universal becoming cosmic. With Strange Weather he generates a visual aesthetic that makes beautiful patterns calculated from user input: the effects of the everyday things one performs mapped over “external indicators” garnered from the internet. Poetics and irony go hand in hand in this work. Tonkin’s background was in science before he came to art. He has a long-standing interest in the now quirky, but of his time, 19th century scientist, Cesare Lombroso. Tonkin writes in an email: “In The Political Criminal and Revolution Lombroso seeks to determine the causes of political unrest. His treatise encompasses not only physiognomy and racial stereotyping but other factors such as the ‘geological soil structure’, meteorological conditions such as ‘barometric oscillations’ and the percentage of young women menstruating. He seemed quite disinterested in the political and economic circumstances.”

Tonkin develops his work primarily for gallery installation, which gives him more control over the speed at which images appear than online versions allow. As the subtitle [ver 0.1, recruitment] suggests, this is the beta version of a longterm project. Data mapping is a practice on the rise in all sorts of economies—especially architectural, corporate and educational. The visualisation of abstract things—like statistics or the movement of capital is usually a prosaic affair. Strange Weather is more aesthetically akin to Asymptote’s Virtual New York Stock Exchange with added chance operations. Strange Weather wants to “elucidate and confound” by using the madness of information overload with the everyday motions individuals make—an absurd and connected notion. A Graphic User Interface designed with the familiarity of a browser window invites the user to register and begin their own editable database of “personal indicators.” When it’s actually connected to the web (here it isn’t—rather, as the title suggests, it is recruiting data entry bods), the personal indicators will form one database that will be mapped over another “harvested from the internet.”

What we see in the gallery is a potential work—the prototype you might take to a backer or a client (in this case, the gallery visitor). The transformation from personal data to pattern sets, otherwise called graphs, is visualised by ribbons of varying breadths, speeds and colours that undulate away from the viewer/user (or Bill Seaman’s “vuser”), forming troughs and peaks of variable dimensions. The ribbons don’t rush toward the usual Euclidian horizon—their paths cross, fold and touch. Eventually the user will be able to both upload and pull time-specific images, URLs and maps from the moving bands of data. Included amongst the sea of undulating ribbons (rhythms) will be other types of digital image maps; satellite photos, weather predictions et al. There’s another graph that looks for random subsets. Tonkin emails examples: “x: number of coffees; y: barometric pressure in Cairo; z: microsoft share price; radius: body temperature.” This 3 dimensional “graph” appears as a complex array of singular atoms—circulating around an unpinnable force. Like da Rimini’s work—here is the appearance of the unnamed and unlocatable.

John Tonkin has been working with mr snow (http://laudanum.net) learning java3d. Francesca da Rimini is living in Adelaide again after a long period away and collaborating with local Kuarna performer Stephen Goldsmith and Sydney-based performer Tess de Quincey.

Francesca da Rimini (http://www.sysx.org/gashgirl/), John Tonkin (http://www.johnt.org/strangeweather/), Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Feb 21-Mar 22.

The decision to introduce a Computer Gaming program into the Adelaide International Film Festival (AIFF) is intriguing. Modern games are definitely becoming more like movies—much money is spent creating or recreating a spectacle—but unfortunately most games fail to exhibit the narrative strength or originality that marks a good film. Most games these days, if they possess a plot at all, trot out tired clichés of revenge fantasies and fascistic domination of the landscape. This was all too apparent in lensflare 02, onedotzero’s contribution to the festival, which appeared to have been partly or wholly sponsored by SONY and other content companies. While a few of the games presented, like Sega’s Rez and Bitmap Brothers’ Z: Steel Soldiers, at least differed in their graphic styles, others such as Capcom’s Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny and Sierra’s Throne of Darkness did little to stir the genre from the artistic stagnation it seems to have fallen into.

The other events in the gaming program were presented by C-Level, a Los Angeles-based “co-operative public and private lab formed to share physical, social and technological resources.” The C-Level performances were intimately concerned with the nature of game violence and audience participation in it, although their attitude towards the phenomenon was closer to relaxed indulgence than disapproval.

Cockfight Arena puts 2 players in chicken headdresses and wings, in front of a large screen on which 2 cocks are placed against a backdrop of urban decay. Flapping of the wings generates lift for the players’ avian avatars, while pedals by the players’ feet are used to lash out with the blades. The use of these costumes, and the physical activity of moving the wings, introduces an almost tribal, totemic feel to proceedings, as if players are invoking the behaviour they wish to see on screen by acting it out in person. The gameplay is similar to Joust, the 1982 Williams Electronics arcade hit, although the chickens are proportionally larger than the Williams ostrich/stork, which means the resulting flight patterns are quite different. Audience members are able to place bets on players, and smoking and drinking are encouraged, evoking the decadent feel of a real back-alley cockfight.

The second work presented by C-Level was Tekken Torture Tournament, an extension of the Playstation game Tekken 3 (Namco, 1998), and the result is, quite literally, shocking. Players have electrodes strapped to their right arms which deliver electric shocks as their on-screen alter ego is pummelled. The inability to move one’s button-pressing hand at various points during the game, due to its being clenched in momentary pain, changes the ebb and flow of the in-game violence. People fight differently when they actually feel pain, something worth remembering in this age of Nintendo wars.

Cockfight Arena and Tekken Torture Tournament reveal a desire to mix the real and the virtual, to raise the stakes for game players by commingling the world on-screen with physical actions and consequences. While the end results are not serious—losing a game does not mean losing your head, the fate suffered by your feathered friend in Cockfight Arena and the physical involvement definitely heightens your awareness of the game and makes the experience much more involving.

Both C-Level events were attended by a predominantly male audience. This could be due to the context in which they were exhibited; in a nightclub, rather than a gallery. Videos from previous performances in Los Angeles, Houston and Tel Aviv showed a more balanced gender mix. Questions during the C-Level forum revealed concerns from the local audience about the focus on violence. It could be that C-Level’s interest in gaming violence (and the choice of site) worked against the group.

The inclusion of C-Level and onedotzero in the AIFF broadens the program and explores cultural issues in a field that will become more important to filmmakers in future years. Multinational companies are developing content for film and games, and digital techniques are increasingly used in the creation of cinema. We can only hope that filmmakers and artists become more comfortable working within the peculiar constraints of computer gaming, and in doing so help move the field on from its technologically advanced but ethically and artistically stunted state.

Lensflare 02, onedotzero, www.onedotzero.com; Cockfight Arena, Tekken Torture Tournament, C-Level, http://c-level.org/, Computer Gaming Program, Adelaide International Film Festival, Church, The Nightclub, Adelaide, Mar 3-5

It is salutary to reflect on the selection of an Australian Army interactive DVD as the cutting edge product—an emblem of excellence across the national multimedia industry—in the recent Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association (AIMIA) Awards.

The awards are the annual litmus test for defining how digital media is being taken up; by which industry, and by which market. This year’s event was held at the Australian Technology Park (ATP), the site of the old Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Redfern, Sydney. A cooperative venture between the New South Wales Government, stakeholder universities, TAFE NSW and a team of international information technology companies, ATP now houses organisations whose primary focus is technological research and development along with services including fibre-optic cabling, LANs , WANs and a supercomputing centre (ac3).

We can rest assured that our troops are going to the US-lead war with Iraq with state-of-the-art, digitally enhanced training. The Australian Army Training Centre (Sydney) took out the 10th Anniversary of the AIMIA 2002 Award for the prestigious Best of the Best Title and Best Education and Reference Title for their simulated combat DVD, Sergeant Offensive Operation. Much to the amusement of award presenter Adam Spencer, from ABC Radio’s Triple J, these awards were worlds away from the 1998 educational/entertainment winner, the Bananas In Pyjamas CD-ROM.

Clearly Sergeant Offensive Operation is no arcade game. In The Australian (Adrian Lynch, IT News, Feb 11), Captain Sharyn Fewster, commanding officer of the Army’s Sydney Training Technology Centre, said: “The …package forms part of the sergeant promotion course to prepare army corporals for promotion to the rank of sergeant. It also trains corporals to participate in offensive operations at the rank of sergeant…Large amounts of virtual reality have been incorporated in the training module so the student corporal can access vital information…The user has access to two critical pieces of virtual equipment: a Knowledge Visor and a Personal Communication System.”

Previous AIMIA award winners, Massive Interactive (Treasures of Ancient Greece, www.phm.gov.au/ancient_greek_ olympics/, 2000) won Highly Commended for Best of the Best with The Pattern Book (www.patternbook.nsw. gov.au) developed with the Department of Urban Affairs and Planning and the NSW Government Architect. At a launch by NSW Premier Bob Carr, The Pattern Book was declared “a practical resource that will be used across the State to help raise the standard of residential flat design in the new century.”

Over the past 10 years, the AIMIA awards for interactive media were more in line with experimentation and the work of nonconformist producers. In 1998, for example, Best Educational Multimedia/Online Product was the Real Wild Child, Australian Rock CD-ROM and Best Site or Title produced by a Student, and the Apple PC for individual innovation was Megan Heyward’s I Am A Singer CD-ROM.

In the contemporary landscape, interactive media seem to have increasingly become organs of the state, a return to their origins in surveillance technology, national planning and entertainment.

Graphite2003, the first regional Australasian and South East Asian conference on technical developments in and artistic uses of computer graphic and interactive techniques, was held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in February. Organised as parallel streams of technical papers, exhibitions and screenings, there seemed few opportunities for discussion between the art and technology camps. However 3 cultural panels addressed this and things became interesting when artists, theorists and technologists interacted.

The first of these sessions, organised by Kelli Dipple, dealt with Sustainable Communications—Lag, Interruption and Collapse, familiar to all who work in online and networked environments. Interestingly the audience was evenly divided between those wishing to embrace technical difficulties like lag as an inherent emergent rhythm of the internet, integral to any new media experience, and those who could not wait for technological upgrades to provide seamless real-time processing of the virtual experience. Keith Armstrong (QUT), John McCormick (Company in Space) and Johannes Birringer (online from Ohio State University) addressed issues of the presentation and delivery of artistic content and how it is affected by network infrastructure for streaming media, video conferencing and chat interfaces.

Besides Graphics chaired by Stephen Barrass (CSIRO) offered insights into the use of multisensory rather than predominantly visual interfaces for human/computer interaction. Recalling the “smellorama” of John Waters’ movies, Barrass proposed a “feelorama” in the form of the Haptic Snuffbox project (featured in Graphite 2003’s accompanying exhibition) in which he and Matt Adcock used a haptic user interface, a feedback pen rather than a mouse, to relay every bump and surface irregularity of the screen image, thus generating a sense of digital touch. Drew Whitehouse (ANU Vizlab) focused on why adults are reticent to engage in interactive environments, using the example of his interactive work for kids of all ages at the National Museum of Australia, and Alan Dorin (Monash) addressed the use of different visual forms, like empty and negative space in digital imaging, to create uniquely digital aesthetics, rather than those relying on cinematic conventions. This highly entertaining panel proposed real solutions in producing hybrid and sensory interface forms.

As I was a member of the third panel, Technological Cultural Interaction, an overview is provided here by artist and Conference Co-chair Ian Gwilt: “MIT Media Lab’s Saoirse Higgins’ panel swept into a sleepy Graphite on the morning after the conference dinner. Like the arrival of the travelling circus the peripatetic showmen amazed the audience with images of wonder and awe with Richard Brown (VCA) referring to notions of alchemy and the ‘magic’ of the interactive experience. His user responsive interfaces, [producing an] intuitive, playful experience, were an example of what can be achieved when art/technology and content work hand in hand. Melinda Rackham’s multi-user 3-dimensional Empyrean space provided a metaphysical meeting place where we could engage with other out-of-body explorers in a sublime digital aesthetic that retained some of the sensual fluidity of the real world—exploring notions of the corporeal experience and social engagement in a virtual space. Catriona Macaulay (University of Dundee) questioned whether developers listen to the needs of consumers, and if consumers really know what they want anyway in terms of cutting edge technology. In this digital chicken and egg scenario, who decides on the outcomes for technology, society and visual culture and how are such decisions made? The ‘quality of experience’ rather than ‘goal oriented tasks’ was an overriding issue that linked panel members and audience. This was definitely a case of the journey being more important than the destination—be it down path, pixel or both.”

The panels identified some major problems in content delivery for artists working in the often uneasy fissure between art and technology. These issues were also explored in the diverse digital genres exhibited at SPAN galleries. Work ranged from Phillip George’s subtle Whitewater digital print, which evolved from an image file over 10 years, to interactive online works like Adrian Miles’ Video blog::vog video diary. There was a proliferation of cute creatures—Robin Pettard and Troy Innocent’s plastic constructions and the simple yet playfully engaging touch sensitive installation Shifting Nature from Cheang Lin Yew, Yeoh Guan Hong and Liew San Yen, where tiny projected artificial-life type critters responded in swarming patterns to audience hands. Likewise in Jennifer Seevinck’s Sticky Traffic, real-time rendered toy insects and wobbly tactile 3D surfaces visually responded to the sound of traffic outside the gallery.

A Singapore street scene was transposed into the Melbourne exhibition space in Paul Lincoln’s Dislocation, an Augmented Reality (AR) work that illustrated a key theme of the conference. AR differs from virtual reality because the viewer sees a digital image overlaid onto the real world. Here underlying assumptions between art and technology divide, as AR research doesn’t necessarily question what is real or virtual, whereas an artist may think that we exist in simultaneous layers of virtuality—that nothing is really real. As in many AR applications, the technology is interesting, however Lincoln’s content (video images of a woman, a small girl and an old woman all eating dinner) was not particularly engaging. Technology is only as good as the concepts it carries, an overwhelming reason why more artists should be resident in research labs.

Content abounded however in the electronic theatre, which showcased computer-generated moving image works ranging from film, architectural animation and software demos to biomedical visualisations. Antonia Fredman’s sophisticated Amateur Developer’s Handbook took an hilarious look at property development for the enthusiastic beginner, while Mike Daly’s binary was a beautiful physiological exploration of a woman bodily intertwined with technology. Anna Tow commented on the current Australian social and political climate with Pending, a dark comedy about hope and identity concerning the mandatory detention of asylum seekers.

Contextually interesting was Steven Stahlberg’s Strange—an animated segment featuring the seductive, synthetic singer, Rhayne. Virtual women of improbable proportions often accompanied by phallic objects would, in an art context, be read as ironic, however there was no hint of irony here. This 42-second animation was realized on Maya in 3 weeks by one animator whose focus was speed and processing power rather than content and cultural representation. In practical terms, the desirability of siren Rhayne, an Idoru or virtual pop celebrity, is not predicated on whether she is real or generated but on her effect, whether she can entertain the end user.

Stelarc’s keynote address introduced his Prosthetic Head. The project links the Alice artificial intelligence software, modified by his personal data, with VRML animation resembling himself to produce a web-based talking head that interacts by answering (typed) questions from users. The technology is not cutting-edge or particularly new, but the cult of Stelarc’s body-augmenting celebrity makes this fascinating. The friendly virtual head is not an intimate other—it will be projected in darkened gallery spaces, 3 metres high, dominating the viewer. Always larger-than-life, Stelarc has finally swapped his biological body, his wetware, for hardware.

Also dealing with bodily immersion, Melbourne’s Metraform screened their Virtual Reality work, Ecstasis, where groups of 4 must cooperate by choosing aligned visual perspectives to navigate the experiential environment. Ecstasis explored notions of ecstasy through a “negotiated betweenness” as ribbon-like avatars flirted and danced with each other while moving through the sensuous organic and digital imagery.

But the real impact was felt when emerging from the enclosed spaces of virtual interaction into the huge Melbourne Peace Rally. I was reminded that differences of perspective, whether cultural, technical, philosophical or artistic require respect and cooperation. Be at Graphite2004 in Singapore—the technology will be there, we could use it together.

Graphite2003, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne, Feb 11-14

My first impression of Rotterdam and the Dutch Electronic Art Festival was a mesmerising liquid architecture display of green pixelated images and text, moving and mutating over the surface of a 50-storey building. I later discovered that this was not part of DEAF03 as I’d first assumed but simply an impressive Dutch Telecom site abstracting segments from current news headlines. The DEAF03 opening was close by though, along an abandoned dockland inside Pakhuis Las Palmas, one of the biggest, coldest and most technologically equipped warehouse spaces I have ever visited.

The buzz of new media celebrity warmed me up as I excitedly squeezed my way past Lev Manovich, Sadie Plant and other members of the new media art elite to get my complimentary glass of pink champagne at the bar. In the centre of a packed wooden amphitheatre, its top rows consisting of giant bunk beds complete with fluffy cushions, the director of V2, Alex Adriaansens, tried to make himself heard over the lively crowd: “DEAF03 Data Knitting, from Wunderkammer to Metadata, will focus on the conditions of our information and knowledge-based society and the role of the media therein. It will specifically explore the ways in which information is gathered, ordered and made accessible through databases and archives.”

As I listened I looked around the impressive space containing over 20 plasma monitors connected to various roaming video camera operators, 5 large video projection screens, countless computer terminals and a 30-foot inflatable plastic jumping tube (and this was just the workshop room!). With a list of partners and supporters that most Australian festival directors could only dream of, DEAF is a huge, multifaceted and technologically sophisticated production which has a growing audience of over 10,000 visitors to each festival.

Warmed by the free flowing champagne and never one to turn down a free ride, I jumped on the bus to see a preview of Whisper, an interactive, performative installation by Thecla Schiphorst and Susan Kozel (Canada) in a theatre on the other side of town. We were ushered onto a white vinyl surface where different atmospheric sounds could be heard by moving into various zones. These emanated from beautiful clear perspex sound domes that isolated you in your own private waterfall of sound. Beside this was a standard looking clothing rack, on which hung 6 strange bulging white robes. Schiphorst and Kozel each put one on and described how sensors in the robes measured your breath and heartbeat and how this bodily data was represented by your own personal heiroglyph on the garment via LED display panels. Whisper, they explained, was an acronym for Wearable, Handheld, Intimate, Sensory, Personal, Expectant, Responsive System. Unfortunately we were then told Whisper was not functioning due to the common and boring problem of “a server being down.” Not to be deterred, I drank more champagne and decided to come back tomorrow to see the rest of the festival. I was not disappointed.

The main DEAF03 exhibition consisted of 20, mostly large scale, interactive artworks housed in a fashionably dark and cold warehouse space. Interestingly, one of the most powerfully charged works was also one of the few that was not interactive. Ingo Gunther’s Worldprocessor, a series of more than 50 illuminated thematic globes made between 1988 and 2003 were technologically simple yet highly evocative sculptures that illustrated and dramatised global trends, statistics and flows. Gunther refers to the Worldprocessor as a “data jacket for the common globe.” Admitting that his works are instantly out of date and always incorrect, he bravely tackles issues such as the culturally biased interpretations of data sets and the challenges of representing complex global issues. One particularly memorable globe visualised how the wealth of particular companies related to the wealth (GNP) of particular countries and continents. One horrifying comparison was that the US store Walmart is economically the size of Africa.

A more personal and poetic globe-based work was The Globe Jungle Project by Yashiro Suzuki (Japan). This magical spinning installation was part of a larger project in Japan to encourage more interaction between young and old through the redesign of city parks. Video images of children playing on the globe-shaped jungle gym by day were re-projected onto the globe at night and could only be seen by spinning the globe so the bars became like a screen. As with quite a few works in DEAF03, The Globe Jungle Project approached the theme of data knitting and digital archives via metaphors of memory.

Pockets Full of Memories by George Legrady (Hungary) also explored notions of collective memory. Visitors were invited to scan any object they had and to fill out a digital questionnaire. The object would then be added to a constantly growing and changing database along with its assigned properties. A projected map of macro-relations was constructed from these micro-personal interactions using a self-organising map algorithm that positioned objects of similar descriptions near each other.

Deciding I needed some bodily stimulation I headed for Stahl Stenslie’s (Norway) Erotogod which was standing tall in the darkness like some futuristic altar to the god of technology. An imposing steel structure, it looked like a chrome wave with an inverted pyramid made of white latex projection screens on its peak. The work was constantly surrounded by hordes of eager visitors. I watched as each person was led up the Erotogod ramp by an attendant and then asked to kneel and straddle a flexible metal paddle seat facing the 3 large screens. While the ‘user’ (who was looking more and more like the ‘human sacrifice’) was kneeling in this slightly humiliating position, the attendant fitted them with a glittering, padded ‘suit’ that looked scarily like a reject costume from an 80s Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The ‘victim/user’ was left on the altar while texts and images were generated on the 3 semi-opaque screens and deep vibrating sounds emanated from 16 speakers placed around the work.

Although initially put off by the 80s spacesuit, I decided to tackle the Erotogod myself. As the suit was fastened between my legs and around my chest and arms the attendant explained that it was full of many sensors and that I should touch myself to trigger different images, sounds and texts from The Koran, The Talmud and The Bible. As I was left alone and feeling quite silly, a new aspect of the work quickly became obvious to me. By touching yourself through the suit, waves of different vibrations emanated through the suit and into your body. I was so distracted by these intense vibrations I hardly noticed the scripts from the sacred texts that were appearing around me. After what was a pleasantly exhilarating, multi-sensory 5 minutes, I left the work looking slightly flushed. Erotogod says Stenslie, “is a futuristic media altar linking auto-erotic touching to stories of Creation; a sensory fusing of religions.” Quite a sensation from one of the early founders of Cybersex (Stenslie built a full-body, tele-tactile communication system in 1993).

Another extreme work but on the other end of the sensory scale was PainStation by Volke Morawe and Tillman Reiff (Denmark). Think prehistoric PlayStation with an extra incentive to win. PainStation is based on the early video game Pong, but in an interesting twist, if you miss the ball in PainStation you actually get hurt. The PainStation module is constructed like an early video arcade game, the crucial difference being the addition of a surface where players must constantly press their left hand. This is the PEU or Pain Execution Unit. When either player misses the ball during the game the PEU is activated and can attack your hand with extreme heat, electrical shocks or lashes of a painful whip. The first player who lifts their hand in this situation is the loser. PainStation was nearly always surrounded by a crowd of young people challenging each other to pain duels. A somewhat simple idea, PainStation was nonetheless engaging and perhaps relevant given the new generation of children developing repetitive strain injuries because of early addictions to computer games.

There were many interesting works such as Zgodlocator by Herwig Weiser, Synthia by Lynn Hershman, Web of Life by Jeffrey Shaw, Poetry Machine_1.5 by David Link and PoliceState by Jonah Brucker-Cohen that I’d have liked to discuss if I had the space [We’ll try to provide it in the next edition. Eds]. The festival’s 2-day Symposium, Information Is Alive, with speakers including Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi and Arjun Appadurai was an interdisciplinary feast for the brain, as were the numerous performances, workshops and seminars held throughout the festival. The DEAF03 website, http://deaf.v2.nlis a journey in itself with enough documentary material to keep you busy for hours.

DEAF03, Dutch Electronic Art Festival. Data Knitting, organised by V2-Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Feb 25-Mar 9

'In Autumn, the ripe season, the Multi-Media Digital Art Museum of China Millenium Monument opens its door for the first time for the ‘multi-media art’, this immature friend. Perhaps, its charm just lies in juvenility. Innovation, brave exploration, and undiminished passion are eternally the attitude and existing style of this newly emerging force. As the undertaker of this exhibition, we warmly welcome the new friend here and will support its development.'

Wang Jiangi, Director, Art Museum, China Millennium Monument, MAAP 2002 catalogue.

I feel that I should state my position up front. I turned 50 last October and (if you don’t count fleeting visits to New Zealand and New Guinea in the 70s) had never been overseas. I also come from Brisvegas and have been actively involved in the Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific (MAAP) Festival over the years as a board member, volunteer, contributor and advisor. So, as I stepped onto the plane in Sydney after a long night at the Primavera artists’ party at the MCA, I was, in the words of Big Kev, EXCITED…VERY EXCITED! I was heading to China for MAAP Beijing; I was a young new media artist trapped in an old woman’s body; and I would soon be the only blonde in Tiananmen Square.

In her catalogue introduction, MAAP Director Kim Machan outlines the importance of MAAP in “showcasing the work of the region’s major new media practitioners, creating new networks, introducing the artists and their work to audiences, and increasing cultural contact and understanding through the experience of new media arts.” Although always built on a strong commitment to new media art in the Asia Pacific, MAAP No. 5 was the first foray out of Australia and into the region, enabling collaborative partnerships between itself and organisations such as The Central Academy of Fine Arts, The Art Museum of China Millennium Monument, The China International Exhibitions Agency and the Australian Embassy in Beijing.

MAAP Beijing featured a wide range of artworks from the Asia Pacific region. Perhaps more significantly, it provided an opportunity for Chinese artists to exhibit their works locally, some for the first time. The accompanying forums, which included presentations by Alex Galloway from Rhizome (US), Julianne Pierce from Australia Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and Pi Li from Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts, provided new regional networks for Chinese artists, academics and students. The importance of this event was highlighted with the coverage on CCTV, the official Chinese television station. How refreshing it was to be sitting in the foyer of our hotel sipping local beer while interviews with new media artists were screened on the large television monitors.

The thematic title, Moist, resulted in a plethora of interpretations. The Art Museum of China Millennium Monument is a grand structure and in the bowels of this enormous sundial is a circular corridor with gallery space on both sides: The China Art Museum. Here MAAP was divided into 3 components: individual installations by artists from Australia, China, Japan, India and Korea; curated screening programs by the Australian Centre for Moving Image, dLux Media Arts, Experimenta Media Arts and Johan Pinappal’s Contemporay Indian Video. There was also a CD-ROM and net art program by MAAP, ANAT and Art Center Nabi. The configuration of the museum allowed separate spaces for many installations and provided areas for banks of computers to view the online component. The pièce de résistance technically speaking was a lecture theatre with a giant, curved 31-metre video wall of 56 programmable monitors. This wall was hotly sought after by artists wishing to see their work writ huge, but the format suited some better than others.

Web of life (2002)—a collaboration between Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw and ZKM in Germany—was visually impressive on such a scale. Viewers placed their hands onto a sculptural component which mapped their lifelines and sent the information through a network to 5 other locations, the resulting image changing according to the person’s ‘vibe.’ The resulting images were sometimes formulaic and my travelmate IMA’s David Broker, was horrified to find that his handprint generated a new age dolphin scenario. Another successful creation for the large screen was Zhang Peili’s Broadcasting at the same time (2002) in which each of the 56 monitors broadcast news readers from different countries announcing, “Good morning, this is the news.” This work perfectly illustrated the homogeneity of the world and its presentation of ‘media humanity.’ While Justine Cooper’s Moist (2002) was created for this wall screen, I thought it did not have the same impact. A video created from bodily fluids magnified many times, it attempted a massive scale shift which resulted in a blotchy, grainy, abstracted image lost in the translation.

Some Australian works were familiar to me—Patricia Piccinini’s Swell (2000), David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s The Levitation Grounds (2000-2002), John Tonkin’s Personal Eugenics (2001) and Craig Walsh’s, Perspective (2002). They looked great in this setting and were well received, as were installations by Ian Haig (Excelsior 3000, 2001) and Iain Mott (Close, 2001). Gong Xin Wang is a MAAP favourite, and his new work was a highlight. Titled Red Gate, it consisted of 4 screens positioned to form a room with openings to enter the space. On each screen was the projection of a large door which opened to reveal glimpses of old and new China before the door slammed shut. The uncanny sound of this constant slamming could be heard while experiencing other works, reminding you where you were and what you hadn’t seen.

The screening program comprised old favourites from artists like Peter Callas, Justine Cooper, Vikki Wilson and Jon McCormack interspersed with more recent works presented to a new and appreciative audience. The CD-ROM and net art component was also extremely varied, with old and new works available for consumption. MAAP’s excursion into Beijing highlighted its importance in the region. It will travel to Singapore before returning to Brisbane in 2005.

MAAP, Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific Festival, The Art Museum of China Millenium Monument, Beijing, Oct 20-Nov 3. www.maap.org.au

In RealTime 51 and 52, I discussed the impact of the world wide web and new media technologies on contemporary Indigenous artists and their work, with particular reference to questions of appropriation. After surveying some recent educational initiatives in the area, notably a successful workshop of the National Indigenous School in New Media Arts (NISNMA) in Adelaide in 2002, I looked at the work of the inimitable Rea and rising stars Jenny Fraser and Christian Thompson.

Leading Wiradjuri conceptual and multimedia artist Brook Andrew is probably best known for his provocatively titled 1996 series Sexy and Dangerous, in which he critiques stereotypes of male indigeneity. Andrew figures prominently in the vanguard of artists challenging colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial assumptions.

It’s mainly white men, self-cast as the true cultural heroes who have historically produced visions of Australia as a ‘nation.’ Andrew frequently deploys Indigenous masculine figures and icons in his work—for example, spears, boomerangs, shields—expressing his artistic vision via the language of pure spectacle, using words from his own and other languages, and re-imaging the Indigenous body as sexy, not savage. By these means he successfully critiques the limitations of narrow imaginings of Australia, past and present, and its position in the world.

Andrew achieves this by combining web-based projects, drawing and installation with judicious use of the written word, performance art, installation, digital photography, video, sound effects and especially neon, for which he has a passion. In an email interview, Andrew writes, “…neon…is a striking colourful medium that for some reason is really successful in human sell-sell culture. it’s beautiful. have u seen the neon heart by Czech artist Jiri David, installed over Prague Castle?”

Andrew exhibits in many Australian galleries, public places and spaces, including the forecourt of Sydney International Airport which features wilbing (to fly). At the walama (to return) forecourt are 22 animated neon boomerangs made from aluminium and high-tension wire. Often his exhibits are the culmination of painstaking historical research, for example, into the specific ceremonial clan designs on particular boomerangs or shields, or the minutiae of carved spears.

In many works Andrew deploys words, sentences or fragments from Indigenous languages, specifically Wiradjuri, Ngarrindjeri and, more recently, Sindhi (a Pakistani dialect) and Hindi as an implicit critique of the imposed, colonising language of English. Language has been a significant instrument of empire, resulting in the suppression of many Australian voices. Sometimes the artist teases his audience with his use of Wiradjuri text. In one case, he writes, audience members misread a Wiradjuri expression as “‘get fucked’, whereas the text actually reads “you don’t share.” (The neon artwork says “buunji nginduugirr AMERICA.” “Buunji” means ‘bludge’ and “nginduugirr” means ‘you’ in the collective sense.) He writes: “it’s the ambiguity and cheekiness of some of my work which i like…”

Often, in ironic, po-mo mode, Andrew refashions ‘traditional’ Indigenous weaponry in postmodern garb, simultaneously mounting a biting social commentary on the cannabilistic consumption of Indigenous art and identity by contemporary capitalism and the advertising industry. Examples of this include his neon boomerangs and massive phallic spears (Seven Spears) created from Australian timbers, LED lighting and bronze for the Arts Program at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. There is always a sense that even his most playful work is deadly serious. As Andrew writes, “…life is politics…i say, we are not innocent people here in the west. we are all complicit with [those in power]. Take, for example, John Howard’s message about anti-terrorism being to ‘preserve our way of life’.”

Describing himself as a conceptual artist, Andrew is drawn to the new technologies (as well as neon) partly because of their surface appeal and seductiveness. At the same time he cleverly deploys capitalism’s and the advertising industry’s own techniques, media and stereotypic imagery, as weaponry against them, commenting on contemporary global and local cultures by borrowing from their own language and grammar.

The sources of Andrew’s artistic eclecticism become apparent when he cites his most important influences: “fred williams: his paintings drop me in the middle of those imaginative landscapes…tracey moffatt: for her guts in artistic navigation in dealing with an at times bitter and jealous aboriginal art world and at times a gutless and parochial australian art scene. i’m not talking about her ‘super star fame’; i’m talking about her ability to survive as an artist…louise bourgeois: her installations transport the mind and body to breathing high with short breaths…andy warhol: because i love to hate the obvious nature of his comments […] & curators and arts lovers who genuinely love art for the sake of it, not because they think they understand it.”

Andrew cites a currently untitled work-in-progress as his career highlight. It involves large neon text works that combine installation and audience participation: “It’s a large spiral red, white and blue neon that is also a cone shape…5m in cone length and 2.5m diameter…and it spins horizontally within an internally mirrored room. Outsiders can see inside the cone. The piece is a performance interactive piece where an audience member (with hospital style white tunic) enters a dark labyrinth. This takes them to 2 ‘workers’ who are covered head to toe in white chemical style suits. Their heads are also protected. The audience member is strapped to a horizontal morgue-style bench and then is slid into the spiralling neon. Indoctrination takes place. Then the audience member is removed to a white bright room and then exited.”

Like many of his works, this one relies on collaboration: “i do use new media mostly through collaborations… like working with the tin sign writers in new delhi…[during an Asialink residency]…i think collaboration is a wonderful way for artists to get outside their own medium.”

He is currently working on, “a new body of work i’ve created through an australia council fellowship which is re-imaging the blak body in a dark enchanted scary forest. the series is called kalar midday—people can guess what it means—i don’t like to give away too many secrets when it comes to my use of language. one of the series has made it into the art gallery of NSW inaugural australian photographic art prize to be opened in a few weeks.”

Essentially, digital new media is a sharp instrument that is easily blunted—but not in this artist’s hands. In his visual arts practice, Brook Andrew is concerned with questions of how a more socially and morally just society might be achieved; how one might address social inequalities and reflect alternative epistemologies and ways of being-in-the-world. The effect of his work is a significant challenge to dominant and oppressive ways of thinking, some would say a politicisation and indigenisation of western history. He achieves this not through being didactic or ‘preachy’ in his approach. Sassy, bold, cheeky, and impudent, Andrew’s work, while politically committed and often hard hitting in its political message, exists in a third space that doesn’t rule out the carnivalesque, the camp, the popular and even sometimes, the garish. Instead it means having a lot of fun and above all, having the guts to stand out as different: “i think artists just spit out what we can when trying to make sense of something either personal or public, aesthetic or political etc. i think the most pressing problem in the world at this moment is a disease which has always cursed humanity, this is the disease of superiority, ignorance and greed. humans are a culture of sheep. i can’t even wear a fish-net shirt in sydney without death looks for god’s sake!”

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