Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

June 2013

Paula Dawson, Hyperobject, My Homeland (detail), 2013, production still for holographic digital print

courtesy the artist

Paula Dawson, Hyperobject, My Homeland (detail), 2013, production still for holographic digital print

I’m staring down into the dark depths of a pool in which unrecognisable organic forms drift peacefully or their tendrils propel them past each other or into the bottomless dark. Actually, I’m look at the glass surface of a low, metre-square box on a gallery floor, but so convincing is the three-dimensional realisation of these luminescent life-like forms that I happily suspend disbelief, encouraged by the absence of the hard edges of 3D filmmaking.

I’m told by an art student invigilator that the tendrilled creatures are apparently constructed from 3D scans of the life-lines of human hands. More surprising is the news that the technology employed to realise this fantasia is adapted by hologram artist Paula Dawson from US military equipment designed to recognise and learn topography in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan.

Paula Dawson, Hyperobject, My Homeland, 2013 installation, Holoshop exhibition

courtesy the artist

Paula Dawson, Hyperobject, My Homeland, 2013 installation, Holoshop exhibition

Creatures appearing in another screen, this one hanging from a wall, ease gently in and out of the frame, their delicacy and transparency belying a near palpable sense of solidity.

Nearby there’s an opportunity to play with a device emanating from an Australian Research Council funded project, with Dawson as one of its team of international investigators. It aims to “forge a set of innovative technologies and processes for creating realtime 3D digital content for holograms and other 3D display systems with virtual tools which enable the direct hand-drawing of subjects, mark by mark.” Manipulating the pen, which is held by flexible armature, feels distinctly odd when a 2D egg-shaped image on the screen ‘feels’ three-dimensional as I move the pen across it. This digitally generated tactility is an intriguing dimension of the Holoshop project.

This show, which includes Dawson’s helium-neon laser holograms, delights in its play with perception and its suggestion of the creative and other possibilities of the strangely named Holoshop. Yet again there is a sense of the uncanny in an ISEA2013 exhibition.

Night Rage, Embodied Media

courtesy the artists

Night Rage, Embodied Media

Disoriented when I step into a small very dark room with a bright light angled back toward the curtained entrance, it takes a while to adjust. Low level sounds immersively evoke the dense sonic aura of the urban night—a mixture of the wild and the manufactured, birds, bats, traffic…At least that’s what I think I’m hearing—a familiar but simultaneously alien night music.

Finally, after peering blankly into the dark, I look up and detect a small circle of dim light—a screen? But it has depth, like a globe, and something suspended within it: silvery, glowing lightly, long (relative to the small space it inhabits), floating or swimming (it bends a little) or caught, like a plastic bag (to which it looks akin), in an air current. Is it a tiny organism, hugely magnified? Smaller, similar if less complex creatures drift by.

The background transforms, sometimes a small green liquidy phosphorescent cloud, or a wall of gnarled bark, or scattered feathers and a bird skull (I’m not sure if I saw them here or subsequently in the documentation) and a floating chunk of fur, before turning from black to deep night sky blue across which large silhouetted fruit bats fly.

Night Rage, Embodied Media

courtesy the artists

Night Rage, Embodied Media

Night Rage is a mysterious work, partly because it inherently limits visual perception, as if to place us in the centre of the night with an uncertain depth of field and vague identification of objects and creatures, testing our capacity to know where we fit in the shape of things. On the other hand, for a hi-tech work involving robotics it oddly recalls 19th century pre-cinematic devices, replete with gothic eeriness—a 21st century peep show of dark purpose in a booth.

The makers of Night Rage are certain of their purpose, to “examine the many shades of ‘nocturnal’ threats to night biodiversity and the myriad myths and stories that have shaped our cultural understandings of life after light. Barely recognisable images float within landscapes of media, noise and sound as the work asserts a profound resistance to today’s all-consuming media mesh” [website].

Night Rage does not offer the easy pleasures of much media art and digitalised mass media, but just how much resistance it offers to that “all consuming media mesh,” let alone ecological challenges, you’ll have to decide for yourself once you step out into the light, perhaps more bewildered or bemused than certain of anything. Perhaps it’s then, as your senses calm, that your thoughts will take shape. It’s that kind of work.

Keith Armstrong and collaborators, Long Time, No See?

The Long Time, No See? workshop, or “walkshop” as it was described in the brochure, came at the tail end of the packed ISEA2013 program, by which time my energy levels were seriously beginning to lag.

However, the promise of participating in a collective imagining of the future through a Smartphone App which documents each participant’s journey and then generates an online artwork complete with algorithmic soundscape was more than enough to motivate me to make the trip to Parramatta. I just wasn’t sure if it was enough to keep me awake throughout the day. This was something I need not have worried about.

Setting your compass

Our foray into Long Time, No See? began not with the App but with a brown paper bag containing instructions and workbooks. I was tempted to say something smart about whether we had to burn them afterwards, but I managed to restrain myself. To be honest, after a week of incessantly wielding iPhone and laptop I was enjoying handling the crisp paper booklets.

It seems that Long Time, No See? is much more than an App or a website. It’s about alternative ways of imagining the world. Writer and workshop facilitator Linda Carroli describes it as “a type of hopeful adventure” which endeavours to “make the invisible visible.” Carroli paced back and forth as she spoke, gently urging us into thoughtful interrogations of about how we, as individuals and communities, construct the future.

Her narrative was subtle, abstract and oddly compelling. I began to suspect that the simplicity of the language concealed the project’s deep intellectual underpinnings. The Creative Director of Long Time, No See?, I felt that Keith Armstrong, silently observing our progress, should have been holding up a sign saying “Warning: Deep Waters Ahead.”

We spent the morning working through the group activities outlined in the “Setting your Compass” booklet, which prompted us to reflect on keywords such as “intent,” “care” and “change” in a number of contexts, before being led outdoors, Apps in hand, by Carroli’s quiet, challenging narrative.

Field testing

In the centre of a grassy expanse in a nearby park, each of us marked the spot where we intended to start. The first of nine stages outlined by the App directed us to take one step forward and two steps back and so on until we’d taken nine steps, but ended up being three steps behind the place from where we intended to start.

Embarking on a journey which didn’t seem to progress very far was amusingly metaphorical. The process also made me more aware of my surroundings, because I’m inclined to march from place to place as if I were a contestant in a plain-clothes orienteering competition. While it initially took quite a while to travel a very short distance, in the following stages, we were free to cover as much or as little ground as we wished.

At each stage the App prompted us to select keywords or tags and directed us to observe or interact with our surroundings by making notes, photographs or sound recordings. I had some trouble with the App’s sound recorder, but designer Robert Henderson and software developer Petros Nyfantis quickly ironed out the glitches and I was soon immersed in the contemplative process of walking, observing and reflecting.

Future mapping

Completing the walk felt like an achievement in itself, but seeing the data we had generated uploaded onto community.long-time-no-see.org provided a whole new world to explore. Our walks appeared to hover in space as ‘islands,’ consisting of waypoints or nodes in the form of photographs or tags joined together by lines.

The islands in Long Time, No See? are plotted in relation to ideas, so that someone’s walk in Brisbane can appear in close proximity to one in Parramatta if they have used similar tags or ideas. The background, which consists of layers of geological, climatic and urbanisation data, is accompanied by a spectacular generative soundscape created by composer Roger Dean, which reconfigures itself via an algorithm depending on the proximity of ideas to each other.

Even though it was late in the day, seeing Long Time, No See? in action proved to be a complex sensory experience—highly sculptural and extremely thought provoking. We found ourselves eagerly discussing how our individual explorations fitted in to the broader picture described on the map and identifying where our thoughts coincided with those of others.

Now that we have our login details, we can create new walks or review old ones through the App or access the web-based visualisation on our desktops, providing there’s a high-speed internet connection.

At this stage, there is a limit to the number of walks which can be depicted on Long Time, No See? at one time, so your walks won’t stay on the website indefinitely. However, the Long Time, No See? team seem to be brimming with ideas and so we can expect much from this project in the future.

Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds, Adam Nash, Distributed Empire

courtesy the artists

Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds, Adam Nash, Distributed Empire

Chatswood shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon. I weave my way between the crowds of North Sydney-siders who duck in and out of the various chain stores along the mall. At the traffic lights I run into Touchy, the human camera (see “Touch me there“), so I know I must be heading in the right direction.

When I arrive at my destination, an urban screen looms gigantic over the Chatswood Performing Arts Centre (The Concourse). What seems like a thousand primary school students, all in uniforms, are milling around. (Presumably they’re taking part in a school band event, as they’re each carrying a musical instrument.) Under the screen, a number of the artists involved with The Portals project are gearing up for the lunchtime artist talk.

The Portals is one of four projects funded by the Australia Council for the Arts through their Broadband Arts Initiative in order to test out the possibilities that networked arts present. For the duration of ISEA, The Portals has linked Chatswood’s urban screen with a similar screen in Darwin (at the Casuarina Campus of Charles Darwin University).

As a delegate attending ISEA, the chance of seeing more than two of the five works presented as part of The Portals is slight. Between midday to six in the evening the works are shown on rotation in two-hour slots. As a Chatswood resident or regular commuter through this locale, I expect it would be a somewhat different experience. Bringing innovative digital arts practice into the ‘normal’ suburban lives that many Australians rarely get the chance to escape from, while it might challenge some passersby, I’m sure is equally welcomed by others.

Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash weren’t able to be present at the artist talk, so the Creative Producer of The Portals, Ricardo Peach, gives a brief overview of their work. Distributed Empire is quite simple in its essence, pulling together a series of ‘selfies’ (photos you take of yourself). You can upload your selfie to the online service (http://www.distributedempire.net) and, from what I can tell, it stretches and morphs your photo, continuously creating generic digital portraits. While the visual realisation may be simple, it is an important reflection of our personal involvement in contemporary networked society. Given the lives we lead, are we able to resist this practice of sharing information and images of ourselves?

Andrew Burrell, Chris Rodley, Enquire Within Upon Everybody

courtesy the artists

Andrew Burrell, Chris Rodley, Enquire Within Upon Everybody

Enquire Within Upon Everybody, developed by technologist Andrew Burrell and writer Chris Rodley, is one of the most engaging of the works in The Portals (or perhaps that’s because I’ve been lured too far into the Twittersphere over recent years). Utilising Twitter and a series of algorithms, questions tweeted to a particular hashtag (#enquiresydney) evoke responses from the social media ‘hive mind.’ While it might take a day for you to personally receive a response to your own tweet, the answer I got back was pretty much on the money. What astounds me is that, as the work is being demo-ed, one of the mothers from the school band event comes over to request that Enquire Within Upon Everybody is no longer displayed on the oversized urban screen. Apparently, some of the text isn’t appropriate for a school-age audience. Although, from what I’ve seen, the most contentious of tweets have been questions about marriage and gender, addressed to Jesus, or about dreams of Julian Assange.

Nancy Mauro-Flude, Nick Smithies, Crystal Thomas and Frontline Media’s Is Starlight A Wifi Signal? was a one-off performance on the evening of Wednesday 12th June 2013, linking Tasmania, Darwin and Sydney. As these artists also weren’t able to be present at Saturday’s artist talk, Peach presented stills from the browser-based networked performance. The work is a poetic approach to this space, presenting snippets of image and text such as “something touched a nerve, made a connection” and “a neon light shone in a language I did not understand.”

Thea Baumann, Ben Ferns, Shian Law, Metaverse Makeovers

courtesy the artists

Thea Baumann, Ben Ferns, Shian Law, Metaverse Makeovers

The other highlight of The Portals was Thea Baumann, Ben Ferns and Shian Law’s Metaverse Makeovers (Live). Several layers of contemporary social culture are woven together: networked technology, augmented reality and nail art. Yes, you heard me. Nail art. While the painted nail designs are eye-catching, when you hold them under a mobile device and use them as the visual input to an app (specifically developed for this work), the entire fluoro-augmented-reality-rainbow comes to sparkly life. While this might seem like a technological gimmick, this work is truly awesome.

Jimmy McGilchrist, Matt Ditton, Tom Killen, Tyler Solleder and Johan Dreyer, Shadow Net

courtesy the artists

Jimmy McGilchrist, Matt Ditton, Tom Killen, Tyler Solleder and Johan Dreyer, Shadow Net

Shadow Net by Jimmy McGilchrist, Matt Ditton, Tom Killen, Tyler Solleder and Johan Dreyer, enables participants in remote locations to dance together. Red and blue outlines of figures are projected onto the screens, and users can also add to the soundtrack by virtually touching a range of green squares floating on screen. While technically I’m drawn to the notions behind this work (“…hidden networks between people, networks and communities on the Internet”) after less than a minute my curiosity wanes. Not so for the handful of primary school musicians who are hanging around. This work is a total hit. The kids try to figure out how it works, with the same fervour I imagine they’d have participating in a treasure hunt. They’re constantly shouting comments like “Get on the big screen!” and “Oh, yeah!!” Eventually it turns into a girls-versus-boys tussle. The group of girls eventually oust the boys to the sidelines.

A whole swag of people is involved in The Portals, including Creative Producer Ricardo Peach with Kathryn Gray and Britt Guy as the Northern Territory Creative Producers. I have to congratulate them all. What The Portals does is to bring our networked and sometimes socially isolated lives back into urban inhabited spaces. While the regular arts aficionado might’ve bypassed The Portals in Chatswood, it really does bring digital culture into a context that other audiences may be able to digest, and hopefully some moments of inspiration to a mundane urban landscape. If the shrieks of joy from those school kids are enough to go by, then it’s more than earned its brownie points.

Metaverse Makeovers

On the precinct skirting the outdoor urban screen at The Concourse in suburban Chatswood, the Portals project has set up a virtual nail salon. Two young local manicurists are on hand to paint our fingernails and to install the special accessory that will allow us entrée to the Metaverse.

Seated on a couch, we glimpse some possibilities of our augmented reality status as another of the team waves his iPad over our nails to demonstrate their new capabilities: suddenly fish swim from our fingertips, flowers unfold, glowing baubles explode in coloured flashes. Move a finger slowly and a shiny ball will follow. It’s decidedly blingy, but fun.

Thea Baumann, Ben Ferns and Shian Law are the creative team behind Metaverse Makeovers. Splitting her time between Australia, Tokyo and Shanghai, Baumann is onsite at Chatswood searching on her iPad for Law who’s in Darwin with Lia Tabrah, the fashion designer responsible for the fetching Hologram Hostess outfit worn by Law. The costumes around as at The Concourse are a riotous blend of kaleidoscopic patterns in pink and yellow lycra, worn with platinum or pink wigs. Telematic communication flows wildly in this little corner of an otherwise formal plaza. While a line of high school musicians files into the theatre, Annette Shun Wah’s live interview with Baumann is followed by a blast from Darwin where the team appears to be wrestling a green plastic crocodile. Meanwhile, a pop up reminds us that Julian Assange will address the ISEA multitudes tonight and Creative Producer Ricardo Peach is running us through the other four Portals projects featured this week at the Concourse on his app-packed smart phone.

Through The Portals with Ricardo Peach:
Distributed Empire

Peach explains that “Distributed Empire [Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds & Andrew Nash] is a kind of portraiture work where people upload photographs of themselves or their heroes to an app that sends the image into the Distributed Empire network that sources similar faces, morphing yours with others into a new portrait that evolves over time.

“Adam told me that for the four-day event the algorithms themselves will decide what the aesthetic will be for this mass portrait in the end. It’s sonified with a composition that Adam made for it. But he’s also developing an algorithm that will use the data from your face to generate a ‘sound sculpture.’

“The face has changed so much over the last few days. It started off quite realistic and then has become quite abstract. I think it’s become quite cubist at the moment.

“You load yourself up, see yourself appear on the big screen and then you morph with other faces. When you go to distributedempire.net you’ll also be able to see other people’s faces who have uploaded themselves onto this sonic, visual sculpture. You can see people taking pictures of themselves here in Darwin and in Sydney…anywhere really.

“Adam’s also been uploading famous portraits as well, the Mona Lisa, the Madonna, also pop culture idols. Technically this work can evolve over years.”

Is Starlight a Wifi Signal?

Peach tells us about Is Starlight a Wifi Signal? [Nancy Mauro-Flude, TAS; Nick Smithies, TAS; Crystal Thomas and Frontline Media, NT], a telematic performance between Hobart, Darwin and Sydney. “Nancy was in Hobart creating gestural movements with Crystal in Darwin. It’s a slow piece with a series of images and texts that evolve with [the artists] co-ordinating and working across a network to see how they react to each other while reconfiguring images and messages, including tweets to the stars from the audience via the hashtag #starlight. People in Darwin experienced it very differently from people in Sydney and Hobart.

“Nancy is questioning how we can negotiate with each other now that we ubiquitously work across networks. What does it mean for us in our personal relations and how we see each other? The work is a complex philosophical piece, very beautifully done. Quite poetic. I’ve uploaded a longer version on Facebook.”

Mauro-Flude writes in the catalogue, “We have always navigated by the stars, and now as a species, we regularly and increasingly, habitually use networked communication systems (GSM, Bluetooth, Wifi, RFID, QR, AR, radio). These omnipresent transmissions and signals are a new kind of fictional species that exist with/in us. What is happening on the level of the machine now information technologies are building new habitats, cosmographies and cosmologies?”

Shadow Net

Jimmy McGilchrist, Matt Ditton, Tom Killen, Tyler Solleder and Johan Dreyer, Shadow Net

Peach shows us video of intersecting, moving shadows, generated by people passing by a camera or by consciously performing in front of it. Some are in Sydney, some in Darwin but all are on the big screens in both cities. “In Shadow Net by Jimmy McGilchrist (SA, NSW) and Matt Ditton (VIC), people dancing on a green mat in front of X-Box Connects in separate locations appear as shadows onscreen, one blue, one red. They can see each other’s movement. Where their shadows overlap the colours turn green, creating icons [elsewhere on the screen] which when activated by movement generate sound, creating a sonic environment. There’s more of rumba sound if you hit the bottom squares.

“[The participants] look at the big screen and they don’t see the difference between themselves and their shadow. They communicate gesturally and also sonically.”

The artists write on Facebook: “Through these shadows, strangers across vast distances are asked to create their own, virtual relationships, and to contemplate the impact of anonymity and intimacy in our ever expanding, highly networked world.”

Enquire Within Upon Everybody

“In writer Chris Rodley and hybrid media artist Andrew Burrell’s Enquire Within Upon Everybody,” says Peach, “you tweet #enquire Sydney or #enquire Darwin and then your tweets appear at the top of the screen, scrolling. Overnight, the artists work to develop a narrative from questions from the day before; that then appear on the right hand side of the screen. Questions appear like, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ The work automatically searches for all the things that are happening on Twitter at that moment. It recognises similar words and comes back to you with an answer. Obviously people tweet about their religion a lot—so God featured very heavily today. We had a lot of ‘God bless you, you’ll be fine” answers. One of the questions that came up was ‘Is marriage [only] between a man and a woman?’ And the answer that came back very clearly was ‘Yes, definitely.’ As Andrew said, ‘It may not be the answer you want to hear but it’s the answer that seems to be out there in the universe.’”

As The Portals catalogue puts it, Burrell and Rodley are “exploring the poetics of search: the creative possibilities of filtering and recombining online data through search queries…inciting questions about the un/reliability of digital information and the im/possibility of uniqueness in networked environments, where almost everything we want to say is always, already being said by someone else.”

Kinds of connectedness

From what we saw of and heard about The Portals [see also Somaya Langley’s response], it’s clear that its works are very much about realising the expressive power of shared play—with images, sound, data flow and live performance—that can come with experimentation with digital networks across vast distances. This is art-making which doubles as social engagement for participants professional and amateur, and passersby, beyond the limits of conventional discourse.

Revelation Film Festival

Jack Sargeant once again offers an eclectic and comprehensive program for the 2014 instalment of Revelation: Perth International Film Festival. Highlights include 1970s prog-rock band Goblin performing their original soundtrack to Dario Argenta’s Suspiria; the opening night documentary feature Burn which follows fire-fighters in Detroit, city of extreme arsonists; and the Iranian drama Facing Mirrors about female liberation and transgender issues. There are also a host of documentaries with subjects such as Divine, John Fahey (the late, much celebrated American guitarist) and Pussy Riot. Then there’s RevCon, the associated conference and its associated conference RevCon Academic for the even deeper thinking film buff.
Revelation Perth International Film Festival, various venues, Perth, 4-12 July; www.revelationfilmfest.org/

Show Off, Performance Space

One of the most arresting promotional images to float into my inbox this year is from Justin Shoulder’s The River Eats. A kind of Leigh Bowery meets Matthew Barney, Shoulder’s performances at Underbelly 2011 and Next Wave 2012 (where this show debuted) certainly impressed with their extravagant visual theatricality. The River Eats (3-13 July), is part of Performance Space’s Show Off program along with those popular culture tricksters Team MESS who are making a new cop show, Bingo Unit (10-13 July), and Roslyn Oades’ I’m Your Man (10-17 July), a hit in the 2012 Sydney Festival set in the world of boxing.
Performance Space, Show Off, til 17 July; Carriageworks; www.performancespace.com.au/2013/show-off-season/

Helium Season, Malthouse

The annual season of works by independent artists and collectives will roll out at Matlhouse from July through to September and the first two shows look particularly terrifying and tasty. New theatre company US-A-UM headed by Kip Williams (whose STC Under Milkwood impressed last year, see RT109) will present an all-female cast adaptation of William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (28 June-14 July). The Public Studio also proved itself a complex force to be reckoned with in the recent production Until Then, Then (see RT114). This Will be Beautiful, their installation-come-film-come-performance, looks to similarly challenge theatrical expectations (19 July-3 August).
Malthouse Helium Season, 28 June-5 Oct, see website for following productions; www.malthousetheatre.com.au/helium-2013/

pulse:heart:beat, Synergy, TaikOz

This concert brings Sydney’s leading percussion outfits Synergy and TaikOz together in an epic drum-off. Program highlights include Masae Ikegawa’s Four Winds in Hachijo-daiko drum style using complex choreographed gestures; the rousing rhythmic complexity of Timothy Constable’s Cannons of Navarro; and Anton Lock’s epic Rhythm River, the title perhaps speaking for itself. Some works will be accompanied by video, both live and prerecorded by Tokyo Love-In, Chris Wilson, Colin Rich and Brad Kremer.
pulse:heart:beat, Synergy, TaikOz, City Recital Hall, 28-29 June; www.cityrecitalhall.com

Staging Broome Stories, Playwriting Australia

Since 2009 Playwriting Australia has been working with emerging writers in Broome to create full-length plays reflecting the diversity and uniqueness of the Kimberley region. After extensive workshopping at the National Playwriting Festival (2012) and Yellamundie (2013) these works by Jub Clerc, Dan Lee, Jacqui Wright, Deb Hannagan and Sermsah Bin Saad will now be presented as staged readings in their home town, directed by Yirra Yaakin’s Artistic Director Kyle Morrison with dramaturg Mari Lourey.
Staging Broome Stories, Goolarri Gimme Club, Broome; 27 June, www.pwa.org.au/broome-play-readings/

Fright or Flight, 3 is a Crowd

In a recent article for RT115 “Circus: second class artform?” Antonella Casella surveys a selection of emerging circus artist and groups exploring “the possibility of circus as pure spectacle, as part of the interplay of form and content.” Further evidencing a resurgence of the form here’s another new ensemble, 3 is a crowd. The all girl trio’s bird-themed Fright or Flight (winner of Best Circus and Physical Theatre in Adelaide Fringe Festival 2013) is about to play Brisbane’s Judith Wright Centre.
Fright or Flight, 3 is a Crowd, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 6-13 July; judithwrightcentre.com/event/fright_or_flight

Box of Birds, Anne Ferran

Box of Birds uses as its source material a series of photographs from the 1940s depicting nameless women in a Sydney psychiatric hospital. Photographer Anne Ferran has drawn on this material previously (see her work 1-38) but here she departs dramatically from the subject matter. Ferran has re-staged the images abstractly asking female performers to improvise with large pieces of felt that represent the crumpled clothing of the original images. Through this process Ferran attempts to “elicit the energy… trapped in those 1940s photographs, their unquiet spirit” (website).
Anne Ferran, Box of Birds, Stills Gallery, Sydney; 26 June to 27 July 2013; www.stillsgallery.com.au

Vocal Folds, Gertrude Contemporary

The latest exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary celebrates the voice in a variety of ways. At the core of the exhibition are three video installations by international artists Marcus Coates (UK), Manon de Boer (Netherlands) and Valie Export (Austria). There’s also a comprehensive listening room featuring selections of works by Australian and international artists focusing on the voice and several playlists by guest curators around particular vocal music styles. Finally, there will be a series of performances by artists such as Jenny Barnes, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Carolyn Connors and Tarquin Manek and a screening night curated by OtherFilm featuring Dirk de Bruyn.
Vocal Folds, curator Jacqueline Doughty, Gertrude Contemporary; exhibition 21 June-20 July; performances 27 June, 11 July, 18 July; www.gertrude.org.au/exhibitions

Dancehouse, Housemates Performance 2014

The Housemate Performance applications have been brought forward six-months and are now open. This is a fully-funded residency programmed for the first half of 2014 at Dancehouse which allows a choreographer the space to develop a new work.
Deadline (extended) July 5; http://www.dancehouse.com.au/research/researchdetails.php?id=81

PauseFest

Pausefest is calling for submissions for installations to be exhibited at Federation Square as part of their 2014 Festival. Applications need to address the theme Connected. A short list of 10 designs will be selected to appear on the PauseFest website and Federation Square’s big screen. The two winners will be awarded $5000 to realise their installation for the festival.
Registration and final design submission August 15; http://pausefest.com.au/download_docs/pausefest2014_eoi_details.pdf

Digital Associates Program, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

Applications are now open for artists and curators to propose media art and digital projects that will make use of QUT’s The Block and associated facilities. Through the Digital Associates Program successful applicants will receive subsidised access to the space and infrastructure. This round is timed to assist with applications to state and federal funding bodies.
Friday 12 July 2013; http://www.ciprecinct.qut.edu.au/dap/

Waverley Artist In Residence Program 2014

Small Screen 2014, Screen Space

Dedicated to the exhibition of video work, Screen Space in Melbourne is calling for applications for their Small Screen program which features single channel works on a large LCD monitor in the foyer.
Deadline 8 July; http://screenspace.com/proposals.html

Brisbane Fringe Festival

Young Brisbane entrepreneurs who felt the city was big enough for an open platform, free-for-all fringe festival running parallel to the Brisbane Festival, have established the Brisbane Fringe Festival, playing 1-14 September this year. Registrations are now open for all forms of festivities.
Deadline for submission 27 July; http://brisbanefringefestival.com/

In Catriona McKenzie's Satellite Boy, two Indigenous 12-year-olds take a journey into country, and we walk the land with them.

Charting the experience of Pete, who runs away with his best friend Kalmain in search of the mining company which has repossessed the home he shares with his grandfather Jagamurra (David Gulpilil), Satellite Boy is a meditative, expansive film which enfolds us in its depiction of the remarkable Kimberley region of Western Australia. Though effective as a film for adults, it possesses the archetypal qualities of a classic children's story: resourceful child heroes, a voyage of self-discovery and a pervasive innocence.

This is McKenzie's first feature film, but the assurance gained through an extensive career in short films and Australian television drama (including such series as RAN, The Circuit and Redfern Now) is apparent in her sensitive use of imagery and her ability to convey the essence of a story without distraction. Satellite Boy has a mythic simplicity: at its heart is the land itself and our relationship with it. McKenzie, who is Gurnai from the Gippsland region in Victoria, chose to set the film in the Kimberley because “the country is strong. It hums with stories” [production notes]. As the film's young protagonists divert from the road into the wilderness, we move into country which is sometimes stark and at other times surprising in its richness.

McKenzie and her DOP Geoffrey Simpson (Shine, Romulus My Father, Sleeping Beauty) give us both intimate detail and the bigger picture, dividing the cinematography between majestic landscape shots and close-ups of faces and bright details (a green frog under a dripping tap; Pete's red toy robot). There is a sense of great space throughout the film, of magnificent isolation. The boys ride their bikes over cracked earth, dwarfed by the landscape. Aerial shots display the Kimberley's vastness. Skillfully, McKenzie creates a sense of events unfolding in real time, her attention to the rhythms and changing light of each day enveloping us in the boys' experience. Sound is for the most part naturalistic, David Bridie's breezy refrain brought in strategically during Pete and Kalmain's most playful scenes.

The land in Satellite Boy is an active presence. Formidable yet reassuring, its message merges with the voice of Jagamurra, as it prompts, “Who are you? Listen!” While Pete and Kalmain are in a sense lost and struggling with issues of identity, the country they walk through is far from the malignant entity represented in the archetypal 'lost child' narrative of European Australian fiction. Though not to be treated lightly, it is ultimately a place of belonging for Pete, a protective force. As Pete says, quoting his grandfather: “You look after country; country will look after you.” The sacredness of country is emphasised verbally by the refrain “everything is connected” and visually by the recurring elemental motifs of stars and fire.

Satellite Boy has similarities to Australian children's classic Storm Boy (1976), whose name it echoes and Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), both of which McKenzie has cited as formative influences [Filmink, May 2013]. In all three films, characters are caught between the powerful, sustaining world of the land, with its ancient lore; and the fast-paced, less trustworthy world of modern commercialised Australia, with each film offering a very different outcome.

David Gulpilil plays the role of guide and protector in all three films: a mediator between the land and the other characters. In Walkabout, he's the adolescent boy who leads the deserted sister and brother to safety, with devastating consequences for himself. As the nomadic Fingerbone in Storm Boy, he becomes friend and mentor to the free-spirited young protagonist. In Satellite Boy, he's the grandfather who steps in to care for his grandson after the boy's mother leaves for the city, and who teaches him the survival methods and lore of his people.

Performances in Satellite Boy are uniformly strong. Young leads Cameron Wallaby and Joseph Pedley convey the highs and lows of their characters' journey with expressive naturalism, their rapport seemingly authentic. It would be easy for McKenzie to allow the sublime quality of the landscape to overshadow her protagonist's story, but this doesn't happen. In this deceptively simple film, all elements are balanced. The humans are part of the land, and the land is part of them in turn. This is a thoughtful, arrestingly beautiful film with a warm and inclusive approach to both characters and audience. A celebration of friendship, belonging and the infinite significance of country, it's a worthy addition to the Australian cinematic canon.

Satellite Boy, writer-director Catriona McKenzie, cinematography Geoffrey Simpson, editor Henry Dangar, sound designer Liam Egan, composer David Bridie, Hopscotch and Satellite Films in association with Screen Australia, Screen NSW, Screen West and ABC TV, 2012; in national release June 20

Interview with Troy Innocent creator of the mixed-reality game Zydnei that infiltrated the back alleys of Sydney leading up to and during ISEA2013.

Nature attempts to outstrip ISEA2013 with a brilliant, painterly light show as delegates and guests are ferried up the mangrove-lined narrows of the Parramatta River. Save for a strip of blue on the horizon, where the sun burnishes low hanging clouds, the sky is amorphously grey. Suddenly there are cries and approving murmurs, cameras shuttering, iPhones flashing, passengers coursing onto deck to see a vast double rainbow arching high behind the ferry, intensely vibrant where it reaches earthwards.

As the rainbow fades and we once again face the windward chill, the sun impressionistically dusts soft waves of faint cloud with rich and oranges and reds against the grey. Will Electric Nights—an ISEA2013 riverside evening event in Parramatta—withstand the challenge? It does, on its own terms.

As we walk from the ferry in the early dark, tall shafts of blue and pink light dress buildings, creating a sense of a large, contained, festive space between two bridges. Beneath one of them is Josh Wodak’s Archangle Assemblages, in which five riders perch on bicycles, pedalling in synch to generate enough power to harmoniously trigger a pattern on the grid of bulbs that hangs before them. The work “generate[s] audiovisual rhythms and reference[s] the bioluminescence of fireflies as they synchronise their flashing” (program note). Harmony doesn’t always come easy, even for a cooperative species such as ours, so sweat is expended and competitiveness kept in check as the riders pedal to achieve unanimity at speed.

A mass of large white balloons hangs beneath the bridge on the opposite bank. Suspended at human height they are jostled by the breeze, wandering adults and romping children. They glow unanimously and serenely with a soft blues, then pinks and later greens, each balloon lit from within. Later, to throbbing dance music and the cries of happy dancers, waves of more intense colours surge through the cloud-like mass and individual balloons flare on their own. True to its title, Celebra (Christian Clark, Fabrizio Devoto, Paul Grindel & Tomas Laurenzo, Uruguay), with its 200 LED-lit balloons, is a sensory delight, generating an instant party.

On the pathway we encounter a trio of strange, figures – futuristic stilt walkers bathed in their own data-flow lighting and sound. Framed by stylish thin metal extensions of their arms and legs the performers are transformed into cyborgs. Not of the Exterminator variety, these serene Stalker Theatre creations (director David Clarkson, designer Alejandro Rolandi) simply are — there are no tricks, no personalities, no agenda that we can perceive. When will they turn on us? Or we on them — are they illegals? Or will we, in the due course of techno-evolution, become them? That is scary. Eric Siu’s very strange, helmeted Touchy adds a more amiable sense of the cyborg as he blindly offers his touch to passersby so they can enable him to record a moment of fleeting intimacy on film.

In Grobak Padi (creative director Michael Hornblow), three traditional, pedal-driven Indonesian food carts and their cooks are not only the providers of, on this occasion, free nourishment but also, with monitors hanging from their frames, they are stations for the real time relay of performances between Jogjakarta and Sydney. A fourth, boat-shaped Grobak Padi arrives on a riverbank stage, accompanied by a synthesis of a pulsing hum and sweet high voices, smoke billowing from its small charcoal stove. A man in suit (Tony Yap), a potential customer, approaches the cart, leaves his coat and glasses on its roof and wanders away into a private dance.
The vendor (Agung Gunawan) arrives in traditional dress and a long, flowing white scarf, moving elegantly about his cart, stepping onto the bicycle and balancing on one foot on the seat where he ‘pedals’ as if flying. The man spins, jumps and bounces, his movements staccato and increasingly robotic, the palm of one hand directed to his face as if obsessed. When the cook places a white female mask over his face, the two commence a strange, lyrical duet — the transformed cook astride the man, the man restraining the cook, covering the eyes of the mask. Eventually harmony is achieved — the couple exiting slowly through an intrigued audience of ISEA delegates, guests, families and young people — hungry for meaning and soon satisfied by satays and the other pleasures generously on offer from a cleverly curated and staged Electric Nights.

Ian Andrews preparing a medical centrifuge modified to play vinyl records at extremely high speeds, with four-arm turntable constructed by John Jacobs

Polysonics was the final event in a suite of activities bearing Nigel Helyer’s curatorial touch including the exhibition EchoSonics at UTS gallery (see review and video interview) and the concert Macrophonics II at Bon Marche (see review). For Polysonics Helyer collaborated with ISEA Executive Creative Producer Alessio Cavallaro and the six performances offered markedly varied approaches to electronic and digitally augmented music-making.

The first performance by Shane Fahey and collaborators, Time—a token of Consistency, presented a music concrete investigation into the passing of time. A variety of timer devices are set up on drums by “horologist” Evan Carr and amplified. Fahey and David Carr then manipulate these layers of ticks, forming complex rhythmic motifs overlapping and merging in and out of one another. The visual aesthetic is particularly strong, the players positioned around a small installation of wooden boxes housing clocks and light globes accompanied by Honi Ryan’s video projected onto the skin of a bass drum. Here noirish shadows wait and pace, overlaid by images of a swinging pendulum, ticking clocks and the moon, beautifully textured and perfectly fitting on the drum’s surface. When the final timer goes off, the performance is over—neat and nicely done.

Decibel from Perth performed in a cut down configuration featuring Cat Hope on bass flute and Lindsay Vickery on bass clarinet and Sydney-based guests Mark Cauvin on double bass and Jon Watts on laptop. Using their custom designed app, ScorePlayer, the ensemble performed two new graphic scores projected for both players and audience to follow. The first, Silent Revolution by Lindsay Vickery, combines a notation of coloured lines with collaged black and white images of historical revolts that gradually become increasingly abstracted. The players are prompted to make short staccato eruptions developing into longer more intertwined atonal sequences. The rich rabble of sound manipulated by Watts on laptop near the conclusion of the score is particularly interesting as is its visual correlation of dense larva-like texture. The second piece, Lower Drawer by Cat Hope, consists purely of coloured lines dictating sustained tones and small pitch bends and glissandi. It’s a quiet and ambiguous piece—always in the process of becoming and never arriving, an intriguing effect that feels intimately linked to the scrolling mechanism of the score which creates a kind of self-contained chaos.

Nigel Helyer has made known his dissatisfaction with performance laptoppery (see RT70), so it’s no surprise that the majority of the works in Polysonics involve physical, visual or installation components. Garth Paine’s set-up includes five robotic singing bowl contraptions that hang above the audience creating highly spatialised tolling and a series of auto-activated cymbals providing feedback sonorities. The core of the performance is Paine on flute, exploring its high and shrill tonalities (from where I’m placed, occasionally too shrill), which are then processed via laptop and augmented with ambisonic field recordings, predominantly bird sounds. The result is a rich and multifaceted soundscape, reflecting a sense of chatter implied in the title Meditations on Conversation.

Michaela Davies’ Involuntary Strings Project is one for your inner-sadist. Davies wires herself and her players to an electric muscle stimulation system. She then transposes her compositions into data which defines the minute muscle movements involved in performing the piece and transmits this back to her players. They are thus ‘stimulated’ to make the musical gestures that make up her music. For this concert she presents one composition purely for the involuntary quartet (Michael Bridges, Kyle Sanna, Lea Simpson, Michaela Davies) and two co-composed works (with Jim Sclavunos and Kyle Sanna respectively) which also include voluntary players (Veronique Serret and Geoffrey Gartner). The combined voluntary/involuntary pieces are particularly interesting as they allow greater insight into the levels of motor control and intentionality, or lack thereof, among the players. The final piece, Untitled for Cyborg (by Davies and Sanna), explores this succinctly by swapping similar roles between voluntary and involuntary performances so we can compare the intricacies of gestural and sound performances.

Leah Barclay’s Shifting Nature is purely a laptop performance (Helyer must have overcome his aversion) presenting a radiophonic journey through Australia, India, Korea, China and Brazil. Her recordings are clear and expansive, including insect sounds, voices, instruments ranging from didjeridu to tabla and even, we are told, sounds of the Amazon River Dolphin. Her processing and augmentation of the field recordings is sensitive, drawing out resonances and rhythmic subtleties. Despite the speaker distortion (it seems the audio engineers were unaccustomed to mixing for live performance), it was a rich audio travelogue.

The final performance of the evening is a celebration of old technologies with Ian Andrews and Garry Bradbury (aka Sanity Clause) employing only turntable mechanisms to create their soundscape. However this doesn’t limit the duo to just playing records. On one turntable what appears to be a spring and marbles jostle together to form a rattly texture. They are later replaced by an oscillating plastic bowl. Andrews’ four-arm turntable simultaneously creates its own mash up of sounds while Bradbury drops the needle onto classic vinyl curiosities capturing warm crackly loops. The highlight arrives when Andrews comes to the front of the workstation and switches on an object, later identified as a centrifuge, on which a record spins wildly. The performance ends with the slow slurred tones of the vinyl as it finishes its deceleration. A perfect sonification for the end of ISEA2013.

Polysonics offered a truly eclectic combination of artists. It was a shame the MC-ing by ABC Radio National presenter Tim Ritchie was poorly pitched for the ISEA audience, his cringe-worthy monologues evidencing a distinct lack of engagement with the music. While there was a marked absence of younger sound-makers (many of whom were performing at the First Draft Depot gig unfortunately programmed for the same night), the range of artists offered multiple perspectives on audio production and an impressive breadth of invention.

Interview with Troy Innocent creator of the mixed-reality game Zydnei that infiltrated the back alleys of Sydney leading up to and during ISEA2013.

Future Calls the Dawn Chorus, Jenny Gillam, Eugene Hansen, Dr Kron and Daniel Shaw

If a system fails in a forest… (as the saying sort-of goes) and we’re not there to hear the crash, will we even know it’s down? How much do we notice the ‘systems’ we’re immersed in – machinic, biological, time-based – anyway?

At 107 Projects in Redfern, If a system fails in a forest… both comments on and investigates some of the systems we spend our lives immersed in, and cleverly forms its own cross-referential system at the same time. The rough-and-readiness of the gallery space – pervaded with a disturbing smell, but more on that later – only adds to a raw quality that jumps from work to work like subtle sparks.

Moving round the room, roughly anticlockwise, a shifting logic gradually unfolds. First, two video works: Scott Morrison’s hysteric Oprahagogo – in which I watch, myself agog, a hyperactive Oprah audience in throes of open-mouthed ecstasy; and Loren Kronemyer’s Myriad – a fast-motion video of ants drawn to sugar trails, fleetingly ‘spelling’ the words THE TRUTH EMERGES FOLLOW YOUR INSTINCTS. Looking back and forth from one screen to the other, I know which species I’d rather interact with.

Next a long wall mounted with black and white plastic ‘bird alarm clocks’ blinking their synchronised LED displays at me; the incongruous, slightly Darth-Vadery gloss of the bird forms unsettling against stencil-style alien heads adorning the wall. These ubiquitous clocks of Future Calls the Dawn Chorus (Jenny Gillam, Eugene Hansen, Dr Kron and Daniel Shaw) supplant nature’s wake-up call; the wires trailing down the wall leave me wanting to connect.

I break sequence here to enter WildPark’s Trans-Emotion Room; a roughly constructed cubicle where two large pairs of shoes are nailed to the floor in front of small stools. Visitors face one another and place their feet into the shoes; the work responds to the warmth of their ‘connection’ with coloured, changing light thrown up from tracks along the edges of the floor. Finding myself ‘alone in a forest’, I test the system pigeon-toed, twisting one foot into each pair to make it work.

Tara Cook’s Transapparent and Tom Hetherington’s Cave Light both turn the gaze back to the self. In Cook’s work, a screen mounted at head level next to a curious potted palm seems to not be switched on, creating a dark-glass, shadowy view of my own face until a barely-visible band of white light appears to crack the screen open vertically, briefly, and then fade away. Nearby, Hetherington’s work is watching me – as I approach the screen it plays back stop-motion images of me over the past few minutes: taking my shoes off for the WildPark work, checking out another work, and finally standing close to read the didactic panel. After leaving Hetherington’s work and returning a while later, it does the same thing again, triggered this time by my touching the screen. How does it know what to play back? – I’m sure someone else has been over here in the meantime, but it’s the images of myself it plays. How? Cook and Hetherington both unsettle with these works: with Cook’s, I wonder is there more? am I missing something? – wanting the system to give me an answer. With Hetherington’s I am left questioning too; in this case with the uncanny feeling that stems from there being almost ‘too much information’.

Between these two works, and neatly opposite the wall of digital clocks is Sneaky Time, a ticking, analogue clock that, rather than booting you out of bed in the morning, moves only when you blink. Ozge Samanci and Blacki Li Rudi Migliozzi’s quaint, ticking clock doesn’t seem to work when I try it – but I do gain a sense that yes, time is not only something that controls us; it also sneaks past when we’re not looking; our relationship to it is ultimately slippery.

And so to that smell – a stench, really, like acrid, burning rubber, which permeates the entire gallery. It emanates from another cubicle, housing Tega Brain’s What the Frog’s Nose Tells the Frog’s Brain: it’s a tidy electrical apparatus or meter that shares the cubicle with a kettle on a low plinth. Perhaps the title alludes to the ‘frog in boiling water’ analogy that’s been used to suggest humans’ incapacity to know our environment is killing us until it kills us. The smell is generated according to the level of power use in a building – this building, presumably? Pervading everything, it’s the ominous presentience of climate catastrophe.

If a system fails in a forest… touches on several of the themes I’ve seen running through ISEA: esoteric technological/human interactions; the translation of data to visceral, sensory phenomena; surveillance as a playful pointer to our increasing acceptance of ‘being watched’. Ours is a ‘forest’ where we often don’t see the wood for the trees: it’s as though this past week has shown us an influx of artists ‘into the woods’, to record, interrogate and express in countless ways across Sydney, what might otherwise make no sound.

Pianola rolls, a vintage portable typewriter, scissors, paper, sticky tape and a mysterious pile of metal file fasteners share the studio table with Macbooks, iPads and a slightly forlorn-looking wireless mouse, apparently un-paired. I’ve managed to track down the Durational Book project – at the State Library of NSW during the week, but relocating on Friday to UTS’s Page Screen studio in Ultimo. Three of the project’s six artists – Zoe Sadokierski, Astrid Lorange and Tom Fethers – are busy and ‘at play’, exploring the possibilities for convergence between text and graphics, digital and sculptural forms. It’s a sort of ‘Twitter meets the book arts’– a sensual juxtaposition of hi- and lo-fi media – and what’s most obvious to me as I walk in is the instant pull: the desire to touch, handle and, I’ll admit it, have, the work that’s spread around the room.

Durational Book is the first iteration of an ongoing project across various art forms: Tom’s and Zoe’s backgrounds are in graphic design, Astrid is a poet and writer, and absent collaborators Megan Heyward, Chris Caines and Jacquie Kasunic work across writing, video art, photography and research. Zoe describes the group’s shared interest in “books and bookishness and e-books and digital publications as well as print books”. Astrid calls the project an experiment with “books as objects that are not singular and not singularly material”. The results are poetic fragments distilled in physical form: words, phrases and sentences honoured like the digital world’s ancestors in exquisitely designed and carefully assembled pieces. Yes, I want to take them all home. Or failing that, to head to Officeworks to get my own gluestick and cutting board (at the same time miraculously gaining a graphic design degree, of course, and the collective imaginations of these six people).

Astrid: “I’ve just finished typing up this long scroll of fairly shoddily typewritten tweets… We’ve been contributing tweets throughout the duration of the project – some people have just been documenting the various things that they’ve been doing, and then my contribution to the project has been tweets solely… So we’ve basically got the entire archive of the week’s worth of tweets in chronological order here…with lots of added, accidental mistakes. Tom has been working from the tweets and producing posters from them.”

Tom: “I produced this on Monday, which was the first working day, and Astrid had actually written about 400 tweets in that time, so I just chose the ones that resonated with me most. And I really liked her tweet ‘and so sentences broadly are time-based judgments’. So it was just a way of trying to typographically let the language speak and also bring in an element of design and composition – a quite classical kind I suppose… [This week I’m] setting myself many briefs – just exploring different aesthetic options…and then once it’s finished I think we’ll go in and see which ones we can print out and refine a bit more.

Zoe: I took a script that Chris wrote – a script that’s part of a video work where the text turns up almost like captions – and cut it up and threaded it through the pianola roll. Because what he can do with the text on screen is actually pace how quickly or slowly you’re able to read this conversation that happens, and I was trying to pace it in the pianola roll. There’s also sections of image inbetween…found objects, they’re from the bookmarks that they have at the State Library – so that’s me trying to pace the reading experience as he paces the viewing experinece in video.

At first glance Ernest Edmonds’s works in paint and on screen in Light Logic appear to be classically Modernist exercises in the exploration of abstract forms, principally the square, and a corresponding juxtaposition of colours. The contrast between these works and the profusion of detail in much digital work in ISEA2013 and beyond is striking. However, Edmond’s spare surfaces in no way reflect the complexity of the technological thinking and skills involved in making his creations, all of which have, in one way or another, lives of their own.

Some are generative screen works, two of them interactive, while the others are paintings. In “Art, interaction and Engagement” (Linda Candy, Ernest Edmonds eds, Interacting, Art, Research and the creative Producer, Libri Publishing, 2001), Edmonds makes a distinction between interaction and influence. His Shaping Form (2007) features a small screen displaying occasional changing patterns. In the lower frame is a motion detector. Edmonds writes that the work is generative: “Movement in front of [the] work is detected by motion analysis and leads to continual changes in the program that generates the image. People can readily detect the immediate responses of the work to movement but the changes over time are only apparent when there is more prolonged, although not necessarily continuous, contact with it. A first viewing followed by one several months later will reveal noticeable changes in the colours and patterns.” He also points out that trying to force the work to respond with gestures “might result in a period of quiet.”

In a video accompanying the exhibition, Edmonds explains that he creates algorithms with regard to structural elements that then allow the computer to generate its own images in response to the immediate environment. He suggests in the essay cited above that in some of his works that the computer-cum-artwork is learning to re-write the rules on which it is founded. The quietly exciting thing about Shaping Form is that the outcomes—choices of colour and patterning—are not preconceived by the artist.

Edmonds’ works, he writes, begin life from “a set of unique rules that are rather like their DNA” (floor notes). They are likewise then subject to the influence of their environment. However, something in Edmonds’ psyche must yearn for the relative permanence of paint on canvas, since the exhibition features a number of paintings of the same shapes that characterise his output, although their blues and brown are of darker hue than the screen works’ bright colourings. Again all is not as it seems. The shape and, presumably, the colour choices have been generated by an algorithm and transferred to canvases where Edmonds applies his real world brush. A case of the artist as painter generated by his digital artwork?

In another room, in front of a large screen on which Edmonds’ ColourNet (2012) is generating itself, stand two iPads on which appear discrete works by Sean Clark and Josh Harle (creator of China Town in CoFA’s Running the City). Clark’s generative Transformations (2013) offers a rectangular palette of colours, not unlike a paint card. If you touch one of the colours it momentarily brightens before changing into another colour as a number of squares prettily shuffle into new positions. Clark writes, “By touching a square you will replace up to four existing colours with new colours based on the colour touched. The artwork will then reorder itself again to incorporate the new colours. You will find that you can change the overall colour of the matrix by repeatedly selecting the colour closest to your target colour.” Visit the artist’s site http://trans.formations.mobi/t1/ where you can try this yourself.

Occasionally Clark’s work undertakes its mysterious activity by itself. Apparently Transformations is in long-term synch with Colournet, joined in mutual influence although “built with different technologies and possessing different organisational rules…[They] exchange colour values to influence each other’s on-going development.”

Harle’s Corelli’s Café (2013) is part of the artist’s fascination with “how emerging technologies” are changing our ways of “inhabiting space,” and “why emergent, poetic accounts of the city are important.” Using custom software, Harle creates virtual environments founded on still images through which we can navigate three-dimensionally, in this case a café in which we can move around the room, close in on the food and notebook doodlings, ‘step’ outside onto the footpath and inspect much else. The overall visual shape is almost that seen by a fish-eye lens, which as in China Town, can offer an unusual, slightly vertiginous global view. The poetry of Corelli’s Café is found in the oscillation in the work’s textures between fine detail and impressionistic ‘long shots’ and the user’s sweep across the image.

The presence of Corelli’s Café n Light Logic is unusual given that it is rooted in what we see in the world rather than in the abstractions generated by Edmonds and Clark and their co-creating machines. However it is, after all, light that Harle harnesses in his re-inhabitation of space with digital painterliness alongside Clark and Edmonds’s generative palettes and the latter’s painting by alogorithms.

Interrupted (detail), Michaela Davies, Alex Jung, Lian Loke, Dagmar Reinhardt, Paul Warren

What with several ISEA shows in which overt or covert surveillance has featured; plus this week’s revelations of mass internet surveillance (brought into especially sharp focus by Julian Assange’s ISEA keynote) – a good old alien invasion is, to be honest, almost a comforting thought. Not that an abandoned dinner table loomed over by a cloud of laser-cut figures like four-legged landing modules necessarily spells ‘alien’. But the cloned, floating pack of articulated cut-outs seems not only to be watching, but swarming. And those whose meal they’ve interrupted have presumably got out of there fast.

This first room of disSentience, titled Interrupted, smells strongly of the old pizza, stale wine and mangled pasta remnants that grace a trestle table from which neat trapezoidal sections have been sawed and snapped off. Stools are scattered around; there are smears of food on the walls and floor. It’s classic sci-fi, but those strange chunks out of the table set up an uncanny echo of the hovering figures above. They shift the landscape to one in which the assumed intruder may actually have been there all along – present before the table was laid out, and right there in it. So that the messily human meal (proteins, fats, carbs and water, just like us) is framed by the clean-cut plywood and metal, hinting at a complex dystopian household that might once upon a time have been symbiotic.

In the second room, Sleep Economy, a life-sized Henry-Moorish figure twists and reclines in a web of wires of various colours and thicknesses. They hold her captive in a loose mesh, twisting overhead into a trunk-like mega-cable which then branches out to be secured along the walls on either side. If this is sleep, it’s a sleep mediated by the network – though the figure’s mid-20th century form almost suggests she’s oblivious or impervious to whatever era she’s ended up in. Like Interrupted, Sleep Economy is a scene in which the human presence is ambiguously contained from above and below – though here, the ambiguity lies in a human presence rather than absence: it’s not clear whether she is captive or cocooned, consumed or nourished by the wires all around.

Hidden in a nook by the gallery’s street-side window is scienceFUTURE: The Cloudlife of X. The unanswered questions of the previous two works pale into insignificance as we enter a world of pure fantasy: a ‘green field’ so green that it’s the visitor who in effect creates the work.

A small stool: on one side, a blackboard and chalk, on the other, a large computer screen on a plinth in which is set a big red button. Written instructions tell you to press the red button. You watch a previous visitor on the monitor as they imagine the life of X, a woman born in 2045. Listening to the end of their fragment of story, you are asked to now contribute the next fragment – the blackboard is there in case you want to illustrate as you speak. The instructions suggest that you bear in mind your own work or concerns as you imagine X’s story.

All thought of alien invasions evaporates as I press the red button and watch a previous participant, who gives me no hard information, speaking only of what X feels: about expresion, exploration, expansion, a world in which things are infinitely open to her. The smell of pizza fades and I take my place in the chain of imaginings, slipping from dystopian mealtime to utopian dreaming – albeit somewhat self-consciously, confronted by my own image at life-size on the screen.

Also at Tin Sheds Gallery are Transpotage, by Spanish architectural duo SelgasCano, and The Generative Freeway Project by Matthew Sleeth. Both are, in a sense, durational works: one technologically driven, the other biological. In Sleeth’s work 3D printers work constantly to produce new segments of ‘freeway’ which gradually form a scape that seems part-toyland, but is eerily abstracted by the featureless off-white of the printed pieces. Transpotage, on the other hand, grows by the light of the sun; hundreds of seeds of varying kinds sprouting in translucent medium in petri dishes, which in turn are housed in enormous dish-like, perspex structures. The living and light-hungry quality of Transpotage and the electronically generated freeway play off neatly: the tendrils of freeway curling and meandering; the clusters of petri dishes creating an ordered, architectural display.

After the orgy of spectatorship that was Vivid which saw record numbers of people flocking to the Sydney’s harbour foreshore to see the city lit up like a Christmas tree, The Rocks now seems pretty demure. However during ISEA2013 there are still some dare I say it ‘fun’ yet conceptually engaging artworks secreted in shopfronts as part of the ongoing Rocks Pop Up project.

Lucas Abela

You can locate Lucas Abela’s installation by following the noise. Emanating from a shop next door to the MCA entrance is an escalating whine of guitar feedback punctuated by strange thwacks and pings. Abela’s Temple of Din comprises two quite astounding chimera. The Pinball Pianola is an elegant object (classically decorated by visual artist Keg de Souza) combining the strings and soundboard of a piano with the flippers and ball flinging mechanism of a pinball machine. A set of toy piano keys operates the flippers that propel the ball against the thrumming strings. This sound is further amplified and the resulting noise can be tuned, or rather made nosier, via a set of knobs and switches designed by Hirofumi Uchino.

The second of Abela’s hybrids, Balls for Cathulu (2013), combines pinball mechanisms with electric guitars. It’s a five-player game with the instruments arranged to create a pentagram (decorated by heavy metal master Reverend Kriss Hades). There is a basic level of feedback at all times but as you flick the balls around they hit the live strings of the guitars setting off new wailing tones. In the centre is a series of bumpers that play percussive sounds when impacted. It’s loud, ingenious and unbelievably satisfying to play, the cause and effect a totally physically process. Plus you have permission to make a god-awful, yet aesthetically coherent racket! These creations, along with a previous work, Vinyl Rally (which I’ve yet to experience), prove Abela, already a renowned noise performer, to be a truly unique instrument builder and installation artist.

Hye Yeon Nam

A few shops along you can find another two pleasing works. Korean/US artist Hye Yeon Nam’s Please Smile consists of a row of skeletal, multi-articulated hands made from neatly machined wood. Rather than being movement responsive (so mid-2000s) these appendages respond to smiles. Once they detect your upturned mouth and shiny eyes they unfold and dance for you in a variety of waving patterns. Beautifully designed, the objects themselves actually make you smile at their uncanniness (their bodily separation allowing them a suitable distance from the ambiguous depths of ‘the valley’) and you enter into a feedback loop of happiness.

Van Sowerwine & Isobel Knowles

It’s a jungle in here by Van Sowerwine and Isobel Knowles (with Matt Gingold) offers a more guilty pleasure. The work is housed in a rectangular box into which you peer to see paper-cutout stop-motion animations. It’s best experienced with two people, each of main characters’ blank faces replaced with your and your companion’s visages captured by a small video camera secreted somewhere the box. At first it’s gently amusing, seeing yourself integrated into this benign public transport scenario. However if you are sitting on the right-hand side you have access to a large button which you push at various times to progress the action. In the first scene two school girls with my face start to harass a man (with the gallery invigilator’s features). Each time I press the button my behaviour gets worse, until I’m poking and slapping him and my evil twin and I turn into giant black crows and peck him to pieces. Another scenario involves a man with my face making unwanted sexual advances to the woman next me, his hands groping her until he turns into a writhing hissing snake.

Like all Sowerwine and Knowles work the cute interface lures us into darker territory and the desire to explore the narrative makes us complicit in this nastiness. It’s like a cartoon show Milgram experiment. How far will I go in my torture of others (the person actually sitting next to me) in order to experience the artwork. I am ashamed to admit, I went all the way—and I enjoyed it.

Beamed in from what must seem another world entirely – the Ecuadorian Embassy in London – most of Julian Assange’s keynote, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t directly address the work of artists. His inclusion in ISEA, however, provided a rare, direct and intense provocation to artists to be politically engaged, to take risks, to amass knowledge and to ask hard questions – all things artists are good at, perhaps especially so in the new media and digital disciplines.

What Assange contributed was a view from the frontiers of resistance, some rousing rhetoric, and the unqualified assertion that resistance is not futile, and more than fertile – that it’s absolutely necessary. Here’s a precis of his address to ISEA delegates:

Wikileaks and artists

When asked to speak at ISEA, Assange says his initial reaction was whether we as artists could ‘get’ what he has experienced and is doing. He wondered, is art a waste of time? We need to ask this of ourselves all the time, he says. Every day we don’t live out our ideals is a wasted day. Pointing to the WikiLeaks logo on the background screen, he explains its visual rationale: the flow of information from a dark world to one of light. Art done ‘right’, he says, does the same thing.

Not everything, but the hardest thing

WikiLeaks didn’t try to take on everything; it focused on the essence of the hardest thing, he says. This essence is political and economic, he says: the greater the oppression, the stronger signal it gives off and the more its release will change the world. The “99% wankery” at conferences like this, he suggests, doesn’t matter: if the other 1% of what’s done actually achieves something, it’s worth it.

The internet: penetration, enrichment, distortion

Once upon a time – five or six years ago – the internet was something that connected us. It has now penetrated, enriched and distorted our lives and all aspects of our culture have penetrated it too, including penetration in the form of corruption, he says. Edward Snowden has this week exposed the existence of mass surveillance of cyberspace. Those “in the game”, says Assange, see the flow of information like oil pipes connecting the continents; they police this “oil” like a valuable commodity. He goes on to allege the corruptions of government agencies and then corporations including Google, facebook, Skype and Microsoft, first by the Bush and then the Obama administrations.

Call to action: 1

The internet is no longer a place where we are all equals: now, says Assange, it’s a militarily occupied space. He quotes from his own book Cypherpunks (2012): “the world is galloping into a new transnational utopia”; “our greatest tool of emancipation has become transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism our world has ever seen”. We can’t escape the web of surveillance, he says – the implication is that our only hope lies in dismantling it. He urges us to take up arms (metaphorically) and fight, for ourselves and those we love.

Shifting ground – and the job of artists

If everyone present at this lecture was locked in a room for six months, says Assange, we would eventually start to figure out together what we want. Over the past four years, a new body politic is developing: the internet has become a realm in which people can discuss and debate what values are important. The internet has become a political space. Assange sees figures like Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning as expressions of this new phenomenon. A distillation of values is taking place. The first value is coupled to the network itself, he says: the right to communicate, to give and receive communications (he refers to UN Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights).

Even if we don’t consciously yet understand what rights we want to protect, says Assange, we’re seeing people who are struggling and taking action for these rights. As artists, he adds, it’s our job to further investigate what these rights are.

What we need to dismantle – the state of things here

Assange describes Australia as “the easiest place in the world for US intelligence services to work”. The anglophone alliance of security organisations centred around the US’s National Security Agency, Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) and the UK’s GCHQ is becoming more and more tightly interwoven, he says; describing Australia as “a US aircraft carrier in the Pacific”. The totalitarian structure has been well and truly built, says Assange: he suggests that all it requires now is the totalitarian regime to drive it.

How to fight the system

How can we struggle against mass surveillance? Erect a new system of values as part of the political/democratic system. Fighting the system should not be done by weakening the structures of government or even security, says Assange, but by strengthening the values that we want and ensuring they are protected by our governing structures.
Assange alleges that the current structure is one in which, while countries such as Australia protect their own citizens to a degree, nations effectively spy on each other’s citizens by agreement. Firstly, what’s going on must be revealed, he says. He insists that Australia’s DSD must be susceptible to FOI requests. ASIO, he says, is currently “a land where transparency doesn’t apply”.

Where privacy is violated there must be an audit trail, says Assange. He states that his WikiLeaks Party will insist that authorities intercepting Australians must report to Parliament twice a year and must be susceptible to the FOI legislation. Laws must not only be made, he says; they must be enforced.

Civic courage – call to action 2

Assange anticipates our thoughts at this point, suggesting that we look at Edward Snowden and think the risk is too high – where would I start? How could I leap off the bridge? You don’t start by leaping off the bridge, he says. If you walk down the street in the daytime you’ll probably walk more confidently than at night – because you can see more, you know more. His point is that if you know more, you can proceed less cautiously.
Never take on fear as a prejudice, he insists: ask the question, will your action really result in danger? The only mechanism these agencies need is the perception of fear, he says. He urges us to test every prejudice we have about what is a risk and what is an opportunity.
His advice to us is: start by leaping off a small stool and move to the next thing when you have confidence.

In question time, Assange outlined allegations of hidden dealings between Google and the US Government (these have been reported in mainstream media this morning); gave a description of WikiLeaks Party organisation and aims; and commented on the value of digital art in our age. Asked by an audience member about how we can preserve “truth, aura and the value of art” (quoting Benjamin), Assange offered these thoughts:

• The benefit of digital art is abundance; reproduceability is a great gain – you can’t enforce scarcity, he says.

• Working within constraints highlights the struggle; and constraints can make for greater work than the freedom to do anything. He describes the work of a group of artists who placed bugs in the Zurich Opera House; and of the Delivery for Mr Assange project, in which a parcel was sent to him at the Ecuadorian Embassy which took photos and posted them online throughout its passage through the mail system.

• Artists are good at stripping away complexity to reveal component parts. He asks, can the surveillance regime be broken down to its essence and re-presented? This kind of work makes complex problems recognisable, he says. Good art sustains curiosity and teaches you something.

ISEA plans to have the entire address available for viewing online within the next couple of weeks.

Echo- or eco? The title EchoSonics is, depending on your accent, homonymic – and it’s the ‘eco-’ aspects of these works that unifies them: in the words of curator Nigel Helyer, the exhibition is an investigation of “acoustic ecologies”. From Ed Osborn’s study of ice-bound Svalbard to Mark Brown’s determinedly obscure Detritical Re-Vibration/Techtonic Transfer; via Minoru Sato’s ‘high-voltage hot and cold’ and two self-performing works by Jon Drummond, EchoSonics elegantly charts forays into representation, abstraction, reification and translation respectively.

Ecology is ostensibly the study of environments, but its real focus is the interrelationships that exist within them. And in EchoSonics, it’s never just sound, but always the relationship of sound to objects, physical phenomena, and our other senses, that provides traction for the conceptual underpinnings of the works.

Ed Osborn – Albedo Prospect

Sound and video form the foundational relationship in Albedo Prospect. A tryptich of large video screens shows slowly moving ice, still landscapes and long, smooth pans that reveal only scree and snow. The sounds are diegetic – trickling water, the faint rustle of clothing or wind. Huge-scale glaciers are resolved in perfect tonal detail, their bulk contrasting with the tiny remnants of ice and the subtle, sloshing, melting sounds of their decay. It’s meditative, distant – yet feels very ‘live’, setting up a relationship of familiar and strange.

As Osborn notes, the Arctic remains a place of essential ‘otherness’, although it has now been documented and explored extensively. He references the now-lost radio transmissions of Arthur Koestler from a 1931 airship flight over the Arctic; and has elsewhere described Albedo Prospect as a re-imagining of these missing reports. The work is the most directly ‘representational’ of EchoSonics, but its focus is poetic rather than literal, addressing loss, being-lost-ness, and perhaps the loss of our ability to be lost. It suggests our continuing otherness in relationship to what, in theory, is thoroughly mapped and knowable.

Jon Drummond – Twittering Machine and Flowforms

Two works by Jon Drummond explore markedly different phenomena to produce aurally captivating and sensually rich sound-worlds. Flowforms synaesthetically links colour and sound, as the diffusion of bright dyes within a body of viscous liquid generates a sonic translation through headphones; a close-up shot of the slow-swirling, inanimate process adds a psychedelic component. Twittering Machine takes the global cacophony of Twitter – an abstracted, constant flow of random ‘tweets’ – and translates them electronically to an apparatus of singing-bowls struck gently by quivering wands. The subtle, melodic result feels deeply intentional and random at once, suggesting the endless chatter of cyberspace subsumed by quiet imaginings.

Mark Brown – Detritical Re-Vibration/Techtonic Transfer

Described by Helyer as the ‘wild card’ of EchoSonics (see video interview), Detritical Re-Vibration/Techtonic Transfer is a work of abstracted origins that triggers a feeling of cool mystery. Constructed of industrial artefact, solenoid and servomotor, a sporadically spinning clapper glances against a small bell, just enough to polish a streak across its surface; accompanied by an insect-like, mechatronic whirr. On a screen above, glimpses of fragments of…something…fleetingly appear, visually echoing a small tray of copper-green detritus mounted alongside the spinning arm. In his interview for ISEA-in-RealTime, Nigel Helyer explains these subliminal video frames – they are 1/250th of a second snapshots of a speaker vibrating along with paint peelings and other fragments. The ‘ecology’ exposed here is that of our usually-privileged visual world, upturned to deliver a sound-world that, while somewhat arcane, is nevertheless continuous.

Minoru Sato – Thermal Acoustics

In Thermal Acoustics, Minoru Sato beautifully aestheticises and concretises the phenomenon of heat in visible and aural form. A complex apparatus of multi-chambered glassware, wiring, mics and speakers, including four large, identical hanging tubes, initially eludes comprehension, humming softly across high and low frequencies while a mysterious brass ball is dragged mechanically around a metal plate to generate dry sparking sounds. Luckily, the artist appears just at the right moment and explains to me what’s happening: miniature heating elements inside some of the tubes change their resonating frequencies slightly, so that feedback loops created in each of the four large tubes and four small ones generate beat frequencies or standing waves. What are essentially the result of sonic differences combine to create an aural environment of soft harmony. As Sato, trained as a physicist, explains, such phenomena exist everywhere, all the time; in Thermal Acoustics, heat becomes a listening experience.

What do a femme fatale with a smoking gun, a fake Hokusai ‘waves’ print with tumbling bunnies drawn into the whitecaps, and a bank of monochrome CCTV monitors have in common? You may well ask.

There’s an answer, but I’m not going to tell you. To find out you’ll have to sign in at Track 8, Carriageworks, where these and a range of other tricks and props await, along with a ‘virtual reality’ experience that’s probably unique at ISEA13.

But first, potted palms and locked doors. No, surveillance. Surveillance, disorientation and parallel realities. All are themes of Alex Davies’ previous work, and The Very Near Future continues the thread. It’s a sort of ‘choose your own adventure’, a flexing narrative that might be yours to control, or might not; where the characters you encounter might be real or illusory. Where someone is always watching (often that someone is you), and where the the room you most want to visit is almost sure to elude you. Almost.

From film noir to fairytales, humans seem to love narrative uncertainty – it can be fearful or pleasurable, and in The Very Near Future the pleasure is visceral. A smile in the gut as you wonder where to go next, or size up your companions; the ‘ah’ moment when you think you’ve won the game. The use of CCTV – a fuzzy grey peep-around-corners on the one hand, and insidious tool of surveillance on the other – both gives us insight and highlights our lack of insight. It raises questions: how do we know what’s real, honest? Is deception necessarily a bad thing? Is fun and confusion – for this is the classic fun-fair setup – devoid of content? We love this feeling in our bodies of not knowing, and Davies plays on this deftly. It’s a risky work, demanding the visitor’s naïvety and sleuthing in equal parts. It capitalises on curiosity and, oddly but tellingly, reflects a digital world where we accept both constant surveillance and continuous psychological manipulation – as players, consumers, citizens. A box of handguns or a box of wigs – what’s more fun, what’s more real, what would you choose?

Volker Kuchelmeister, A dromological vision machine, 2013, Interactive video installation

Point of View at Kudos Gallery proved to be one of the more intriguing exhibitions in ISEA2013, testing perceptual processes and ideas, if, frustratingly without the aid of floor notes or catalogue.

Volker Kuchelmeister

The title of Volker Kuchelmeister’s Juxtaposition refers to his adroit and witty merging of scenes filmed by the artist in Hong Kong and on a sojourn in the World Heritage wilderness of south-western Tasmania.

Wearing 3D glasses the viewer—or stroll with a friend—activates the work by means of gripping a horizontal rod that rotates the cylindrical projection surface as you move outside it at your own speed, observing a continuous stream of images over some 12 leisurely rotations.

The magical journey begins and ends in a Hong Kong graveyard. Along the way are regular reminders of the contested space between built and beautiful natural environments and the mostly uncomfortable encroachment of one upon the other, though the seamlessness of the transitions makes for some pleasing possibilities: concrete edifice melding into wilderness; natural rocky outcrop slowly encroaching on a hill of head-stones; and a tree trunk that has forced its way through an council street map.

The simple design of the structure along with the successful use of 3D and accompanying soundscape makes for an absorbing experience. For the 10 minutes or so it takes for us to make our way through this constantly unfolding diorama—and for some time after—the cool dark of Kudos gallery becomes animated urban jungle. This disorienting phenomenon—partly induced by walking in circles—has apparently been noted and scheduled for future exploration by Kuchelmeister, a prestidigitator of perception with an impressive repertoire of visual tricks up his sleeve. A video of the activated work revealing its construction can be seen on the artist’s website.

Volker Kuchelmeister, foreground Juxtaposition, 2010, Interactive video installation, background: A dromological vision machine, 2013, Interactive video installation

On the other side of the room, Kuchelmeister’s A dromological vision beckons us in via a dotted white line on the floor. From several metres back the wide image on the wall in front of us appears like an apparently fixed colour field painting. As we approach along the line the image transforms into vaguely recognisable, subtly vibrating shapes before becoming very specifically a snowfield, or on another approach clouds above a grassy plain, a domestic harbour or a street in a country town. These are tracked by a camera moving left or right, creating an interesting intersection of speeds—the left/right of the screen and the forward/back of the interacting viewer—and making a connection with the title’s focus on speed.

As we move forward and back along the line, we choose to linger longest—who knows why—on that alluring halfway mark where definition hovers, where reality begins to transform into abstraction.

Josh Harle

Another kind of interactivity is encountered in Josh Harle’s impressionistic video image of Sydney’s China Town floating on a large screen. Jutting out from just below its centre is a small touch-sensitive screen on which the same image appears in greater detail. With a finger we can change our perspective on the street or focus on aspects of it, drawing lights and a bower of tree branches closer or setting the image on a slow, vertiginous spin. Although a visually appealing work, the proximity of the touch screen to its larger equivalent makes it difficult to focus on the expanded image without stepping back. But when we did, we ‘lost touch.’ Perhaps we missed something.

Chris Henschke

Chris Henschke’s work in recent years has been greatly inspired by a Synapse residency at Australia’s most powerful light source, The Australian Synchrotron. A YouTube video documents his time there with interviews and footage of the imagery he created, making science into art and offering scientists and technicians striking virtual representations of their work. Small beams of light are prismatically unlocked revealing fantastical, effusive geometries as in the long wall print produced by processing synchrotron ‘light’ using particle accelerator simulation. The result is a long string of dense, complex circles varying in intensity from gold and orange to near white as they increasingly overlap.

The large screen projection Lightbridge yields a sense of being confronted by the outward flow of synchrotron data converted into vivid animation. Lightcurve (infrared arc) in the Synapse show at the Powerhouse Museum is likewise immersive, this time producing the sensation of travelling through a curving tunnel (as in a synchrotron?), the imagery densely, colourfully detailed. Both works are enhanced by quite musical renditions of data and, possibly, synchrotron hum.

A large human-scale photographic image of a cross-section of a section of the CERN synchrotron in Switzerland (which Henschke also visited) is quite disconcerting—its copper piping and flourish of entwining cables and wires evokes nothing less than steam-punk technology.

Stranger still is Machine Study no. 4 comprising 3D print, turntable, video camera, projector, screen, photodiodes, amplifier and speakers. The 3D print—a semi-fragmented circle of clay-like material—a model “derived from particle accelerator assemblies”—sits on the spinning turntable from which light that hits it is converted to screen imagery reminiscent of the synchrotron simulations already experienced but here with a humbler, even homemade sense of presence. The flickering screen image appears to change in intensity, from pale to darker blues and variations in the shapes of the flickering vertical lines emanating from the spinning model. There’s more here than meets the eye.

As we make our way around the gallery we’re peripherally aware of others entering the space and, perhaps in the absence of those illuminating room notes, cursorily viewing interactive works that really reward time taken to appreciate. So many ideas are manifest in an event like ISEA, so much potential to view in haste to make room for the next surprising thing. Sensory overload is one way to counter distraction. On Friday last, new media aficionados, stilled by Ryoji Ikeda’s electrifying Datamatics, subsequently lingered, transfixed on his captivating Test Pattern installation. Innovative works suggest multiple forms of engagement and Point of View offered us more quietly pleasing, sometimes rewardingly strange possibilities.

Artist Alex Davies discusses his attempts to rupture time and space in his epic mixed-media installation The Very Near Future, presented by Carriageworks and ISEA2013, 8-15 June 2013

A common theme over the last seven days of ISEA2013 has been the relationship between old and new technologies. In his artist talk (part of the panel titled Nostalgia of the New, 9 June), musician/video artist Tom Ellard was emphatic that these terms old and new are essentially meaningless. He posed the provocation: does the pencil become old as soon as you stop using it? Does something become old as soon as it is out of your visual range?

Ellard draws parallels between the idea of ancestor worship—where in fact the relative is believed to still be present—and the idea of media ghosts, which I’m interpreting as ways of making that refuse to die. He proposed that what we see with the fetishisation of old technology is in fact the idea of “venerating the container” in the same way ancestor worshipers pray to urns and altars.

The Macrophonics II concert, featuring Julian Knowles, Donna Hewitt, Alon Ilsar and Wade Marynowsky positions itself right in the middle of this debate, exploring both old and new containers (technology) and media ghosts (aesthetics) with an emphasis on performativity. Knowles in his program notes states, “I’m particularly interested in finding the unique ‘voices’ of each media situation or technology and finding meaningful relationships between them in an effort to create ‘all media’ works as opposed to ‘new media’ works.”

Knowles opened the concert performing with guitar, laptop and a variety of tape machines—reel-to-reel, cassette and dictaphone. He starts delicately, with sustained guitar notes which he gradually surrounds with waves of hiss and crackle, building layers and adding beats until he approaches a post-rock epiphany. Knowles is captured live on grainy video by Wade Marynowsky, who filters and augments the image with coloured flares and flourishes.

Alon Ilsar follows, exploring his relatively new instrument, the AirSticks. Ilsar is a well-known drummer performing with artists and groups such as Meow Meow and Darth Vegas. His skills as an ‘analogue’ musician stand him in good stead with this digital instrument. There is great precision in his manipulation of the complicated spatial matrix devised for the hacked-game controller. The sounds become increasingly complex and multi-dimensional—a wrist twist creating dynamic tonal shifts, toe taps and hand flicks overlaying crunchy beats. Marynowsky accompanies the artist, fragmenting Ilsar’s image into small, multicoloured bars, walking a fine line between figuration and abstraction.

Watching these live video projections I had a brief moment of nostalgia for the VJ experiments of the early 2000s, but mostly I will admit to being more engaged by the gesturally rich performances in this quite intimate space. However Marynowsky’s solo audiovisual set was a highlight. In a festival that opened with Ryoji Ikeda, it was a bold move to present a piece in highly geometric, tightly synched glitch style; but Marynowsky made it his own, adding rich blues and pinks to soften the angularity, accompanied by crunchier textures and funkier beats.

The final performance by Donna Hewitt used both the eMic—an interactive microphone interface that she has been developing for over a decade—and her newer wearable interface (created with Knowles) which allows greater gestural play and interaction with sound. Hewitt comes from a pop/rock music background and her two pieces were unabashedly tonal with luscious harmonic layering reaching an almost symphonic scale. The control offered by the eMic is particularly impressive, allowing Hewitt to generate this complexly looped and layered composition without once returning to the laptop.

Macrophonics II was perhaps less about the tensions between old and new media and more about the interplay of aesthetics, technologies and micro and macro cultures. Knowles and Hewitt position themselves within a pop lineage rather than high-art computer music framework. Perhaps what Macrophonics II really illustrates is how the ‘new technologies’—these complex interfaces and processing systems—can break out of the niche of experimentalism and become part of the wider popular music culture with early examples like UK artist Imogen Heap’s Glove project leading the way.

Artist Alex Davies discusses his attempts to rupture time and space in his epic mixed-media installation The Very Near Future, presented by Carriageworks and ISEA2013, 8-15 June 2013

The inside of my head, as the old saying goes: “nice place for a holiday but you wouldn’t want to live there.” If one of the defining features of contemporary arts experiences is that they show us something about the way we think, then ThetaLab takes this idea to a whole other level, creating a real-time interaction between participants’ brainwaves and a responsive soundscape.

In the waiting room a wall-sized video monitor shows what’s to come: a dimly lit chamber with three futon-like beds on which three participants lie inert. Attendants quietly walk past, adjusting computer settings, keeping watch. Now and then a shaft of brighter light falls across the room as someone leaves, parting the dark curtains between the ‘pod’ and the foyer. Outside, punters are swarming around The Rocks for the final night of Vivid Lights. Here, it’s like a monastery or a health retreat, minus the whale music.

The EEG monitor is strapped around my head. Artist George Poonkhin Khut explains that over 30 minutes I will listen through headphones to a soundtrack influenced by my own brainwaves. As my mind calms, the initial loud crackle of Alpha waves will recede, giving way to other sounds. While there’s no ‘desired result,’ the system is set to respond to Theta waves, which usually occur in a state of ‘wakeful awareness,’ such as when meditating or just before sleep.

Immersed under headphones, the next half hour is challenging, illuminating and intensely interactive, considering that my body lies still and is not in communication with anyone else. It’s just me and the neurofeedback system: a half-hour mental dance of confidence, calm, impatience, frustration, surprise, wonder and occasional self-punishment in the arms of ThetaLab.

The sounds I hear range from a constant, throbbing murmur that travels through my whole body, to bell-like tones that seem to call a higher consciousness. My Alpha wave activity settles a little—the loud crackle subsides—but the beating bass tones continue, and I know my heart rate is going up, not down. I try a bit of yoga nidra relaxation—and get some bell sounds, yay! As soon as I think ‘yay’ the harsh crackle is back. This is the trick of meditation, and ThetaLab is creating an aural window into my process of ‘trying’ to achieve it. As my time in the lab proceeds, I experience a few moments of real calm, where soft roads of sound like low cello begin to hum in one ear before eluding me again. And at the end, feeling a little like I can’t drum up a Theta wave to save myself, I can only think, wow, is that what it’s like inside my head?

But seriously, as I leave the building (after ‘describing’ my experience in a blackboard drawing and completing a short exit interview) I realise: this sound, whether grumbling, crackling, smooth or harmonic, is me. It holds a mirror to who I am, in a particular situation. All the conflicting feelings are reflected; the unstoppable ping-ponging between awareness, in-the-moment-ness, thought, peace, the arts-journalist self, the curious self, the self-judging self, the playful self. And I really wish I could take it home and do it more, learn to really find those Theta waves. Co-creator James Brown later tells me that an intensive workshop of ThetaLab-—say, 10 hours a day for a week—is something the artists would love to experiment with.

ThetaLab renders a particular experience of the brain and the mind accessible—one that for all but the mystic is usually beyond perception. For me, it was challenging—but an incredibly illuminating, warm and embracing experience nonetheless. Some people fall asleep, some people access those elusive Theta waves easily. It made me want to lie down and chat to my brainwaves more often.

Here’s a bit of background to Theta Lab, from a short interview with George Poonkhin Khut:

George, can you give me a brief history of Theta Lab? How/when/why did it come about?

I’ve been wanting to work with Alpha and Theta brainwaves since I first got interested in body-focussed interaction in the early 2000s, but it wasn’t something that I could pursue at the time within the context of my doctoral research, because of the very stringent human-research ethics approval process… The idea of brainwave-based interactions – as a creative practice – would have been just too much. So I focussed instead on breath and heart-rate based interactions [for an example see BrightHearts as part of Synapse: A Selection at Powerhouse], and did some private experiments with Alpha and Theta neurofeedback, with Dana Adam, a psychologist working with these technologies in a private practice.

A collaboration with Max Lyandvert and students from the NIDA Costume and Props departments in 2011 gave me the opportunity to begin exploring recent developments in affordable and easy to use brain-computer interfaces – and the Theta Lab project developed from this opportunity. [Winning] the National New Media Art Award in 2012 gave me some extra time and money to invest in affordable hardware and to commission the development of software to integrate these technologies into my existing Max-MSP tool set.

I was also very keen to work with a sound designer…. I’d been really impressed with James Brown’s approach to sound for performance – his work for Victoria Hunt’s Copper Promises and Matthew Day’s Intermission – and also his interest in multi-sensory performance and altered states of consciousness (Aisthesis at PACT); and sensed that Theta Lab would align closely with his own interests in music and live art.

The actual experience of the work itself. We intuitively knew that it would be great to incorporate vibro-tactile sub-bass sounds into the neurofeedback sound design – but actually feeling it, in connection to the changes in the Alpha brainwaves and the way it blended with the headphone component of the sound design, was something else entirely. The unusual combination of mental and visceral action and sensation is very hard to describe, but very sensual and pleasurable.

Very much at the prototyping and testing phase. There’s so much more to explore with how we sonify these brainwave dynamics, and also technologies for measuring and calibrating the brainwave signals. We really hope we can find some opportunities to develop the work further over the coming 12 months – through some combination of artist residencies, living-lab type creative workshop events and live arts festival events.

Brainwaves are rapid oscillations in voltage (0.1Hz – 40Hz) between parts of the cerebral cortex, that can be measured with an electroencephalograph. The relative mix and power of these oscillations can be seen to vary according to mental task and process.

See George Poonkhin Khut’s article, Solace in the Sensorium as part of the RT117 Art, Wellness and Death feature.

As an invitation to ‘run the city’ Marnix de Nijs ‘s Run Motherfucker Run (see Run for your lives [1]) is attractive, but some of its spooky, empty locations suggest its machine is safer, unless you find it’s interactivity unsettling. Then it’s a bike for you, or a walk. But look out for the kinds of runners seen in MAP Office’s Runscape, who pelt through the streets and byways of Hong Kong, darting past walkers and parkour-ing over balustrades.

Map Office (Gutierez + Portefax), Runscape

MAP Office’s Runscape comprises a triangular installation, each exterior screen wall focused on a city: Hong Kong, Berlin and Sydney. For Hong Kong the artists have created a 25-minute video work. You can exercise vicariously by watching two males cover an enormous amount of Hong Kong space, the continuity of their running apparently seamless but clearly the result of very careful camera set-ups with numerous points of view. A voiceover evangelically extols the virtues of running: it will yield “a new aesthetics”; it has an outlaw quality, being regarded “with suspicion…but it’s not illegal”; and it’s “a bullet that needs no gun” in a city “like a pinball table.” Although its pop-theorising-‘running off at the mouth’ is aurally tiring, Runscape is invigoratingly visceral to watch (if fearing for pedestrians that ‘running the city’ doesn’t take on big time).

The marginally interesting Sydney component of the work comprises runner point-of-view and other shots playing out at normal and slow motion speeds on a bank of small monitors. On the Berlin side of the installation are strips of images, representations of running in films. Among these are occasional gnomic quotations citing “cinema as urban planning” and “the real seen as décor for future fiction,” while describing the runner as “mov[ing] through the static frames of film, unlocking a visual improbability.” Set among these are video monitors showing movie excerpts including, not surprisingly, Run Lola Run.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, still from 49 Meters 49 Times: A Rehearsal with Entities in Shanghai, 2010, HD digital video, 1 mins.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s enticing video 49 Meters 49 Times exhibits a runner advancing on the viewer, but manipulated in such a way that the subject is semi-transparent, flickering until disappearing in near close-up. Even more ghostly are pedestrians, grey-ish floating figures who offer no hindrance. As in Runscape, they are incidental presences, if in a work more magically engaging.
Elsewhere in the two spaces devoted to Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s running-inspired works are maps of cities, rather quaintly evoking a sense of urban ecology, and a photo series of the artist and others moving through a variety of landscapes (some in a state of ruin; some rural) in a multitude of countries. Again there’s an inescapable sense of evangelicism and ‘depopulation.’

Brad Miller & Ian MacArthur, #capillary

In this very widescreen work, rows of varying depths featuring still images of Sydney travel horizontally in opposite directions, come momentarily to rest and then glide on with a liquid restlessness which is occasionally heightened by a distorting watery bubble pulsing out of an image. The photographs come in fascinating clusters, juxtaposing black and white images of an old building, aggregating graffiti, flowering shrubs and trees, aeroplanes, communal walks (yes, actual people), rusted signage, harbour parks, bicycles—nothing is too humble for this lateral kaleidoscope. With its ethereal sound score, #capillary is an engaging meditation on a multi-faceted city and the ways in which we take it in, here via a vast moving image comprising a multitude of stillnesses, evoking a flaneur with a camera.

Richard Goodwin & Russell Lowe, Crysis in Parasite Paradise

Crysis in Parasite Paradise (2013) is a strikingly critical work in Running the City, although critiques are inherent in the advocacy of other works in the exhibition. A small room is dominated by a huge maquette of a futuristic Sydney, its older buildings, like the Town Hall and Queen Victoria Building dwarfed by bland, largely identical office towers. These are linked by gun-metal grey conduits and tracks that suggest the militarisation of the city—the components clearly made from plastic war toys. More disturbing is the presence of helicopters jammed into walls and hovering on the edge of building tops as if about to plummet. Sitting at a computer, you can mouse your way through the same city with vertiginous swoops, ambles to the harbour’s edge and through building interiors. The digital detailing, as in the maquette, is not complete, nor doubtless intended to be. What you experience is a sense of not just heritage buildings being buried in the dark, but our own miniaturisation and powerlessness in what looks like a battleground.

Running the City offers a fascinating look at ways of seeing and connecting with the world we have built around ourselves, ranging from direct engagement to quiet reflection. Walking, bicycling and running are gaining increased traction, socially and politically, alongside growing public concern and action over town planning, so it’s not surprising that works about our physical, and virtual, engagement with the city should come with a sense of romance and idealism (save for Goodwin’s contribution), individualism and even transcendence, if sometimes feeling less than communal. However, a ‘flash run performance’ led by MAP Office did, it seems, offer a sense of running the city together—engaging with it and shaping its future.

Maps are curious things. They purport to show us an objective, readable representation of space and yet their capacity to deceive is limitless. Aside from possible inaccuracies, the map cannot ever measure the real. The map is not, as Gregory Bateson reminds us, the territory and “and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all…Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.” So why bother with them at all?

Maps matter because they work by encoding perceptions of the space within which reality transpires and in doing so they encourage their readers to bring the reality depicted by the map into being. Maps persuade. They allow us to imagine a space that is always just out of reach and in doing so they act as instruments of power. Unquestioned, maps lead to unquestioned power by seducing us into believing that their way of seeing space is the only possible way in which it can be apprehended.

How then to resist the power of maps? Make your own. This is the common place occupied by the four speakers in the Mapping Culture panel held at the MCA as part of ISEA and Vivid Sydney. Fee Plumley’s nomadic art project, the really big road trip (http://www.reallybigroadtrip.com/), provided the catalyst for bringing together three other singular but interconnected cartographers.

Kate Chapman is a US geographer and technologist from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team who have most recently been working in Jakarta on crisis preparedness and response. The Open Street Map Foundation is an international not-for-profit organization whose aim is to support the distribution, growth and development of free geo-spatial data, allowing communities and individuals to make use of that data for their own purposes. Chapman spoke about the difficulties faced by communities when they attempt to meaningfully represent the real issues that they face, such as the distribution of poverty, as abstract symbols on a map. Another problem is finding ways to give these communities access to the mapping tools that they need. One solution has been to distribute paper maps to people who can then use these as the basis for building more culturally significant maps based on mutual agreement. In the longer term, the foundation aims to build mapping capabilities in communities through the delivery of online training in the use of digital tools for map creation.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle is a non-status/treaty nêhiyaw/âpihtawikosisan (cree/metis) interdisciplinary artist and singer/songwriter from the land now known as Canada. L’Hirondelle spoke about her online/offline work nikamon ohci askiy : songs because of the land (http://www.vancouversonglines.ca/). Commissioned by Grunt Gallery in Vancouver, the work began as a kind of psychogeographic dervice as the artist walked the streets of Vancouver while mapping the space through song. As she walked, L’Hirondelle paid homeless people she encountered to listen to her sing. Conversations with them were recorded and used as part of an online installation where listeners can navigate the Vancouver streetscape as it is translated through sound. The online component of the work also cannily translates traditional understandings of how data is mapped in databases. When she was asked how to characterise the ‘values’ of each data set of recorded sounds so that they could be used in the online representation of the work, L’Hirondelle explained that she subverted the use of alphanumeric tables and substituted them with the “tipi pole teachings” of her own Cree culture.

L’Hirondelle’s use of the word ‘songlines’ inadvertently led her to an encounter with another artist currently exploring the ways that maps are made and understood. Brenda L Croft is a member of the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudpurra peoples from the Northern Territory. She spoke of her recent attempts to retrace and rediscover the important walking places of the Gadigal people in Sydney. In contrast to the work of Open Street Map, Croft is interested in how one might move from mapping the observed to mapping the invisible or the vanished. Like L’Hirondelle, and in collaboration with her in the future, Croft aims to walk the streets of her adopted home, Sydney, in an attempt to remap and thereby reclaim spaces that have been cartographically occupied by others, thereby challenging both the power of maps and the maps of power.

All of the speakers on this panel challenged the audience to rethink our assumptions about how maps are made and how they operate on us. They recalled for me geographer Doreen Massey’s formulation of space, it’s “potentially disruptive characteristics: precisely its juxtaposition, its happenstance arrangement-in-relation-to-each-other, of previously unconnected narratives/temporalities, its openness and its condition of always being made.”

“Engagement” is a key curatorial concept for Catching Light. Between artists, between visitors and art, between art and how we respond to it. Implicit in this principle of interaction as affect is the specific participation associated with art animated by electricity, which makes this exhibition fitting as part of ISEA 2013. And if it was simply an exhibition of electronic art in a regional gallery, with the remit of introducing an historical spectrum of media art to a broader and less predictable audience, Catching Light would have adequately acquitted its cultural and community responsibilities. But what makes it a significant event regardless of its association with ISEA is its curatorial ingenuity.

Five creative “innovators from the analogue and early digital eras” (Linda Dement, Tom Ellard, Troy Innocent, Stephen Jones and Wade Marynowsky) have mentored and collaborated with “new generation” artists (Kelly Doley, Paul Greedy, Benjamin Kolaitis, Pia van Gelder and Michael Candy) in dialogue to do with where we have been and are going. The result is a suite of new works informed by a rich history, innovative stuff made in 2013 that sits cheek by jowl with important precursory experiments in and recognised milestones of what were then “the media arts,” such as Severed Heads’ 1984 video Goodbye Tonsils and Troy Innocent’s world of artificial life, Iconica (1998).

This creative convergence, in the vision of curators Michael Dagostino and Megan Monte, is significant and memorable as a merging of one generation of media arts practice with another. Indeed Dagostino suggests that the impetus for the bringing together of emerging and established artists was motivated by a sense of having heard so much about pioneering works of the 1980s and 1990s but never having experienced them. This exhibition was the means of going back in time to capture that lost light. But whether through design or happenstance Catching Light highlights something deeper and more profound to do with media art history, the languages of interactivity and the future of this chimera called media art. In particular the works exhibited attest to the waning of spatial interactivity as a cultural paradigm in the face of the resurgence of a dominant time-based audio-visuality. After Sean Cubitt, and with a polite nod to Jacques Derrida, it is videography that is emerging as the dominant art form of mediated art: the predominance of a time-based screen apparatus of moving images that can, or has been, manipulated with the spatial manipulation of analogue/digital forms (it’s curious and not a little disconcerting that the finalists of the 2013 Anne Landa Award for “new media art” at the Art Gallery of New South Wales are time-based, predominantly video works that require no interaction from their audience).

Accordingly in the wrestling ring-like stadium of Troy Innocent’s and Ben Kolaitis’ Play Parameters (2013) competitors tussle with “playing sticks” to colonise a digital territory that manifests as light on the playing surface, blurring the distinction between game-play and playing electronic music. Wade Marynowsky’s and Michael Candy’s colloquially named Fish and Chips (2013) features beautifully made kinetic sculptures inspired by the designs of Leonardo Da Vinci. Mobilised into the otherworldliness of the ocean floor by divers in the accompanying video documentation, these obscure objects of desire seek to attract fish with the automated sound of rocks hitting each other. In Tom Ellard’s and Paul Greedy’s Home Clavilux (2013) the coloured doodles made on a sensitive pad by the visitor metamorphose on a separate screen into elegant vapours of luminous affect that resemble x-rays of bodily humours captured in real-time. Stephen Jones’ and Pia van Gelder’s Tetrasynth (2013) is a kind of pataphysical machine of unknown possibilities, a hybrid of analogue and digital video synthesis. At once contemporary and vestigial, the weird issue of machineries of joy that bend light, it is a fitting emblem for this exhibition.

Such works represent the changing poetics of interactivity, figured as a dialogue between artists from the past and present about the ongoing language of media art. And that sense of change through time is suggested in the title of this review. Letters stretch and prolong the formation of parts into meaningful wholes, foregrounding the elongated intervals in time and space that make language possible. But it is in its sense of entropy, of something that struggles to keep going, that also gestures to Linda Dement’s and Kelly Doley’s extraordinarily powerful 50 beats (2013). This deceptively simple but confronting work is the audio-visual correlative of the complacent denial of feminism in culture. There is an overwhelming sense of loss here that makes the installation also bristle with frustration and anger.

In an urgent situation of code red, the in extremis rendition of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” envelops the semi-darkened space. Agonizingly slowed down to fifty beats per minute, the time signature of a human heart close to failure, this soundtrack has gone horribly awry. In the presence of this sonic evacuation of human life and female politics an undifferentiated sludge drips from a half-tonne explosives bag suspended from an industrial frame, oozing with uncomfortable slowness into a bland and utilitarian bucket. Text on a myopically small screen screams urgent messages of outrage and warning as the feminist body politic crawls towards oblivion. Both animus and activism are reduced to a melancholy waning that is nonetheless tinged by the threat of explosion. Only when you look down do you realise you are standing in that threatening ooze.

The canny insight that motivates Catching Light garners this perception of generational change into coalitions of the analogue and the digital, emergent understandings of history and the practices of the techno-arts as cyclical and dynamic, never fixed or static. The current International Symposium on Electronic Art being held in Sydney, of which Catching Light is a part, attests to this feedback loop of change. As the only international city to host ISEA twice, previously inviting the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts to its shores in 1992, Sydney again becomes a time-space event of the artifice, innovation, dysfunction and obsolescence associated with the changing hues of digital light.

Can citizens be playmates? Can cracks in the pavement form a jigsaw puzzle? Where Kaldore Public Arts Projects’ 13 Rooms made performers into living sculptures, Deviator by pvi collective makes audiences into performers playing an interactive app-led game in Sydney’s inner city.

At 6.30pm, outside National Art School, Darlinghurst, we players are given smartphones, headphones and codenames (I’m Susan Orlean from Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation). A GPS-enabled app loads with an iconned map. Our instructions are to play hard, run fast and go far, find the QR codes indicated on the map, scan them and follow their directives to earn points.

It turns out the tasks are imaginative and socially acceptable forms of tiny rebellion. In my rovings, Deviator had me follow a stranger for two minutes (embarrassingly thrilling), write a message on one of many little chalkboards (“I still miss you”), plant broccoli seeds in Green Park (I shiftily took a few for my own garden) and be chased and kissed into submission by one of the games’ gatekeepers (clown-wigged “Motherfcuckers” stationed around the QR codes). In each task I felt like a kid with a secret. I felt like I owned the city.

The details are considered and finessed. A message interface allows us to send out mass communiques to our fellow players, the games are named after children’s games (Twister, Ring-A-Ring-A-Rosie) and QR codes are artfully hidden with a local’s insider knowledge. It’s flat out fun and seriously playful.

In a roundabout way, Deviator is about something more. The rhetoric of the app’s audio and text is of the Occupy Movement. But Deviator isn’t a movement; it’s saying something in itself. The artists’ critique is of the sameness of city life, the PR-powered politicians in lock-step, the pollution and distraction of mediocre media. The artists’ answer is to offer small doses of chaos and spontaneity, fleetingly recapturing public space through collective and softly subversive play.

It’s an abstract freedom that expires after the game’s 45 minutes, but it’s a kind of freedom nonetheless. So often in contemporary art, battles between ideas are waged in a void or white cubes. But art is not a self-sufficient world; pvi collective knows this, and Deviator’s on-street location animates its core ideas. If you’re not engaged, you’re not trying hard enough. Deviator isn’t a blueprint for social change, it’s a way for contemporary art to disrupt daily greyness, and hijacking the language of revolution is an effective, albeit purely polemical, way to do that.

Where the game succeeds best is in making audience members—strangers—into members of a collective. Imagine sprinting down Oxford Street, spotting another pink-cheeked, headphoned player and swapping a conspiratorial grin before running onwards. It’s radical.

Deviator is another vindication of Performance Space’s continued experimentation in off-site and, in this case, on-street programming. Following January’s Micro Parks which invaded tiny patches of forgotten inner west reserves, Deviator enlarges that map. I can’t help but think pvi collective have achieved their stated goal, using smartly and creatively engineered technology that brings people together. It’s a curatorial masterstroke to program this kind of event on a week night at an after-dark, cop-show start time. My friend and I felt like we’d been on a 45-minute holiday, then returned to our regularly scheduled post-work programming. Deviator stung us awake and made our city new.

Mark Hosler is an entertaining guy. The full title of his talk is “Adventures in illegal art: creative media resistance, Negativland, and the fight not to be absorbed.” He has the easy patois of the Southern Californian that riffs through events, times and places in a way that immediately connects with his audience. And it’s a full house at the forum, a mix of older types who actually remember analogue media as something more than mere nostalgia and young people who have grown up in a world where memory is so cheap, it’s almost redundant.

It’s hard to gauge how many of the audience saw the works that Hosler is showing here the first time around but judging from the reaction there appear to be many here for whom it is a revelation.

As Hosler cycles through the works and happenings that made him and his collaborators in the famous (or perhaps, in some instances, infamous), experimental audio collage band Negativland, those of us who have followed their work for over two decades are reminded how infectiously fun, challenging and clever these guys are. Twelve studio albums, starting in 1980 with the self-titled Negativland, two live albums, six EPs and the radio program Over the Edge, broadcast on KPFA FM in Berkeley for 32 years, are just some of their achievements. But Hosler’s presentation focuses mainly on the video works, kicking off with No Business and followed up with Truth in Advertising, Guns, Christianity is Stupid, The Mashin’ of the Christ and Gimme the Mermaid.

Between the videos, Hosler talks about the process of making the works, one very much guided by a kind of vernacular deconstruction. Hosler points out that the starting point for many of the works comes at that moment when the material they are working with reveals its own internal contradictions. Teasing this out allows the material, in a sense, to expose itself and gives them a way to move the material to its own inevitable endpoint. So, for example, Truth in Advertising takes audio material sourced from a radio call in a show called Penny Wise hosted by Bob Phillips. By manipulating and repeating certain phrases from the show, which purports to advise its listeners on saving money, they demonstrate how the program routinely promotes consumption and advertising as transparently natural. This process of denaturalisation lies at the heart of much of the work Hosler screens in the lecture.

Hosler also talks at length about the various copyright battles faced by Negativland highlighting the case brought against them by Irish mega-pop group U2 through their record label, Island Records. The case has been well documented elsewhere, notably by the band themselves in their zine, The Letter U and the Numeral 2, which was later released as Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. Hosler’s characterisation of the album cover (a release by Negativland called U2) that sparked the controversy and subsequent lawsuit as a moment of ‘consumption disruption,’ resonates as an excellent description of many of their works.

Hosler spends some time talking about one particularly hilarious culture jam that had the somewhat satisfying outcome of exposing the cannibalistic character of much mainstream media. Unable to afford to tour their album Escape From Noise in 1987, due to a lack of time and funds, the band issued a press release claiming that the real reason they were cancelling the tour was that one of the songs from the album, “Christianity is Stupid” had played a role in a quadruple axe murder in Rochester, Minnesota. The perpetrator, David Brom, had killed his devoutly religious family, they claimed, after listening to the song. Of course, this was a complete fabrication but it didn’t stop multiple news outlets in California reporting it as fact. The ensuing media frenzy later became the source material for the band’s next album, Helter Stupid, where they relentlessly lampooned the media who had failed to fact check the press release that got the whole thing started.

This anecdote could be read as a kind of manifesto for Hosler and Negativland. Nothing is sacred. No source material is off limits. It is our right to write with the media that surrounds us like ether, that is the pharmakon of our lives. Our poison and our cure. Interestingly, this manifesto appears to have been embraced in the vernacular remix cultures that have emerged from YouTube and other media sharing sites on the web just as Hosler and the band have decided that its time to go back to where it all began—experimental electronic music.

Hosler says he preferred it when what they were doing stood outside of the mainstream and that he’s happy to leave it to others to take up the mantle of taking from the media and turning it back on itself. One can only hope that the spirit of Negativland—their wicked, playful and, yes, politically subversive spirit—remains in the mix.

The twitter hash tag for ISEA—#iseeISEA—has attracted some light-hearted criticism. Why perpetuate the dominance of the visual? Why not #ihearISEA? Or even #ismellISEA?* At the Verge Gallery, University of Sydney, you can actually cop a whiff.

In my previous blog piece “Touch me there” I discuss some artists who are exploring mediated touch and this got me thinking about the other less art-privileged sense of smell. Never fear, ISEA2013 has a little bit of everything and New Zealand artists Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris are tackling the challenge of mediated olfaction.

Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris, Downwind

Downwind is a gently interactive work—you are invited to approach a sugar bowl which politely opens for you. Then you place a small amount of sugar on your tongue to heighten your sense of smell. Forming a kind of poppy field, the other objects look like mutant lamps with spherical ‘shades’ that concertina in and out, responding to your presence. This movement puffs air in your face, carrying a scent somehow stored within. These scents are quite subtle yet complex and hard to categorise—maybe there’s tobacco, grass, tea but I can’t be sure. Many seem to have synthetic top notes that mingle with the organic and create the olfactory equivalent to glimpsing something out of the corner of your eye—smelling from the edge of your nose perhaps?

It is this ambiguity that the artists are interested in—the myriad combination of smells that comprise the scent of a human (hopefully without employing some of Patrick Susskind’s suggested techniques in his 1985 novel Perfume). Enclosing the space are large draped white plastic sheets, marbled with suspiciously yellow stains, a patterning that also adorns the pods. Creating a unified visual field, these sheets are also impregnated with scent—a fermenting hopsy smell of unwashed human, but I could be wrong. That’s the point. Turner and Harris are interested in the way in which smells are variously interpreted by individuals, thus rendering each reality unique. That smell so sweet to one person may be repugnant to another—smell as a signature of subjectivity. Downwind is sensorially and conceptually satisfying.

Ian Haig, Night of the Living Hippy

Ian Haig’s Night of the Living Hippy is well served by its juxtaposition with Turner and Harris’ Downwind and vice versa. The heightened olfactory state adds an extra dimension to Haig’s twitching, desiccated cadaver. We are assured by the wall text that the skeleton is plastic; but the mummified skin, tufts of hair and gouts of unidentifiable decaying matter are rather convincing. Parts of the skeleton are connected via guitar strings to Arduino micro controllers tugging and pulling bones in rhythmic sequences. All the mechanics are visible so it is not as if we are expected to buy the illusion of self-activated movement, rather it looks like extended torture—this body is subject to perpetual artificial stimulation, never allowed to finally rest.

The work references Paul Thek’s 1967 piece The Tomb (also known as the Death of a Hippy); ironically, it was destroyed for lack of storage in 1972 (see the Gallery of Lost Art). Thek himself died in 1988; Haig’s skeleton serves as a representation of Thek’s body and his lost artwork. In his artist note Haig also suggests a narrative for the arts in general in which nothing remains dead or static; everything that has come before is material to be re-utilised and re-animated. This thinking around the relationship of old and new technologies and their re-combination has flowed through much discussion at the ISEA2013 conference, neatly taxonomised as “post-digital.” Haig’s hippy is perhaps a post-digital post-human.

Nandita Kumar, eLEMenT: EARTH

Indian artist Nandita Kumar’s eLEMenT: EARTH sits in contrast to the implied fleshiness (or lack thereof) of the other two pieces offering a clean, tech-fetishist aesthetic. The artist has created a beautiful and intricate garden—enclosed in a large glass jar—made from circuits, tiny speakers and sensors. It’s a future fantasy in which technology has been integrated into nature, and this new alliance has led us back to the Garden of Eden. Responsive to movement, the piece also emits a delicate sound track of increasing densities and intensities that draws you further into its magic diorama.

Kumar’s piece reminds me of Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi utopias. Interestingly, after viewing the exhibition I went to the conference session on science fiction in art, where Amelia Barakin eloquently discussed the correlation of “world making” in science fiction literature and in visual art processes. Lizzie Muller offered the idea of speculative objects to augment speculative fictions—objects that prompt us to dream of alternate ways of being. Nandita Kumar’s eLEMenT: EARTH perfectly embodies both these concepts, while also connecting to the sensory and visceral preoccupations of the other two works which it accompanies.

An agoraphobic rendition of a gymnasium treadmill, Run Motherfucker Run, confronts you on arrival at the centrepiece of Running for Sydney at the College of Fine Arts. At least three times as wide as the conventional machine and four times as long (5m x 2m), equipped with sidebars you are forbidden to touch, a low mattress at the rear (in case you’re swept off your feet) and a giant screen (8m x 4m) in front of you displaying urban scenes filmed from moving vehicles, this interactive installation not only offers a sense of virtual exploration but a test of physical capacity and especially balance.

The latter comes into play when you have to choose between two sets of flickering images, right and left, to determine which kind of ‘scape you’d like to enter. To do so you have to step in the direction of choice while the treadmill pulls you back if you drop pace. Once you’ve regained equilibrium (some users don’t) the screen fills with near life-size streets, alleys, docks and a brilliant red running track among other cityscapes.

I walk hesitantly and then jog a little, following tram tracks on a wide neon-lit street. But the treadmill seems to have a hyperactive tendency: my small increase in pace triggers much greater speed, because I’ve moved closer to the screen’s sensor. On instruction from the sidelines I drop back and the machine slows and, giddy, I stagger off and the screen image dims and disappears because I’m no longer powering it. It’s not called Run Motherfucker Run for nothing. The artist, Marnix de Nijs, suggests that the work can evoke a sense of being pursued.

A visit to his website reveals that “the distance you run on the conveyor belt is the same as you will cover in the virtual city in front of you. By quickening your pace, the acceleration of the belt, as well as the speed of the image, increases and, depending on your running behaviour and the directional choices you make, the progress of the film is determined” (http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/run-motherfucker-run.htm).

Media artist Keith Armstrong arrives, leaps onto the treadmill and shows us how it’s done with an energetic workout—he’d enjoyed Run Motherfucker Run years ago in Rotterdam and knew how it operated. It can ‘run’ at up to 30km per hour. Next, three ten-year-old boys easily engage with this outsize substitute for the real-street experience. Gymnasium proprietors might well take note but hip-hoppers in search of a bit of Snoop Dogg gangsta angst (the work has the same title as the song) could find it a tad tame, even though the musical score is full of ominous beats and rumbles—just why is not clear. As in some other works in Running the City there’s an element of risk and romance attached to racing through the unoccupied realms of the city at night, as well as a topical fascination with fitness and speed.

If you can’t get to Run Motherfucker Run take a look at an unsteady-cam rendition on YouTube or a clearer account of the installation on Marnix de Nij’s own site.

“The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of human aesthetics which holds that when human features look and move almost, but not perfectly, like natural human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics and computer animation. The ‘valley’ refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of humans as subjects move towards a healthy, natural human likeness described in a function.” Wikipedia

At Artspace three works engage with robotics in very different, bemusing and emotionally confusing ways. The ‘uncanny valley’ effect is most obviously suggested by and felt in Mari Velonaki’s The Woman and The Snowman. Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders Accomplice is even stranger—its robots, hammering at walls, with no suggestion of human appearance but a nonetheless palpable presence. Simon Ingram’s Smoking Bolts, its robots creating three large abstract paintings, is less spooky but mysterious in terms of agency: who and where is the artist?

Mari Velonaki, The Woman and The Snowman

In Mari Velonaki’s The Woman and The Snowman the resemblance between an onscreen robot and a female human is vaguely disturbing, but moreso when I learn that it is the creation of the advanced humanoid robotic research of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro in Osaka and not the result of movie-making animatronics. The robot’s slight tilt forward and slow hand movements suggest mannequin-ish awkwardness but we know there’s more to ‘her’ than that.

On a large screen The Woman stands on a snowy landscape; on another, in the distance, is The Snowman, a conventional head and body minus limbs. The trees behind suggest Australian mountain country. Forward of the angled screens is an enigmatic device of human height and comprising two gleaming, rotating chrome shells arcing around a small video monitor moving on its own trajectory. Alpine countryside, a large house and pine forests appear on the screen, reflecting the artist’s Swiss origins. Amid these images another appears in which a party of well-dressed people (styling suggests mid-20th century) have raised their glasses in celebration of, perhaps, the skiing season. The still image has been carefully [re-]constructed with a 3D depth of field and a tracking shot that make its subjects seem faintly robotic—a sensation sometimes felt when looking at old carefully composed photographs. The looping dance of the kinetic machine and its self-contained imagery evokes a sense of both the intimacy and artificiality of capturing personal memories, especially when juxtaposed with The Woman who in an imminent future might enjoy some skiing and build a snowman.

The combination of Australian and European landscapes, of Swiss human and Japanese humanoid forms is underlined by the pleasant entwining of Western and Japanese musical forms for strings, compensating somewhat for the snowy coldness of the large screen images and The Woman’s inertia, as does the kinetic machine which looks like it might have come from a luxury furnishing store.

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice

The score for The Woman and The Snowman is punctuated by the occasional sound of Ingram’s robots dipping their brushes into paint trays and buzzing to the canvas, but more so by the pounding heard from Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders’ Accomplice. At least two things make this a profoundly disturbing if witty work. The first is the evocation of images reminiscent of, among others, paranoid schizophrenia symptoms portrayed in Daniel Paul Schreiber’s autobiographical Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) and Roman Polanksi’s film Repulsion (1965) in which imagined forces break through walls. At work behind installed walls in the gallery, the robots in Accomplice hammer away at varying durations and with apparently different intensities—doubtless amplified by how far they have worked their way into the wall and also where they are pounding. This sonic detail yields a sense of insistence and multiplicity. Suddenly only one robot is to be heard; then, three at once, each with their own percussive identity. The sense of impending, slow invasion is palpable, especially when a small rectangle of the wall falls onto the rubble-strewn floor.

It’s intriguing that robots don’t work at one spot until finishing their task. They stop, glide away and commence work on a new spot or one already commenced. We glimpse them through the holes they’ve created, gliding up or down or horizontally, illuminating their way with ringed ‘eyes’ of intense blue light, swivelling as if inspecting their work…or us. The effect is as comical as it is anxiety-inducing, the latter state increasing when we learn that “[e]ach robot is equipped with a motorised punch, a camera, and a microphone to assist in the complete transformation of the surrounding environment. Collectively, these robots explore, learn, play and conspire by knocking against the wall, producing holes and patterns that mark the evolution of their social development” (room note).

Just how autonomous this robot clan is, in terms of artificial intelligence and agency, is an issue underlined by the work’s title: Accomplice. Who is the accomplice? The robot clan, empowered intellectually and mechanically to destroy a room for an artist to make a point about the power of robotics? Or the artist, who having created the clan loses all but the fundamental agency to ensure destruction, which the robots execute on their own terms? Clearly, autonomy of the human variety is a long way off for these machines, but if they are in fact learning and planning then the future inches nearer. We grow more and more excited at our capacity to create intelligences other than our own (if for the moment modelled on ours) and just as apprehensive about things that hammer inexorably through the walls of our wellbeing.

Simon Ingram, Smoking Bolts

Placed flush to each of three large canvases are pairs of vertical bars. On each pair sits a small robot with a paint tray and a shaving-brush-like brush. The robots move up and down and the bars horizontally. A third design factor, room for the robot to angle itself across the bars, allows it to paint more than vertical and horizontal lines. A blue painting, almost totally filled in with a huge blue, densely painted circle, still reveals bare spaces in which earlier rectangles and diagonals are evident.

Agency in Smoking Bolts we are told is human: “These painting robots are operated remotely by the artist in New Zealand and by Artspace staff to enact a trans-Tasman painting collaboration that reframes painting’s traditional mode of production” (room note). Just how that agency is shared is not evident. A laptop computer sitting by one of the paintings-in-progress reveals a diagram of a large circle and triangle, evident too on the canvas, and suggesting pre-planning. But much else has happened—a swathe of lines straight up and across—with the robot still working doggedly on a red vertical to the one side as we watch. So, while it’s clear, one way or another, that humans are at work here, there is a sense of absence, of the artist working surreptitiously, which the room note curiously aligns with stealing: “the title of the exhibition is derived from the culture of the heist, or break-in, where something valuable is snatched leaving nothing behind but the smoking bolts.” Just what has been snatched—an audience’s desire to identify with an artist and not a machine?

Enculturing robots

In live art and new game theatre theatre (see RT115) there is an increasing trend towards artists making works for their audiences to perform. An audience is inducted—learns the rules—but also brings issues and narratives to a game. It is programmed but will take the game wherever it goes. The game persists, but outcomes will never be the same. Simon Ingram hands over hands-on creation to robots who wield brushes in his stead; and he shares agency over these machines with others—the Artspace staff. Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders nurture the intelligence of their robots, allowing them to learn and collaborate within the artists’ framework, and again with uncertain outcomes as to precisely how these machines will destroy the walls.

Robotic agency does not appear to be an issue in Mari Velonaki’s The Woman and The Snowman—a work about how we see both ourselves and ‘them.’ She illustrates the complexities of the meanings and associations that constellate around robotics in terms of memory, prediction and anthropomorphism. From snowmen to robots, humans like to make things in their own form, as many believe the gods first made us. We have long imbued inert things with imagined life and fantasised living machines. Now that they are showing signs of life, this intriguing and thoughtful Artspace exhibition proposes and enacts the enculturation of and collaboration with robots. Uncanny.

Interview with Oron Catts curator of SymbioticA’s semipermeable (+) at the Powerhouse Museum.

Artists: Guy Ben-Ary and Kirsten Hudson, Andre Brodyk, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Corrie van Sice, Tagny Duff, Benjamin Forster, Sam Fox, Donna Franklin, Verena Friedrich, Nigel Helyer, Cat Hope, Svenja Kratz

Interview with Oron Catts curator of SymbioticA's semipermeable (+) at the Powerhouse Museum.

In a utilitarian studio within UTS’s Bon Marche building is a 6-metre geodesic dome, covered in translucent scrim and with 24 speakers ranged around its three-dimensional interior. Through the scrim, the studio’s ceiling lights and exposed piping are visible; behind the dome, two desks are cluttered with laptops and flanked by piles of gear in sturdy roadcases.

Inside, the sound of wind follows me as I move. Then the pings of bell-birds, running water, cathedral bells, all overlapping one another in waves. And a woman’s voice, in French: I catch fragments that translate as “the world and its abundance”, “open me”, “your wisdom and your light”. I feel I’m in a futuristic spiritual incubator, softly proselytised from a spherical dimension. Before I’m completely transported, I notice a set of wavering synthetic sounds, wobbling in microtones toward or away from melody, not always quite succeeding in rising or falling. But today’s experience of SoundLabyrinth is focused on what’s outside the dome: those cluttered desks and what happens behind them.

SoundLabyrinth is created by Melbourne-based artists Mark Pedersen and Roger Alsop. They explain the technical basics to us: essentially, a Mac camera is used to detect light changes, and therefore movement, within the dome’s inner space, which is divided into 16 segments. Gesture drives the installation. Some gestures are unintentional – walking in, for example. But the system recognises movement and responds with sound; the user realises this is happening, which then elicits intentional gestures in response.

Alsop and Pedersen are using separate computer systems to deliver sound to 24 speakers placed throughout the dome; essentially, we’re seeing two independent projects in a shared space. Pedersen’s software system uses ambisonics to place virtual sound objects within the aural space; object ‘placement’ can be driven by his own choices, or he can use the movement of a visitor’s arm, say, as the driver. He achieves this by defining planar location and elevation – imagine a circle with floor position marked, and a semicircle for setting the height. A decoder then does the maths to determine the balance across all 24 speakers. A complex Venn diagram maps out ‘what plays where’ across the floor space, with each overlapping circle representing a sound.

Alsop’s set-up is without the graphical representation of Pedersen’s. Instead his screen is a maze of lozenge-shaped boxes, grids, and connecting lines, representing sensor sectors, range, area, frequencies, amplitude and more. His project uses just eight of the 24 speakers; their outputs are set up either through a compositional sequence, or manually driven. In other words, while Pederson’s ambisonics first maps a spatial sound location and processes accordingly to achieve the result, Alsop’s programming begins with the allocation of sound to individual speakers to ‘create’ the spatial location of the sound as a consequence.

Watching visitors move around the space, waving arms around to see what happens, I wonder what makes us want to ‘interact’ with a work like SoundLabyrinth. Having watched delighted responses to Experimenta’s playful and interactive Speak to Me exhibition at the Powerhouse on the weekend, I’m especially curious. Once upon a time, humans and nature lived in a responsive, reciprocal interaction with nature. In cities, are we hungry for the environment’s response to (or awareness of) us?

Experimenting with all these parameters has an anthropological aspect, says Alsop. For example, in his set-up, some people might stand where they can hear beat frequencies across similar tones, while others avoid them. By setting up minimal differences between speakers – around 8 Hz difference, he suggests –a variety of tonal colours and phases can be achieved as people move in the space. The person almost becomes a synthesiser, he says; their body in effect creating the tones.

Both artists are fascinated by gesture, and by the capacity for computers to read gestures and respond. Alsop says that just about everything we do – even thought – is a gesture: “humans are a gesture recognition system”. Pederson speaks of gesture in the context of encountering the other through immersive spaces – where what you experience can be “both foreign and tactile”.

What gestures mean to people and how much this varies can’t be measured by a computer, Alsop says, but over time it can be ‘taught’ incrementally. A system such as his own for SoundLabyrinth is like a piano – it offers a finite number of choices or notes, but infinite combinations are possible. Human interpretation, on the other hand, is like a cello: multitimbral, infinite.

Nigel Helyer, curator of EchoSonics at UTS Gallery (4 June – 21 July), in conversation with Gail Priest

And down a few escalators to the lower decks of the Powerhouse, for a survey of recent work from ANAT’s Synapse arts/science residency program. With a distinctly different feel from SymbioticA’s semipermeable (+), Synapse: A Selection seems more grounded in ‘things’, in direct human engagement with life, with objects at macro scale. It seems that in the ‘wet biology’ terrain which defines much of SymbioticA’s output, the materials and life-forms that are investigated, manipulated and theorised are those that need to be apprehended in the context of the interventions, the art itself. But whether it’s by accident or alignment with a different approach, the things themselves lie at the heart of Synapse: A Selection – and indeed the heart, with all its bloody gore, is the subject of the work that most affected me in this show.

The first two works encountered are each balanced on a relationship: in the case of Nola Farman’s Animating Solar Technology (in progress), that of specific materials to temperature. On display are a series of maquettes of sculptural works that ‘remember’ their shape despite heating or cooling, designed to morph at daybreak and sunset. In a nearby video, artist Kirsty Boyle plays with a traditional Japanese mechanical doll. While Farman’s maquettes position technology in relationship to the natural environment, Boyle’s video is familiar, then uncanny. We watch her manipulate the doll’s limbs, gently testing its physical limits. But before long the doll exerts a converse influence: when she cradles it like a baby, strokes it, rests its head on her shoulder, it appears that the inanimate object directs her attention as surely as she moves its wooden parts.

Swirling imaginary renderings of the inside of a particle accelerator (Chris Henschke) and a still life tableau composed entirely of natural salt (Ken and Julia Yonetani) lie along the way to Erica Seccombe’s Grow, a 3D animation work employing xray tomography in its creation, to give a microscopic view of germinating seeds. In soft blues and golds the images float, evolving almost imperceptibly, the expanding heads of the seeds within their casings not unlike human foetuses twitching in the womb.

At the interactive heart of Synapse: A Selection, in the centre of the gallery space, is George Poonkin Khut’s BrightHearts – Embers iPad app. Created to help children learn and practise relaxation and anxiety management before and during painful procedures, the app monitors heart-rate via a sensor clipped to the earlobe. A sparse starfield is the background to changing concentric rings of colour which advance and recede; the sounds are pure, bright, soft, glockenspiely. It starts out red-themed; as my breathing slows the circles seem to soften, retreating to the middle distance. It’s hypnotic; it seems the display is responding to my vital signs, but also influencing them. It’s an aesthetically seductive, immersive, purposeful play of biofeedback, perfectly positioned on the cusp of art and technology.

Hidden in a small side room is the other ‘heart’ of this show – the visceral one: Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor’s Study Towards Aftermath. A video documentation of the perfusion of pig hearts, performed at the Science Gallery in Dublin earlier in 2013, the work cleanly records a technical process, but this documentation is both disturbing and acutely poetic.

From what I see, ‘perfusion’ entails taking the pig hearts, hooking them up to tubes, zapping them into apparent life with a defibrillator (don’t quote me on this), and pumping blood through them (or letting them do the pumping themselves); in this case into a large perspex ‘blood-catching’ apparatus. Against Gail Priest’s minimal soundtrack of gentle harmonic hums, soft and distant, we watch the set-up: the splattering blood as clamps are manipulated; the urinal-like containers into which the hearts bleed copiously; the audience clustered around. The cinematography is stunning: sharp-focused and built on primary colours, mostly red. The two hearts in their dead-but-animated state pump and bleed; at one point, one seems to hiccup blood – it’s gruesome. The cut arteries gape like too-soft mouths; the beating action is undulating, horribly sensuous, and riveting.

Synapse: A Selection meanders through diverse artistic and scientific territories, evoking fascination, horror or contemplation across disciplines, and infused (or perfused) with the sense of risk and experiment. As the quote from Einstein on the introductory panel asserts: “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

Nigel Helyer, curator of EchoSonics at UTS Gallery (4 June – 21 July), in conversation with Gail Priest

We increasingly entrust machines with our sensual augmentation, constantly allowing them to see and hear for us. However beyond the functional—the moving of objects or handling of hazardous material—we can’t yet entrust them to really touch for us.

Forgive my naïve psychologising but it seems as though both seeing and hearing involve a two-part process, the split allowing space for machine mediation. A machine can record information and show it to us by proxy and then we can see/hear and process it. However with touch it seems as though the recording and the processing are simultaneous and more tightly entwined—our skin actually needs to be in contact in the moment, not presented with a ‘recording’ of the touch. Or is it that perhaps we don’t yet know how to make this touch recording?

Eric Siu

Visiting Hong Kong artist Eric Siu has developed a quite beautiful workaround for this dilemma. In Touchy, , he encourages actual touch between humans but the results are recorded in visual format. Siu has designed a helmet camera with mechanical shutters over his eyes so that when wearing it he is essentially blind. That is until someone touches him (while also placing a hand on a specially wired light bulb). This contact completes a circuit and the shutters spring open revealing Siu’s most beguiling eyes. If you keep touching for 10 seconds, a photo will be taken which can be viewed on the screen at the back of the helmet. Despairing of a world where people are physically shut off, communicating remotely via small screens, Siu is intent on bringing “connection back into reality.” He offers a simple equation: human + social device (ie camera) = happiness. And from his video documentation this appears to be true.

Thea Baumann

Thea Baumann’s Metaverse Makeovers employs a similar equation. She has devised an augmented reality experience for nail bars offering manicures and toxic fume highs. Baumann and collaborators Ben Fern and Shian Law have created nail decorations that are also QR Codes. The human touch of having your nails done can thus be extended into a quasi-magical visual experience, viewed either via personal hand-held devices or on screens in the salon. The fantastical content that appears once the nails have been scanned has been designed in consultation with “nail bar communities.” Baumann has actually attracted investors to this project; Metaverse Makeovers is now a transmedia company concentrating on the Asia-Pacific marketplace to further develop a range of Augmented Reality products for fashion, design and leisure industries. Maybe mediated fingernails are getting us closer to mediated fingertips.

Mari Velonaki

In aesthetic contrast is Mari Velonaki’s Diamandini an ivory-hued interactive robot which responds to the presence of people, approaching or retreating, or hanging around, depending on learned behaviours. Diamandini is being developed over five years as an ARC research project with Velonaki and her team, in particular David Silvera-Tawil, now exploring how touch can be built into her systems utilising specially developed artificial skin emedded with electrodes. Perhaps we are closer to those touch recordings than I thought. (Mari Velonaki also has a work in the Artspace exhibition see realtime tv.)

As I was pondering the theme of this article I came across a Charlie Sofo video work titled Touch, exhibited as part of Experimenta’s Speak to Me. While on a residency in Dunedin, Sofo filmed himself exploring his new environment using his hands—fingertips running over woodgrain, concrete, wire and plants. It’s highly evocative of the memory of touch but it illustrates the kind of tactile muteness to which I allude—the simulation is not yet stimulation. In my fantasies of the future I see a world where Sofo’s artwork will utilise Velonaki and Silvera-Tawil’s artificial skin. I’ll not only be able to see but actually feel that blade of Dunedin grass.

From the recognisably organic form of a lab-grown tree-fungus dress to slick, cold-steel missiles like infiltrating spores, the works in SymbioticA’s semipermeable (+) elicit both pleasure and discomfort as they push science, and ‘wet biology practices’ in particular, towards and through a range of conceptual limits. I reached semipermeable (+) after a stroll through Experimenta’s Speak to Me, sharing the Level 4 Powerhouse space. Stepping from the family-filled, playful halls of twittering mechanical peacocks and kaleidoscopic turntables into a room full of cool glass, metal clamps and tubing was indeed like slipping through a membrane.

WA’s SymbioticA is world-renowned for its emphasis on hands-on collaborations between artists and scientists; for pushing the bounds of biotechnology and prodding with equal vigour at its ethical limits. While a few works in semipermeable (+) eschew the lab-ware in favour of traditional installation, the overall aesthetic is strongly grounded in the microscopic, the genetic, and forms of living (or dead) containment.

A hallmark of SymbioticA is the work of founder Oron Catts with Ionat Zurr, and it’s great to see their now-iconic Victimless Leather (2004) here – a living, miniature coat grown from continuously dividing human and mouse cell lines, and ‘fed’ by an automated nutrient drip. Alongside it is a new work by Catts, Zurr and Corrie van Sice, The Mechanism of Life – After Stephane Leduc (2013). Pointing to Leduc’s 1911 theory that life is merely a chemical process, a custom-built apparatus ‘prints’ blobs of ‘protocells’ into a petri dish, the inks and dyes spreading to form hexagonal arrays that miraculously ‘grow’ before your eyes.

From life, to un-life: a dead cane toad makes music – albeit very, very quietly. It’s a sort of fuzzy, low, soft sound, usually inaudible, but processed for the human ear in Cat Hope’s Sound of Decay (2013). The corpse itself is a vaguely disturbing form almost obscured by the condensation that lines the walls of its sealed glass container, and as such evokes death and a kind of elongated time-scale more surely, perhaps, than a clear view.

German artist Verena Friedrich takes the endless promises of the cosmetic industry and manipulates skin cells to tout the benefits of ‘cosmeceuticals’, displaying the results in a video installation titled Cellular Performance (2011–12). Rendered in electric blues, stark whites and rich blacks, the cells with their tree-like appendages and neon brightness form words: natural living things infused with a decidedly ambiguous dose of consumer culture.

Nigel Helyer, Supereste ut Pugnatis (Pugnatis) ut Supereste (SPPS), 2013 (installation, detail)

Almost opposite Friedrich’s micro-billboards, Nigel Helyer’s slick, steel, contaminant-bearing missiles evoke both fertilisation and all-out biological warfare at macro scale. Intricately detailed, their crafting is both sci-fi and organic, reminiscent of Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s Museum of Copulatory Organs (Sydney Biennale, 2012). Carrying SPPS – “an omnisexual bacterium, ingesting histories and narratives that connect through powerful metaphorical bonds” – Helyer’s missiles have a disturbing ‘biological’ appearance, less like bombs than seed carriers shot across borders with the aim of catching their sharp fins on unsuspecting hosts.

Several further works in semipermeable (+) employ the use of cultures and cell lines: foreskin cells reverse engineered to create a functioning neural network (Guy Ben-Ary and Kirsten Hudson); a human/canine hybridoma (Benjamin Forster); fluorescently transformed embryonic kidney cells; virally ‘tattooed’ skin cells (Tagny Duff). These explorations of ‘what we can do’ with biological matter feed an artistic space that holds many conflicts – and there’s a strong sense of the (desirable or undesirable?) ‘semipermeability’ of a natural domain whose borders were once considered impenetrable.

The ubiquity of sealed glass cases, plugged flasks and contained fluids – all necessary for containing the biohazards or fragile life-forms within – has a certain irony, given the theme of the membrane and its qualities of porosity, transfer and exchange. In semipermeable (+), we are locked out of life’s processes, except when they are simulated. And this, in a sense, is telling: the rigidity of our control over nature demands that we’re protected from the renegade species, from the contaminant, from the challenge to our integrity – whether it’s from biohazard or infiltrating thought. The mix of sterile glass and proliferating life (or death) within is potent; because ultimately the ideas that emerge around this work are what slip across our perceptive borders, infecting us whether we touch, breathe, brush up close, or not.

I am haunted by the goofy laugh that punctuated Stelarc’s 90-minute presentation of his extraordinary and gruesome body of work (or perhaps work of body). This laugh erupts from him at curious moments—an awkward, teenage boy-like honk—providing a real sense of the man inside the artist and offering more insight perhaps than standard theoretical analysis into his artistic and personal motivations.

The title, Meat, Metal, Code, neatly encapsulates his various approaches. Meat covers his suspension works in which the artist, and more recently willing participants drawn from the body modification scene, are suspended in space by butcher’s hooks. The body floats freed of weight yet we are more aware than ever of gravity’s awesome power. Meat also incorporates Stelarc’s most challenging work, Extra Ear in which he is growing an ear on his forearm (no doctor would agree to let him grow it on his head). Stelarc pulls up his sleeve and shows us the quite perfect looking ear in relief that is emerging, the cells and blood supply forming over an architecture made from a micro pore inserted under the skin. When completed, the ear will have its own microphone in order to record and transmit sounds, a process tested and found to be successful when the operation was first undertaken.

Metal addresses the various robotic and biomorphic appendages that Stelarc has created to augment his own body, or later, to act as independent agents. These include his third arm, an upper body exoskeleton, a six-legged walking machine and finally a swarm of dancing robots sporting screens for heads. Code is incorporated into all these works of course, but it also takes the spotlight in pieces such as Prosthetic Head, an illustrated 3D representation of the artist, freckles and all, that responds to questions and stimuli. Stelarc had this head lip-synch to early 20th century tenor Enrico Caruso as the conclusion of his presentation. As ISEA executive creative producer Alessio Cavallaro quipped, “it ain’t over until the Prosthetic Head sings.”

Mixed among Stelarc’s own work were fascinating examples of scientific developments that excite him: all terrain insect robots powered by “wegs;” electronic circuitry that can be applied directly to the skin like a fake tattoo; and organ printing experiments in which standard Hewlett Packard technology is adapted to utilise living cells instead of ink to build up functioning organs layer by layer.

This catalogue of information flowed mostly historically and with no real delineation between Stelarc’s art and the speculative research, but we never really heard much as to why he wanted to make these things, why push his body to these extremes. Only during the very short question time did the artist actually speak philosophically about his work. Quoting mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead, he says that our imaginations are only as interesting as our instruments, so perhaps he feels the responsibility to create new and better ones using his own body as the raw material. When asked about science fiction Stelarc says he is not so much interested in speculation but rather in “the direct experience of an actualised interface” and that the role of an artist is to “generate contestable futures.” Now we were getting into some meaty (metallic, code-rich) discussion but the MCA was closing and we were kicked out.

So I am left with Stelarc’s laugh—his bodily eruption of excitement and delight at these futures that he has built himself into and built into himself.

Interview with Michael Dagostino (director) and Megan Monte (curator) about Catching Light (1 June – 7 July), an exhibition of old and new media featuring collaborations between established and emerging artists.

Artists: Linda Dement & Kelly Doley, Wade Marynowsky & Michael Candy, Troy Innocent & Benjamin Kolaitis, Stephen Jones & Pia van Gelder, Tom Ellard & Cat Hope

The first of RealTime's video coverage of ISEA2013. Guest video artist Mike Leggett in conversation with Mari Velonaki, Simon Ingram and Petra Gemeinboeck & Rob Saunders exhibiting at Artspace, Sydney, 2 May – 16 June, 2013.

Three installations with robotics as common ground approach this growing area of gallery art in distinct ways.

Mari Velonaki's 'The Woman and the Snowman' responds to the advanced humanoid robotic research of Prof Hiroshi Ishiguro in Osaka by incorporating the artificial with large projections of real places and small renderings of images taken from personal histories. Within the swirling arcs of a kinetic machine are hidden narratives of mountain living, robotic skiers and long lost movies accompanied by layers of sound, responsive to their machinations. An innovator in the Field Robotics Lab at the University of Sydney, Mari relates the complexities and challenges of interdisciplinary art making.

Simon Ingram's use of Lego robotic components to make three large scale paintings over the period of the exhibition is a collaboration with the staff of Artspace who are able to affect the software Simon operates from his base in Auckland, New Zealand. A painter by background, since 2007 he has ' developed a way of working to build on and collaborate with abstract problems inherent in both the history of painting and a range of attempts to plot living systems and electromagnetic energy.'

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders 'Accomplice' incorporates machine learning with audience experience of the mechanical destruction of the walls of the gallery. The robots – only glimpsed as they hammer holes from the other side – communicate and plan the next days work during the hours the gallery is closed. This is where AI (artificial intelligence) and wider dialogues about the role of robotic technology meet in a public arena, versed in the histories of destruction in art.
Mike Leggett

In the early 1990s, cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix imagined living with Big Daddy Mainframe. In her ISEA/Vivid keynote address anthropologist Genevieve Bell suggested we are now living with Big Daddy Data. The machine has become secondary—it’s the information that lives. This data is generated by our lives, but once created it has a life of its own. Bell suggests it even has desires.

Bell grew up travelling around the Northern Territory with her parents and subsequently became an anthropologist. Somehow she ended up working at Intel in the US (she confesses it involved a late night bar conversation) where she was brought in to help the company with insights into what her boss described as “women (all of them) and ROW—Rest of World (everywhere that wasn’t America).” So now Bell whispers in Big Daddy Mainframe’s ear illuminating Intel on what all females and all non-Americans might want from their machines and their handling of Big Data.

However Bell has taken this one step further and is interested in exploring what perhaps Big Data itself wants. She suggest 10 things:

1. Not all data wants to be digital (some information only has value in the physical world).
2. Data wants relationships (it seeks networks and needs other data for context).
3. Not all data has the same network (Australian’s know all about that!).
4. Data has country (context).
5. Data is feral (perhaps it doesn’t want to be contained—it will jump the fence when it sees the opportunity).
6. Data has responsibilities (our lives depend upon it).
7. Data is messy (that’s why it’s so hard to keep track of it).
8. Data likes to look good (particularly to algorithms).
9. Data doesn’t always want to last forever (for example Snap Chat where images only last a certain time and then are deleted from all online existence)
10. There will always be new data.

It’s not Big Data that Bell sees as a potential problem, but the fact that its interpretation is in the hands of “priests and alchemists” who tend to come from technological backgrounds rather than fields such as the social sciences and humanities. She talks of an alarming return to empiricism and “capital T Truth” in current technological culture. While the streams of data are multiple, it is as though postmodernism’s message of relativism never happened, hence a belief in a mantra that More data means more Truth. Bell leaves us with the suggestion that our responsibility as artists is to ensure we become part of the interpretation of Big Data.

This is certainly a responsibility that the speakers who followed have not shirked. Mark Holser from Negativland spoke to videoclips of the groups pioneering work in appropriation and media manipulation. A particular entertaining anecdote involved a hoax they pulled issuing a fake press release announcing the cancellation of a tour due to the linking of one of their songs, “Christianity is Stupid”, with an axe-murdering christian teenager. The group was amazed as to how the story played out across the mainstream media becoming a performance in itself.

The final keynote speakers, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, have taken this idea of ‘media performance’ to its zenith. The duo discussed their Hacking Monopolism Trilogy in which they have variously infiltrated internet moguls Amazon, Google and, most recently, Facebook. The latter project, Face to Facebook (http://www.face-to-facebook.net/), involved the “scraping”—harvesting of data that is available without actually hacking through security—of one million Facebook profiles. Using basic facial recognition software they selected 250,000 profiles and categorised them according to terms like ‘easy-going,’ ‘smug’ and ‘sly’ to create a fake dating site called Lovely Faces.

The project, launched as part of Transmediale 2011, created a furore of public, media and legal attention way beyond what the artists had imagined. The project upshot of the project is multifaceted. At the most basic level it illustrated a weakness in the Facebook security infrastructure (now fixed) which allowed them to so easily harvest the information. It also alerts the general public to the possible pitfalls of willingly handing over their personal data to a corporation, who, after all, is using their data to generate advertising income. Most importantly it traces the flow of information (and misinformation) through global media channels. Within a few days, the duo collected 1100 media responses, many including fictitious side stories. Far from being cheap pranks, each of the projects of the Hacking Monopolism Trilogy are highly conceptual and fascinating artworks casting a critical yet playful eye over our increasing reliance on and blind faith in Big Daddy Data.

The 742 world-heritage-listed caves of Dunhuang were laboriously carved out of a sandstone escarpment in north-western China. Their Buddhist murals are both astonishing and highly fragile – the oldest are well over 2000 years old. Pure Land recreates one of them, Cave 220, at 1:1 scale in virtual 3D.

Essentially, Pure Land is a diorama, which we’re guided through by creator Sarah Kenderdine. Donning virtual-3D glasses we enter the circular space. At first, it appears like any other interpretive display – it’s an in-the-round photo representation of the sandstone cliffs over which hover thumbnails denoting different caves. Kenderdine selects Cave 220 and we’re off…

Plunged into darkness, our first glimpse of the cave walls is via a pale circle of torchlight which dully illuminates patches of the intricate artwork on the walls: this is what a visitor to the physical cave would see, and it’s easy to imagine the damp smell, the dust underfoot. Then the mode is switched and we see the entire cave and its majestic figures, and the extension and limits of the space become palpable – it feels like we’re ‘really there’ – which is ironic, of course, because the obscured, 2D ‘torch view’ is actually closer to the ‘real’ experience.

From here, we’re subject to the whims of a floating circle – reference to the magnifying glass which a scholar of the artworks might use in the caves. It hovers like a perfect smoke ring away from the wall, homes in and clicks, magnifying details in larger circles that hang at arm’s length from the viewer. A range of effects brings to life aspects of the murals – restoring the original, vibrant pigments to some sections, enlarging details or animating objects – lanterns are lit and ribbons flutter. Oxidised figures regain their skin tones. Stringed and percussion instruments float off the walls and rotate to the sounds of traditional music.

It’s a museum display, an experience of art rather than an ‘art experience’. And yet two 3D-animated dancers with twirling ribbons are magical: at around 2/3 human stature it’s as though their size becomes a metaphor for their distance from us across time. They are there in the space in front of us, oblivious to us, moving in perfect unison and we are voyeurs of their ancient world. This image, of all, sticks in my mind after leaving.

The utter opposite of Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics [ver 2.0], Pure Land aims at pure representation of the real. But as Kenderdine explains, it’s not simply an ‘interactive experience’ designed only for the museum visitor or to preserve the caves. To understand the murals themselves, she says, requires a spatial relationship: the alignment of figures in the actual caves – north, south, east or west – is crucial, and grasping the meaning of the murals requires a knowledge not only of the figures, objects and elements, but of their spatial relationship to one another.

Pure Land is also located firmly in the notion of verity – unlike one of its (now-cancelled, unfortunately) iCinema companions, Scenario (a poetic, interactive fantasy involving an AI-equipped humanoid imprisoned in a basement – see RealTime 104). The differences seem polar: Pure Land aims to ‘take us there’ – where ‘there’ is a real place. We remain spectators while navigating – though poetic and emotional engagements like my own with the dancing figures are possible. With so many different ways of viewing this ‘real’ place, the result is a kind of meta-verity, in which much more can be seen – and perhaps responded-to – than if we were actually there.

The first of RealTime’s video coverage of ISEA2013. Guest video artist Mike Leggett in conversation with Mari Velonaki, Simon Ingram and Petra Gemeinboeck & Rob Saunders exhibiting at Artspace, Sydney, 2 May – 16 June, 2013.

Three installations with robotics as common ground approach this growing area of gallery art in distinct ways.

Mari Velonaki’s ‘The Woman and the Snowman’ responds to the advanced humanoid robotic research of Prof Hiroshi Ishiguro in Osaka by incorporating the artificial with large projections of real places and small renderings of images taken from personal histories. Within the swirling arcs of a kinetic machine are hidden narratives of mountain living, robotic skiers and long lost movies accompanied by layers of sound, responsive to their machinations. An innovator in the Field Robotics Lab at the University of Sydney, Mari relates the complexities and challenges of interdisciplinary art making.

Simon Ingram’s use of Lego robotic components to make three large scale paintings over the period of the exhibition is a collaboration with the staff of Artspace who are able to affect the software Simon operates from his base in Auckland, New Zealand. A painter by background, since 2007 he has ‘ developed a way of working to build on and collaborate with abstract problems inherent in both the history of painting and a range of attempts to plot living systems and electromagnetic energy.’

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders ‘Accomplice’ incorporates machine learning with audience experience of the mechanical destruction of the walls of the gallery. The robots – only glimpsed as they hammer holes from the other side – communicate and plan the next days work during the hours the gallery is closed. This is where AI (artificial intelligence) and wider dialogues about the role of robotic technology meet in a public arena, versed in the histories of destruction in art.
Mike Leggett

As seductive and profound as Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics 2.0 was, a sneak preview of test pattern immediately following the performance added a (literally) human dimension that took both works to a higher set of coordinates.

“To me, beauty is crystal: rationality, precision, simplicity, elegance, delicacy. The sublime is infinity, infinitesimal, immensity, indescribable, ineffable.”

But first, datamatics [ver 2.0], which, it turns out, is all of the above. A near-monochrome diamond-cut of ones and zeros flying faster than the eye can grasp; an hour of heartbeat-paced, Morse-toned pips and subliminal surges.

What I’ll call Act I is pure 2D surface: black screen, white bars, barcodes, churning letters and numbers, an infinite, ever-changing scroll of data that approaches the vertiginous – seasickness is somewhere just beyond the peripheral vision. Infinitesimally high-pitched pips and chest-numbing hums accompany a flickering rainfall of unintelligible information. But it’s not long before the unprocessable begins to be processed – not only do letters and numbers become readable despite their impossible frame rate; it seems abstraction can only exist for so long before representation rears its head. Vertical lines gain ‘heads’ and become pins; tilted on an angle they become a fully-strung loom, then a dance; horizontal galloping frames are passing trains… But most of all, black becomes black-ness – a space – and everything white moves forward out of the surface, floating.

And it’s space that dominates in a slowly-turning ‘Act II’. Not only a mapped-out universe whose anonymous stars are sequentially named and positioned; it’s a spatial landscape too of submarine pings into the echoing deep. What emerges from it is a profound representation of the impact of mathematics on the world, the endless grid of ‘knowledge’ that positions everything from clustering stars to swarming starlings; weaving ubiquitous right-angled webs and grids across everything that moves. The 3D scanner replaces the barcode, its octave span of lock-in tones works into a slow, lulling rhythm.

From rotating starbeds to a white space-scape in which an architecture is drawn, layer upon layer – linking white dots that flock like blossom then clouds of birds then fine hexagonal molecules in complex formations. Cumulatively, inexorably, Ikeda expresses a beauty of mathematisation – and maps out an almost tangible spatial realm between the data and its representation.

datamatics [ver 2.0] escapes its scenic structure towards the end, compounding and decaying: masses of moving white dots compete with a glitch across their geographical field; 2D and 3D, black, white, grey, binary and organic forms share the screen in blinding succession. Axes and rhythms continue to bind together a now-overwhelming mass of coordinates, an obsession with the cross-hair, with the heartbeat, with the infinite and the minute. Ultimately, thumbnails from previous screens appear embedded in the endlessly scrolling raw data, like glimpses of the creator from a world (or an edit-suite) afar. Flashes of sepia seem to fly by, even single frames of colour amid what now sounds like a toned-out, machinic drum and bass track. Colour? Data might technically be dead-matter but the screens seem alive: it’s clinical and pulsing, and I’m starting to doubt what I’m seeing. Colour?

And then it ends. And then I’m next door, taking off my shoes and stepping onto an enormous, strobing field of light: Ikeda’s test pattern. Like a distillation (or expansion) of datamatics [ver 2.0] into literal space, test pattern is conveyer-belting barcodes flying across the floor at hundreds of frames a second – plus humans standing around in the middle of it. Their clothes are coloured, they have curves, hair, bags, all illuminated by the streaming light under their feet. This is not a work of abstraction, it’s literally alive. The sound is less ’scape and more securely ‘music’: nevertheless it drills sensual holes into the skull.

From above – and this is the great beauty of test pattern, its gallery view down onto the floor – the people below are like the clots of live matter in datamatics [ver 2.0]. There may be a dark side – at times they seem oblivious of the conveyer-belt that might be transporting them, observable only from the outside…But most of all it seems like a bizarre picnic: clusters of visitors sitting around, chatting even, in the blinding, strobing light, apparently undisturbed by their absorption into the data matrix.

In datamatics [ver 2.0] the natural world evolves from abstraction, it’s mobile and is pinned down by line and coordinate. Participating in test pattern, the natural and the unpredictable – the human element – is relatively still against the streaming data, relentless metaphor for an infinitely mathematised world. Seen together, both works are utterly immersive – the former through eyes and ears, and the latter through our actual presence in the work; surrounded by a black-and-white that’s both meaningless and potent, and where the real information is in our own human form.

X and Y are busy letters. Mostly ignored by word makers, the mathematicians and scientists took pity and gave them the important job of describing the placement of objects in space. Watching Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics [ver 2.0] I am made keenly aware that I am merely a dot on the XY axis of the universe.

Datamatics parses the information of our existence. The sources are not clear—I can only glean star locations and chromosome sequences—but somehow by the end of this audiovisual performance lasting just under an hour, I am sure that all the information that dictates my being has passed before my eyes and been audibly manifested. It’s simultaneously breathtaking, exhilarating, terrifying and humbling.

Datamatics consists almost solely of dots and lines, letters and numbers. These are rendered in reverse—white on black—with short ruptures of black on white, and the occasional restrained applications of red and blue. The opening sequence has dashes of varying lengths in columns streaming vertically. Quick to make figurative analogies from the abstraction, I think ruler markings, Morse code, punch cards, pianola rolls. Then information begins to reveal itself, unravelling from the block lines like pulled threads (I think of Ada Lovelace weaving), to form connections between streaming numbers and letters which I absorb rather than read. The process of analogising becomes futile and I begin to ride the data flow.

The piece progresses from two dimensional scenes—defined by vertical flows or horizontal streams—shifting in the second half (the new addition to datamatics from its original 2006 version)—to rotating intersections of lines defining three dimensional space. Finally it resolves into branch like crystalline structures, but the glitch in the system, the error code, is never far away rupturing scenes and finally becoming all-powerful in the awe-ful conclusion.

All these markings would be just that, without the remarkable power of Ikeda’s sound—his work defines audiovisuality. This is physically powerful music made from data sonification and digital glitches—eardrum ripping beeps and snaps, brain freezing sine tones and thorax thrumming bass rumbles. This essentially noisy palette is held together with tightly controlled yet not overly predictable pulses and rhythms and precise alignment of audio and visual. We are propelled through this potentially alienating inundation of sound and image by the pleasure of synch points—the red cross hatch goes with the high peeping, the planar shift with the bass hum—orienting us in the sound-image space. Constantly surprised by sudden noises and flashes of light, we are never left adrift to drown in this sea of information.

Processing huge amounts of data hurts. (I know, I’ve been manually indexing the 1000 articles that make up the RealTime Media Arts Archive) and Ikeda shares his pain in a postmodern exposition of metadata. The final section of datamatics cannibalises the information that constructs the sound and images of performance itself. Screengrabs, scene numbers and specifications can be identified in the final frenzy of flashing, scrolling information that fades from black to white via the introduction of a sickly sepia to the palette. All the information seems to fold in on itself in possibly one of the most spectacular audiovisual crescendos I’ve ever experienced.

And then it’s over. We are released from this glorious information onslaught. I can’t help feeling I’ve seen some dark secret in the data, something that makes me feel both part of some enormous universe yet more alone than ever—a single dot on an XY axis.

In its press release of 3 May, ISEA2013 added weight to its “Resistance is Futile” theme by announcing that a Special Keynote speech would be delivered to conference delegates by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange via live video link from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, 5.30pm 13 June.

Assange’s presence emphatically underlines the ambiguity of ISEA’s theme: “the 2013 program explores the ways art and new technologies are used in the service of power, protest and resistance.” The internet that increasingly monopolises our lives is nonetheless an invaluable tool, if not of the utopian order dreamt of in the 1990s.

As the ISEA2013 press release puts it, “Julian Assange has a unique insight into the futility, or otherwise, of resisting the incursion of the digital into every aspect of our lives. In systems under constant and multiple pressures there will always be leaks. Wikileaks exists because of this, embracing the digital, exploiting the ubiquity of digitised information: Resistance is Fertile.”

ANAT, Synapse: A Selection

On 3 May, ISEA revealed a third batch of events in an enormous program which displays the works of 150 artists and delivers talks, forums and partnered events with VIVID Sydney. Synapse: A Selection looks back over five years of collaborations between artists and scientists with works by artists, some of whom are represented elsewhere in ISEA2013: Keith Armstrong, Helen Pynor & Peta Clancy, George Poonkin Khut, Mari Velonaki, Erica Secombe, Ken+Julia Yonetani, Nola Farman, Chris Henschke and Kirsty Boyle.

Along with the launching of the RealTime Media Art Online Archive 1994-present and Campbelltown Arts Centre’s Catching Light exhibition (bringing together digital artists from the 1990s and current practitioners), Synapse: A Selection provides a short-term historical perspective in a field that can sometimes develop too quickly for reflection and, curiously, is archivally weak.

SymbioticA, semipermeable (+)

In semipermeable (+) at the Powerhouse Museum, SymbioticA—the University of Western Australia’s Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, will present extant and newly commissioned works from 15 artists including Nigel Helyer and the centre’s director Oron Catts. The works range from investigations into “protocells, infection and DNA through to skins and garments, to borders and state control.” Surprisingly, after many years of internationally respected experimentation and creation, this is SymbioticA’s first major exhibition in Sydney.

Electric Nights, Parramatta

ISEA2013’s programming is notable for its incursion into the streets (including Electronic Art Pop-Ups by six international artists in The Rocks) and greater Sydney. At dusk, 15-16 June, on the banks of the Parramatta River, “audiences can interact with a mass of LED-lit balloons, participate in a kinetic sculpture on bikes to generate energy and watch stilt performers with roaming data projection.” There’ll also be Indonesian food associated with an interesting food-internet crossover in the form of Grobak Padi 2013.

The grobak is a traditional Indonesian food cart, although serving food is not its function here. In Grobak Padi 2013 “wired up carts will link Sydney and Yogyakarta live via multi-channel links, along with in-cart video art and a multimedia dance spectacle by artists Michael Hornblow (Australia), Agung Gunawan (Indonesia) and Tony Yap (Australia/Malaysia).”

Keith Armstrong, Long Time No See?

Keith Armstrong’s collaborative work, facilitated by Western Sydney’s Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE), Long Time, No See? (www.long-time-no-see.org) will also be found in Parramatta. A specialist in interactive installation and art-science collaborations, Brisbane-based Armstrong and co-creators will provide the public with “an opportunity to create possible futures through data mapping and a smartphone App on local walks through Parramatta.”

The Portals

At Chatswood’s new cultural centre, The Concourse, five telematic artworks will connect communities in Sydney and Darwin through networked and interactive artworks, via high speed broadband and large screens in public spaces—a welcome change from big screen advertising and an opportunity for artists to show the public how to make the creative most of online infrastructure. “The Portals includes live art, visual art, e-literature, interactive performance, sound art and community engagement” with some works running continuously and others as “one-off performance events in Darwin and Sydney.”

In Metaverse Makeovers (LIVE), artists will work “with nail technicians to makeover members of the public with stick-on nail ‘appcessories’ created by Thea Baumann and collaborators—wearable augmented-reality nail accessories that interact with a companion game app” that connects the two cities.

The Portals also includes Shadow Net, using Microsoft’s Kinect technology “to incorporate the shadows of passers-by…into a shared, virtual game space; Distributed Empire, a real-time portrait generator that recombines the faces and voices of volunteers in various locations; and Is Starlight A Wifi Signal? which encourages audiences in Sydney and Darwin to interact via their mobile devices with a networked performance that includes moving bodies, projections and text” (The Portals, press release; www.facebook.com/ThePortalsProject).

Memebrain Art Hackfest

Also at the Concourse, is the intriguing “cross-locational” Memebrain Art Hackfest, a long-term project starting out at ISEA, created by Sydney-based dLux MediaArts with Dorkbot, The Portals Project, Darwin Community Arts and Byron Bay’s Kulchajam. Its aim is “to generate rich creative exchange in an informal online atmosphere to challenge the way media are used culturally.” The artists, working in the Concourse’s underground, invite the public to join them online.

Troy Innocent, Zydnie

Overground, leading Melbourne media artist Troy Innocent will also be at the Concourse, as well as in Darlinghurst and Newtown with Zydnie, his street game “that explores colonisation as an ongoing process via urban codes and language. Choose one of the three warring factions in a battle to revert, renew or remake the city.”

RealTime@ISEA

If you’re attending ISEA2013 or keeping track of it at distance, follow RealTime bloggers Urszula Dawkins and Gail Priest daily (http://isea2013-in-realtime.net/) and catch reviews and video interviews and exhibition coverage at www.realtimearts.net

Immerse!

Events like The Portals, PVI’s Deviator, Electric Nights and others offer opportunities for the public to engage with artists and their works online or on the streets. Some of these you can simply visit, some you need to book for. ISEA offers new relationships with art, technologies and the internet that will take you beyond the everyday of email overload and tweeted gossip. RT

ISEA2013, 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Sydney, 7-16 June; www.isea2013.org

In The Body in Question, writers Ilana Cohn, Barbara Campbell, Antonella Casella and Robert Reid respond to changes in practice, presentation, expectations and artist-audience relations in performance art, circus, dance, live art and new game theatre.

Dancer Rennie McDougall talks with dancer and choreographer Luke George about a work-in-development, Not About Face, in which George plays medium to an audience covered in bedsheets with eyeholes cut out in a fantasy version of spirituality which will reveal “languages of movement from past teachers and choreographers, the traces of which remain present long after.”

Anne Thompson kickstarts our new series, Women+performance, a survey of the current generation of innovative contemporary performance, live art and cutting edge theatre artists across Australia, starting with an interview with Adelaide-based Tessa Leong and Emma Beech.

The CAD Factory started life in 2003 far from rural tranquility in Sydney’s inner-city industrial borough of Marrickville. It was an artist-run space presenting gigs, exhibitions and housing a recording studio. In 2010, CAD Factory founder Vic McEwan and partner Sarah McEwan opted for a scrub-change and moved to Birrego, 30 kilometres southeast of Narrandera in regional NSW, where they’d purchased a rundown one room schoolhouse. Here they’ve set up home and a base for a vibrant cultural organisation that is presenting an impressive program of community-focused events in the Riverina region.

Their schedule of projects has been growing steadily, starting small in 2011 with artist residencies and music gigs. This year they have a full year-long program including an eight-day live-in makefest at the Grong Grong Hotel, performances at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery as well as school workshops and activities that emerge from their residency program. The CAD Factory also has two major site-specific collaborative projects: Tipping Point (not to be confused with the green think-tank series run by Angharad Wynne-Jones), and a major art/business collaboration with the SunRice Co-operative.

Tipping Point

Vic McEwan describes the idea behind the work: “[The Tipping Point] is the watershed between the Murray and the Murrumbidgee. If rain falls on this side of the little hill it flows into the Murray, if it falls on that side it flows into the Murrumbidgee. We were looking at that as a literal tipping point but we also did interviews with local people about the tipping points that they have, whether they are psychological, environmental or social in relation to water.”

Interviews were conducted with people who have different relationships with the area and its water. Participants included Julie Briggs, a lawyer who deals with the legalities of water as a tradeable commodity; Graham Strong, a farmer and musician engaged in sustainable farming practices; Des Edwards, the former-Mayor of Narrandera; and Cedric Briggs, the area’s most senior Aboriginal elder. Briggs grew up on missions on both the Murray and the Murrumbidgee rivers and was part of the Cummeragunja walk-off in 1939 when 200 Aboriginal people left the mission in NSW in protest, crossing the river to Victoria, where many settled. McEwan condensed these interviews into full-page articles that were published in the local paper and then Vic and Sarah created illustrations, animations and sound works inspired by the material. After conducting the Cedric Briggs interview, they set up a workshop with the local high school and invited four Aboriginal students to illustrate his story.

The final presentation was a 35-minute audiovisual performance projected onto the ruins of an old brewery on the banks of the Murrumbidgee, on the edge of the town. The original idea was to create a sculptural screen out of the industrial pivot irrigation systems used on farms, but the iconic site was about to be sold to a private owner so they decided to change the plan—this fluid, responsive decision-making appearing to be a real strength of the McEwans’ working process. “We thought this is the only opportunity to use this; it’s related to water and it means we can take one of our projects right into the middle of town. So it was a bit of a strategy about exposing more people to what we do.” And it worked, drawing a crowd of 400 people. As one of the ten One River projects curated by Lindy Allen, Donna Jackson and Malcolm McKinnon, Tipping Point also will have a second life in Canberra as part of Robyn Archer’s Centenary program (see interview with Robyn Archer).

SunRice

Following Tipping Point will be the culmination of the SunRice collaboration in which Vic McEwan, photographer Mayu Kanamori (Aus/Japan) and installation artist Shigeaki Iwai (Japan) will be artists-in-residence at the newly re-opened Coleambally Mill (the site was closed during the worst of the drought). McEwan and Kanamori have already stayed for a week to familiarise themselves with the site, watch the first harvest and also to allow the workers to get accustomed to the idea of having artists around. The deal struck by McEwan was that he would raise the money but SunRice would offer access to the factory and allow staff to be involved on company time—a significant investment and leap of faith for a corporation. The outcome in September is expected to be a walk-around performance with installations in the factory and adjoining storage areas.

McEwan discusses this art/business relationship: “I often work with community but I’m also interested in how to work with business. We’ve asked the CEO of SunRice to give us a document that tells us what they think they can get from our project that will satisfy their business plan. It means in the future we can go to organisations and say if you employ an artist to be in your factory for a month or two they can deliver this project that has these artistic outcomes but it can also satisfy these business outcomes.” However he’s keen to stress, “we wouldn’t be doing this with an organisation that we weren’t happy with. We feel SunRice is a moral company that has the community’s best interest at heart.”

Working the region

It’s testament to the McEwans’ charm and sensitivity that they’ve been able to develop these productive relationships with the local community and industry in such a short time. McEwan says when they first moved into their schoolhouse they were unable to get running water at the property. After the positive community response to one of their early events, the committee in charge of the private water scheme in the area agreed to allow them access to the facility. A fair trade of water for art perfectly exemplied holistic community cultural engagement. With Vic McEwan now working full time on CAD Factory activities, including putting the final touches to a fully equipped recording studio, projects and partnerships look to grow ever more ambitious. Over the next few years CAD Factory events will definitely be worth the roadtrip.

RealTime in the Riverina

Later this year, RealTime will be covering key arts events in the Riverina and surrounding regions working with The CAD Factory, Narrandera, Wired Lab, Cootamundra and Eastern Riverina Arts. We will be delivering a writing workshop in the region as well as online coverage including video and audio documentation of selected projects.

That landscape haunts Australian performance has become almost a cliché. I was infected by one recently, driving from Brisbane to the Gold Coast to work on a show about vaginas with a group of young women.

This is a landscape drenched by a collective past that many of us eschew: the DNA of Bjelke-Petersen Queensland is encoded in the pastel skyscrapers and the discarded leisure playgrounds of past generations.

But I was a dramaturgical greyhound with a scent and what struck me was transformation. Traditionally the Gold Coast has suffered, like other satellite cities (Newcastle, Wollongong, Geelong and even Hobart) from a slow leaching of talent and legitimacy.

For a population of half a million, there is no professional theatre company, despite a thriving amateur arts community. As Patrick Mitchell, a theatre director who has spent the last four years writing about Gold Coast theatre for his PhD at Griffith University, suggests, there is also a neglected history of commercial performance.

This is the city with a cabaret scene that nurtured Peter Allen, a music scene with all-night Pyjama Parties at the Beachcomber Motel and legendary rock gigs at the Tallebudgera Playroom; one that sustained luvvies and professional performers until the advent of the Casino in the 1980s.

The camp and performative terroir of the Gold Coast has been sustained by the Warner Brothers film studios, theme parks, dinner theatre restaurants and the sheer unabashed display of the landscape, thrown together without the civility of planning. But somehow the city is now coming into its own in a way that a new generation of artists is embracing without anxiety.

Like Anna Carey, who builds models of remnant 1960s iconic leisure architecture and photographs them (Pacific Moon); or Brett Ramsay who photographs trompe-l’oeil and painterly sleights of hand in the various leisure precincts of the city (Leisure[e]scapes 1).

Ripeness is all when you look at the Gold Coast through the lens of creative industries. Instead of a post-industrial economy we have a post-pastel one: stagnating tourism dollars, low rents, high student populations and a city council eager to rebrand itself through arts and culture in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2018. Indeed, submissions for the design of a new arts and cultural precinct to co-time with the Games have been announced and include a new 400-500 seat theatre.

Reclaimed cultural spaces are mushrooming in the industrial estates situated between the beachfront villages of the wealthy and the rolling suburban estates of ex-pats, young families and retirees.

Like 19 Karen Street behind Mermaid Beach for street/live art; Crown Studios at Burleigh Beach for contemporary music, design and video art; and Techspace for digital work behind Southport Beach. The most arresting of these artist-led spaces is Rabbit and Cocoon behind Miami Beach, an arts and cultural precinct with 40 resident artists, curating its own radio station and staging performances and fashion shows.

The Design Institute of Australia opened a branch in 2012 and there has been an explosion of independent theatre companies showcased by the Arts Centre’s recent Independent season, including Soapbox Theatre Productions, Awkward Productions, White Rabbit Theatre and newer Gold Coast/Brisbane hybrids including Rocket Boy Ensemble and Blacklight Collective.

Festivals are proliferating, from the popular Currumbin-based sculpture festival, Swell, to the Surfers Paradise Festival and Bleach, which exported one of its shows, The Surfer and the Mermaid, to the Tamarama Rock Surfers Children’s Season in Bondi in 2012.

What characterises all of this activity is a sort of postmodern adjacency. Like the unplanned and kitsch rococo of the landscape it is an unashamed mix of commercial sensibility and traditional aesthetics, street and vintage, sport and performance, fashion and eco-poetics.

As an outsider to the Gold Coast it is easy to find these juxtapositions glamorous when I don’t have to live or work within their contradictions or limitations.

But I leave judgment to the ‘little master’ of Australian performance, Artistic Director of Opera Australia (and formerly of the Brisbane Festival and the Queensland Music Festival), Lyndon Terracini, who is planning to stage a three-day Opera on the Beach in May 2014, to be performed at Greenmount on a stage made of sand. His impeccable sense of the popular zeitgeist signals that something is about to pop in this post-pastel landscape: as Muriel said “goodbye Porpoise Spit” and, as we move closer to the Commonwealth Games and its Arts Festival in 2018, welcome to a growing cultural energy.

Exist-ence, founded by Rebecca Clunn in 2008 and co-curated by Clunn, Nicola Morton in 2013, describes itself as “a festival of live art, performance art and action art.” Although by no means alone as Arts House, Punctum, Performance Space and others nurture live art, it is certainly a unique festival in terms of ambition, continuity and growing national and international scope.

Entranced by Labanna Babalon’s (US) new age-punk-booty-popping online personality? You’ll be wanting to meet her in the flesh at exist-ence 5 where attendees might well be “sucked in by my venus flytrap booty popping and get a new perspective on life, aliens and why we’re all here (interview, www.vice.com).” Curator Morton, who first met the artist in 2008, says that Babalon’s performances can be quiet, candle-lit occasions. She certainly has an agenda: “You gotta put it in perspective of everything turning upside-down. Like, super right wing Christians almost seem like Satanists. Man becomes woman, woman becomes man. The Whore of Babylon becomes Jesus. All this stuff flips in order for us to graduate into 5D. Relaxed duality, the holy hermaphrodite embodying both of these things.”

Babalon’s overdrive new ageism and aura of sexual excess is an amusing mix of indulgence and critique, fantasy and realism; she’s like a logical extension of the hip Jessa in Lena Dunham’s Girls. “I have all sorts of idealistic and crazy fantasies, and I could also let go of them all and fall in love with one man and have a baby and hope the apocalypse doesn’t happen. But also, I wouldn’t mind having a Whoreship mansion filled with all my girlfriends and a whole floor of bathtubs and doing crazy love meditations that eventually cleanse the earth.” Morton tells me that Babalon’s Brisbane performance will be focused on “channelling her muse,” the subject of a rambling video currently online.

Boyish, long-haired Henrik Hedinge (Sweden) appears on Vimeo conducting odd tasks—walking on a row of wheat grain biscuits and making crude gloves for passersby with cabbage leaves and a stapler. But there are more visually striking, even disturbing instances of his work. Morton says that Hedlinge is currently focused on “morphing the body into the environment.” In recent work he has camouflaged himself in a room full of balloons, merged with foliage and now, “by strapping machine-like apparatuses to his body,” is becoming one with industrial society.

Other overseas artists in the program include Peter Baren (Holland) and John G Boehme (Canada/Australia). Baren’s work has been described as “multi-sensory…(his) ARK performances include fog, cling-plastic-wrapped performers, circling satellites, orphaned whisperings, molasses, written and spoken texts, boomerangs and more… to evoke a disquieting sense of primordial mystery, public yearning, fear and cultural reformation” (Lance Blomgren, LIVE2005 performance, Vancouver). Boehme, who now teaches full-time at Camosun College and is a seasonal lecturer at University of Victoria, has created many performances, including an edible spa (the artist bathing in and covered with food) and Canine Freestyle dancing with a small dog. A “trans-disciplinary artist, he writes, “I see Labour, Leisure and Sport as facets of the same unconsidered compulsion to fulfil societal expectations” (finearts.uvic.ca/~jgboehme). Also on the program is Sari TM Kivinen, an Australian/Finnish artist based in Helsinki who uses writing, role-play and “fragmentation” to tackle identity.

Nicola Morton says of Rebecca Clunn’s vision, “It’s always been her ambition to bring great international live artists to Brisbane because local artists and audiences have such rare opportunities to see them. It’s great to see how well we have all responded to her vision.” For exist-ence 5, the conference keynote speaker will be Jill Orr (jillorr.com.au) a leading Australian performance artist whose first works appeared in 1978.

Interstate Australian artists in the festival include Nathaniel Pyewacket, Julie Vulcan (see SPILL) and Jade Boyd, while Eric Rossi, James Cunningham, Bonnie Hart, Robert Millett and emerging artists Alrey Batol, Karike Ashworth, Anna Carluccio and Holly Childs number among Queensland artists who are well represented in the performance program as well as at the conference.

The two-day conference,”Performance, the Body and Time in the 21st century,” curated by Clunn and Tara Heffernan features 30 speakers, including some streamed overseas contributors. The conference will be followed by the three-day performance festival in June. Artists will then perform in July at A is for Atlas & Fehily Contemporary in Melbourne and Sydney’s PACT Centre for Emerging Artists.

Rebecca Clunn tells me via email that “the Live Art National Network (performancemap.org, using Google Map) will grow this event through our friends and colleagues in other states. The streaming app, Crystal—developed in collaboration with software engineer and EXIST contributor Kerstin Haustein—will allow participants to live stream performance directly onto the web. We hope the practice will reach a whole new audience; no matter where you are, you will be able to access the work digitally.”

Morton says that EXIST, the artist run initiative behind the exist-ence festival, aims to develop a live art audience in Brisbane and “much needed dialogue that goes beyond the cursory ‘what is live art?’ question.” She says that the standing of live art in Brisbane is improving with IMA (Institute of Modern Art) programming live art and especially with the support of Joel Stern and Danni Zuvela’s Otherfilm Festival, which “is bridging the gap between cinema and more figurational body practices.”

Exist-ence 5 will doubtless offer surprises, challenges and exhilaration, and the meeting of minds in bodies willed into uneasy states on the edge of the conventions of performance and the everyday. Let’s welcome that strangeness: “[I’ve] been doing social experimentation on Facebook, trying to communicate with aliens by putting out weird messages” (Labanna Babalona).

exist-ence 5, festival of live art, performance art and action art, QCA Project Gallery, Brisbane, 17-30 June; A is for Atlas & Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne, 10-13 July; PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, Sydney, 15-17 July

Castlemaine. A town rich in gold mining history. Set around a river that never runs (but often floods). A town where every second person you meet is a writer or artist. The best of inner city—coffee, dumplings, markets, gigs crammed into two big blocks. The best of rural as you watch roos and rosellas in your backyard after rain. A town where beautiful old buildings stand and decay. And every two years, an ambitious 10-day program of theatre, music, literature and visual arts.

Apparently you need a grandparent buried in the cemetery to call yourself a local, but I’ve been here nine months and this is my first festival. I can walk. Everywhere. The laneways are covered in works by high school kids. One stencil of a reindeer on the wall of the Bendigo Bank—with the accompanying inscription “Christmas is a lie”—causes outrage. A stealthy graffiti artist comes at night to blacken the inscription out. Makes front page of the local rag. You can’t offend Santa in this town. Or what’s his name, Jesus, for that matter. But does the teen artist remember a time when Christmas was about more than Masterchef-ing the BBQ, or cheap gift tags from the two dollar shop?

“I need a dollar, dollar, a dollar is what I need”
[soul singer, rapper Aloe Blacc]

Ranters Theatre, This Is Me—Now

Actually, the festival is rich with insight into what young artists think. In This Is Me—Now, Ranters Theatre creates video portraits with five teenagers from the region: Ruby Benedict, Ruby Scott, Bonnie Cook-Hain, Eamon Coulthard and Holly McNamara. The videos are about identity and space, and the rules of longing and belonging. Holly is a girl straight to camera, sitting in the bush. She describes it as a “very unconditional space…doesn’t need anything added to it” as she performs a soft-spoken song on her ukulele. Ruby Benedict does a performance piece to camera, becoming ‘the huntress’ on a red velvet couch. Ruby Scott turns her back, drawing a surreal cityscape that morphs into a creature as her voiceover draws me in. Bonnie, swinging her legs over the railway platform, sees herself as a girl who can’t conform—“most girls want to fit in…the in crowd”—and doesn’t care. In her white roller skates she talks about her love of books, music, family, friends and contact sports: “I like being pushed around on the field…Being different makes me feel confident.” Eamon imagines Castlemaine in a state of heightened anxiety—‘lock down’, ‘code red’—a place undergoing rapid (and sinister) change, where spikes are placed on the tops of buildings to ward off birds, even though no birds ever land there.

The Republic of Trees

But the birds have plenty of other places to land. Castlemaine is the kind of place where gleaning is encouraged. Organised groups fossick from trees ripe with apples and pears, distributing extras to community centres and local childcare. A living stage at the festival has planters. Tales of trees, of eco-survival, permeate the performances. In The Republic of Trees (based on Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees), a wandering minstrel show that meanders through beautiful Vaughan Springs, we encounter a dining table at dusk, with butlers in waiting and young women walking their dogs around the perimeter. We learn of creatures that can cross the country east to west, their feet never touching the earth. At midnight, Cosimo (Matt Wilson) joins the canopy, vowing never to set down again. Wilson’s physical theatre experience shows as he glides through trees on ropes and ladders, slippery with condensation. As we hear of God pissing down, rain starts to fall on us. Bookshelves and chairs are suspended, pulleyed, as we hear tales of yearning, philosophy, romance. For Cosimo, all that matters is principle, his ideologies of freedom, even if it means losing out on love. But his act becomes commodified, a display to be rolled out for an audience: “see nature’s greatest marvel.” And at what point—wars, horrors, exile, environmental degradation—is it more important to touch the ground?

The Man Who Planted Trees

In The Man Who Planted Trees, a farmer in Provence seeds hundreds of plants a day, in an arid region where nothing grows except wild lavender (the performers waft scents like lavender and mint over the audience with large fans). Scotland’s Puppet State Theatre Company takes us to meet him, accompanied by a dog (the true star of the show). The performance works brilliantly by paralleling two narratives: the straight parable, along with the dog’s meta-textual journey. A dog who just can’t help himself, he keeps butting us out of the narrative—“It turns out my eyes are buttons! Amazed I can see anything at all!”—to great comic effect. The timing is wonderful, the writing simple and complex (at once) and the show works on the level of all great children’s storytelling (The Muppets, Aardman) where the humour comes from where the two strands of narrative merge.

Site-specifics and Transplant

Back down on the ground and I head to the festival’s biennial visual arts program (curated by Deborah Ratliff), where the site-specific works are outstanding—Pia Johnson’s shrine of Chinese red packets, Hong Bao; Bindi Cole’s dialogue, I forgive you, at the Theatre Royal cinema; Tara Gilbee’s apothecary at Tutes Cottage; and Clayton Tremlett’s character sketches at the Old Police Lockup—before entering a tiny cube-theatre, and donning my scrubs for the puppetry production Transplant. As an operation goes awry and a woman unleashes frogs and flowers from her stomach, the actor-cum-doctor and his unpredictable patient manage to unnerve everyone to the point where I am the only audience member left in the room.

Chants des Catacombes

There’s a lot of talk of community in this town. And of protest too, for example the recent successful EPIC battle against the coming of the pokies. And now there’s the gaol. A beautiful and haunting site on a hill, looking over the town, it’s recently been sold for a pissy amount. There’s rumour of apartments. But it’s spectacular as a site for performance. The highlight of the festival is Chants des Catacombes. We arrive at the gaol at 11pm. Lit by small candles, we walk the flickering perimeter and are led into a dark space. Out of smoke, three screaming prisoners appear. Above and under us, the women are close enough to touch (and we do). They merge their foreheads to ours, pleading. They crawl through our legs, begging. Their voices soar through the corridors and down the narrow stairs as we follow them: a French showgirl in a salon (we loll on her bed as she plays the harp); a courtesan dancing for the general; a surgeon (under pretence: a woman pretending to be a man). And just as I’m thinking, “why do female characters have to be so passive?” the work takes up this question directly, speaks of Desdemona and Othello, shifts a gear to take up the fight.

The entire performance is told through contemporary song and dance, and undergoes a Baz treatment, morphing from the gender-bending Blur’s “Girls & Boys” to Nirvana to Portishead to Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and even Kelis’ “Milkshake” for comic effect. The three central performers Anna Boulic, Laura Burzacott and Zoe McDonald are murder victims trapped in the underworld and they raise hell with their voices. The choreography and lighting—as the musicians and actors lead you through the space—entrap and confront you with your own fears of madness and confinement. The audience is jittery. They hold back and are compliant. But the performers stay intimate and in-your-face, restless with violence and payback. It’s a performance I longed to see endlessly on repeat—in a space I couldn’t wait to be released from.

Canadian Bruce Ramus, a master of what he calls “integrated light art,” resides in Melbourne, his company’s base for the creation of large-scale public artworks. In 2011 he made Light Hearts for Federation Square’s The Light in Winter festival; he’s lit the Sydney Opera House for VIVID, illuminated Darling Harbour with Luminous, lit the Wintergarden facade in Brisbane and turned a sports park, AAMI, into a constantly morphing light sculpture.

Earlier in his career Ramus was responsible for the spectacular lighting designs for U2 and REM and their huge concert audiences. Today he is focused on the use of light to engender a sense of community in a different way, and sustainably so. I spoke with Ramus about the making of and the goals for a new, commissioned work for the 2013 Light in Winter, The Helix Tree.

You’ve had a long association with the relationship between light and music and of course the voice when you work with bands, but the brief for Light in Winter one looks pretty interesting in terms of its requiring a direct relationship between light and voice. Is it a relatively new thing for you?

We’ve been working on pieces that are interactive for about three years now. We installed a much larger one at Darling Harbour last year and that was very interactive, but not for voice, and the last piece we did in Fed Square, Light Hearts, had a very low-tech interactivity about it, encouraging children to make lanterns.

But we’ve been putting together a portfolio of ideas, software and code to enable us to make the most sense of these opportunities and make it mean something. It’s our way of trying to create spaces for community engagement with light.

It responds to two elements of voice, pitch and amplitude. The amplitude alters the brightness of the lights and the pitch changes the colour. The idea is that each evening at dusk a different choir comes to the piece and sings it to life. They will sing directly to it and make it change. The movement is pre-programmed but the actual volume of the voices allows the brightness and the movements to be revealed. The pitch changes the colour of the light as it’s moving.

Then, once the choir finishes, there’ll be a period of time when the public themselves can sing to it. After that it will go back to its own program and its own rhythm. That will be happening from 8.00 o’clock each evening until dawn the next day. Which gives the tree a chance to breathe at its own rhythm.

We’re experimenting with that now. I don’t know the specifics of the kind of microphone that we’re going to choose; that’s down to our sound designer. But it will be a centralised microphone. It’s not like a vocal microphone that you sing into. It’s directional, picking up the voice but it has a very narrow band of reception so it’s not picking up the wind and the traffic—just the voices that gather around it.

I started to look at the helix as a shape and I was inspired by the way it depicts an infinite flow of energy; it just keeps twisting and turning in space. I also noticed that helixes don’t impose on other helixes in nature. They intertwine—they’re harmonious. You don’t find competing helixes. They co-exist and create this harmonious energy. You can see it in trees and in the DNA of all of us, in our ear canals. Because community engagement is such a huge mandate for Federation Square, I began to see how it might make sense as a shape for this project. I saw how it could symbolise healthy families and communities where you have individual strands of energy— people—and when they don’t impose on each other, there’s harmony.

I loved the notion of power without resistance, the adaptability and flexibility of a tree where it is in true harmony with its environment. It gets pushed and pulled and moved around by nature but it maintains its strength without resisting.

The tree itself is built from mild steel pipes made from largely recycled steel. The large helixes are 219 mm wide and the smaller ones are 169 mm. Each one of those is about 21 metres long, making the overall height of the tree about 13 metres.

Yes. There’s a trunk where all the helixes begin within about a metre and a half of each other. So it’s very compact down at the base, and by the time the branches are at their widest they’re about 17 metres apart. It’s abstracted but one can certainly get the reference that this is a tree.

It’s a type of neon, but not actual neon with gas—that’s a little bit impractical for such a short period of time. We’re using LED neon that looks very similar but is essentially an RGB LED encased in opal plastic. So there are four strands of that on the large helixes and one on the small. There are 21 of these 21-metre long helixes. The idea is that the tree feels luminous. It doesn’t have fixtures attached to it per se, so it will feel like the tree is emanating light.

It sure has! Doing sculptures of this size, starting from nothing and doing the engineering design and fabricating this amount of steel, it’s very complicated. Imagine you’re looking at three seven-metre long pipes that are 220mm wide. That’s a big pipe. We bend that pipe and then we cut the pipe into about five sections and then twist each section, say five degrees, and re-weld it. The next one gets twisted seven degrees and re-welded. The next one is twisted 10 degrees and re-welded. So you get a helix curve out of something that doesn’t look like it should curve. And then when we go to erect it…it’s a mind-bender. And that’s only the tree, there are still the three ponds that it will stand in to build, and a very large viewing platform…all to give space for reflection.

It’s been a great learning process and a wonderful extension of my ability to see in three dimensions and to visualise. It’s too easy to grab the re-size tool on a CAD program and drag it till it says 13 metres. I’ve never tried to put so many very complicated curves into one very compact space.

Yes, it has. The site itself throws up challenges as well because, as you know, it is built over railway lines so there are significant weight-loading restrictions. The square is also covered by catenary wires that are about 14 metres tall, which make it difficult to get a crane in between all the wires…then there’s the high pedestrian traffic and the limited time…it’s not straightforward, but we love a challenge!

That’s the hope…that it will feel like a healing energy, some kind of communal harmony; that it brings some peace to the centre of a city—especially the one I live in. That’s a feeling that for me is rare. It’s not every day you get to put something like this in place. And we’re hoping that once it’s done it will be purchased for permanent installation.

The Light in Winter, director Robyn Archer, Federation Square, Melbourne, 1-30 June

Asakusa, Tokyo. The temples remain but the modern skyline grows: The Tokyo Skytree is the tallest building in the world; and Asahi Art Square, host of the Azumabashi Dance Crossing showcase, makes up for its smaller stature with an ostentatious tear-drop sculpture on its roof. Lit up at night, it is affectionately known as the “golden shit.” How the modern and traditional often seem incongruous in Japan.

In previous years the focus was on Azumabashi DANCE Crossing, but with the selection of works by curator Keisuke Sakurai, himself a choreographer and dance critic, the emphasis is now on CROSSING: hip-hop-rakugo, turntable-butoh, Zen-7/11-thrashmetal…in short, hybrid-performance.

The festival’s theme was “groovy bodies”—a rather vague and none-too-serious theme for post-tsunami, post-Fukushima Japan. Addressing this issue in local media before the event, Mr Sakurai said, “This 2013 edition of ADX was conceived in an attempt to reconsider not how art can serve an instrumental or practical purpose, but precisely its apparent ‘uselessness’—as well as the potential usefulness of this futility, if you will.”

The evening began with dance from 21seiki Gebageba Buyodan. It was a wishful and grotesque piece that shifted between mimed daily chores and the movement of addiction in daily life…perhaps a literal interpretation of “groovy bodies.” Danced to music best described as Middle-Eastern-ragtime, these abstractions of movement were playful or sometimes monstrous, such as the gathering of all the red-shirted dancers centrestage, standing back-to-back in a circle, to mime the eating of giant onigiri (rice balls). Subtle changes in pace built a tension that was sadly cut short by the allotted 20 minutes.

Next was Noriyuki Kiguchi’s irreverent meta-theatre. A man dressed as topographical Tokyo revs up the audience while on the screen behind him entries from Kiguchi’s diary explain possible ideas, lack of arts-funding and the difficulties of creating a piece for ADX. Kiguchi himself is called centrestage where he receives a shocking slap for said navel-gazing. This direct yet fractured social commentary is but one example of the influence of Oriza Hirata’s colloquial language style of theatre in the 1990s. Kiguchi’s final image—of the Japanese Emperor (who made a rare public appearance after the Tohoku earthquake) dancing the salsa while his wife (a man dressed in drag) encourages him with over-polite smiles—seems at first to be naff and inconsequential, but perhaps best grapples with the relationship between public face and private grief.

The offering from Toukatsu Sport was just as fractured in its conception. Projected on the back wall was the opening to Roman Polanski’s film adaptation of Carnage. Before we enter the apartment of the sitting-room drama the strings of the soundtrack are faded out and replaced by House beats, the film replaced by turntables, and two women who walk on stage dressed in hip-hop bling, carrying stuffed toys. They begin a rapid-fire monologue of what my +1 would later call “journalism of complaint”: about the venue; about recent pregnancy; dissing other theatre groups. Images alternate between Carnage, turntables and traditional rakugo (pithy anecdotes laden with puns and comedy). Language barrier aside—even the Japanese around me were struggling to keep up with the speed of the dialogue—it was enthralling to watch the English, American and Japanese story-telling in mash-up.

After the interval, the band core of bells opened our ears. When a young man walks into a convenience store to trade in his soul for a new one (for Y7400) he is invited to play guitar in a noise-band whose frontman is a growling Shinto God. Ko Murobushi performed butoh, with music provided by Yoshio Ootani’s distorted, looped saxophones and chains on turntables. Joined by members of the former’s company, each performed their own personal calligraphy of a collapsing city while Ichiro Endo, cheerleader, performed a heartening if baffling motivational dance. The difficult joy of ADX is having all these artists brought together but being unable to create or comprehend a super-narrative.

The evening concluded with Takahiro Fujita’s Dots, Lines and the Cube. His company, Mum and Gypsy, has been focused on a form of post-dramatic theatre since its formation in 2007. DLC tells the story of a kidnapped girl from the perspectives of three characters. The actors hopscotch around lines created with masking tape. The energy on-stage is that of a child’s wind-up toy; when the energy of a refrain is expended the story is wound up again and told from a different perspective, in uncanny mimicry of the news cycle of a traumatic event. It has all the uselessness of a game, but perhaps, as Mr Sakurai suggested, there is a potential usefulness in the futility.

Sedimentary City Canberra by Brit Andresen and Mara Francis, Urban Innovations Collaborative, CAPITheticAL Design Competition

“My feeling is that the program in print and online is always a mere blueprint and you really rely on the people to take it up. It’s like my feeling always that the cultural landscape of any place is a three-legged stool: it’s audience, artist and the dialogue that surrounds them. If any of those three go astray you’re probably in trouble. In this case, I think the people of Canberra have taken up the blueprint and used it.”

When I meet Robyn Archer in Sydney to discuss the progress of Canberra 100, of which she is Creative Director, she’s more than pleased with the response she’s had from the people of Australia’s capital, great turnout at events, people thanking her in the street and “projects that are generating opportunities for local artists like never before.”

Legacies

Archer is particularly pleased with the national interest Canberra 100 has generated in the media about the city’s designers Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin: “That was intentional, to say why don’t we just hark back to bold beginnings and ideals and aspirations. My focus since the beginning of the year has been, what’s the legacy going to be? It’s good to have everything going on this year but we hope that the seeds we’ve planted are going to have a legacy into the future.”

One legacy Archer points to resides in Canberra 100 promoting “just how much fodder there is for artists in terms of the Australian story in places like the National Film and Sound Archive, the Library and Museum. Terrific reference points all over the place.”

Street swag art

Among a number of exhibitions at independent galleries that have impressed Archer, she was particularly taken by Flipside curated by Merryn Gates: “an exhibition about homelessness in Canberra. Street Swags are made by Jean Madden in Brisbane in consultation with homeless people. They’re very light canvas with a light foam lining, fold up as a shoulder bag and have been given to 26,000 homeless people already. There’s one of these in the show but it’s beautifully printed by Gates with images of Walter and Marion Burley Griffin (Dream City, 2013). I love it and we’re hoping to do a project about homelessness in the capital in the future.”

Parties at the Shops

Archer is especially delighted by the success of Parties at the Shops. “My thinking right at the beginning was well, if we can do you a spectacle on 11 March, on the actual birthday of the city why don’t you do it for yourselves as well—parties at your local shopping centre that you can walk to. Well, it was unbelievable. I visited 17 on the one day. In Yarralumla, the residents had a dinner. There were 450 people sitting outside under the trees eating and dancing to a Zydeco band. The one at Watson was similar with about 600 people. But what was so moving was a really tiny place whose one shop is a graffiti-ed convenience store. Two hundred and fifty people had a barbeque, double garage doors rolled up and DJs playing. Out of that they decided they’d revive the Residents Association. They were saying really beautiful things like “next time—already with the idea that there would be a next time—we’ll invite the people from the suburb next door because all their shops have closed. I think that Parties at the Shops and You Are Here (the 10-day multi-arts festival spread around the CBD showcasing Canberra’s emerging and alternative arts communities) are the real ‘no-brainers’ that will survive.”

Celebrating the cultural calendar

Part of the reason for Canberra 100’s immersive character is Archer’s incorporation of the city’s annual events and national conferences into the year long celebration: “It was really about profiling the natural cultural calendar of Canberra anyway—things like the Canberra International Music Festival are really fantastic. It’s one of the festivals that I think should be encouraged in the future, mainly because Chris Latham has brought it into Griffin-inspired venues in the series of three that he’s done. So as with the best festivals, you get to explore the city. What I did was to look at what was on the cultural calendar already, make people aware of that but then plug some of the gaps and introduce some new ideas. There are so many conferences on and, to my chagrin, so many opening or closing on Saturdays and Sundays. Days off are now a thing of the past (LAUGHS). So many organisations chose to have their national conferences in Canberra this year.”

Archer has to make many an opening speech during Canberra 100. The day we meet she’s to open an Arthur Boyd exhibition “about his political life, at the Museum of Australian Democracy—part of the ongoing series they’re running all year called The Art of Influence, which is all about arts policy and political engagement. Last week was the Gallery Guides’ Conference, next I address the Midwives’ Association and then the Museums Australia Conference. So, Canberra 100 is big, very mixed and it’s full-on the whole time—and it jumps around violently from things I know little about to things with which I’m very familiar.”

Science and art

Science is a significant component of Canberra 100, in Science Week and beyond. “The science credentials of Canberra are amazing. There’s been a series of Canberra Nobel Laureates coming back to talk about their work. But the interface between art and science is also enormous,” says Archer, citing the work of Erica Secombe, who has been working with CSIRO but also now with the ANU Department of Nuclear Physics using their imaging technology. Erica looks at what they’re doing and, to some extent, her investigation is driving some of their research, which is the best possible collaboration. This is again about Canberra as a resource. And also about artists who come from science families: David Finnegan, one of the founders of Boho Interactive, his father was at the CSIRO and Huey Benjamin who’s composing for Garry Stewart’s new work for the Australian Ballet, Monumental, is from a science family in Canberra.”

Celebrating First Australians

A major component of Canberra 100 is the Indigenous program: “I’m particularly proud that the people who’ve produced that program are in Mildura—Helen Healy’s HHO Events. It’s really nice to think of the national capital stimulating a very big national Indigenous program that’s operated out of Mildura.

“Kungkarangkalpa: Seven Sisters Songline, performed by senior dancers from Central Australia outdoors at the National Museum was fantastic. Wesley Enoch did a great job on that of telling the story very, very honestly. He provided just a beautiful simple, screen-based background for traditional performers to bring their story down for the first time.” With a large program spread across the year, Celebrating First Australians has its own printed program (also available online).

“Canberra 100 is all about changing perceptions of the national capital—it’s actually made people aware of a very strong local Indigenous community. We’re showing the work of many, many local performers and artists. Jenni Kemarre Martiniello is a glass artist who has been working with Venetian glass technique to create interpretations of eel traps—they’re absolutely exquisite. She has a studio at the Canberra Glass Works. This celebration is about a young singer like Anita Barlow and established ones like Dale Huddleston and his family. The ACT’s unique in that it has an elected Indigenous body that looks after the interface between local policy and consultation directly with the ACT government, and they told me, ‘You’ve really got to get to the grass roots of stuff. There’s a mixed touch footie carnival at the Boomanulla Oval. Get out and do [Canberra 100] there.’ Locals don’t think that there’s an Indigenous community here and yet we’ve been taken out by one of the rangers, Adrian Brown, to rock art sites that are dated to 800 years old and they’re 30 minutes out from Canberra.”

Coming up in the Celebrating First Australian’s program is Big hART’s Hip Bone Sticking Out, QL2’s Hit the Floor Together which is being led by young Indigenous choreographer Daniel Riley McKinley and a forum entitled Inside Out—“the first day will be an overview of the past and where activism has got us to this point. The second day is given over entirely to younger groups—particularly those who are using cultural pathways for activism, artists like Warwick Thornton. On the second day it’s much more about people who are taking the cultural route to demonstrate and others working from the inside. Nothing could be plainer than Thornton’s Samson and Delilah to tell you how it is and then it’s up to you to go there. Others like Tim Goodwin are going inside. He’s a terrific lawyer who has been working for the High Court in Melbourne. He was a Fulbright Scholar. He’s going the legal pathway—more the Larissa Berendt sort of path. So, many, instead of demonstrating on the outside, at the fringes, in the street, are coming into the professions, getting all the craft and skills and doing it that way. But whenever I say that to some senior Indigenous leaders they say, ‘Yeh but is it just a cop out? Are they just doin’ the art and not doin’ the stuff on the streets, ‘the hard stuff?’ That forum will be on in association with NAIDOC Week and there are a number of exhibitions as well.”

Archer says of Hip Bone Sticking Out, that Big hART “has been working in Roebourne in WA for a long time and Roebourne is, as we know, a very divided community over whether mining and its returns are a great thing or are just going to stuff everything up. Big hART have been working mainly with young kids and really looking at a very optimistic future. Whatever happens the kids will take it on, bring it on. We’re giving free tickets to the local Indigenous community so they actually get to see all the shows and meet and talk to the artists.”

Future Canberras

If Canberra 100 asks locals and all Australians to take a fresh look at the city, its creative history and what it offers now, not least for emerging artists, what has been the role of the event in terms of speculating on Canberra’s future?

Archer says, “I think the most significant change to Canberra will happen if the high speed rail ever gets up—whether that’s in our lifetime or not, but at some point it will, and that will change things. If you can live in Canberra and be 45 minutes away from your job in Sydney there will be a lot more people who will want to live in this pristine bushland and that will drive a whole lot of necessary environmental changes because there isn’t really enough water even for 370,000 people. Scrivener the original surveyor thought there was enough for 250,000 people and he was right but the need has become more and more pressured and with Climate Change it’s exacerbated. One presumes that necessity will be the mother of invention.”

The issue of the future was addressed by offering landscape architects the opportunity to imagine a Canberra of the future in the CAPITheticAL design competition. Archer wanted the entrants “to put themselves in the same place as the competitors who had to design the city in 1911” but for a 21st century Canberra. She points out that for many of the entrants sustainability and a sense of democracy were high priorities. There were 1200 expressions of interest and 114 entries from 24 countries from which 20 were chosen for exhibition at the Gallery of Australian Design and judging for a $70,000 prize. The winner, Ecoscape’s The Northern Capital, which would doubtless appeal to Tony Abbott and Bob Katter, maintains the ACT city for Parliament and the public service, but creates a new city “on the edge of another manufactured lake, namely Lake Argyll in the Kimberley region… to deal with Asian and northern development.”

Second prize went to the quite beautiful if equally disturbing Sedimentary City Canberra, aerial views of city and surrounding landscape into the future. Curator Michael Desmond describes the entry, created by Brit Andresen and Mara Francis of Architecture and Urban Innovations Collaborative (A+UIC), as dealing with time, “shrinking and contracting both the lake and the city in response to drought, fires and the full effects of climate change and economic fluctuations, showing the city as a living organism, tuned to the epic history of humanity” (catalogue).

Skywhale

Canberra-born visual artist and sculptor Patricia Piccinini has strikingly realised a melding of past and future in Skywhale, a full-scale hot air balloon in the shape of a recognisably Piccininian hybrid, here a multi-breasted, benign maternal mammal, lingering contemplatively over the Australian landscape—evoking both ancient mother goddesses and evolving mutancy. Not surprisingly, Skywhale has been greeted with both repulsion and fascination, and some nonsensical and censorious politicking. Festivals that celebrate the past certainly sustain and reinvigorate legacy but unless they have vision, asking where are we are now and where are we going, and demonstrate these—they will have no legacy of their own to bequeath to future generations. Robyn Archer has built a centenary with an eye to the future.

For the program for the next six months of the Canberra Centenary go to canberra100.com.au and look out for a forthcoming RealTime e-dition guide to the festival.

The measured toe-tapping, the headshaking hand-flapping. Sara Wookey is performing Yvonne Rainer’s landmark mid-sixties dance Trio A. Compared to clockwork more than once. Trio A keeps on going steadily, evenly, and never repeats. Its movement vocabulary—stepping, swaying, bending, rolling over—looks a lot like everyday movement.

Artist Sara Wookey is one of five people vested by Rainer—certified, Wookey says—to perform and teach the four-and-a-half-minute Trio A. Re-engaging with Trio A is timely: the Judson Dance Theater’s 50th anniversary was celebrated this past year, and the question of re-performances of 1960s-70s works remains topical. Wookey was in Australia during April at Rainer’s request to speak on Trio A and run workshops in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne through New York City’s biennial Performa program. Wookey’s latest work, Disappearing Acts & Resurfacing Subjects: Concerns of (a) Dance Artist(s), considers the fragility of body memory against fixed representations, and she has initiated reDANCE, which revisits Judson-era dance: projects highly congenial to Trio A.

In Sydney, Wookey explains that it took Rainer six months to make the work. Learning it is challenging, because even the gaze is choreographed—though it is intended that even non-dancers could do it. The body is held as if you’re not thinking about it, just walking to the corner shop or doing something like opening a door or sitting down. Trio A and Judson Dance have considerably influenced contemporary practices internationally, including Australian dance and performance art. Walking, falling, carrying people like objects; no music; non-narrative breaks; and, most surely, a concern with unadorned movement—all of these came from the Judson dancers’ rejection of the priorities and perceived excesses of ballet and modern dance.

When Wookey asked Rainer what ‘certified’ might mean, Rainer unhesitatingly said it was about transmission—like a radio transmitter, Wookey adds. Her performance of Trio A is as precise as that implies. And she gets the attitude right, simultaneously conveying intense focus—Rainer was known in the 1960s for her performance persona, just as she was known for her explicit wish to be a straightforward ‘doer,’ sans glamour or star quality—and Trio A’s matter-of-fact, workmanlike feel.

In her lecture-performance, Wookey demos Trio A straight, and then as an ‘unplugged’ version, uttering Rainer’s aptly descriptive teaching cues as she performs each movement: at one point, arms hang ‘like rocks on strings.’ In Judson style, words can be equivalent to actions: for a handstand, Rainer might now just say ‘handstand.’ The third version of Trio A that Wookey performs in Sydney is set to music, the Chambers Brothers’ In the Midnight Hour. Wookey manages her timing perfectly: both dance and music wrap up at the same moment. This version, presented in exactly the same way by Wookey, now suggests, with deadpan irony, the funkiness of 60s popular culture.

Wookey succeeded in ‘transmitting’ Trio A as a crystalline lens, itself an object of brilliant clarity, and one whose focus is as sharp as ever.

Sara Wookey is the Artistic Director of Wookey Works Studio: www.sarawookey.com; www.redanceproject.org. Sara Wookey, “Dance is Hard to See: Capturing and Transmitting Movement through Language, Media and Muscle Memory,” 13 April, workshop 9-12 April, Io Myers Studio, University of New South Wales, hosted by Performance Space, Sydney

Contemporary circus is a wonderfully open form. It harnesses a multitude of approaches that stem from the notion of ‘Circus’ as the central informing principle. There continues, however, a prevailing opinion that circus skills should only be harnessed for performance when they reflect a narrative/contextual intent—that the display of circus skills, in and of themselves, is somehow gratuitous.

It seems to me that underlying this attitude is a belief that circus as an artform is somehow second rate unless it is woven into another, more worthy, artform such as text-based theatre or contemporary dance.

While I am in no way arguing against the use of circus in conjunction with other elements—text, movement, narrative, or character—I would like to make an argument for the acceptance of circus in its own right.

Over the last year I have seen a series of new works from emerging companies that demonstrate the unique role circus skills play within a performance text. In these pieces, circus skills are used variously as metaphors, character traits, moments of narrative exposition, key elements of mise en scène, heightened atmospheric moments or avenues for creating tension, suspense, surprise, shock or as ways to skew reality and challenge conventional perspectives. At the same time, the acrobatic bodies are used as sites to explore gender, sexuality and race. These works also consider the possibility of circus as pure spectacle, as part of the interplay between form and content.

Skye Gellmann, Blindscape

Skye Gellmann’s Blindscape can be reduced to two main elements: audience members individually navigating the open space through narration and sound effects from an iPhone; and two performers pushing the boundaries of their physicality, as individuals, with each other and with the audience.

Pure spectacle arrives as an element when the artists perform feats of extreme acrobatics on the black circus pole which is the visual centrepiece of the work. The question for me at this point, is what is the iterative effect of this moment? We, as audience members, expect this piece to include circus, and have been watching a series of body movements leading up to this point. Yet until now, all of the physicality could arguably be described as heightened, realistic, dramatic expression. Is there a moment where the work stops being contextual, and presents a moment of pure spectacle? Or has the gradual build-up of dramatic body movements ensured that this moment is just another in the fabric of exploration found in this piece?

Melissa Reeves, The Lost Act

With The Lost Act, playwright Melissa Reeves has created a unique script which utilises a kind of vaudevillian realism, much along the same lines as the literary genre of Magic Realism. In this work-in-progress (directed by Suzie Dee) Reeves collapses the naturalistic world of her characters with that of a vaudeville show. Throughout, the relationships between performers in a circus act completely mirror the relationships in the dramatic narrative. The plot revolves around a young set of siblings in search of their lost parents, who once performed an infamous circus act. At the same time, the siblings are themselves seeking to create their own new act, or, perhaps, recreate that of their parents. Within this plot, Reeves explores notions of identity in a post-colonial world. It is a world in which nothing is quite what it seems, and reality itself is a performance.

Once again, like Blindscape, The Lost Act allows for the possibility of spectacle for its own sake, with a number of scenes that present pure circus skills. However, these are more than mere divertissements, as they are an integral part of the world that is being made. It would be interesting to see how this interplay between naturalism and vaudeville evolves in a full-scale production, so I hope this show reaches the next round of development.

Polytoxic, The Rat Trap

Queensland company Polytoxic’s The Rat Trap is, on one level, about pure display from go to whoa. It tells the tale of Siamese twins, separated at birth and reunited in a Tiki bar where burlesque acts are indistinguishable from the extraordinary lives of the artists who inhabit them. The show has powerful themes, yet the pleasure, skill and showiness of the circus sweeps around these, giving us a sense of being at some kind of fabulous cabaret, rather than at a serious piece of theatre. At the same time, because the characters are performers in a Tiki Bar, the circus skills are to some extent, though not completely, motivated actions within the narrative. I would call the circus in this context a kind of “Nietschean excess”—the circus is representing that which is beyond definition, or limitation. It is not hiding the narrative, it is exploding from it! If The Lost Act is vaudevillian realism, The Rat Trap is burlesque hyper-realism.

Rat Trap’s vignettes evoke fantastical ideas, but the physical exploits within them are real. This show totally up-ends the idea of reality, and inspires audience members to question the very notions of place, presence and identity, all the while convincing us that we are in an escapist dream. Pure spectacle is the essence and the trump card of this show.

Sara Pheasant, Leggings are not Pants

In Leggings are not Pants, Sara Pheasant, directing performers from the Women’s Circus in Melbourne at 45 Downstairs and Gasworks Circus Showdown, deftly uses circus to heighten themes of gender, sexuality and, ironically for circus, the mundanity of everyday life. For example, a group of women watching television perform a chorus of naturalistic movements which build to become spectacular acrobatic tricks. This allows the skills to be interwoven in the piece, and yet emerge in key moments of strong spectacle. These function much like music in a film. They heighten the audience response to each scene, and occasionally provide an extended exploration of its emotional heart.

Casus, Knee Deep

Knee Deep, by Casus, is a unique work, inspired to some extent by the work of Circa, in that it combines highly athletic circus with a pared back aesthetic. Casus does, however, bring something new to the table. Over the course of the piece we see distinctiveness and quirkiness emerging from each of the cast members. This is mostly achieved through exploring each performer’s relationship with a raw egg. As a framing device, the egg also reminds us of the fragility of life and creates a striking juxtaposition with the strength of the circus performers. This show has a light touch, and invites us into the world it creates, yet, at times, as with many of the pieces discussed, often opens up moments for the celebration of pure circus acumen. Individual acts climax with great skills that seek, and receive, applause. In the context of this show, these spectacular moments are triumphs over the fragility of human existence.

These works demonstrate that circus, even when it is presented, arguably, as skill for its own sake, is always doing more. Circus is much more than a trope or a narrative device. It is a complex ‘body of representation’ which resonates uniquely in each work.

Circus artists/creators seek to use circus skills in performance for myriad reasons: to harness a populist form; to develop a craft they have been honing for years; to use circus as a history of representation from which to draw images, metaphors, characters; to work with an artform that offers freedom from linear, text-based, narrative-driven theatre; and, ideally, freedom from the gendered and cultural stereotypes of dominant discourse.

Ultimately, circus-based theatre makers draw from all of these inspirations to create their work. First, and foremost, they select circus skills ipso facto, for their own sake. Circus is the form from which all else follows.

Blindscape, PACT, Sydney, 19-29 June and touring throughout 2013; The Lost Act, presented as a rehearsed reading in 2012, is scheduled for development in 2013-14; The Rat Trap premiered in 2012, with further seasons in 2013; Knee Deep is touring internationally this year.

In 2009 the Battersea Arts Centre in London hosted A Small Town Anywhere, a new work by UK-based company Coney. In it around 30 participants took on the role of villagers in a small country town. Each concealed a terrible secret and likewise had a mortal enemy among the other villagers.

A Small Town Anywhere condensed an entire week of drama into the space of roughly two hours; days and nights passed with subtle shifts in lighting; paper snow fell at one point and gossip, treachery and paranoia threatened to tear the little community apart.

Tom Bowtell and Tassos Stevens, two of the company’s co-directors, describe Coney as mixing “live and digital art forms to create immersive stories and play.” Their work, as well as the work of other groups such as Hide and Seek, Slingshot, Splash and Ripple and The Larks, is part of an emerging practice that, for ease of reference, I’ll call New Games. Their work varies widely encompassing Tiny Games, a series of 99 “easy to play” site-specific games designed for the streets of London by Hide and Seek, and 2.8 Hours Later, a city-wide zombie chase game, by Slingshot.

In recent years around the globe there has been an increased interest in play. In America campus games of Killer have turned into a worldwide nerf war (based on foam-based toy weaponry. Eds), with Humans vs Zombies. Real World Alternate Reality Games have been produced as marketing tools for Hollywood blockbusters such as Why So Serious? (for The Dark Knight, 2008) and The Beast (for Spielberg’s AI, as far back as 2001). In America there has also been a renewed interest in physical games: street sports mapping classic board game patterns onto the grid of New York streets in PacManhatten and festivals such as Come Out and Play. At the same time, across the UK and Europe, festivals of new games and playful experiences have spread including IGFEST, Play Publik and w00t.

New Games shares territory with the immersive work of English companies such as Shunt and Punchdrunk, in which audiences are free to explore a theatricalised space in order to discover hidden performance and narrative elements placed throughout. Earlier precedents can be found in interactive video art, such as Nightwalks and Frozen Palaces by Forced Entertainment, and technology enhanced Live Art such as Blast Theory’s A Machine to See With, Uncle Roy All Around You, Rider Spoke and Can You See Me Now (all of which utilise various levels of bespoke digital technology to enable audience/player agency within constructed social and performative events.) This is not to suggest a directly causative relationship but to demonstrate the emergence of a common theme in contemporary theatre and Live Art that is shared by contemporary play; participation, immersion and reactivity.

New Games blur the lines between technology, social interaction, location and story. What they have in common is the placement of the participant at the centre of the experience. In most cases, the convergence of specific rule sets, designed environments, narrative elements and participant agency (or some combination of these) generates a shared social experience. These experiences are designed to position participants within an abstracted system of organised performance relying on person to person interactions in the physical world to generate emergent narratives.

Alex Fleetwood, director of Hide and Seek, describes A Small Town Anywhere as “a vitally important step in the development of participatory dramaturgy.” Andrezj Lukowski, reviewing for Time Out UK, describes the experience as “an interrogation of ideology and its poisonous effect on community” and notes that “the fraught final stages feel as complex and electrifying as any actor-based drama. The moral decisions we are asked to make might seem simplistic to a fly on the wall, but the luxury of such detachment is long gone.”

In a work like Coney’s A Small Town Anywhere everyone in the room is playing (or is at least aware that a play state is in existence) and governs themselves accordingly. Participants are performing and not performing at the same time. As Guardian reviewer Lynette Gardner describes her experience of the production, “By the time I turn up for the show, I have written my own backstory, which includes a grim secret about (a) murdered baby. The show doesn’t require any acting skills, and, because there is no audience in a traditional sense, all social anxiety about being on show or not doing the right thing quickly evaporates. I play it as if it’s real—and that’s exactly how it feels. For two hours, I lose myself in the show.”

In an interview in 2012, Coney’s Co-director Tassos Stevens explains to me that, “In some ways, Coney’s work is more about giving present audiences the space to play than it is ‘making play,’ certainly that more than ‘making games.’ The essential commonality between all the very different kinds of things Coney makes is the focus on the playing audience experience. Small Town is a framework that we create, which audiences fill in with their play. It’s about the group, the Town, the roomful of mostly strangers and everything about the group mind. It’s also about the web of individual narratives that players make for themselves, and how those interplay and a set of external challenges that change the stakes and the game (if they are paying attention). It’s about a community under pressure and what happens between a roomful of mostly strangers playing.”

Since 2009 Coney has built on the work of A Small Town Anywhere with the creation of Early Days (of a Better Nation) in which “the audience become part of a Small Country that can be anything it wants to be.” Early Days is the concept of Annette Mees, developed in response to the events of the Arab Spring, Occupy, Anonymous as well as the London Riots.

Play-tested in various locations from Stoke Newington International Airport to the Battersea Arts Centre, Coney describes Early Days as containing “elements of constitution, economic cuts, an assassination, a leadership election, an economy of beans and a live news channel.” The playtests so far have involved seven performers including “one noble leader, two clerks representing the governing machine, (and) three media reporters who were streamed live to a 24hr news broadcast in the room.”

In one way or another, New Games such as A Small Town Anywhere and Early Days (of a Better Nation) are systemic engagements designed to give shape to lived experience. They allow for and respond to player agency within constructed narrative environments. They give participants the chance to practise ‘ways of being’ in ‘not for real spaces.’

Coney, A Small Town Anywhere, Battersea Arts Centre, August 2009; Early Days (of a Better Nation), ongoing development from 2012

Selina Thompson, Pat it and prick it and mark it with b, SPILL Festival of Performance 2013

In the morning I am told Quizoola, Forced Entertainment’s iconic 24-hour question and answer performance, is sold out and despite their best efforts, the wonderful people at SPILL and at the Barbican have not been able to find a spare ticket.

I watch a little of it live online and in that 15 minutes a conversation takes place between Robin Arthur and Terry O’Connor in which he asks, “Would you like me to touch you?” She answers, “I wouldn’t mind if you touched me.” “But would you like me to touch you?” “I’m not saying I want you to touch me, but I wouldn’t mind if you touched me.” The audience laughs in the theatre far away.

Selina Thompson, Pat it and prick it…

SPILL National Platform takes place in a series of studios over three floors and the place is abuzz with activity. In Selina Thompson’s Pat it and prick it and mark it with b, in a room on the ground floor the artist is making a dress out of cake. Soul music plays on an iPod and the smell of cake fills the air. People are invited to help, cakes come out of the oven, are layered on to a cake rack and stuck together with jam and pink icing. It’s a performance that makes itself. Delightfully unselfconscious, the artist and her best friend and helper walk about, baking and working in their underwear, singing a bit and talking casually with the audience who seem to become Thompson’s friends in the process. On the walk upstairs, from one performance to the next, “on contact” is scrawled on the walls, evoking the theme of the festival with marker pens and paper.

Julie Vulcan, I Stand In

Entering Australian artist Julie Vulcan’s I Stand In, the first hit to my senses is a warm, gentle balm for the brain—the smell of healing oils. Vulcan stands at the other end of the room in front of a wood panelled wall with an altar of white flowers to one side and a body, beneath a white cloth, laid out before her on a table. The backdrop suggests a Hawaiian funeral parlour. The ritual begins with the removal of the cloth. The body is firmly massaged for 15 minutes. The artist cradles the heavy, limp body in order to oil the back. It is possible to imagine it is not breathing.

The most striking thing about witnessing this eight-hour performance is that each touch on the participant’s body creates a haptic connection with my own, each part responds as though the touch is happening directly on my own arm, my cheek. I realise that my body, more than my mind, is witness, responding before I think. In its generosity to the bodies of both the participants and the audience, I Stand In reminds us of the care we can enact towards each another. It reminds us of the strangers’ hands that guide us from our mothers’ wombs, that nurse us when we are sick and the hands that care for us in death. It reminds us that we are all part of the cycle of care, that our bodies recognise before the mind has time to catch up.

Heather Cassils, Becoming an image

On entering Heather Cassils’ Becoming an image on the lower floor of the building we are held in a black ingress so, we are told, our eyes can adjust to complete darkness. In low light the audience sits on the floor around a grey mound.

Sounds come first, a hiss, phut, huh; those of a fighter warming up. They get louder, stronger and then violent as fists hit something solid. Like a shock delivered straight into the brain, the image is there of a body, small and strong, flung against the mound of clay.

Photographer Manual Vason is Cassils’ performance partner in the work in which the only light is the flash of his camera. We see Cassils punching the clay, working to break down the mound. The fight is intimate, sexual, the smell of sweat adding another sensory layer. The performance takes place mostly in the afterburn on the retina, as in the darkness we try to catch up with the shock contact of light on the surface of our eyes, the image of the artist’s body leaving traces of negative images. In the gaps in our vision it is possible to make out the shape of something bigger that is alluded to in this performance, a summary of what we miss in the darkness, the invisible fights against the monumentalism of history. In the words of Heather Cassils, “You have to break things down to build things up.”

SPILL Festival of Performance 2013, producer Pacitti Company, London, 3-14 April; spillfestival.com/

Pacitti Company’s SPILL Festival is two weeks of sensorial encounter where the personal, political and mythological are transferred through the bodies of performers and audience. Sixteen of the 25 works are by women. The following three shots glide from wide, mid to hand-held, close-ups of the gendered, queer world we live in. If this opening has a certain eau de pussy, it’s an invitation to read on, not necessarily a warning.

Lauren Barri Holstein, Splat!

Splat! is the sound of 100 tomato juice filled balloons thrown and burst on a knife’s edge clutched by The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein’s vagina (insert handle first if you want to try this at home). It’s the sound of douche and douche again all over the chest and mouth of someone you care about. Give me a towel.

It’s a deconstructed post-fairytale in a forest inhabited by zombie Woodland Friends, where Bambi, canal birthed in a condom placenta, trophy mounted, rollerskates blindly through emissions, urinates near the vomit, near the target, on twins and hangs as a slaughtered carcass stuffing a burger in her cake hole. It’s a feminine schlock technical rehearsal on a closed Hollywood set with The Famous calling her own stage cues and requesting repeats. It’s a tower of cliché, ideology, genres and dispassionate delivery that might make you choke, with laughter.

You are shunted from wince to cringe to clenched sphincter then leant towards a performance precipice and asked with a hand held mike, “How do you feel emotionally, right now?” She has to go harder because you can’t feel it anymore. Do it again.

Splat! straddles porn, gets bulimic at the microphone, cleans and sticks the unstickable with tape. Its frame has a weft that might muddle your expectations of the next brown-eyed money shot—the sluiced mountain of images is planted with tender instructions, sensitive ballet pointe ballads, the full, uncensored, itemised budget for the show and the soft silence of long blonde hair clippings snowing gently down. Put that back together.

It’s a vulnerability fuck-over and The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein is in control.

Lucy Hutson, If You Want Bigger Yorkshire Puddings…

Lucy Hutson is the kind of cooking companion who makes her own personal recipe. In If You Want Bigger Yorkshire Puddings You Need a Bigger Tin she mixes sexual politics with a family focus group, body identity and a biography of gendered experiments into a disarming dish served as a dialogue between documentary video and contemporary performance, with the lights on.

In an era where queer women debate the actual choice made by younger women in transition, rather than the right to choose, Lucy Hutson offers a home-made brand of good old fashioned asexual identity that is delightful and refreshing.

In the same way you can make a food comparison by asking if your grandmother would recognise it, Lucy approaches gender transition by preparing to run it past the ladies at the Women’s Institute. No snips and no tucks, just a ball of wool, a roll of cling wrap, a shot of self-acceptance and the courage to live with fuzzy edges. The Women’s Institute would be proud.

Rosana Cade, Walking: Holding

I dare to keep my eyes closed on a busy London road and anticipate each swirl of density coming towards me as the moment Walking: Holding will begin. Rosana Cade’s delicate, cold fingers take mine for a walking story of same sex, mixed ethnicity, fag hag and other couples.

Cade and her serial strollers lead us through personal experiences to the point where self-consciousness can invade intimacy and hands meeting below the hip divide.

Rosana’s stroll takes us to an ironwork sign, “LADIES.” I walk with a young, cross-dressed man in a sweet floral blouse, flats and a touch of lippy, down a small dirty street where big men manhandle large tools. I’m released between a van and a tag wall where anticipation and ankles tip awkwardly on a pile of rubble. It’s funny how many loaded frames there are in nondescript locations. I hold the hand of a man whose story makes me clutch it. I stop breathing. This is close. We recover when he asks for, and I offer, something of my own that raises his eyebrows. We part at a sheened wall where the close reflection of our coded couple is joined to make three before it becomes a new two.

These walks take you past public displays of affection, and more: from the throwaway indulgence for heterosexual, Caucasian-matched, western couples, to the erosive emotional fallout of hand division for others and intimacy rarely touched between strangers.

SPILL Festival of Performance 2013, producer Pacitti Company, London, 3-14 April

In the 2013 SPILL Festival of Performance, I witnessed three artists presenting diverse interpretations of personal and public desire using raw, essential and intimate body fluids.

Jamie Lewis Hadley, Analogue to a Blunt Trauma

Waiting at the far end of a cavernous white warehouse space feels like being on a film set. There are lights and cameras anticipating action and a white sheet-covered couch framed by a corridor of pillars. At the far end a door opens, a man enters and emerging in silhouette he walks purposefully down the centre of the room with what seems to be a gun in his hand. As he passes each pillar, fluorescent tubes blink on. This beginning of Jamie Lewis Hadley’s performance is an intentional set up, referencing cinema tropes and creating an expectation of theatrical artifice. However, from here we witness a more intimate yet perfunctory act, as collaborator Dr Belinda Fenty proficiently extracts and fills a medical grade blood bag with Hadley’s blood.

The casual demeanor with which Hadley lies across the couch and the friendly exchanges between the two belie the more serious nature of the act. I think of blood and loss, this reflection amplified by the subsequent proceeding violent act, in which Hadley takes aim and shoots the hanging blood bag multiple times. Real gun, real membrane and a rapid release of real blood; the metaphor is not lost. The moment is shortly echoed on a blood-stained sheet that had been dragged across the floor and hitched as a screen. Here the action is replayed in high definition slow motion. The effect is at once jolting and seductive. Jamie Lewis Hadley’s work is provocative and intelligent, its precise delivery relies on blurring boundaries while challenging the politics behind consumption of shocking, ‘beautiful’ trauma.

Julia Bardsley, Medea_Dark/Room

From the moment I ‘enter’ through folding red and cream latex, I understand something is developing in here and it’s sticky, magnetic, electric and gold. I am reminded of entering the folds of the domestic heater to find the minute liminal world inhabited by the radiator lady on her stage in Lynch’s Eraserhead. There is a stage of sorts in Medea’s room, which she inhabits intermittently to conduct her ‘glorious genitalia’ experiments. On one visit I witness one such moment. Medea stands in front of a wall piece, one of the many expertly considered installation elements that make up her darkroom. Referencing theories of the relationship between sex and the gaze, this metaphorical mirror contains seven round sculptural elements that signify a journey from arousal to sublime bliss—the centrepiece literally bursts out of its frame like a red multi-pronged fleshy sea creature. Medea selects a frame and enters her ‘stage,’ defined by a projection. The image is striking, she has become the personification of one of her many detailed scientific constructions and formulaic scribblings. Wired up from nipples to groin, each breast protrudes from Medea’s fetish-styled garment. She pulses electrically, literally etching out orgasmic potential onto the carbon canvas of her genital frame. There is an exquisite seductiveness to Julia Bardsley’s loaded and intricately layered performance installation. Regardless of the point at which I encounter her experiments, I witness the vital moment of creative combustion; whether it is the small detail in the eclectic workstation amid liquid drenched gold sheep and a magnetised prophylactic or a pulsating Medea in a circle of light.

Martin O’Brien, Last(ing)

The room smells of chemicals but I wonder if this is conjured by the sight of a radioactive green substance that fills various buckets placed around the edges, where we the audience hug the walls. Martin O’Brien lies ceremoniously on a table as David, his assistant, ritually applies gold leaf to his chest. This delicate act, of marking out a pair of golden lungs, is broken by O’Brien intermittently coughing up mucous into a glass beaker. It is at this moment that the other elements in the room feel more menacing and foreboding.

I am aware that O’Brien’s practice revolves around “physical endurance and hardship” informed by his chronic cystic fibrosis. What follows is a series of procedures and tasks that not only serve as metaphorical illustrations of symptoms but also convey a sense of a body objectified within a medical regime. The artist’s work is unforgiving, messy and raw, never pretending to be otherwise. Within moments of fragility there is strength. I am held by the final action, reflecting the journey of a body purged. Martin stands encased in a prison of barbed wire, his head covered in a lung shaped latex hood. The green fluid into which he had previously plunged forms clumps on his body hair. As I witness the labour of his breathing and excruciating gasps for air, one thing shines through—the remnants of his golden lungs, a defiant signal of the artist’s reclamation of his body.

SPILL Festival of Performance 2013, producer Pacitti Company, London, 3-14 April; spillfestival.com/

Marina Abramovic, Luminosity, 1997, re-performed for Kaldor Public Art Project 27: 13 Rooms

Sydney dancer Nalina Wait was one of a group of nine performers in 13 Rooms whose task it was to re-perform Joan Jonas’ Mirror Check (1970) and Marina Abramovi?’s Luminosity (1997) at half hourly intervals and alternating between works (plus breaks). In Mirror Check the performer slowly inspects her naked body with a hand mirror. In Luminosity, the naked performer is positioned high up against a wall, arms and legs extended while supported by a bicycle seat.

Wait spoke with Clare Grant, Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW, and her students about the experience. Here are excerpts from Wait’s responses to questions.

Eye contact

We were given the general task to look at the audience: “keep still, move slowly and look at the audience”…But when you actually do that—when you actually lock eyes with someone who doesn’t know you…possibly thinking of you in a kind of objectified way—[there is a sort] of exchange, of seeing each other. It was really quite profound. You’d see people who’d get really upset, freak out and wouldn’t really want be looked at and they’d hide, but couldn’t help but have a little peek. And eventually they’d somehow open up and, ‘Okay, I’ll look back at you.’ And we’d actually meet and that was really quite amazing.

The task

The task was the same [as in dancing]. In dancing, in improvising, normally I’ll develop a task or my body will…or there will be something that I’m doing that is a task that I must do…So in many ways it was just like dancing except mostly just using the eye [which] was the biggest movement. And I got really tired because I tried as much as I could to focus on the people I was looking at and not have a generalised or softened peripheral gaze.

I think about it as a job. The task is to look. I’m constantly thinking about the looking, the engagement of the looking—noticing and refreshing looking, being alive to the looking all the time, not getting tired of it or bored with it, to refresh it and to notice it in every moment.

Being naked

To begin with we took turns in front of each other. The scariest moment was the first time, taking your coat off and standing up there. But after a while we got used to it with each other. Then we extended the length of time we were doing it for, to negotiate how to do that over time, what kind of things you need to do in yourself to maintain that and build up to it…[W]hen the public actually came in…they were so open and taken by [the work]. I realised I didn’t need to push them or hold them in their place with my gaze. I could actually be more receptive and compassionate and more active in it, communicate within it rather than hold them back and defend myself. But it took a bit of time to come to that. I only realised I was doing that after one guy left and he said, “That chick was fully eye-balling me” or something…I thought, oh yes, I’ve got to also receive through the eye a little bit more.

Agency

Vulnerability

If there was the occasional person trying to undermine the performance I just thought about being Jesus…(LAUGHS), being compassionate towards them. This is your situation…it’s not actually mine. [I was] trying to be compassionate with them having an issue with it inside themselves, inside the work. Because it is confronting work.

Focus

For me, in Mirror Check there was even less agency [than in Luminosity]. I tried to squeeze as much agency as I could from it …or interest. I think that’s what the work is, finding interest in the task. And after the thousandth time of looking at your own reflection in the mirror, it is boring. It really is. But if there is some way that you can focus—I had to do it through focus mostly. I just had to literally see every little thing and be engaged with it in the scene for me to feel like I was doing the work. And I noticed if I ever just slightly shifted my vision, or went out of focus, the atmosphere of the room would break and people would leave. You feel like you’re doing this quite personal thing, but people feel it.

Mirror Check was tricky for me because I prefer to be able to see the people in the room and feel we’re all in there together rather than…keeping a fourth wall in a performative sense and not looking at anyone, which I found difficult. I had to look…even if it was at the wall or somebody’s shirt so I could still feel engaged.

So I felt slightly disconnected from the audience but then again I’d finish a round and someone would applaud. So it’s like, okay, you’re with me. Then I’d just listen more to the tone of the room, to feel whether people were with me. That’s when I noticed if I went out of focus, it would break.

Kaldor Public Art Projects, 13 Rooms, curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, Klaus Biesenbach, 11-21 April, Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney

Clark Beaumont, Coexisting, 2013, performed by the artists and commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects for Kaldor Art Project 27: 13 Rooms

The title foregrounds space. As Klaus Biesenbach says in the catalogue introduction, not 13 Performances nor 13 Artists, but 13 Rooms and later, when talking about developing the project with Hans Ulrich Obrist, of wandering amongst the sculptures in the Villa Borghese, “we could do a sculpture gallery, one room after the other, but in each room it would be a ‘living sculpture’…” (catalogue).

Obrist takes up the curatorial narrative of wanting the exhibition to occupy time as well as space. So, with terms borrowed both from the visual and performing arts, what conceptions of space and time did 13 Rooms give us?

Sydney-siders like to go to the water to recreate. The wharves and piers closest to the CBD are a story of continuous erasure: in place of canoes, cruise liners; in place of bond stores, Biennales; the site of a bitter waterfront dispute will soon be a casino. The artists of 13 Rooms were not asked to address the history or material properties of Pier 2/3. The space for their work had been determined well before it landed in Sydney, in Manchester as 11 Rooms and in Essen as 12 Rooms. For the Sydney iteration Harry Seidler and Associates—the firm renowned for modernist architecture in Australia—was commissioned to design variations of the classic white cube gallery, one for each artist. Outside the cubes, the audience performed: promenading, catching up, queuing, standing back to watch, chasing after children (or not) and choosing when to effect the next entrance.

As for the selection of artists, most are big names on the international art circuit, though not all derived their reputation from within the field of performance (Hirst and Baldessari, for example, famously extend definitions of painting). The importation of name artists to Sydney is not new—the John Kaldor projects since 1969 and the Sydney Biennales since 1973 provide a lineage of exposure to local audiences of ambitious works from elsewhere. Among the local art community such encounters stir a genuine willingness to engage which, if not well managed, can quickly slide into cynicism or resentment. The Sydney Biennale curators were made to recognise this early on and have included a (usually) good proportion of Australian artists in their selection, thus elevating those artists specifically and the local scene generally to the international stage, and as a side benefit, allowing for natural dialogue to arise between locals and visitors.

The 13 Rooms curators had commissioned works that specifically did not rely on the presence of the artist-authors. ‘Sculpture’ (transportable, transposable, mute) as per Biesenbach’s narrative, was still then the stronger term. The ‘living’ part, it was inferred, could be achieved by alienating certain qualities or qualifications (appearance or physical training, for example) from the subject. For those of us coming out of a whole other history and ethos of performance that embraced the risks of authoring-while-doing, unrepeatability and an assumed contract between performer and audience of doing time together, it was a difficult proposition to swallow.

Of the international works, some came off better than others, depending on the performance strategy applied. Santiago Sierra, for instance, delegated the idea of authenticity to other bodies. His Veterans of the Wars of Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Iraq and Vietnam Facing the Corner, brutally rejected any thought of entertainment (no movement, no eye-contact) and threw the complexities of moral responsibility back on the observers. Hirst and Ondák leant heavily on and were rewarded by the skilled sociability of their ‘interpreters’ to deliver their work. Delegation of bodily presence over time was more problematic for the two artists who were the inhabitants of their work when originally performed: Marina Abramovi?’s Luminosity of 1997 and Joan Jonas’ Mirror Check of 1970. Both works suffered from their management (warnings, guards, taped off areas, ‘no camera’ signs, constant opening and closing of doors and half-hour shifts for the ‘interpreters’). That the performers were able to hold focus and thus transmit a real sense of live engagement says much for their experience as practitioners in their own right.

Interestingly it was the locals—young Brisbane-based duo Clark Beaumont—who relied on endurance and improvisation for the effectiveness of their work. They were the only authors as performers and the only artists willing to take the 7.5 hours per day opening times (that is, gallery time) as the given duration for their performance. They could not have fulfilled the ‘living sculpture’ brief more closely.

As ephemeral as the works they briefly housed, the 13 Rooms are gone now. Pier 2/3 is still there, waiting to receive its next guests.

Kaldor Public Art Projects, 13 Rooms, curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, Klaus Biesenbach, 11-21 April, Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney. Quotations from Hans Ulrich Obrist & Klaus Biesenbach, “Curators in Conversation,” 13 Rooms catalogue, Rushcutters Bay: Kaldor Public Art Projects, 2013.

Joan Jonas, Mirror Check, 1970, re-performed for Kaldor Public Art Project 27: 13 Rooms,

When Hans Ulrich Obrist met Eugène Ionesco many years ago, the playwright told Obrist how pleased he was that his play, La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano), had been performed every single night for over 40 years in a Paris theatre. To Ionesco’s mind, this constant staging had cemented the play as a mainstay of Parisian cultural life, enabling it to achieve the kind of permanence that normally eludes time-based performance and is instead reserved for public sculptures cast in bronze, marble or stone.

Obrist, who is co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, cites this encounter as a source of inspiration for 13 Rooms, a project for which he has teamed up with Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1 in New York. Together they have created a travelling exhibition of performance art. Or, as they term it, ‘living sculpture.’ The line-up of artists includes some of the biggest names in performance from the 1960s and 70s until now, but Obrist and Biesenbach insist that 13 Rooms is not a showcase of performance art but more “like a sculpture gallery where all the sculptures go home at 6pm.”

First presented at the 2011 Manchester International Festival as 11 Rooms, and then as 12 Rooms at Germany’s Ruhrtriennale in Essen the following year, the show has been brought to our shores by Sydney arts patron John Kaldor as the 27th project to be mounted by Kaldor Public Art Projects. One new artist is added with each presentation and here it is Brisbane-based duo Clark Beaumont. They join 140 local performers reproducing the works of the international artists during the exhibition’s 11-day run at Walsh Bay’s Pier 2/3, where 12 pristine white cubes have been constructed, each containing a living and breathing work of art.

Yes, there are only 12 rooms in 13 Rooms. Many visitors are likely to remain oblivious to this anomaly because the first artwork is easy to miss: following the usual greeting that meets each visitor upon entering the exhibition space, a gallery attendant recites a headline from that morning’s newspaper. Tino Sehgal famously forbids any documentation of his art; not even a wall label accompanies this work, and it is only by listening closely to the attendant’s subsequent words—“This is New, Tino Sehgal, 2003”—that we catch a clue as to what we have just experienced. It’s a rather surreal interaction that heralds the collection of equally curious, playful and, at times, confronting works which are to follow.

A more material exchange is at the heart of Roman Ondák’s Swap, in which visitors are encouraged to exchange an object in their possession for whatever is on the table in the centre of the room, while Damien Hirst’s whimsical contribution involves a rotating cast of identically-dressed identical twins who chat cheerfully to visitors while seated beneath two of Hirst’s almost-identical spot paintings. The muscular male in Simon Fujiwara’s Future/Perfect won’t speak back however, as he lies still on a tanning bed reciting English lesson phrases from an iPod.

Opening the door to Xu Zhen’s In Just a Blink of an Eye reveals a breathing body frozen impossibly in mid-air. If it’s true that the average amount of time visitors to the Louvre spend in front of the Mona Lisa is 15 seconds, then Xu Zhen’s floating figure is more successful than most art objects in holding our attention. In fact, many of the works in 13 Rooms put into question the very act of looking—at art and at people. In Laura Lima’s Man=flesh/Woman=flesh-Flat, the visitor must crouch or lie on the ground to encounter a performer with a physical disability who is positioned horizontally within a confined opening 45 centimetres high, and the rotating dancers that make up Allora and Calzadilla’s Revolving Door demand not only a visual but a physical negotiation of the space. In Xavier Le Roy’s Untitled we actually see nothing at all; at least, that is, until our eyes have adjusted to the almost pitch black room to reveal the shadowy outlines of two hooded figures rolling on the floor in an intimate, slow-moving choreography.

The feverish diversity of works on show at 13 Rooms is an important ingredient in the exhibition’s tremendous appeal and accessibility, but they do share one common tie. With the notable exception of Clark Beaumont’s piece, they are all evidence of the increasingly popular practice of ‘delegated performance.’ Rather than using their own bodies as the site and material for their art, performance-based artists nowadays are just as likely to provide a set of instructions that enables other people to undertake their work. There is perhaps no artist working today who interrogates more explicitly both the material and representational politics of delegation than Santiago Sierra. In Veterans of the Wars of Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Iraq and Vietnam Facing the Corner, a real war veteran stands stiffly facing the corner of an otherwise empty room, hands held behind him. Why has he or she been relegated to this position? And how are we to behave in that ambiguous presence? On the back of a t-shirt worn by one of the men I encounter is the slogan, “War IS Terrorism.” For all his apparent stoicism, this Sydney veteran has found a way to pierce through the negation and nihilism of Sierra’s instructions, to speak a protest against war and against the very silence he has been employed to enact.

Re-performance has also emerged as a hugely popular strategy over the past decade, restaging for a contemporary audience historical works previously considered to exist as non-reproducible events. John Baldessari’s 1977 video work Six Colorful Inside Jobs is reinvented here as Thirteen Colourful Inside Jobs, and 10 female performers rotate in 30-minute shifts between Marina Abramovi?’s 1997 Luminosity and Joan Jonas’ Mirror Check, first performed in 1970. The naked performer in Luminosity balances precariously atop a bicycle seat attached high on the wall. Vulnerability is belied in the way she returns the audience’s voyeuristic gaze with sometimes confronting force, making us question who of us is more exposed. The dynamics of the gaze are inverted in Jonas’ piece; the performer does not acknowledge our presence as she carefully examines her reflection in a hand-held mirror which she moves progressively down her naked body.

What is gained and lost when these historical works move away from their creators and are taken up by other people? One of the women re-performing Mirror Check is Melbourne-based dancer Atlanta Eke, who uses her naked body in her own practice to aggressively subvert conventional representations of femininity, as in her recent project Monster Body (RT114). For those familiar with Eke’s work, hers is a body that is already brimming with significations that were necessarily absent from Jonas’ quietly feminist 1970 performance. Eke’s presence in this 2013 Mirror Check highlights the inevitable diversification of the work’s meanings as it is displaced across time and space onto other performing bodies.

No longer bound to the body of a singular artist or to the fleeting moment of a once-in-time event, this is performance art made mainstream, as confirmed by the eager Sydney audiences lining Walsh Bay. Purists will nostalgically decry the loss of risk and rebellion that has proudly characterised a form that was, until recently, the underdog of the art world. But if you can manage to push past the crowds, the works at 13 Rooms still attest to the thrill of the live encounter and affirm its power to make us question our relationship to art and to others—even if here those encounters for the most part lack the presence of the artists themselves.

The only room in which the artists are physically present is Clark Beaumont’s Coexisting, which sees young Brisbane duo Sarah Clark and Nicole Beaumont sharing the top of a plinth for the duration of the exhibition. In a modest, tender portrait of the intimacy and mutual reliance that come with friendship and artistic collaboration, they channel Gilbert & George’s self-described living sculptures and render somewhat literal Obrist and Biesenbach’s curatorial pronouncements about the works in 13 Rooms being more akin to sculpture than performance. Clark Beaumont do however interrupt their statuesque posing to indulge in three 10-minute breaks per day. It’s certainly the first time I have encountered a sculpture that needed a toilet break.

Kaldor Public Art Projects, 13 Rooms, curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, Klaus Biesenbach, 11-21 April, Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney

A response to Wagner’s Parsifal, using the Act II libretto, Jack Symonds’ Climbing Toward Midnight is a strange work, if blessed with excellent singing and a bracing, richly textured score for piano, viola, cello and bass clarinet with the composer conducting vigorously from the keyboard.

The transposition of Act II of Wagner’s Parsifal to our own time is not problematic in itself, but the ‘hero,’ shorn of his role in the Holy Grail quest, is cast here as a suited businessman—a rather insubstantial ‘fool.’ What remains is a secularised psychodrama in which Parsifal’s mother and Kundry, the woman intent on seducing him (which she achieves in this version), are represented by the same woman. Well, not quite. Because of a physical indisposition, the soprano (Lucinda-Mirikata Deacon) sings from a window above, while a dancer (Maya Gavish ) performs the two roles onstage.

This contextless ramping up of the Oedipal drama and the intensification of its associated imagery—Kundry as seducer, lover, corrupter and, a non-Wagnerian addition, mother-to-be (in a deliberately gross fat suit)—is further amplified by action in which the repressed is unleashed as violent action. The revelatory kiss in Wagner’s Parsifal is not for Symonds. Instead a swooning quasi-dance floor embrace to destabilising glissandi is prelude to Parsifal’s sexual sinning and his subsequent brutal rejection of Kundry, dragging her about the stage, dispersing a tonne of her lingerie, pouring sand over her (an inversion of the empty nourishment she offers him earlier), scrubbing her with bread and forcing a bottle of wine into her mouth from which obscenely froths white, not red, liquid. If Symonds’ aim is to underline the misogyny in Wagner’s opera he and his director (Netta Yashchin) well exceed the master. This Parsifal is finally a brute, far removed from his naïve antecedent and certainly unable to offer anyone redemption. Had Symonds wanted to be even tougher on Wagner he might have addressed the composer’s more problematic indicators that Kundry is a woman from the East.

The excesses of Climbing Toward Midnight are many. On a spare, white polyhedral set (designer Jessica O’Neill) that evokes an emotionally empty Arctic space (its geometric pleasures depleted by very ordinary table and chairs) the action commences sparely but is soon awash with constant, very ordinary dance movement (if by a very able and expressive dancer) that alternates with the singing from the soprano or in conjunction with it. Symonds’ challenging score needs space to breathe, for the audience to focus its attention, for the work to gain unlaboured momentum. Another layer of complication comes in the form of fragments of poetry by the German Expressionist poet Georg Trakl, difficult to absorb, let alone read through the haze that obscures surtitles placed behind the action.

Had Lucinda-Mirikata Deacon not been replaced onstage by dancer Maya Gavish, doubtless we would have seen, and especially heard, a very different Climbing Toward Midnight. Deacon’s singing is at once powerful and mellifluous, a highly nuanced indicator of the range of Kundry’s feelings, which, as danced, are choreographically one-dimensional. Mitchell Riley’s Parsifal is finely sung, acted and bravely moved, but restricted by the role’s limitations. This character’s curiosity, submissiveness, confusion and anger are without anchor, lacking something like the Christian Mysticism that underpins Wagner’s Parsifal. Regardless of the production’s relentless busy-ness, his feelings come across as abstract, and as icy as the set design (even when lighting designer Ross Graham swathes it in passionate reds and oranges).

If not one of Sydney Chamber Opera’s best, musically Climbing Toward Midnight is a work I’d at least like to hear again, for the seductiveness and melancholy of its quieter passages and an otherwise energising rawness, deceptively cloaking its complexity.

Sydney Chamber Opera, Climbing Toward Midnight, composer, conductor Jack Symonds, director Netta Yashchin; The Parade Playhouse, NIDA, Sydney, 15, 17, 19, 20 April

isthisyours? began with six women (Jude Henshall, Ellen Steele, Louisa Mignone, Nadia Rossi, Rhiannon Owen and Tessa Leong) coming out of the Drama Centre at Flinders University in Adelaide and deciding to unite to make work.

Their first devised piece, Make Me Honest, Make Me Wedding Cake, had a lot to say about being women in the world. “We thought the rage from our teenage years would pass with time but it didn’t. We were also better educated and we realised that the things that bothered us were not just going to go away.”

Their most recent work, Best We Forget, is an irreverent look into our fear of being forgotten and our ongoing struggles to remember. The show begins as a panel discussion—three performers outlining their personal interests and specialties in relation to forgetting. It then fragments into elaborate scientific demonstrations and forays into popular culture and the rituals of contemporary domestic life such as playing the action movie star and the ‘significant birthday’ party speech, all on the theme of forgetting or wanting to be remembered. At some point the actual show begins to forget itself…The panicked personas then try desperately to reassemble the panel, while looking into theories like the Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting of which the show fast becomes an example.

“It feels important that we create, write and devise this work. I still have a quote from Hélène Cixous floating in my head from uni days, ‘Woman must write herself…Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.’” The company’s work is not characterised by themes. Says Leong, “We try to frame and present what it is that we have become numb to as we go about our lives (the ‘givens’ of our lives), such as the oppression of women, economic rationalism, consumer culture, fear of death, hope for immortality, desire for meaning, in such a way that they can be thought about. Our drive is to question these things with an audience.”

Leong has kept moving through identity positions as a performance maker. She started with ‘woman’ and then was “aware of the privilege she had as a woman in Australia; the opportunity for education and wealth, to live my life in a peaceful country with a stable system of government.” Sometimes this awareness of privilege was like a wall that was not helpful; at other times it led her to a passionate interest in making changes in the world. Now she feels drawn to look at her own Chinese heritage and into the work of Chinese artists and Chinese-Australian artists who generate work from their family story. “I really appreciate now in a conscious sense that in our family there was always a conversation about what was the norm. All things need questioning when one makes work—privilege, ancestry and gender. But there are other questions as well. My view is that if you can’t understand what you are living you can’t frame that any other way or imagine a different way or future. This is important to me as a person and as an artist.”

Emma Beech grew up in country South Australia. She says ‘When I came to Adelaide to study theatre (again at Flinders Drama Centre) I was constantly curious. I was concerned about people’s lives. When I made theatre I always thought about my brother, who had never been to the theatre. What would he want to see? He was my ‘cop in the head’.”

The Australian Bureau of Worthiness started with Beech wanting to interview people on the street about their lives. “I wanted to know what’s happening in people’s minds and lives. It always seemed different from what you see on TV. I have entered the middle class but I didn’t start there. I always thought the images weren’t quite accurate. I wanted to know what people were doing privately because I spent so much time in private experience. I was hoping there was a shared human experience. I have always wanted those conversations to be had.”

Her friend, director Sarah John, advised her to ask only one question. She decided on “What makes your day worth it?” She asked Tessa Leong to work on the project and Leong in turn suggested the third member, visual artist James Dodd. The three are invited into communities for short periods of time. They go out into the streets and ask the people they meet the question. Then they do a performance for the community.

Beech states, “I perform the conversations I’ve had from my memory of them-—what they left behind in me-—as a combination of narration, direct re-enactments of people by showing their gestures and body language. I also read aloud Tessa’s writing which takes the form of letters and prose reflections. This is done in front of projections of Jimmy’s drawings of the town. I also tell stories about what people said and did outside of the conversations on topic; what people wanted to talk about. All three of us seek out the surprising moments: the gems of genuine contact, the unique perspectives and the unexpected topography tucked away, the things you would miss if you weren’t diligently walking the non-main streets of a town and chatting to people. We present the gaps between what we expected or were led to believe and what we found and learned, between the story the town presents and the stories we hear and find.”

Tessa Leong says that working with Emma Beech in the Bureau of Worthiness changed her practice with isthisyours? Her definition of audience changed along with her understanding of the transaction possible. “It’s amazing when validation comes from the connection with the person present. We’re now focusing on experiencing new things with audiences, like a lot of contemporary artists, and figuring out if and how that is possible. We find inspiration from other female artists and now have access to them and their work—Sophie Calle, Guerrilla Girls, Chicks On Speed, Marina Abramovic (starting your own institute is a great way to write yourself into the world), Tracey Emin—I love their fearlessness and furore. They make up new rules.”

Beech also makes solo work, playing Fatima alongside Stephen Sheehan in Dating the World. This two-hander introduces StevlShefn, a ‘foreigner’ who, keen to communicate, speaks and sings in gibberish, and Fatima, a woman from the same unknown country who wears a black burqa and is calm and articulate in English. She translates his ‘outlandish’ outpourings to us poker faced. This is comedy about ‘foreignness’, gender and love.

Beech’s most recent solo, Homage to Uncertainty, is a collection of anecdotes and observations about chance encounters, family and investigations (for this piece she spent time recording how much work people did in a day in an effort to understand why she was not ‘getting on’), re-enactments and a little dancing. She says, “As a maker I’m driven by hearing or having a story that’s good enough to tell someone else.”

“When I think about the condition of women in the world I think of my sister at home with three children, working two days a week as a nurse with a husband who works long hours, “ says Beech. “I think we no longer want to talk about oppression and feeling inadequate because there is so much wrong with the state of the world. Women are freer in many ways but there is still much that is not allowed. Emotional isolation for both women and men is a very present part of our world. I see so many women in theatre audiences. So where are the men? If women are going to speak, where are the men who will listen? I am curious about this. People don’t connect and we don’t know what is going on and we end up isolated. I keep thinking about that.”

Director, dramaturg and writer Anne Thompson is Director of the Drama Centre at Flinders University. She has worked in visual and physical theatre with independent artists and small companies (Terrapin, Snuff Puppets, My Darling Patricia) and was co-founder of the award-winning Eleventh Hour Theatre.

DVD: Raising the Curtain—A celebration of Australian theatre

Madman and SBS DVD have come together to present Raising the Curtain, a unique history of Australian theatre from the convict era to the present, employing re-enactments, archival footage and photographs, and interviews with Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Robyn Nevin, Andrew Upton, Jack Charles, John Bell, Louis Nowra and others. The three episodes cover key figures in the development of Australian theatre, the influence of vaudeville and circus, and the current redefining of tradition.

DVD: Godzilla—Millenium Series Box Set

Make six of the 28 to date Godzilla movies your own! Originally embodying a warning about the dangers of nuclear war, Godzilla soon became more important than the message with audiences the world over. The Millennium era of Godzilla (1999-2004) traces Godzilla from his origins to fighting all the way to the last in the series, Final Wars.

CD: Ida Dueland, Winterreise

Winterreise, inspired by Franz Schubert’s famous work, is the latest album from Ida Duelund, a talented Danish vocalist and double bass player working in collaboration with sound designer Jethro Woodward. Active in jazz, experimental, improvised, pop and chamber music, Dueland has performed with Chamber Made Opera, The Australian Art Orchestra, Malthouse, Rawcus and Four Larks Theatre. You can sample Dueland’s evocative singing and fine cello playing in the RealTime Sound Capsule #4 or hear a track from Wintereisse at idaduelund.bandcamp.com.

Please note you can nominate for ONLY ONE GIVEAWAY.
Email us at giveaways@realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number.

In Warwick Thornton’s blood red pigment prints, three looming figures—a policeman, a priest and a stockman (indiscernibly black or white)—hover above the landscape as if at any moment they might either ascend to the heavens or bring down their wrath (Untitled, 2013).

On the adjacent wall, in his latest photographic series, Mulaga Gudjerie (2013), Darren Siwes’ Indigenous subjects are caked in white greasepaint, ostensibly dressed as a British Queen and her Consort. Their poses are in turn imperious, hostile, formal or put-upon. Like other works in this exhibition, Siwes’ images are disturbing in their ambiguity, simultaneously projecting a shifting hierarchy, mocking monarchy and its trappings and reminding us of the imposed costuming of some 19th century Indigenous portraiture. In the room notes Siwes writes, “I see my work residing somewhere between the truth and a hypothetical.”

The large white room of the Anna Schwartz Gallery is full of such crossovers between this world and its others. In r e a’s photographic triptych Poles Apart (2009), we see the artist, dressed in a black crinoline, running as if pursued (an image more explicit in the associated video not on show here) through a landscape beloved of the Heidelberg School. She blurs and vanishes into her surroundings. In strange juxtaposition Danie Mellor’s native hunters (Bayi Minyjirral, 2013) move through a rainforest rendered in the blue and white of willow pattern, their landscape made alien.

The ever-evolving Christian Thompson conjures another impressive series of shape-shifting self-portraits covering his eyes not with pennies as in death but with shells, flowers and fruit: his own body an unlimited palette for projection. There’s more ambiguity in Destiny Deacon’s inkjet prints of gleeful adolescents enthusiastically embracing Western depictions of vampirism and trying them on for size (Blakula Series, 2011).

We’ve seen parts of Michael Cook’s haunting work Civilised (2012) but never all 14 images in the series presented so generously here. There’s a disconcerting aura of surrealism in these graceful, dream-like photographic collages featuring lone subjects on a misty shoreline wearing costumes ranging from Elizabethan to Victorian. We’re reminded of all manner of invasion and in particular the imposition of European culture on indigenous peoples but, save for one woman drowned, far from appearing abject, Cook’s subjects maintain their customary bearing in the face of our disorientation, one man confidently wielding a cross to ward off a Tasmanian devil.

Sharing the entrance to the exhibition with the bronze Mokuy (2011) of Nawurapu Wunungmurra is Tracey Moffatt’s film beDevil (1993), its three gothic tales filmed in saturated colour dealing with death and disappearance, and everyday spirits who refuse to leave. Curator Marcia Langton reflects, “When Debil Debil opens it will be 20 years since beDevil first screened in Australia. It was a revolutionary work of cinematic art. Its presence in this exhibition marks a point in our history. Since then, conceptual art work that tackles difficult matters of history and the self has flourished” (Room Notes).

Debil Debil is a thoroughly engrossing exhibition, bringing together some of the most skilful artists of this inventive era.

Debil Debil, curator Professor Marcia Langton (AM), artists Brook Andrew, Daniel Boyd, Gordon Bennett, Michael Cook, Destiny Deacon, Ricardo Idagi, Danie Mellor, Tracey Moffatt, r e a, Darren Siwes, Christian Thompson, Warwick Thornton, Nawurapu Wunungmurra, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Carriageworks, Sydney, 20 April-8 June

A musical performance can be like a chess-match, as Sydney-based composer, performer and broadcaster Julian Day and Adelaide-based artist Riley O’Keeffe showed in co-improvising a sound work on the opening night of the Bloom—Space exhibition at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation.

Day and O’Keeffe each used two keyboards and took turns to activate the keys by placing weights to hold them down, responding to each other one note at a time. Over 20 minutes they built up a powerful, layered drone of complex chords. Day has performed solo in a similar vein (RT106), and O’Keeffe combines musical performance with visual art (E-dition,17July, 2012), but here the two performers build intuitively on each other’s sounds. Adding vibrato of different speeds creates phasing between the keyboards, producing shifting rhythms overlaying the chords and creating an effect similar to piano harmonics. The sound becomes very dense, though never overwhelming, always retaining musicality and elegance.

This collaborative approach set the scene for Bloom—Space in which emerging Adelaide-based curator Adele Sliuzas teamed Sydney-based artists Carla Liesch, Will French and Day with Adelaide’s Lisa Harms, Roy Ananda and O’Keeffe to catalyse moves and countermoves in each other’s art practice.

Carla Liesch’s Landscape Painting, a mound of lawn in the centre of the gallery on which people sit or lie, becomes the exhibition’s focal point by creating a relaxed, approachable viewing position (in contrast to the vinyl or timber benches typical of art museums). Next to it stands Ananda’s Aether drift, a tilted plane constructed of hundreds of timber hexagons, each about 40cm across, suspended by two huge aluminium ladders. Sitting on the lawn, I feel as if I’m on a hill overlooking the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge poking up through the afternoon fog that floats into San Francisco Bay. Comprising building materials, Aether drift can also suggest a complex molecule, the infinitude of a fractal and biotechnological manipulation. Audience members at the artists’ talk, sitting on the grassy knoll, felt they were looking at clouds, yet Ananda’s evocative work might have weighed 50kg or more.

Contradicting the scale and authority of Ananda’s ladder-supported plane is Will French’s Doubled Up, Fingers Crossed, two precariously inverted timber A-frame ladders, with pencils wedged underneath to balance them, located on the opposite side of the knoll to establish symmetry with Aether drift and contrast with Liesch’s organic, growing lawn. Sliuzas stated that her intention with the exhibition was to demonstrate the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect,’ but what came through strongly was the physical and conceptual relationship between the artworks and the way they aggregated into a composite whole.

Lisa Harms’ intriguing work, Script for a_____Song (with no proper name), comprises a long roll of paper lying across and under a table, bearing text like a theatre script, beautifully crafted, with great visual power and tactility. A pre-recorded tape of voices like a vaguely overheard conversation emanates from the table. Nearby, partitioned from the rest of the exhibition, are two videos, one of a concrete floor projected onto the wall, the other of ornithological illustrations projected inside a small cupboard. Harms’ combination of sound, text, video and installation seems to propagate the entire exhibition.

Julian Day’s contribution to the exhibition, Requiem, is also in a partially enclosed space—two keyboards wedged between partition and wall by horizontal pipes that activate the Fs and Cs, creating a droning chord heard continuously through the gallery, and competing with the rising and falling voices in Harms’ audio. Day’s installation is as precarious as French’s inverted ladders.

Collaboration between artists is commonplace, but Bloom—Space demonstrates the potential for group responsiveness, and, with its multiple symmetries and inversions, how an exhibition can function as a single entity.

Roy Ananda, The Devourer

photo James Field, courtesy the artists and Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne

At the Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Roy Ananda’s engaging and extensive solo exhibition The Devourer is a multifaceted exploration of popular culture through sculptural form. His Hideous Climb through the Unfashioned Realms represents the curvature of space-time using a block of moulded plaster painted to look like an astronomical map. From the Gulf of Space to the Wells of Night is a wall of beautiful drawings on graph paper that depict 3D space in a 2D grid, defying conventional perspective and questioning how human perception functions.

Ananda is well-known for his elaborate, large-scale and miniature sculptural works constructed from industrial equipment and building materials that establish a characteristic language of form and process. In The Devourer, he demonstrates his interest in the impact of horror and science fiction genres, and HP Lovecraft in particular, that pervade contemporary culture through games, cinema and literature. His The Abomination of Abominations is a tall wooden frame through which snakes a long sheet of paper printed with a grossly oversized black and white image of a centipede. His interest in model-making is evident in the small-scale shelves of tiny figures and objects depicting in physical form the kinds of games popular in virtual reality. Ananda’s exhibition simultaneously addresses our predisposition to fantasy and the nature of materiality, questioning what is subjective and what is real.

Bloom—Space, curator Adele Sliuzas, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, 3 May–1 June; Roy Ananda, The Devourer, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Adelaide, 26 April–26 May

The Lost World (part 1) is the beginning of Julie Gough’s journey into unknown times and places, where artist becomes detective, archivist and anthropologist in a search to understand her ancestral past and its effects in the present.

Part 1 takes Gough outside her comfort zone, away from the highly charged sculpture and installation practice for which she is best known, to reasonably uncharted territory in video. The Lost World (part 1) principally consists of video (with works of 10 to 45 minutes), a medium that while providing the artist with a means to explore ephemerality, absence and recurrence, demands commitment from the viewer.

Gough’s journey is set in motion by Observance (2012), a video installation originally shown in a 2012 Adelaide Festival exhibition, Deadly: in-between heaven and hell, at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute. The work is now exhibited as part of a series of large wall-projected videos on the four white walls of Hobart’s CAST gallery. Fittingly, Observance is the first work seen on entering the gallery, projected on the wall opposite the doorway. Here Gough takes the role of detective, surveyor and stalker following and recording unsuspecting eco-tourists around her ancestral land in Mount William National Park. The snippets of surveillance footage, cut into short bites, build a sense of anxiety. The unknowing participants are viewed as if through Gough’s eyes prompting one to question: ‘Who are they?’ ‘Why are they here?’ ‘Are they a threat?’ A sickening reality check of what the ecotourism industry of Tasmania might be reenacting.

Observance sits somewhat separate from Gough’s recently developed Lost World collection which includes The Lost World (part 1) (2013), Oblivion (2013), Traveller (2013) and Haunted (2013). These were created from or in response to the controversial diary of George Augustus Robinson, Friendly Mission, which has become something of a textbook of Tasmania’s colonial history, but as Gough puts it, “Friendly Mission doesn’t allow for a future, just despair.”

In Traveller, Gough takes up the persona of the Traveller, equipped with animal hide and cultural tool kit including screw-together wooden spears. She is depicted trying to hitchhike her way to locations with poignant associations such as The Nut and Highfield House. She is shown ritualistically screwing together her spears (which Gough is renowned for in her sculptural practice) and preying on cattle at Highfield House—a somewhat humorous attempt at hunting. In the next scene she camps out under hides after ceremoniously burying a copy of Friendly Mission, as if putting an end to a nightmare.

Oblivion is presented on the wall that mirrors Traveller. Here the artist sits completely still on the edge of a waterbed reading Friendly Mission, while leeches burrow beneath the skin of her bare legs. Suffering leech phobia, my stomach turned with fear and repulsion, making me wonder later, was the artist’s reaction to Friendly Mission a similarly physical one? This 45-minute marathon climaxes when a huge tiger leech exits Gough’s skin and a stream of blood rolls down her leg. When queried about the title of the work, the artist explained that the title Oblivion was “hardcore—it’s about being stuck in a place, not of this world, and not in a ‘real’ place, while immersed in Friendly Mission.”

In The Lost World (part 1) Gough takes a journey with her brother, searching for a significant and unnamed location. Together they face numerous obstacles: a high-vis-wearing official blocking access, barricaded areas, dangerous water currents, toxic vegetation and the very real risk of being lost in the wilderness. Throughout the work a sense of drama builds. Brother and sister become lost, over 10 hours and miles from their destination. As evening breaks, they receive worried voice messages from their mother, one after another until eventually Constable Wright calls from Devonport Police Station. Sound and video editor Jemma Rea is to be commended: the viewer senses the amount of time lost in the bush, but also the increasing hysteria felt by the hikers and concerned third parties.

Anchoring these four videos is a sculptural cairn/compass built from bluestone spalls installed in the centre of the gallery space. A large compass needle moves at random trying in vain to find its bearings. This object has been appropriately titled Haunted (2013), bearing both a material past and the sense of disorientation at not being able to locate oneself. This humble object embodies the aimless helplessness of being lost.

Julie Gough’s investment in her investigation and her personal sacrifice aids in the rewriting of history through the experience of place. She describes her series of actions as “tasks of encounter” undertaken to bring her out of Robinson’s Friendly Mission and back into reality. The artist seeks insight through acts of surveillance, voyeurism, disappearance and physical risk. An unintentional outcome of being lost in a Friendly Mission is that at times the artist and her loved ones experienced distress, anxiety and pain—possibly an accurate and challenging retelling of the artist’s ancestral history.

Julie Gough, The Lost World (part 1), CAST, Hobart 26 April-26 May; The Lost World (part 2), October 2013, CAST and Cambridge Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, UK

Grumbling away beneath the glitzy headline “The Sound of London Now,” the underlying theme of the Metropolis New Music Festival was the musician’s responsibility to society and the environment.

The theme was not thrashed out in pre-concert talks or panel discussions, nor in interviews or advertising material. Completely absent from the public image of the festival, it was instead provoked by the subjects of the pieces themselves or by throwaway lines in program notes. If the ‘gently provocative’ approach to ethics does more harm than good, would a polemical or strictly unethical artistic practice be preferable? Can a work be gently polemical, or must it adopt a ‘critical’ tone?

Mira Calix

Mira Calix raises ethical questions in an almost imperceptible manner, drawing you into an enchanted sphere of electronic and instrumental susurration before whispering a message in your ear. Her intimate concert, Looking for Cowslips, in the Melbourne Recital Centre Salon drew inspiration from the nature-themed poetry of Alice Oswald. In withdrawing her book Memorial from the TS Eliot prize in 2011 because of the prize’s questionable sponsors, Oswald described poetry as “the great unsettler.” Calix’s compositions for strings, winds, voice and electronics provide unsettling settings of unsettling poetry, raising the question, in existential more than political terms, of humanity’s relationship to nature.

In a more concrete, jubilant form of charm offensive, Calix presented her short film “Fables: The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” a one-shot melodrama performed by a cast who have all experienced homelessness. Calix’s approach to ethical questions is to inspire empathy, to sensitise you to the issue at hand. Despite the gentle surface of her music, it ‘takes sides.’ Problems arise when the same tactic is used with a bomb or the slaughter of an animal with the aim of ‘raising the question.’

Matthew Herbert

In Matthew Herbert’s albums, music and ethics function like the two independent hemispheres of the brain, with the technology of the sampler acting as the corpus callosum making them appear as one walking, talking, contradictory being. Herbert leaves it up to the audience to determine the relationship between the two, such as in The End of Silence, a concert made entirely out of a six-second sample of a pro-Gaddafi war plane bombing Ras Lanuf in 2011. At one moment, startling in its beauty, the roar of the jet plane is transformed into the breathy tone of an alto flute and a lyrical melody is played by keyboardist Sam Beste. The ambivalence I felt towards this sound was calculated; as the program reads: “On first hearing the recording is terrifying, but at the end of the program once Herbert has finished mixing, layering and manipulating the sounds will you still feel the same way?”

There is no doubt that Herbert intends to be critical of the former Gaddafi regime because he says that the Ras Lanuf sample “punctures the safe veneer of distance” between us and the “atrocities committed by dictators in the Arab world during the Arab Spring.” Nevertheless, there is nothing in The End of Silence, neither its militaristic dance beats, its flute-like melody, nor its eerie ambience, to suggest that it is not a paean to the war plane, a song of thanksgiving to pro-Gaddafi forces. We could very well say that it follows in the futurist tradition of praising the power and majesty of the noise of war. I felt very differently about Herbert’s second concert, which was made entirely out of sounds recorded during the life of a pig destined for the dinner table.

I have to confess that I am uniquely unqualified to write about meat; apart from a recent foray into seafood I have never eaten it. Chef Jesse Gerner, who cooked some pork at the back of the stage during the concert, would do a better job reviewing a concert than I would reviewing a steak. Despite wrangling with the ethics of leather, I have never consciously excluded or abjectified meat from my identity. It is perhaps for this reason that I was so moved by the sound of an organ animated by a mixture of pig’s blood and air that played as the thick smell of cooking pork wafted over the audience.

Why would I allow the sound of the blood-organ to resonate with me emotionally on the one hand and set up a wall to the plane-flute on the other? It could be because of a discrepancy between the values I attribute to human and non-human life, a discrepancy I would not reject outright, but would be surprised by its magnitude. It could also be because of the scarcity of ‘tone’ in One Pig, the sounds of pig-life consisting mainly of almost pitchless noises. Or could it be because of the difference between the sound of a weapon and that of a body? The sound of a weapon implies an action that could be taken or stopped, demanding a response from the listener. The sound of a body implies a deed already done, the passive evidence of violence. This is exactly what was missing from One Pig: the sound of the weapon. The nonchalance with which the audience picked at the crackling cooked during the performance sums up the net effect of Herbert’s latest provocations: far from provocative, they are desensitising entertainment.

Thomas Adès

Composer and conductor Thomas Adès eschews ethical considerations from music. An intense and world-weary Adès looks out from the cover of his book of interviews with Guardian music critic Tom Service. Inside Adès juxtaposes semi-philosophical platitudes with genuinely stimulating musical observations. The ‘semi-philosophical,’ or more correctly ‘anti-philosophical,’ tone is not accidental for a composer who read logical positivist philosophy and had his own late-Wittgensteinian epiphany at the age of 14. To Adès “ethics are a distraction an artist cannot afford,” along with metaphysics, epistemology, the lot. Adès’ anti-philosophy leads to some contradictory beliefs as he wants to protect music from its context and ethics, but does not want to define what music is. He will say that Wagner’s music is inherently political with the notes being “born wearing little uniforms,” even though he will gladly adopt a Wagnerian style because “the [musical] material is fascinating.” Or he will claim to compose completely instinctively according to the “magnetism” of the notes, avoiding the topic of style and technique, while also shirking his own agency in determining the direction of the notes: “My material does not exist in physical reality…These notes are not objects that are in front of you—although in another sense it helps to treat them like that; maybe they are, in fact, a sort of invisible object.” Adès wants the musical autonomy of a Platonist philosophy without the apparent restrictions of a positive definition of music.

Adès has a point though, whether you are a Platonist or not, ethics complicate the creative process. However, should an issue form a source of inspiration, the musician should at least do some soul-searching and make a point about the issue lest the relationship of the music to the issue appear parasitic. As Mira Calix has shown, this does not mean that a piece has to be ugly and therefore critical. Without some sort of commitment there is always the risk that the composition just repeats the bombing, or the killing, on the imaginary level.

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Melbourne Recital Centre: Metropolis New Music Festival, 8–20 April

Alvin Curran, Shofar III concert with William Winant, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, 2009

This year’s Totally Huge New Music Festival looks to be bigger than ever, spreading across Perth’s cultural precinct and beyond in August. The festival will also incorporate the International Computer Music Conference with its extensive program of selected live performances from around the world. Matthew Lorenzon spoke with Tura New Music’s Tos Mahoney to find out more.

This will be Tura’s 26th year, the 11th Totally Huge New Music Festival and the 27th International Computer Music Conference. Though none of those numbers are particularly auspicious, it looks like it will be a momentous year for the festival. What can we look forward to?

The integration of the first International Computer Music Conference in the southern hemisphere means there will be a focus across the broad spectrum of computer music and electronic music. As well as international headliners like Alvin Curran, Haco and Agostino di Scipio we’ll have a large contingent of Australian acts including Speak Percussion, Decibel and Clocked Out. There will also be, concurrently with the festival, an installation by Otomo Yoshihide at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. We’re looking to get him back for the festival too, if we can.

Both the conference and the festival are centred around the Cultural Centre, but we’ll have events from the Museum to the Library, PICA, State Theatre Centre and even The Bakery. There will also be some events in Fremantle, where Alvin Curran will be presenting a version of Maritime Rites—not the full version, but he’ll be performing the piece himself. Curran will also present Beams—a totally acoustic work—for a varyingly large ensemble at Fremantle or Midland.

We also pride ourselves on bridging the Australian east-west divide on a constant basis. Of course Speak Percussion have been here a couple of times now. This time they’ll be presenting a new collaboration between Robin Fox and Eugene Ughetti, which we’re very excited about.

How will the International Computer Music Conference and the festival connect?

Though it sits outside the conference, the Fox-Ughetti collaboration will fit quite nicely into the ICMC program. In fact all the way through the program there are constant connections. The great thing about the ICMC is that it’s not just an academic conference: as well as written papers there are also peer-reviewed performances. Clocked Out will be doing some of their own compositions as well as performing some of the works from the ICMC. We’re still not exactly sure which pieces yet, but I can say there will be a wealth of fantastic work that will be presented as both part of the conference and the festival. Some will be live performances, others acousmatic surround-sound works by each artist and then there will be a listening room where about 60 works will be on a loop for the whole week.

To our credit we have had Cat Hope from WAAPA and Lindsay Vickery from Edith Cowan University working on this for a long time. The universities and Tura New Music jointly bid for the conference. This is the first time in the conference’s 27-year history that it will be south of the equator. We didn’t quite know what we were getting ourselves into! We had over 400 submissions for the conference and we understand that it attracts an uncommonly engaged audience who go to everything, whether it is officially part of the conference or not. If you were ever going to bridge that east-west gap and visit Perth, this would be the time.

Cat Hope decided on the theme “Developments in electro-acoustics” to broaden the notion of what the conference could contain. We are providing a contingent of performers and resources for the conference beyond the obvious electronic ones—including Decibel, Clocked Out, didjeridu players, a jazz orchestra and a laptop orchestra. There will be a huge spectrum of events.

Yes, we are organising an emerging local artists’ stream for the conference curated by Sam Gillies, a composer and recent graduate from WAAPA. That program will feature about 12 local artists and ensembles.

On a side note, Tura New Music has been collecting an invaluable archive of recordings of and documentation about contemporary Australian music. Have there been any developments in regards to this incredible resource?

We guard the Tura New Music Archive with our lives and have recently received funding through a joint ARC grant with ECU, the State Library, the National Library and ABC FM. It is called the “Western Australian New Music Archive Project.” Its goal is to set up an online research archive of Western Australian New Music going back to 1970. The Tura archive will be part of that but we will also be uncovering as much as we can in other collections. The grant allows us to employ a research assistant for up to three years. We’re about to put out an Expression of Interest, but if you know anyone who knows about digital archiving please tell them to get in touch with us!

11th Totally Huge New Music Festival International Computer Music Conference, Perth, 9-18 Aug; www.tura.com.au

Leah Scholes, Eugene Ughetti & Matthias Schack-Arnott; Speak Percussion, MaerzMusik Festival

There is nothing quite like travel to make one reflect on what it is you’ve left behind. This year I’ve been living in Berlin. In a city with such international activity one begins to wonder how to relate to it all. What can I say, as an Australian, that someone else can’t?

In March, Australian ensemble Speak Percussion came to Berlin to present a program as part of Maerzmusic—one of Germany’s largest and most diverse festivals of new music. Before the festival, I met with Eugene Ughetti, the artistic director of Speak (the ensemble also includes Leah Scholes and Matthias Shack-Arnott), to talk about how it sounds to be Australian on an international stage. “I’m wanting to offer a fresh language,” says Ughetti. “I don’t want something any European ensemble could duplicate.”

Speak’s program presented pieces by four of Australia’s premier composers, Anthony Pateras, Thomas Meadowcroft, Matthew Schlomowitz and Rohan Drape (it’s worth noting, however, that only Drape still lives in Australia). What united Speak’s program, other than being simply works by Australian composers, was the focus on novel orchestration taken by each of the four. “There’s a playfulness in the program that is quite Australian,” says Ughetti. “There are risks, but not calculated, Stockhausen-esque risks. Fun risks.”

Drape’s See, Hearer, Clearer (2012) showed remarkable economy of orchestration. All three members of Speak huddled around a single vibraphone, teasing out tones and chords to hold the middle voice between prerecorded piano material and sine-tone shading. In Schlomowitz’s Popular Contexts Vol. 6 (2013), a sampler, vibraphone and drum kit provided an impossible collage of gestures from jazz, rock and daytime television. In Hypnagogics (2005) by Pateras and two pieces by Meadowcroft (Cradle, 2013 and The Great Knot, 2011) much of the orchestration centred on everyday objects from suburban Australia as well as shot glasses, espresso cups, two beautiful Revox tape-machines etc. In Pateras’ Hypnagogics, these ready-mades were abstracted to pure sound but in Meadowcroft’s pieces they doubled as cultural trigger points. These broader associations are an important part of his music, lending it a beautiful, private quality. There was a real joy in being able to exactly picture Meadowcroft sitting at home, tuning wine glasses or shaking tins of marbles to ensure that every sound sat just so.

Fittingly for Speak, this year’s Maerz festival had a particular focus on percussion. The festival opened with two percussion concerts back-to-back: Dutch group, Slagwerk Den Haag performed Michael Gordon’s Timber (2009) before Robyn Schulkowsky and Joey Baron performed pieces by Christian Wolff and several of their own improvisations. This was a nice piece of programming. Both performances were immediately identifiable as American and yet sounded nothing alike. In Timber, six percussionists stood in a tight circle, summoning thick brambles of cross rhythms from a set of simantras (resonant planks of wood). Though Slagwerk’s performance was exceptional, and the piece has some interesting ideas, at an hour’s duration there was a feeling that Timber’s limited materials weren’t enough to support its hefty structure. Where Slagwerk was static and minimalist, Schulkowsky and Baron were vigorous and loaded with ideas. Baron’s playing is jazzy and angular, Schulkowsky’s classily poised and teeming with energy. Their two languages are more interesting at the points where they veer away from one another rather than where they converge.

Two days later Christian Dierstein delved further into percussion’s theatrical possibilities. In Lucia Ronchetti’s Helicopters and Butterflies (2012), Dierstein climbed ladders, yelled monologues and spilled loose objects over drums. In Daniel Ott’s questromung 2 (2011), he swung cymbals suspended from industrial-looking ropes. Here, one could find those “Stockhausen-esque risks.” They may not be ‘fun’ per se, but there is magnetism.

Robyn Schulkowsky made a second appearance later in the festival as percussion soloist with the Konzerthuas Orchestra performing Air (1968) by German composer Helmut Lacheman. Air’s key concerns were spatial—percussion sounds skittered through the orchestra while harmonic colours smeared gradually across the stage. The Konzerthaus Orchestra’s program finished on US-resident British composer Brian Ferneyhough’s orchestral behemoth, Firecycle Beta (five conductors, 10 percussionist, four keyboardist and string orchestra, 1969-71) Despite its many moving parts, Firecycle Beta is an elegant machine and the five conductors worked the orchestra like interlocking gears to dizzying effect.

Though Mearz was held mostly in concert halls, the festival (somewhat surprisingly) also hosted three concerts at Berghain, Berlin’s most (in)famous Techno club. When it’s not hosting pansexual, free-for-all dance parties, Berghain is a spectacular venue for new music. The retro-futuristic PA system in a hollowed out former power plant makes it feel like a missing scene from Blade Runner. There, I caught Thomas Ankersmitt’s Stress Patterns (2012). Ankersmitt performed on a modular synthesiser (“a dinosaur of the digital age,” declared the concert program), working masterfully through the carcass of this early machine, extracting squealing high tones and liquid rushes of noise.

On the second Friday night, the festival got its moment of new music rock-stardom with Steve Reich and Beryl Knot’s 1993 video oratorio The Cave (1990-93). The piece is a modern re-interpretation of the biblical tale of Abraham, with Hagar recast as a jilted black woman and Ishmael becoming ‘the James Dean of the Old Testament.’ The oratorio takes a documentarian approach, with fragments of recorded interviews looped and reinforced by the acoustic ensemble—the same technique Reich used on Different Trains and WTC 9/11. Repetition is, of course, the central trope of Reich’s music and he’s certainly not shy about repeating himself between pieces as well. In The Cave, however, there wasn’t much learned in this repetition and the use of video served mostly as a distraction, heightening the disconnection between the interviews and the acoustic ensemble.

Perhaps it’s anachronistic to think of music as having a national voice. Certainly, any composer today with a decent internet connection is no longer limited to any one country’s influence. It’s a hard notion to shake though, and since leaving Australia I’ve become increasingly aware of some element of Australian new music that I seldom hear in Berlin. Ughetti calls it “a casual multiculturalism”—this willingness of Australian new music practitioners to strip some of the purist underpinnings from classical, jazz, noise, visual art etc and to allow these conflicting narratives to intermingle without inhibitions. Australia is a big place, there is room enough for contradictions.

Many Australian theatre directors look towards the practices of European directors’ theatre—textual freedoms, visual lavishness, multi-sensory semiotics—for inspiration. However, Daniel Schlusser is one of only a few who understand that the full promise of Regietheater is not to dress up a play, but to articulate an argument.

Schlusser’s recent work has methodically explored the emotional subconscious of the theatrical canon, situating the importance of each classical play in its resonance with ongoing societal neuroses. Unlike the often intellectualising Germanic Regietheater, Schlusser’s is emotionally highly literate theatre. While it dissects the individual and collective psyche with an analyst’s knife, it never disputes the legitimacy of feeling, never simply dismisses the irrational.

At the risk of over-simplifying, the unifying method of Schlusser Ensemble’s work is to reduce a play—the psychology of characters, interpersonal conflict, the plot—into pure, physical metonymy. Whittled down to its most rudimentary theme, it is then re-built as devised, durational, anti-theatrical performance, bearing superficially no resemblance to the original work, and hardly any to theatre. This production uses Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie as a pretext to focus on the crucial question in the interpretation of Williams’ oeuvre: the closeness of his art to his life.

In Schlusser’s hands, the actors only half-wear their roles (the Southern accent comes and goes), the characters lose the plot and wander on stage engaged in very private games with one another, and the stage loses the theatre as everyone forgets to perform to the fourth wall. The performance loses theatrical expressiveness: characters articulate themselves only through the lowest forms of communication: gesture, verbal cliché, banter, the low-end detritus of our culture. And yet, dense intertextual play permeates every banal detail: for those who know their Williams, the references are rich.

It is not metaphor: the stage has its own, physical meaning. In Menagerie, Edwina Wren’s Laura wears a single rollerskate. This does not simply represent physical disability, but literally shortens one of her legs. Her collection of glass figurines becomes eggshells, so much easier to break. The tenement flat in Depression-era St Louis is transformed into a shack in what might be New Orleans post-Katrina. When Jim, the potential suitor, is introduced to Laura, they are physically locked into the Wingfields’ shack by the hopeful, curious, near-giggling family.

The Glass Menagerie is a slim work and Schlusser Ensemble is done with its storyline within the first 35-40 minutes. The remaining 35-40 are spent expanding on the connections that Williams’ first play presaged, and the rest of his oeuvre so richly entangled: those between Williams’ plots and the real events of his life. Echoes of real people manifest in recurring characters (Williams’ sister Rose, lobotomised and schizophrenic, but dearly loved, in Laura, the shy virgin with a disability in Glass Menagerie), and the often professed affinities between Williams and his exquisite female characters. Laura refracts into Rose; Laura’s mother Amanda into the mater Williams, former southern belle smothering her children with needy love; Tim’s colleague and Laura’s tentative suitor Jim, the straight man who plays with these hurting people, into Tenn’s real-life lover Frank; narrator Tim into the observer Tenn, and into Brick, the homosexual husband of Maggie the Cat (on the hot tin roof); and finally, Maria St Just, Williams’ fag hag, best friend of 35 years and conscientious executor of his estate, into Maggie, a character originally based on her.

Schlusser Ensemble zooms in on the mutual cannibalisation of Williams’ life and art, but not as a pure intertextual exercise. As Maria accuses the playwright of having staged her suffering, as Tenn recreates his loneliness and vulnerability in dozens of fictional women, as beautiful, aloof men continuously reject needy, shy, men and women, what is revealed is not merely Williams’ attempts to exorcise trauma through writing, but the sheer emotional weight of that attempted transfer, and the impossibility of catharsis.

Everyone in this world is queer, in the sense that everyone has attachments, passions, sorrows that cannot be fully articulated in language as we have it. Gay men. Lonely women in love with gay men. Ageing beauties in a patriarchal world. Sensible nurses attached to traumatised children they care for. Poor people grown rich, and rich people grown poor. Siblings who love each other even though they cannot help each other. There is much sorrow on this stage: the sorrow of Williams’ oeuvre compounded with the sorrow of his life. On the surface, it is laughable, ignoble suffering—but only because our culture (certainly Williams’ at the time) did not afford it legitimacy.

Judith Butler understands melancholia as ungrievable loss, as a feeling that cannot be consummated because language lacks the words to legitimise it. For Butler, unlegitimised, ‘queer’ lives result in unlegitimised, unmournable deaths, such as the deaths of the AIDS pandemic. A queer tragedy does not exist, there is only farce.

In Schlusser’s Menagerie, just as in Tennessee Williams’ work and life, all characters grieve in a muted, unconsummated way: through role-playing, partying, sexual frustration, plumes of euphoria and dysphoria and deep friendships. Trying to find a language for their experience creates strange aberrations, responses that are not right, that seem cheap and clichéd misidentifications (like Williams’ own with the cultural image of the suffering woman). That is why it is a stroke of brilliance to fill the soundtrack with exemplary wannabe-trailer trash cliché Lana del Rey.

Menagerie respects its characters’ ignobleness. In a certain way, the production is a beautiful gesture of empathy with the often excessive gay party culture. It asserts, simply, that sorrowful lives go on, because tragedy is not as true as melodrama, and because we will always rather live to be a laughable cliché than an honourable corpse. It ends with a hopeful, consoling image of the cast huddled safely on the roof of the shack, in life vests. The hurricane may be coming, but they are used to doing it tough.

Melbourne Theatre Company, NEON: Menagerie, Daniel Schlusser Ensemble, director Daniel Schlusser, Lawler Theatre, Melbourne, 16-26 May

Elizabeth Nabben, Steve Rodgers Dance Better at Parties, Sydney Theatre Company,

The intimacy of Gideon Obarzanek’s production of his Dance Better at Parties, its structure a series of one-on-one dance classes, acutely highlighted the emotional vulnerability of his protagonists. William Yang and Annette Shun Wah’s Stories Then and Now frankly delineated the lives of six people of migrant background, each telling their own story with the intimacy of direct address while opening out rich cultural and historical perspectives. Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 4 was, of course, bracingly epic but it compellingly foregrounded desperate attempts to maintain or establish emotional kinship.

Dance Better at Parties

Dance Better at Parties is a gentle, lucidly constructed parable from Gideon Obarzanek, Associate Director at the STC in 2012, about guilt, grief and emotional transference.

Dave (Mark Rogers), a shy man in early middle age seeks out a dance class, simply, it seems, so he can “dance better at parties.” He hesitates when confronted with a choice of seemingly complex styles but then enrols, persuaded by his young teacher-to-be, Rachel (Elizabeth Nabben), who is deft at delivering a charming pitch by rote (we hear her later on the phone uttering the same to another potential client).

The otherwise sincere Rachel eventually overcomes Dave’s reticence with some very determined instruction, one of the production’s several key pleasures since the teaching, elaborated in convincing detail (right from how to walk), is central to the grieving Dave’s emotional recovery from the death of his wife, loosening his body, standing him tall, imbuing elegance and reigniting desire. Rachel perhaps more than likes Dave, but is shocked, as is the audience, when he secretly films her—the outcome is violent. In one of the play’s odd gaps we’re left uncertain as to why she then continues teaching him, or even how his return to class was negotiated. The relationship warms, Dave’s skills improve considerably, evident in the pair’s joyous dancing in the final lesson. However Rachel doesn’t turn up to partner Dave at the school’s end of course party. His disappointment brief, he seeks out another partner with his new-found confidence. Without her saying it in the previous scene, we can see in the lone Rachel the weight she has taken on and the artificiality of a relationship without foundations. It’s a simple but effective tale that nicely sidesteps sentimentality.

The taut framework of the narrative is provided by the strict time limits enforced by the dance sessions, teasingly leaving words unsaid and desires held in check. Above all the performances are engagingly quiet in a city where small theatre spaces flood with overly forceful projection. Rogers (his Dave ungainly, initially slightly stooped, hesitant, growing in confidence) and Nabben (her Rachel confident, playful, an eager teacher, but emotionally alert to her own needs) are subtle performers who find an abundance of nuance in a spare script built from interviews Obarzanek made with dance class students (oddly no one is credited with writing Dance Better at Parties). The spare set (design Renee Mulder)—wide parquet floor, cupboard, table, chair and, in the end, a celebratory golden curtain—underpins the overall simplicity of the directorial approach, allowing the underlining of small complexities, while the spare fluoro lighting amplifies the production’s intimate realism, save for those scenes that step out of the ordinary with alarming colour (design Benjamin Cisterne). Jessica Prince’s choreographing of the teaching techniques and the dancing provides Obarzanek with physical theatre opportunities rich in comic missteps, intimacy and display.

All Dave wanted to do was “dance better at parties,” but he goes much further than that in a play that is as funny as it is sad. Dance Better at Parties first appeared, if from the same impulse but in a very different shape, in 2004, with five interviewees on video screens, their stories realised, quite unliterally, by five dancers. It’s somewhat surprising to see the creator of Glow, Mortal Engine and other demanding multimedia works turn his hand to simple, social drama in this work’s latest manifestation, but the seed was there in the original work, and is also evident in his co-directed 2007 film Dance Like Your Old Man. It’s still about dancing. Now as part of the South Australian Film Corporation’s HIVE Lab, Dance Better at Parties is set to become a film (RT111. p25).

Stories Then & Now

Six people step in turn before a microphone, framed by large projections of photographs drawn from the family history of each on two large screens. Their unrushed delivery, careful pacing and spare storytelling is unmistakably in the manner of the well-known performances by their workshop leader, the photographer William Yang. Like Yang, they have recalled, reflected on and distilled personal histories to make sense of their uncertain identities as migrants at the nexus of at least two cultures—sometimes more. Academic Ien Ang spoke of an ethnic Chinese childhood in Java, growing up in the Netherlands (a stormy adolescence) and then finding a career in Australia, love with an English archaeologist and a home away from home in the south of France where the different strands of the family can come together.

Stories Now & Then, directed by Yang and Annette Shun Wah, is a gentle, undemonstrative show, yielding the kind of pleasure that comes from being read to aloud. Here however, the six largely non-professional performers had learned their lines, if not always comfortably; only a couple were able to relax sufficiently to significantly vary pace and tone. Not that this really mattered, we didn’t expect them to act. But I was concerned for their vulnerability, centrestage in a large theatre, with a sizeable audience and big projections. I wondered why, save for theatrical neatness, the speakers all had to present in exactly the same formal way.

That concern aside, the frank tales these brave speakers told were culturally and historically intriguing, each very different from the other but with a middle class commonality—born into, lost and found again, or, from humbler origins, newly achieved. Ideological, religious, cultural and generational tensions dominated the stories, sometimes amusingly, now and then darkly as the lives of the speakers moved from social and political restraint to independence, if often without quite resolving relationships with their parents. However, their concern for grandparents and parents (caught, for example, in the conflict between Communism and Nationalism in the late 1940s; talented women denied full education; a scholar blacksmithing for seven years in a village during Mao’s Cultural Revolution; a career in Indonesia ruined by the 1967 coup) is recurrently evident, alongside blunter revelations about abandonment or a funny but telling tale about an unlikely (and thwarted) arranged marriage in very recent times.

These stories are of a kind that many Australians are unlikely to hear or are only told within family circles. Occasionally they make it to radio, rarely to film or television. They are necessary fuel for developing empathy and for an understanding of what Australia has become. Ien Ang, Jenevieve Chang, Michael CS Park, Sheila Pham, Paul van Reyk and Willa Zheng perform courageously—their openness about their lives is a welcome gift. It’s fascinating that not a few recognised the irony that the often appalling disruptions to the lives of their forebears and, for some, themselves have in part yielded the lives they now enjoy.

Bell Shakespeare, Henry 4

Adapted by John Bell from Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and inventively directed by Bell with Damien Ryan, Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 4 was an exhilarating three hours of theatre. While the bovver boy and suits mix seemed at first a tad dated it stood up well to the test of conveying a sense of a mediaeval England that was in little way national, except when opportunism or crude xenophobia required it—as when the lads sang a punk anthem rendering of “Jerusalem.” A giant wall of plastic crates across the back of the stage (design, Stephen Curtis) gave the first sign of the fragile state of Henry IV’s England when it was broken through, an image reinforced by the yellow and black OH&S markings across the floor and a staging that could transform with the trundling of a juke box from one point to another and the stark delineations of place and mood generated by Mark Scott’s dynamic lighting.

Above all, this production made great sense of the play’s comedy, not only in its knockabout robustness, but also its constant revelations of hypocrisy and cruelty, not least in the ‘conscription’ scene where Falstaff (John Bell), Shallow (Sean O’Shea) and Silence (Arky Michael) compel unfit workers into the military and, for bribes, allow others off.

As ever, it’s the wordplay that crowns the comedy (aided by an abundance of apt topical references) but inventive physical manifestation and adroit timing bring it off. This is also comedy that at time runs close to pathos as we witness Falstaff’s stumbling attempts to back away from errors that put him at odds with his beloved Prince Hal (Matthew Moore). At other times his self-correction adds insult to injury, as with his cruel judgments of and then inept apologies to Mistress Quickly (Wendy Strehlow) and Doll Tearsheet (Matilda Ridgway).

Bell is superb as Falstaff, fat, grinning, wobbly on his pegs, a raging wit, deviously mercurial but rarely understanding the damage he is doing to himself in a world in which he attempts to stop the clock, imagining that whatever he does, the bond with Hal will be sustained. It’s a finely tuned performance, at once richly idiosyncratic and integral to the production’s ensemble playing, which includes an excellent Bardolph (Terry Bader), a fine Poins (Yalin Ozucelik), a vigorous and sensitive Mistress Quickly and a battered, emotional Doll Tearsheet, all of whom deliver much more than comedy. I admired David Whitney’s Henry IV—the aplomb of an assured businessman a veneer barely hiding the king’s anxieties. I was less sure of Matthew Moore’s much-praised Hal—too detached, too knowing, tonally dull. His rejection of Falstaff appears to be set in stone from the beginning. But in the run of things, this didn’t matter too much when it came to the ‘death’ scene between Hal and Henry where Moore revealed a more complex response to his father, and realpolitik—that’s in the writing and he did it justice.

Sydney Theatre Company, Dance Better at Parties, Wharf 2, 9 April-11 May; Carriageworks, Performance 4a, Stories Then & Now, Carriageworks, 22-25 May; Bell Shakespeare, Henry 4, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 24 April-26 May

The latest game-based interactive project devised by Perth-based PVI Collective demands physical agility, cunning, courage and tactical manoeuvring. Premiered in Glasgow, refined in Perth and set to invade the Sydney streets for ISEA 2013, Deviator is a site-based intervention enabled via mobile phone and augmented reality.

Players are cast in the role of Deviators, equipped with smart phone and headphones, briefed and set loose on the urbanscape. Game instructions are relayed over the headphones, interspersed with an atmospheric city soundscape that coalesces with the actual sound in the player’s immediate surrounds. Once a game destination is reached, a QR code is scanned and the game begins. Performers dubbed Motherfuckers are dispersed throughout the space to help, play with and coerce players. There are 12 games in total, most of which tap into the collective childhood psyche by being appropriations or detournements of familiar games. They include Sack Races, Kiss Chase, Follow the Leader and Twister. This element of play is folded into more political concerns with the aim for participants to take part in small gestures of resistance to the dominant order and hence counter the potentially stifling routine, alienation and monotony of city life. Each game refers to the theme of revolution by compelling players to be aberrant bodies acting contrary to normative social expectations.

This game-playing approach draws inspiration from the 20th century predominantly French political-artistic movement, the Situationist International. This group had aims to change the world through actions counter to commercialisation, spectacle, apathy, alienation and consumption. They developed techniques and philosophies toward different ways of being within urban space that would agitate the sterility and oppression of the ruling systems of the day. One of their key drives was to draw everyday life into more game-like situations and to this end they devised ideas based on organised play as an essential design tool for moving culture away from mass spectacle and toward more meaningful collective participation.

For tactical media artists such as PVI, games are one of the key means to slip between the gaps of officialdom, to subversively invert the status quo, to be pranksters with an agenda. Deviator is safe play, it will not trigger a revolution but it does bring elements of obscurity and difference into the urban fabric. It is not every day that you see people blowing up balloons until they pop in their faces, or being chased by deranged clowns hell bent on kissing them. For participants then, the game logic is seductive and the desire to accumulate points becomes so strong that some players literally run, or others, such as code-name ‘Butt-Fractal’ who deviated from the game itself, hacked the system to rig the high score, pushing his colourful moniker straight to the top of the list.

Like the Situationist International before them, PVI desire to recapture and transform everyday life into a creative and inspiring experience, drawing together art, the social, the everyday and the political. The writer Hakim Bey described what he called “Temporary Autonomous Zones” as “a microcosm of that ‘anarchist dream’ of a free culture, free from excessive controls on freedom, choice, mobility and agency.” Deviator activates Temporary Autonomous Zones, encourages ‘tiny revolutions’ and so grants permission for greater mobility and diversity of choice of action within public space, playfully re-defining relations therein.

PVI, Deviator, PICA, Perth, 19-24 March; ISEA and Performance Space, 11-16 June, National Art School, Darlinghurst, tickets from Performance Space, http://www.performancespace.com.au/

Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, in rehearsal for The Maids, Sydney Theatre Company

One of the great plays of the 20th century, Jean Genet’s The Maids (1947) is about to be staged in Sydney. It is also one of the most disturbing, described by one writer at the time as having an effect more emetic than opiate. That might seem like an exaggeration now, but doubtless the play still has the capacity to disturb us deeply with its account of two poorly treated maids who are sisters play-acting their way to murdering their mistress.

I meet Benedict Andrews one evening after rehearsal to discuss his forthcoming production in a new translation by Andrews and STC artistic director Andrew Upton, with performers Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert and Elizabeth Debicki and design by Alice Babidge. It’s early in the rehearsal schedule, but there’s much to talk about,

The language and the action in The Maids are intensely physical, the play is hyper-theatrical, ritualistic, shocking. Where does that come from?

The borderline where Genet’s life becomes myth and in the idea of literature as a kind of criminal act—you steal the words that belong to someone else in order to transform your completely miserable and shit circumstances into something glorious. One of the foundational actions of theatre and—speaking as an ex-Catholic and altar boy—of the Catholic ritual and mass is the transfiguration, the alchemical change from something that is shit or dirt or that is nothing more than a wafer and some wine into something that is glorious.

But in Genet that mass or ritual always has the energy of perversion about it. The Maids is maybe the purest of his plays. There’s always a play within the play, as part of its fibre and texture—in the brothel in The Balcony, in The Screens with people pretending to be something else. And it’s a fundamental of every single moment of this act that’s about the beginnings of theatre. Why did these two women in The Maids invent this game? They’re living in terrible conditions, absolutely trapped in the position of the lowest in the society and the lowest in a power relationship. There are two of them, not one. They’re already each other’s mirrors. They live in a shitty little attic where they tell each other stories and, as Genet says in his wonderful essay “Comment Jouer Les Bonnes” (How to play The Maids), they masturbate each other at night. And somehow from this incredible need and this crisis, they have to invent theatre. And I think this is what’s so interesting about Genet, that he has that foundational gesture. There’s a line where Solange says, “My jet of spit is my spray of diamonds.” In each author, each great theatre writer, you find a definition of what theatre is.

The sisters create a performance; they act, but it’s not easy— it’s interrupted, sometimes they can’t sustain it, and they argue about what happened.

It becomes murderous. They invent the idea of murder in it. I think it’s that which makes Genet still radical. I’m not sure if some of the other plays haven’t dated. I think the idea of The Balcony is still great but I don’t know if I want to see it in the theatre. Somehow the idea of the revolutionary in it has dated. But The Maids hasn’t dated in the same way because the problem behind it is so great. It’s born of a real crisis, a gap between wealth [and poverty] that hasn’t changed.

The interesting thing about re-reading The Maids is recalling the shock of that first read back in the 1960s. Then I saw the Glenda Jackson, Susannah York, Vivien Merchant film which is very theatrical but still has some great strengths.

The script exudes suspense, brutality and a fearful intimacy around a fantasy that is set up, undone and set up again until reality and psychosis finally undo it altogether. How do you create an intimate space for that in a large theatre? Miking, live projections and continuous sound design are not uncommon strategies now that theatre is becoming increasingly cinematic and you’ve used these yourself to varying degrees.

Actually at the moment it’s all about making a space where the two actresses can be free and inventive. But many of those things you just listed, we have! There’s a vast stage space and video artist Sean Bacon’s working with us. That’s been a very good relationship.

And Monteverdi’s opera The Return of Ulysses (2010) in London as well. In both the screens were not decoration but part of the works. Sean’s in the rehearsal room with us. We have Pantrax zoom surveillance cameras again, studying actors, filming them. It’s like another dimension, simply for the fact that the form of The Maids is a box within a box within a box—mirror reflecting mirror reflecting mirror. Once upon a time having a copy of a bourgeois apartment sitting on a stage in a little box would already give you that box within a box. It doesn’t quite do that now. So I think you have to account for this reverberation in other ways: the idea of what is a performance, what’s real and what’s artifice.

In the end it is a play so I’m only just starting to be able to think about the filming that little bit out of the corner of my eye. I know from experience that you have to pay attention to the filming to get away with it, but [right now] it’s just about letting the actors play with each other.

When something in Genet is fake, it’s real; when something is played it becomes real. It’s about what Sartre calls “this whirligig of the real and the appearance.” It’s about setting that up in as many ways as possible and enjoying it. Then you have noir and the thriller of hate. And underneath an incredible love story of these two orphan sisters and their incestuous relationship. It really sets us spinning. And Andrew Upton and I have made a new, quite direct version of the translation.

As soon as you have those two women, Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, two of the most elegant actresses on earth, so recognisable already as the mistress [in other plays and films] but now playing dress-ups, putting on make-up, putting on their mistress’s outfits, it’s already somehow subversive in terms of what it means for them to play these maids.

The Maids is a kind of failed revenge drama. The sisters build up the energy of Furies in Greek drama but they fail. If theirs is a love knot, two sisters, it is already a taboo love, again a Greek theme. You have these two people so absolutely bound to each other that there’s no other reality for them apart from each other, They try to destroy the structure they’re trapped in, try to make revolution of it. They invent theatre as a way out of it, but it’s the Mistress who escapes. That whole farce of that society, that whole lie, keeps going on. Now they have to face each other and the trap in a new way. How can we go on together, how can we go on apart? If there’s no escape from it, what can we do? And the act of love becomes: should one kill the other?

Sydney Theatre Company, The Maids, writer Jean Genet, director Benedict Andrews, translation Benedict Andrews, Andrew Upton, Sydney Theatre, 4 June-20 July

In a fascinating review of a new edition of Isadora Duncan’s My Life, Joan Acocella writing in the New York Review of Books (May 23), reminds us of the artist’s detestation of ballet: “What appeared to her most vile about ballet was its unnaturalness: the rigid back, the studied positions, the relentless daintiness.” Two productions, MAU’s Birds with Skymirrors and ADT’s G, a response to the classical ballet Giselle, encouraged reflection on contemporary Western dance’s continuing affinity with its forbear.

MAU, Birds with Skymirrors

Immediately after witnessing New Zealand-based MAU company’s Birds with Skymirrors, created by Lemi Ponifasio (interview RT114, p 39), a friend expressed deep pleasure at having seen a contemporary work rooted in a tradition so different from Western, and especially American, modern dance. I’d enjoyed a similar feeling after seeing Tempest without a body (RT95, p14) on the company’s previous visit to Sydney, although that work had, with its screaming angel and other demanding images, a more contemporary performance presence.

The sight of a frigate bird trailing videotape first excited but then disturbed Ponifasio as he reflected on the floating islands of pollution in the Pacific Ocean. Hence a recurring black and white projected image of a large bird struggling in oil spill. Initially the footage is barely glimpsed; by the end it plays at painful length. But this is only a very small part of a work in which a series of images unfold, for the most part slowly on a broad stage against a reflective wall of dark, softly shimmering, silver material. We adjust to Skybirds’ sense of time and space in which apparently natural sounds mutate electronically and a woman dressed only in briefs and high heels approaches us with the aplomb of a fashion model, hands behind her back, and then yells at us. A bare-chested man on the other side of the stage ripples his abdominal muscles. The two slowly exchange positions. She lies down, the light turning her golden until she appears to be become nothing more than glowing embers. With enormous force the man repeatedly slaps his chest and bends slowly backwards, later dipping at the knees, arms extended, and becoming birdlike. He then disappears into the dark to the sound of a rumbling ocean. What is left is a profound sense of the ephemerality of the body, whatever its cultural or species manifestation.

Other images unfold: shaved-headed monk-ish figures in black speedily glide about the stage, hands articulating Pacific dance gestures, bodies swerving away from near contact like circulating atoms or birds in formation, suggesting lives micro- and macro-cosmic and worshipful, if it at times martial. Three women sing like sirens. We glimpse a projection of the moon landing of 1969. Three women dressed in black expertly twirl bright white poi in increasingly complex patterns, their three-dimensional depth conjuring DNA helixes. Crowd noises wash around us. The bird struggles. A huge centrestage shaft, angled at 70 degrees and symbolic perhaps of built civilisation, slowly surrenders to gravity. Birds with Skymirrors is a sombre, haunting creation, sublime in its otherworldliness, but it brings us back to earth with a sense of the endangered wholeness of nature, conveyed by disciplined performers who embody the traditions of the Pacific, not literally—the choreography is not specific to any one culture in the region—but with powerful, rhythmic certainty and a sense of transcendent poetry. And without the dance steps we know only too well.

ADT, G

Garry Stewart’s G bursts into life with Adolphe Adam’s music for Giselle (1841), but like much else in this entropic work, it soon ‘degrades’ into a harshly propulsive, idiosyncratic score, the product of composer Luke Smiles’ masterful manipulations. But ‘entropy’ shouldn’t suggest that G slows; in fact its pulse is regular, the dancers in perpetual motion mode (a reminder of the work’s endless reproduction and reinterpretation) appear on our left and travel briskly across the stage only to shortly appear on the left again, over and over.

What is in decay is a sense of the work as stable, regardless of digital readouts that tell us roughly where we are in the narrative. Classical ballet movements and flourishes suddenly flower with their inherent sense of display but are juxtaposed with or merge with their contemporary opposites—jagged, a-linear movements and self-contained entanglements of another order of beauty. Roles dissolve—various Giselles and Albrechts suggest opposing states of being ranging from abject to comic, and at all times driven. And for all the cyclic compulsiveness of the movement there is constant, manic change—lighting is starkly demarcated as one brilliantly rich colour state follows another (Geoff Cobham), tiny variations in costuming pass almost unnoticed (a crown glimpsed), a sword suddenly appears, the digital readout offers comment (“S is for sexism,” as the screen romps through the alphabet) and moments from the ballet’s narrative leap out at us with visceral near literalness—Giselle’s wrenching madness, the constraint applied to her and the protracted tormenting of the bodies of treacherous suitors by the vengeful graveyard Wilis, the ghosts of maidens betrayed.

If G represents a critique of the moral values inherent in Giselle the ballet, it is at the same time both respectful of and bemused by ballet’s demands and its follies. There is nothing careless about the ballet steps woven into G. Garry Stewart writes in his program note that he “read a comment in RealTime that perhaps ‘deconstruction’ will become the new classicism.” In G, Stewart transcends ‘pomo’ labelling with an exquisite melding of classical and contemporary.

Lemi Ponifasio, MAU, Birds with Skymirrors, Carriageworks, 1-4 May; ADT, G, choreography Garry Stewart & ADT dancers, design Garry Stewart, costumes Daniel Jaber & Gaelle Mellis, Sydney Theatre, 16-18 May

Five sets of clothes lie at rest on the extended strip of white floor, the fall and crease of polka dot skirt differentiated from the over-patterned confusion of an Hawaiian shirt and the bold stance of red overalls. Are they garments in waiting for their danced transformations? Bottom-drawer memories saturated with faded desire?

The assorted fabrics signal such ideas while announcing the arrival of the ordinary. Slippage occurs as young people appear, walking effortlessly into a dance of gesture and imaginative play in which intricate story-threads weave a cloth of reflection and memory. These ordinary people morph into magicians of performance who wear unstable identities of the everyday with the privileged audacity and awkwardness of youth.

Whether intentioned or the result of investigation with the dancers, choreographer Sue Peacock has guided the construction of Reflect with a canny attention to how age shapes (and is shaped by) the human potential to reflect upon actions, feelings and the puzzling collisions of identity across time. A more established group of performers would wear and shed those sets of clothes quite differently, exuding nostalgia or unwanted beasts to banish into forgetfulness. With this group, the trial and error of re-entering yesterday’s garb is refreshingly matter-of-fact. Indeed, the most seasoned performer, Kynan Hughes’ pronounced desire to understand the unstable nature of tease and twist forms a touch-stone for the swapped gesture and identity of the others. His Hawaiian shirt speaks volumes, its imagistic loudness at odds with his unassertive performance character.

To gain some idea of the reflective nature of choreographic and character construction, the overlays of scenic design need acknowledgement. Dancers on stage, their dark and looming shadows and the light-washed projections of the same personalities in rehearsal inter-reflect, jostling like random memories for attention. Indirect pulses of recall slip between present and past. Shadows, which in the everyday imagination are insubstantial, acquire indelible definition, at times blocking the dancers and their filmed reflections.

The signature Peacock structures arise and dis-assemble across time, with motif and fractional patterns playing games of intimacy and rebuttal within and between the members of the group. For example, the head lifting of another elicits a gesture of compassion which shifts and belongs, fleetingly, to each and every individual. Against that shared response (their common humanity?) individuals do develop: Tyronne Robinson has his moments of display, Bernadette Lewis her frivolity, Storm Helmore her insularity, Jenni Large her powerful latency and Hughes his disorientation. In this way, Peacock opens readings of her ordinary grouping of young people to fluctuations of manipulated movement which align with human emotions and the scenographic composition.

Structure and elusive sensitivity alternate, like the presence and past that drift through the performance. Each performer possesses a personality but that personality is multiple and is subject to changes of clothing. Reflect emerges like a fantastic hall of mirrors onto the white and blank canvas of its floor. The telling reflection lies in its capacity to reveal the magic of the ordinary. I think it does, quietly and subtly.

Performing Lines, Reflect, choreographer Sue Peacock, design Andrew Lake, sound Ben Taaffe, Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of WA, 3-11 May

Last year I saw a show in New York, wherein two performers re-enacted a famous 1963 interview between Martha Graham and critic Walter Terry. Richard Move, who played Martha, has devoted his entire stage career to immortalising Graham through imitation. Unlike other drag manifestations, Move’s Graham is an utterly faithful non-parodic transformation. He thoroughly inhabits Graham’s boldly constructed persona in all its detail, as well as displaying the same discipline and emotive conviction evident in her choreographies.

In the interview, ‘Graham’ speaks of how when performing she is “possessed” by the character she is playing, its spirit taking hold of her bodily vessel and expressing itself through her in the moment of performance. As we hear this we are witnessing the same magic occur through Richard Move, an incarnation that is explicitly an imposter ‘possessed.’ In the words of Move in the words of Martha Graham, “First we have to believe, and then we believe.”

Melbourne-based choreographer and performer Luke George proposes something attuned to this concept of channelling past performers in his new project Not About Face: “We will come together, we will become anonymous, we will fake belief and believe in faking it.”

George recently presented Not About Face for Dance Massive’s Open Studio program as a work-in-progress, wherein the audience enters a rehearsal studio like cheap Halloween ghosts, donning bedsheets with eyeholes cut out (I had a fitted sheet, all the more domestic). Under the sheet I become an insular entity, aware of my presence but transformed into obscurity. Each of us is now a wraith, an anonymous self. Without seats or a marked performance area we are left to negotiate our proximity to the performance and each other.

George, at first unidentifiable from the rest of us ‘ghosts,’ eventually emerges to claim his presence as shepherd to our flock. Once revealed he undergoes a series of transformations: channelling deceased performers, communing with a past version of himself through a television set and guiding us into summoning incantations of colour, to name a few. Between performative acts George speaks to us as himself, casually and directly, making explicit that this is all authentically pretend.

Speaking about his latest work, George explains “I act as a medium.” In one instance he re-enacts a recording of a woman acting as a medium for a 35,000-year-old prophet. George’s act as medium however is (like any ghost) more transparent. “I just use headphones, and you can see my iPod and it’s completely visible.” We see this process in action made explicit—the paradoxical truth of the pretending.

Performance has entertained a long history of spiritual summoning, ranging from the devout to the kitsch. People tend towards one of two responses to such spiritual experiences—belief or scepticism, both of which act only to close off possibilities. The space between knowing and not is where George chooses to operate. “I don’t have a position on whether I’m a sceptic or whether I’m a believer, I am more comfortable just to explore it without having to make a decision one way or the other…to be in a question state and to pursue that question.” Once acknowledged that Not About Face is an act of ‘fake-belief,’ the concept of ‘spirit’ then takes on much more complex possibilities.

For George this interest in “evoking other bodies in this time, or in another time” comes from a desire to understand what motivates the body’s impulses in choreography. As a dance artist interested in improvisation, influenced by his recent collaborations with New York artists Miguel Gutierrez and Hilary Clark, he is engaging with choreographies that aren’t restrictively pre-conceived—the performance unfolds in the moment of its happening. This leads to the question “What is the source of the physical information at the moment of articulation?” and then, for George, “Who else is contained in my body? Is it just me?”

All bodies carry histories, and they are always performing these histories. This becomes all the more specific for the dancer’s body that has absorbed unique languages of movement from past teachers and choreographers, the traces of which remain present long after. These physical manifestations may reveal themselves consciously or unconsciously each time a performer is in action. In a history of performance, one that by its very nature erases tangible traces, we can imagine the bodies of the present are something of a vessel to the past, whereby we witness past physical resonances simply by observing the performing body in action.

George reminds me that our minds are programmed to activate “80% of the synaptic responses that occur when performing [an action]” simply by observing it, allowing us a particular and unique “capacity for empathy because of action.” His interest in movement as “a presence that you can’t see” reveals less a superstitious inclination than his embrace of the unique quality of an empathetic visceral experience before it is a visual one.

When George recently participated in Open Studios it was in a rehearsal studio, not a theatre. He has also explored the possibilities in Not About Face through public encounters at Westspace gallery, The Meat Market and at Movement Research, Judson Church in New York at different stages of development, each space carrying with it a different set of expectations from audiences.

A traditional theatre, with its many design elements, is a space that dance-makers sometimes need to distance themselves from in order to highlight the cognitive transmission of bodily information. In George’s somewhat ordinary studio setting, there’s very little smoke-and-mirrors to entice you into any fantasy version of spirituality. With few visual cues, personal imaginative space is given permission to muse on complex ideas, to entertain the possibilities of the unseeable elements of performance. Luke George’s offer is a generous invitation to both actively inhabit the pretend while internally freely conjuring your own experience, seeing it through the eyes of your homemade ‘spirit.’

A sword swallower specialising in neon tubes. A pair of artists-cum-biochemists growing a leather jacket. A series of video portraits capturing faces at the moment of orgasm. Genuinely innovative documentary content has become a rare commodity on Australian TV, but Anatomy has been quietly livening up the ABC’s Tuesday night Artscape slot with stories like these for nearly five years.

“Tony identified 10pm Tuesday as virtually the only documentary timeslot left where it would be possible to push the boundaries,” says Michael McMahon of his fellow producer Tony Ayres’ original pitch for the series. “We wanted to develop a model that would give emerging directors the opportunity to work with a production company and a broadcaster to create half-hour documentaries which would be works of art in themselves.”

Four series and 12 episodes later, the best of Anatomy has certainly lived up to the producers’ initial vision. It’s also presented emerging directors, exploring some quite risqué content, with rare access to broadcast hours. “It’s a great model,” comments Rhys Graham, director of the first Anatomy episode, Skin, broadcast back in April 2009. “The nexus of sex, the body and the creative process is something I am fascinated by, so it was a huge pleasure to be able to delve into that. But it’s also a rare chance to have resources to make a film of your own and be given the creative freedom to do what the producers feel you’ll be able to do best. That’s a very unusual opportunity to come across these days.

Skin set something of a template for the series, tackling a confronting subject with seriousness and respect through an innovative documentary approach. Graham’s film features direct address to camera, self-conscious performative moments from the central character, and stylised intertitles. The story focuses on Geoff Ostling, who has had a tableau of Australian native fauna designed by Australian artist eX de Medici tattooed across his entire body over a 15-year period. Like other films in the series, Skin homes in on the space where art, the body and reflections on human mortality intersect, to create a discomforting work that celebrates life, even as it is haunted by the presence of creeping death and decay.

Since the initial three episodes broadcast in 2009, another three series of Anatomy have been commissioned by the ABC, with each film by a different director. Highlights have included Mind (director Emma Crimmings), a fantastical probing of identity through the life story of writer Tom Cho, Tissue (Alethea Jones), examining the bio-art of the SymbioticA group, and Soul (Larin Sullivan), a portrait of burial shroud designer Pia Interlandi.

“Younger filmmakers are often asked to fit into a rigid structure, whereas a model like this is great for directors who shoot their own material and have a really unique eye, because it allows them to do really interesting and engaging work, but still get broadcast audiences,” says Rhys Graham of the Anatomy model. His experience on the first Anatomy series has certainly paid off in terms of his career, with his second feature-length documentary, Murundak—Songs of Freedom, doing the festival rounds last year. The film was co-directed with Graham’s fellow Anatomy alumnus Natasha Gadd.

For other directors, Anatomy was an educational introduction to the constraints of television even within an innovative series. Kim Munro’s Nerve in series three was the filmmaker’s first experience of making work for broadcast, and she found it more difficult than she expected. “I was probably naïve in what I thought I could do,” she says looking back on the experience. Nevertheless, she describes it as incredibly valuable. “You go to film school and have one experience, and then it’s so hard to even get any kind of mentorship or attachment. Tony and Michael’s company Matchbox is such a well-regarded production firm, they’re in a perfect position to be able to mentor people and get these interesting works done.”

Despite the success of the series with audiences, critics and filmmakers alike, the ABC has been criticised in recent years for perceived cuts to its arts programming, particularly following the axing of Art Nation in 2011. More generally, Australian television documentary has become increasingly generic over the past decade. Yet Anatomy demonstrates that when experienced producers are willing to target the right timeslot, films that break the mould are still possible.

So if the model works, why aren’t we seeing more series like Anatomy? The answer partly lies with the restricted nature of broadcast schedules. Anatomy was born of Tony Ayres’ smart pitching of content for a particular timeslot and meeting broadcaster needs. “You’ve got to have the ideas that are going to work in particular timeslots, and that the broadcaster feels their audiences are going to respond to,” explains McMahon. He describes the process of successfully gaining a commission as “hard,” despite having an impressive array of award-winning documentaries, feature films and TV series under his belt, including Wildness (Scott Millwood, 2003), The Home Song Stories (director Tony Ayres, 2007) and The Slap (various directors, 2011). “There’s a lot of competition and those timeslots are not given away,” he says ruefully.

Then there are the financial constraints faced by even well-established production houses like Matchbox. “We would love to continue to work with that model to give emerging directors the opportunity to work with broadcasters,” McMahon replies when asked if he envisions more Anatomy series. “It’s just difficult for us now to make an internal financial argument for the half-hour documentary format.” Unfortunately, half-hour documentaries rarely have a life beyond their initial broadcast, making it difficult to generate substantial income off each production. Anatomy is potentially breaking ground in this regard, with a boxed set containing all 12 episodes being released shortly by the ABC, and individual episodes now available on i-Tunes. Nevertheless, making half-hour films financially viable remains a challenge.

So although Anatomy has been a success by any measure, successfully duplicating the model is perhaps easier said than done. But emerging documentary filmmakers obviously need opportunities to develop their skills and distinctive voices, and Anatomy shows that these chances can provide an entertaining shot of innovation sorely needed on Australian screens. “When filmmakers are trusted to make the work and are not forced to mould themselves to another format, you’re more likely to get interesting films,” says director Rhys Graham. With Anatomy we have six hours of eye-catching television to back up his claim.

Anatomy, twelve episodes 2008-2013; various directors; producers Michael McMahon and Tony Ayres, Polly Staniford (series 2), Trevor Blainey (series 3), Matchbox, Australia

I was in the early swoony stages of pregnancy when my husband took the road to Paradise. I walked slowly every day around the lake in Queenstown, New Zealand, through a fog of morning-sickness-quease, uneasy at the water’s ever-changing moods.

The clouds that formed over Wakatipu had different shapes to those here, pointed and pink, fairy-floss spears. With adventure-time over, backpackers heading home, the place felt lost, isolated, still. As I rounded corners towards Glenorchy I felt photoshopped into a scene of snow-capped mountains and corn-coloured paddocks too fakely glorious to be real. Jane Campion’s TV series Top of the Lake (written and directed with Gerard Lee) picks a point on the map (Paradise) and takes me back there (warning: spoiler alert).

Lakes have often been used in TV shows and film as the dumping ground for small-town guilt and secrets: Laura Palmer, ‘wrapped in plastic,’ adrift in Twin Peaks; Jimmy McGovern’s murderous plotting around the deaths of three girls in The Lakes; another teen, floating while men fish, in the river above Jindabyne (where a dam flooded the town formerly housing 300 people). In Top of the Lake, a 12-year-old girl, Tui (Jacqueline Joe), enters the freezing water dressed in her school uniform. She is carrying a child—she doesn’t “even know how it got in there.”

As shipping containers land in Paradise and characters start to emerge, there’s a strange discordance in the plotting and mood. The squabbling, unearthly women’s camp (housed in the containers), led by overseer and no-bullshit prophet GJ (Holly Hunter), lands to face off against local ‘boganville’ family Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan) and his sons Mark and Luke, the bikie-druggie-misogynists who think they own the land. And yes, as the names suggest, there’s biblical intent everywhere. Many characters, writhing naked in the sinewy landscape, have their Adam and Eve moments. There’s a mother with a seemingly immaculate conception (when asked who the father is, Tui says, “no one”). And it’s up to the audience to work out: who’s the snake?

Added to the mix are the central storylines of The Return and a police procedural whodunnit. Detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) heads back from Sydney to visit her dying mother, and lands a case that revisits her own past: a rape involving locals who may still live there; a first boyfriend and a lingering kiss; a boss who seems enamoured; and a Darth Vader moment (welcome to the dark side, Robin). Much has been made of the ABC pulling out of its involvement in the series when Moss was cast in the lead role. It’s true that she is out of place. Her accent doesn’t work, she brings none of the baggage of a New Zealander or Sydneysider (especially when strong Oz actors like Robyn Nevin work effortlessly around her) and the idea that she is a detective is at times laughable: confronted with any crime situation, she tends to cry out for help. But as an actress Moss is utterly compelling. Her face is a halo of light, and her skin so transparent she seems to pour emotion into your cupped hands (both Campion and I can be fans of the overwrought). I’ve devoured her in West Wing and Mad Men, and in the final episodes of Top of the Lake I move beyond the accent. David Wenham seems uncomfortable, at times playing for laughs, and contending with the worst haircut in living memory. He’s done menacing so well (The Boys) that he needs to shift gear and opts for smooth monotone, but the plot points are heavily signposted and it’s clear he’s the baddie from the moment Robin enters his office and sees the deer head on the wall (really, they still have those at police headquarters?).

Much of the series feels like Campion’s return, too. To a country she is ambivalent about, to a series of clichés to explore, to cafes that actually have espresso machines, to a place where men prefer the sexual company of sheep (yep, we go there) and think all feminists are lesbians, to possible new horizons where women can hope to be naked and free (but opt to close their eyes and fall for the men anyway). Campion’s strengths in filmmaking, though, have always been for the quirky, the gothic, the mingling of wild passion with nature, and her intense eye for detail. Matt might be mad as a cut snake, lashing himself with a belt over the grave of his mother, but he still uses her fine china for tea: in the kitchen background his son carefully turns the delicate teapot three times while brewing a pot for his father.

A sense of grief pervades the series: for children sexually violated while they drowse; for cancer ‘that’s not going to go away’; for men who abuse their power and get away with it; for women who keep making the same mistakes even while seeking enlightenment. While Top of the Lake doesn’t manage to draw the threads together, or handle the quirk with David Lynchian flair, it’s challenging TV that takes us on the road to Paradise and gives the place a damn good thrashing.

Top of the Lake, writer-directors Jane Campion, Gerard Lee, co-producers BBC2, UKTV, Sundance Channel; shown on Foxtel’s UK channel in Australia.

Terre Thaemlitz’ Soulnessless (2013) has been largely reviewed in line with its format: a 16GB micro-SDHD data chip filled to its digital brim, qualifying as the “world’s longest album in history” and the “world’s first full-length MP3 album” (as it says on the release’s slip cover).

But there’s much more happening in Soulnessless than its demonstrative act of formatting. Unlike the bulk of ‘politicised technological boutique sound/noise/digital’ releases trading in purported commentary on the means of their production, the state of nowness and the humanist intervention of their endeavour, Soulnessless is empowered by an unerring insularity and asocial tenor which emboldens and clarifies its purpose in reflecting on what it means to produce (more than merely ‘release’) music for the listener today.

To simply describe this complex work: Soulnessless is five extended compositions based around piano recordings, digital processing, layered record samples and occasional onsite interviews, all loosely but carefully addressing symbolic relationships and aural similarities between (a) the extended contemplative states enamoured of Minimalist and ‘ambient’ musical composition, and (b) the ecstatic and transcendental states induced by Catholic rituals of prayer. The micro-SDHD contains five ‘cantos’ (the fifth being an acoustic piano improvisation recorded in a single near-30-hour take), some remixes, an MP4 video of the first four cantos and assorted PDF documentation and commentary. (In the spirit of Soulnessless’s complexity, I’ll discuss in detail a few tracks, rather than attempt to précis its whole corpus.)

This perplexing density of content and form is quintessential Thaemlitz. It bears his distinctive and fascinating cross-wiring between gender politics, transsexuality, classical music’s sexual repression, gay culture’s musical hedonism, and the pop industry’s relentless promiscuity, all swirled into a treacle of viscous thought and technological queering. Viewed in light of Thaemlitz’ artistic history, Soulnessless is a pinnacle in his concentration of these interests and pursuits into a single work (as unwieldy in size as it is).

Soulnessless’ ‘insularity’ is exemplified by Thaemlitz’ alignment of the male computer musician with the Catholic nun, each cloistered within their mental tomb (scroll bars and sound loops in the former; temporal regimes and prayer cycles in the latter). Canto—Rosary Novena for Gender Transitioning features a group of nuns (or maybe just church-goers) reciting the Catholic rosary. It doesn’t take much prompting to reinterpret their droning unison as a type of ‘effects plug-in’ which diffuses their sound and renders them in a post-human (or transcendental) state. After all, where would electronic music of all persuasions be without artificial simulation of Baroque church acoustic architecture and its ethereal reverb? Thaemlitz’ clinical ease in presenting this recording unadulterated for three minutes before a single piano chord rings forth enables such contemplation. It’s a remarkable act of listening more than sound-making, reminding one of Annea Lockwood’s recordings of spaces: her works are acoustic testaments to her aural encounters.

Yet unlike either eco-globalist field recording discourses or Cagean Zen-inflected welcoming of pure sound, Canto I applies modernist secular approaches to aural awareness while retaining the most over-determining aspect of the sound’s cultural content, ie Catholic rituals. The most predictable dialectic of field recording lies in its attenuation of ‘real world’ events to imply veracity, but Canto I perversely applies field recording to the ‘unreal world’ events of religious practice. Most surprisingly, the result is not anti-Catholic, but strangely post-ecclesiastical. As fiery as Thaemlitz’ polemics have always been, a calm quells the melodramatic fire and brimstone critique which besets most Catholic revisionism.

The calmness of Canto I is no superficial emotional by-product. It’s the result of Thaemlitz’ gauging how so-called ‘ambient’ music can be considered its opposite: a disquieting realm of cultural noise and interference. He literally brings to noise the queasy realms sanitised by decades of Minimalist and ‘ambient’ decontextualisation. The aural ectoplasm of the nuns’ choral dribbling could be aligned with Gavin Bryars’ impressively clinical reprocessing of inebriated babble in Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1975), but Canto I suggests less of an observational frame placed around social occurrence and more of a reflective trip inside the heads of the nuns themselves. If there is a Minimalist precedent, it would be Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing (1979), where the listener lies at the threshold of Ashley’s somnambulistic rambling. Canto I sets audible voices against inaudible voices, aligning the nuns’ incanting while listening to the inner voice of God addressing them, with Thaemlitz the composer voicing his own voicelessness, evoking what poetically arises as a transgender purgatory. Even the fetishistic glitch processing has its place in this queasy meld of celibates and celebrants: that familiar computer clicking sounds like rosary beads.

The title Canto II—Traffic With The Devil, could evoke the dumbo macho mysticism of Sun O))) and their doomy cartoony ilk. But a careful listen (again, facilitated by the long-form nature of the Soulnessless project) evidences not an erotic wonderland of granular complexion or collapsing realms of saturated noise, but an inverse world of immaterial complexity born of a lack of ‘soul’ (ie ‘soulness’). The track feels like a deliberately artless computer grid of cut-and-paste data (the X-Y verticality of digital placement simulating an act of construction). It harkens back to the future lazily dreamt of in early 90s MIDI-dependent ambient/trance/techno (before Warp and Mille Plateaux exponentially complexified those beginnings). Canto II not only parodies the numbing mania of cut-and-paste reflexes, it hollows out those tropes to produce a severely scaled-down automatism rendered with the texture of its immateriality. Maybe we’re hearing processed fragments of piano events from Canto V, but neither the originating grain nor any resultant timbre is as important as the residual aura of their computerised congregation and assimilation.

The Soulnessless project stridently accepts this as a reality-effect of democratised computer production, wherein musical composition never achieved the Stockhausian utopia of ‘trans-orchestration’ or ‘techno mysticism.’ In short, Canto II plainly demonstrates the artefacting of its own existence. Thaemlitz’ compositions are relentless acts of emptying; the Cantos are not heroic acts of faux-radicalised musicality (as if Wagnerian ideals still need to be railed against in the 21st century) but signs of synchronism between the Self and one’s selflessness in the face of immaterial technological production. Canto II’s arching emptiness and contracted repetitiveness is not about Minimalism, Techno or Minimal Techno, but about how those musical genres symptomise macro conditions, of how music is figured and configured in the present of our over-historicised times where everything is ruthlessly contextualised, placed and fixed.

The negative impulses felt in Soulnessless are wonderfully didactic, for they proffer ways in which one can reductively and deductively ‘picture’ musical production—via a semiological reading (parlaying religious iconography into technological praxis as in Canto I) or a textual reading (acknowledging the empty effects of ‘computer creativity’ as in Canto II). The negative world of Soulnessless is a great place to visit—because it’s where you’re already living.

A glance at what we can expect from this year’s Melbourne International Animation Festival reveals a program that can fairly be described as spectacular in its breadth. More than 400 films, both short and feature-length, will be shown over the festival’s 11 days.

MIAF will encompass 11 international, three Australian, three Canadian and three children’s programs; surveys of animation from Lithuania and Portland; a CG Symposium and RENDER: a two-day animation conference with international guests.

A highlight of this packed program is a survey of the works of master Japanese animator Koji Yamamura, who also features as one of MIAF’s special guests. Yamamura’s animations for adults combine elements of the traditional tale with unsettling meditations on the nature of existence, using hand-drawn animation to depict an unravelling of the self. Yamamura gained international recognition for the absurdist Mt Head [Atamayama] (2002), nominated for an Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 2002 and awarded the Cristal d’Annecy and Grand Prix at the 2003 Annecy and 2004 Zagreb Animated Film Festivals respectively.

Mt Head is based on Rakugo, a form of traditional Japanese performance where a lone actor tells an extended comical story with minimal props. The film tells the tale of a miser whose head unaccountably sprouts shoots, ultimately becoming a microcosm with a cherry tree at its apex. In keeping with the artform, Yamamura almost completely confines the film’s sound to a Rakugo narrator whose sardonic sing-song is accompanied sparingly on shamisen. Deftly following the vocal cues of the storyteller, Yamamura’s imagery demonstrates the facility with which the expert animator conjures ideas of scale, mutation and paradox.

Mt Head’s precise lines, parchment backgrounds and watercolour tinting recall the delicacy of traditional Japanese painting, which Yamamura combines with the more cinematic effects of artificial lighting and layered images. In Mt Head, sound and image are of equal importance. Neither overrides the other, which is fitting given the film’s basis in an almost totally vocal artform.

Two other works previewed by the festival, Re-Collection, by Nicholas Kallincos—part of the Australian Showcase—and Andrew Thomas Huang’s Solipsist, from the International Program, also explore the threat to the self through an atmospheric balance of image and sound.

Melbourne-based animator Kallincos attained a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Adelaide before studying animation at RMIT. Re-Collection, his fourth short film, follows on from his mysterious, romantic short The Luminary (2005), which screened at 10 international film festivals. The central character in both of these non-verbal puppet animations is an insect collector with a light bulb for a head who encounters a human-sized white moth. While The Luminary’s mood is one of wistful longing, Re-Collection has a more sinister edge, as the collector is plagued by nightmarish manifestations of the moths he seeks to possess. Re-Collection’s use of light and sound (with a score by Cornel Wilczek) is particularly effective in driving the mood of this piece. Indeed, light as a concept is intrinsic to Re-Collection’s central motif of the unavoidable attraction between collector (with lightbulb head) and moth.

While the collector attempts to fall asleep, Kallincos’ tableaux of his bedroom are overlaid by the sounds of the bush at night, ghostly chimes and a subtle high-pitched tone which sets the nerves slightly on edge. As he is dragged into the lunar world of his nightmare, the sound becomes more charged, with electric guitar introduced. Later, the restless sound of flapping wings, along with skilled deployment of shadows and flickering light, evokes perfectly the panic of the sleeper beset by insects at night.

Young American animator Andrew Thomas Huang’s striking work Solipsist (2012) begins with the idea of solipsism—a state of being wrapped up in oneself—but arrives through a series of hypnotic passages at its antithesis, with individual entities subsumed to each other—disintegrating, being buried, re-forming into something new. Using live performers, puppets and skilled yet unobtrusive CGI, Huang orchestrates scenes of sensuous transformation against a watery pentatonic score.

In Solipsist, two women sway languorously as myriad sinuous forms bind them together; undulating, marine creatures intertwine to form a pulsating forest; a climactic final passage depicts spectacular disintegration, covering everything that has preceded it in an explosion of coloured sand. The pace throughout is meditative, the idea explored coherent, yet abstracted enough not to be obvious. It’s not difficult to see why on the basis of Solipsist, Huang was commissioned to direct Björk’s Mutual Core video and has exhibited at MOCA LA, MOCA Taipei and the Saatchi and Saatchi new directors’ showcase at Cannes.

The considered artistry of Koji Yamamura, Nicholas Kallincos and Andrew Thomas Huang is reason enough to attend MIAF 2013.

2013 Melbourne International Animation Festival (MIAF), ACMI, Melbourne, 20-30 June

Find

June 2013

Setting your compass

Field testing

Future mapping

Metaverse Makeovers

Through The Portals with Ricardo Peach: Distributed Empire

Is Starlight a Wifi Signal?

Shadow Net

Enquire Within Upon Everybody

Kinds of connectedness

Revelation Film Festival

Show Off, Performance Space

Helium Season, Malthouse

pulse:heart:beat, Synergy, TaikOz

Staging Broome Stories, Playwriting Australia

Fright or Flight, 3 is a Crowd

Box of Birds, Anne Ferran

Vocal Folds, Gertrude Contemporary

Dancehouse, Housemates Performance 2014

PauseFest

Digital Associates Program, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

Waverley Artist In Residence Program 2014

Small Screen 2014, Screen Space

Brisbane Fringe Festival

Lucas Abela

Hye Yeon Nam

Van Sowerwine & Isobel Knowles

Wikileaks and artists

Not everything, but the hardest thing

The internet: penetration, enrichment, distortion

Call to action: 1

Shifting ground – and the job of artists

What we need to dismantle – the state of things here

How to fight the system

Civic courage – call to action 2

Ed Osborn – Albedo Prospect

Jon Drummond – Twittering Machine and Flowforms

Mark Brown – Detritical Re-Vibration/Techtonic Transfer

Minoru Sato – Thermal Acoustics

Volker Kuchelmeister

Josh Harle

Chris Henschke

Map Office (Gutierez + Portefax), Runscape

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba

Brad Miller & Ian MacArthur, #capillary

Richard Goodwin & Russell Lowe, Crysis in Parasite Paradise

Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris, Downwind

Ian Haig, Night of the Living Hippy

Nandita Kumar, eLEMenT: EARTH

Mari Velonaki, The Woman and The Snowman

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice

Simon Ingram, Smoking Bolts

Enculturing robots

Eric Siu

Thea Baumann

Mari Velonaki

ANAT, Synapse: A Selection

SymbioticA, semipermeable (+)

Electric Nights, Parramatta

Keith Armstrong, Long Time No See?

The Portals

Memebrain Art Hackfest

Troy Innocent, Zydnie

RealTime@ISEA

Immerse!

Tipping Point

SunRice

Working the region

RealTime in the Riverina

Ranters Theatre, This Is Me—Now

The Republic of Trees

The Man Who Planted Trees

Site-specifics and Transplant

Chants des Catacombes

Legacies

Street swag art

Parties at the Shops

Celebrating the cultural calendar

Science and art

Through The Portals with Ricardo Peach:
Distributed Empire