Art and I sit down to sample the delicacies of the internet. We are on a mission. Open up Copernic, a groovy little download which manoeuvres through all the search engines at once, and enter the exact phrase “Australian porn.” Hotbot. Excite. Altavista baby. We’re on the path to fulfilling desire…
1. http://www.erotic-movies.ahost.net/index.html [link expired]
Free Nude Teen Thumbnail Galleries. This is first on the list, and I’m trying to imagine the appeal of looking at grotty adolescent fingernails. My own are raggedy around the edges—must book in with Carmel, my nail technician. Click here for more porn than you can shake a dick at. The technological sophistication is astounding. Click on the butt—FUCK my Ass is revealed bottom left of screen. Calling all BUTTmen—some sort of extra terrestrial lifeform perhaps? That’s a banana, Art cries accusingly. This site promotes teen sex which means teen girls having sex for the very first time apparently. While promoted as being very young and all virgins, the disclaimer at the bottom maintains that all models are 18 years or over. Almost teens. Net Nanny software links mean cruising fathers can feel assured that their precious teenage girls are safe.
The women look like aliens. They have strange black blobby shapes over their bodies. Pixelated pussies. Live pornpourri. FREE to all members. We eagerly click on How To Join. Receive FREE newsletter: Sex Files. We enter the required information. Name. Email address. Birthdate. Password. Member name. joblow15 is ready to rock and roll. Other porn sites keep flashing up. Close a window, a new site jumps in the fray. Cafe Flesh. XXX world. Virgin sluts. Jesus Christ, Art keeps exclaiming, they’re popping up from everywhere, his fingers juddering crazily on the mouse. We’re now one step away from seeing live teen sex, but what’s this? Credit card details for legal age verification. Oh, Art moans. He’s never let us have a credit card. Always insists on paying everything in cash. He likes to keep control of our budget and expenditure and you know what women are like with plastic! We can’t get to the tele-fucking level but we can get free XXX pics delivered to our email box. We set up a hotmail account and joblow15 gets delivered. Who can resist the promised land: potty shots—hidden cameras reveal young girls going to the bathroom (a blondie sits on tiles, next to the loo, legs spreadeagled, looking straight at us!). Va Va Voom.
2 http://www.alsscan.com/ [accessed 1999]
Warning, warning, warning. Stop. Do not access. You must be 21 years or over: “if you are accessing from any country where adult material is specifically prohibited by law, go no further.” All these reminders are a bit of a dampener to the drive, darling. I sign a form stating that I am not a US postal officer or law enforcement agent and will not use information as evidence for prosecution of individuals or for the purpose of entrapment. Well, it all depends, really. I started hiring a private detective to follow Art when I found various items of my lace underwear missing. I am visitor number 31,759,980, part of an intimate club almost twice the population of Australia.
Art tries to download Jessica’s shoot right to our computer. Here’s Amy, “wild crazy…watch her lean back and piss into a glass bowl.” Look at the quality of that scan, Art cries, zooming into a pierced nipple. They use digital cameras, the site says proudly, giving a quick plug to the Sony VX 1000. See pissing, fisting, bottle and veggie insertions, and a speculum. Which reminds me, I must book in for that pap smear which I’ve been putting off for years. Those blasted ads on TV make me feel guilty. If I do get cervical cancer, apparently I won’t have an excuse if I don’t go every 18 months. I have to certify that “anal sex, urination, vegetable and bottle penetration and fisting, do not violate the community standards of [my] street, village, city, town, country, state, province or country.” I am nervous about this. Perhaps we should do a quick survey of Hope Street, Art suggests. Mmmm Hope Street. I always suspected he had a bit on the side with that tart who lives opposite the RSL, the fake blonde with the German accent and red stilettos. Aaaah, ooooooooh, 2 girls are engaged in a lip pulling contest and then there’s the carrots. Eggplants. Zucchinis. Squash. Art reckons this site’s so hot he’s going to cook a stir fry tonight.
3. Video licking free XXXX SheMales
We want to watch Pammy and Tommy’s home video, see live video channels, find out more about that blonde bombshell lying in a fog filter with a finger placed delicately in her mouth, and look at those millions of hidden cameras: inside toilets, under desks, in the tip of a dildo. But that blasted credit card screen comes up every time. (Meanwhile, Tina Tripoli has delivered our bi-weekly Sex Files newsletter and we reply to receive pics.) Butts, boobs, beavers and more pop ups, “perverse and on the fringe of decadence.” Cheri in The House of the Rising Cum. Teenfacials and tittycities. A flash tour of booptropolis. Use your powers of deduction to select the natural redhead (it’s not as easy as it sounds).
4. http://rosie.ozsex.com/australia/ebony305/porn.html [link expired]
At last some Oz porn (which was what we were looking for in the first place but it’s so hard to find). A definite Oz flavour with “stacks of real life roots.” Suck for free samples, lick my whip, and I’m transported back into Penthouseville, circa 1982, with the reader’s input: 1st prize winner goes to Pantyhose vs Stockings where a man seduces a woman in a library who “has A format beautiful breasts.” So that’s why Art spends so much time at the State Library. I always thought he went there to take notes for his Business Management course. We find other Aussie links: Urination nation; Transvestites, “yes, that is both pieces Tackle and Snatch”; and Pregnant women. Adult Check. Age Check. Ishield. Adult Age. Christ, what happened to the age of instant gratification, Art cries, scrummaging in the drawer for his cheque book.
5. http://www.3d-entertainment.com [link expired]
Art says he wants to see more multimedia, audio and video. The use of sound has been most disappointing. I guess gasps of pleasure are more intrusive than photos of a woman chained naked to cane furniture, dog-collar-linked to her terrier. So we visit a site which has porn in Stereoscopy and Virtual Reality: “A review of images in stereo format allows us to look at the even common things from a new perspective and get quite different kicks. Especially it refers to Erotica. The sense of reality makes them especially Piquant.[sic/k]” Art immediately perks up and puts on his blue and red glasses, saved from the Three Stooges TV special a few decades ago. The 3D effect reveals a girl tied to a boat backdropped by a beautiful deep blue sky. She looks cold, her goosebumps through the glasses big bright boils. Click to Enlarge. Every man’s dream. She has pubic hair. Art recoils, and it is a bit of a shock after the shiny, sanded and polished pubises of the American teens, as denuded as the Daintree after a bulldozer has torn through. The Virtual chat room is unfortunately out of order, but a new nude avatar world is on its way. You no longer need to go to Gentleman’s clubs or Woody’s car wash to ogle topless women. That’s good news for Art, who pretends he’s going to the TAB, but I’ve seen photos of him at Hooters. He’s gone now…up the street to pick up a few vegies.
alotronic (http://users.dbworld.net.au/~allen/aloxoom/alocore4.htm – expired) is an example of what can be achieved by a personal website with a bit of creative flair. Part promotion, part experiment, Allen O’Leary’s interest in theatre and information technologies informs his hypermedia work The Casino Project. A groovy JPEG of a man running helter skelter entices you to join the pace of the site which is flashy and fast. Although a work in progress (60% complete), it is conceptually sophisticated, using frames to flesh out the inner workings of a man “jagged around the edges”, dealing with a relationship breakdown in the Melbourne Casino surrounds, “a beast with ten thousand eyes.” He drives to “her river”, contemplating ownership and borders, the need to claim spots as lovers’ spaces, as if you’re the first to discover them. Relationship breakdowns are a common theme in hyperfiction (My Father’s Father’s House, Six Sex Scenes), frames embodying in neat visual form the fractured, dislocated identity/emotions suddenly-singles experience post-love. The razzle dazzle of the Casino, “it’s two blocks long and one year old”, and dark murky depths of the Yarra, loom.
Using pixilated locations like the Crown carpark at 9.45pm, O’Leary entices you into a world of online gambling and really, all cruising, both in love and on the web, is a risk. Do you choose to look or buy? Surveillance translates well too. Men and women watch from behind cameras behind closed doors. Seductive and hesitant, like Matthew Condon’s novel The Pillow Fight (also uncovers the inner worlds of a casino/couple), The Casino Project is so far an exploration of male identity, anger and (loss of) control. which drills into the psyche.
Simpler in design, but crafty and intriguing in action, is Tulse Luper 92 suitcases (www.zen.co.uk/home/pagew/ paul.m/tlhome/html – expired). It’s a mouthful but what do you expect from a site rumoured to be filled in around the edges by Peter Greenaway. Confusing graphics of desktop meta-images—folders belonging to Greenaway, David Hockney—lead to small suitcase icons filled with the unimaginable and notions of the authentic. The Luggage Rack has bags added regularly. Stuffed and enticing, the contents are worth persevering for: little jigsaw puzzle pieces, unlabelled portraits, curiouser and curiouser. Click on screens and nothing happens. Numberly fun: letters from PG about Bacon numbers, “a measure of how closely an actor/actress is related to Kevin Bacon”, obsessions with statistics, a 30cm ruler (one foot). The writing crosses all genres but has a detective slant. Who is Tulse Luper? Where are the rest of his suitcases? Which are the real/fake ones? It’s possible to place clues and forge notes. Secret compartments lead to an unmade film about Tristram Shandy, mathematics and fly collecting, translation as art, road kill and buzzards, suitcases filled, as the intro reveals, with deaths, sounds, letters and stolen notices. Check out the feedback form for wry humour, Brit style.
Continuing with the abstract expression, extensive hypermedia works by Miekal And (http://www.net22.com/gazingulaza/ joglars/index.html – expired) focus on the textu(r)al and tactile: a ticking-over-word-puzzle tribute to intermedia composer Dick Higgins (Mesosistics for dick higgins); a typo-city font voyage (after emmett) where letters become characters (weren’t they always), exploring text-based design as language. spidertangle wordround is a hypertext workshop and playspace for creators to muck about in. Some of the works are cold and alienating at first: LogoKons plays with visual noise machines, black and white iconic windmills (or “fans for cows” as a young observer once said) that generate creaks and the spaces between that words create. The most interesting is Ubutronic Audio Faucet + Brainwave Seducer, a concentrated mix of sound, hypertext and graphics, atonal and resonant mouthmusic, building new noise rhythms according to the words you click on. Stumpsitter: a chorus of frogs and swamp boogie. A voice and harmonies appear out of nowhere. Close your eyes and it becomes trancelike, you’re a composer, making your own poem-song. Open up both Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers at the same time for the stereo mix…and my computer has a panic attack…
D.art 99 is a gallery exhibition of CD-ROMs and a cinema screening of linear video “made by artists who use digital processes”, both programmed by dLux media arts. The screening was presented as part of the 46th Sydney Film Festival; the CD-ROMs were exhibited at Artspace from June 10 to July 3. D.art will soon tour nationally. The opening also included a performance by Wade Marynowsky and launch of the remarkable CD-ROM Basilisk & a universe of dirt by Wayne Stamp, Lloyd Sharp and Panos Couros.
We haven’t yet reached the point on the curve of increasing bandwidth that will make many of the more interesting forms of digital art easier to distribute, so opportunities to view international works locally are still rare. At D.art 99, CD-ROMs and videos from the US, England, Spain, Brazil, the Netherlands, Finland and Canada were shown alongside work from Australia. It is heartening to recognise that media artists all over the world are striving (not always successfully) to make sensible use of digital tools beyond their preset effects. dLux media arts should be commended for continuing to program international pieces—a practice first tested at D.art 98. It seems obvious that exhibiting the best international pieces benefits local production and critical practice, in much the same way that the major film festivals have offered film practitioners an international context for their efforts. Once the relevant funding organisation emerges from the Hall of Mirrors it may be encouraged to support the exhibition of international digital media art locally.
One of the highlights of the video program was Peter Callas’ work-in-progress Lost in Translation—part 1: Plus Ultra, his first piece since moving his production process out of the video studio and onto the desktop. You have to admire anyone who will learn Unix for their art, and the result of his extensive re-skilling in SoftImage is shown in this piece which seems to offer an expanded dimension to his previous efforts in the essentially 2D world of the Fairlight video synthesiser. While still using 2D sources—images and drawings from the heroic period of Portuguese exploration and consequent non-heroic period of South American colonisation—Callas has managed to manipulate them (figures especially) in a manner which suggests a life in 3 dimensions. In one sequence a Prince-Henry-the-Navigator type of figure is seen hunched over a map and continues to draw and redraw the edges of the world. In another a bed-ridden figure cut from what looks like a Goya is made to buckle in spasms from some deep sickness of the soul. The new tools have allowed for a greater depth of texture and mood. Callas’ new work is more poetic. Lost in Translation seems to escape some of the comic harshness provided by the saturated colours of his early work, while pleasingly retaining the psychotic repetitive actions of the figures and his political concerns, and remains unmistakably a video by Peter Callas.
Michaela French’s Flux is also a beauty, or is beauty. A richly layered and textured series of visually poetic fragments carefully sewn together in the edit suite. It makes you think of all sorts of things—love, loss, longing, ferris wheels, Christ how did they do that and what is that a picture of? We are finally starting to see some spirited use of Adobe After Effects which proves that all those bank commercials with their gliding logos haven’t ruined it for everyone.
Ian Haig’s 2 minute blurt Trick or Treat “ghouls, zombies, bloodsuckers, freaks and demons are brought back from the dead”, looked like 16 different personalities vying for control of the body of Edvard Munch as it squeezed through a sphincter in the space-time continuum. It was comically unnerving in a Tobe Hooper sort of way. But it ended just as its visceral effects (significantly augmented by Philip Samartzis’ soundtrack) were starting to be felt. Hopefully, Haig will turn it into an endurance piece for those people who can’t get enough of his sort of madness.
Tina Gonsalves’ Swelling was another substantial piece in a generally high quality video program that suffered only a couple of lapses.
New media curators always have to grapple with the problem of exhibiting interactive digital media art (CD-ROMs and websites) and linear digital media art (video) in the same program. Recent attempts by film festivals to incorporate both have usually resulted in a batch of PCs with CD-ROM drives sitting in the foyer of the cinema. dLux have gone the more sensible route and put a batch of PCs in the foyer of an art gallery, allowing for a longer exhibition window. The set-up at Artspace was pretty perfunctory—4 Macs on 2 trestle tables with headphones to stop the sound spill and a bunch of chairs scattered around. It looked like one of those laundromats in Chinatown which also offers net access. But the event had people queuing up every day to see the exhibition, and with a lot of people around the unfussy approach worked well.
Cristina Casanova’s Vamos a Contar Mentiras (Let’s Tell Lies)
Someone always seemed to be interacting with Spaniard Cristina Casanova’s Vamos a Contar Mentiras (Let’s Tell Lies)—a popular piece. Through a menu made of happy chocolate-box cherubs, the user was able to gain access to a series of animations which told oblique stories, ostensibly about a group of school friends. It was fun and flirty and always entertaining, but had one of those confusing interfaces which, if you didn’t have a good memory, had you by mistake returning to areas already explored.
A notable tendency within D.art 99 was an emphasis on sound. Visual artists who have taken up video and digital media at art school have not always embraced sound production, especially when taught by other visual artists. There is an old rule of thumb handed down from video artist to video artist that says sound is 10% of the effect and 90% of the trouble. Chris Henschke’s Orchestra of Rust and Michael Buckley’s The Good Cook showed that with CD-ROM production it might still be 90% of the trouble, but you get full value for your effort. Likewise, Panos Couros’ soundtrack for Basilisk & a universe of dirt works effectively with Wayne Stamp and Lloyd Sharp’s bacteriological, alchemical, ahistorical, and proctological imagery.
Chris Hales is an English artist who has long worked with his own brand of interactive movie—poetic (and sometimes comic) linear videos into which he has set hotspots for the audience to select. These provide jumping off points for other scenes or other narratives. The Tallinn People’s Orchestra is a slightly different work in that it uses sound as a basis for its development. A simple locked-off shot of a square in the Estonian capital shows at various points different figures walking into the shot in the foreground, middle ground and background. Planes, pigeons, people all have a separate sound figure and can be turned off or ordered differently to evolve the soundscape. It is not as immediately fulfilling as his previous The Twelve Loveliest Things I Know and others, but still an interesting example of the development of interactivity with linear video streams. Chris Hales remains one of the few artists worldwide who is interested in this area which seems rich with possibility and may reach its height with the spread of DVD-ROM.
Wade Marynowsky’s Diaspora 2000 was both a performance and CD-ROM. The performance was held in the vestibule at Artspace after the opening speeches and during everyone’s second beer. The speakers were cranked up and the video projector above Marynowsky’s head was pumping out a stream of media against the universe. The music was a reasonable sort of bland techno filth thing. It was kind of okay in performance and the energy was up but at times it looked like another virtual anorak going through the motions.
The CD-ROM version of Diaspora 2000 (made in Director) even though the same, is another thing entirely. The user is given a very simple keyboard layout to learn and then get started. By selecting different keys, you can call up different sound samples coupled with images. Some are drum loops, some melodic sequences and some short samples. Not only can you overlay sounds over each other, but the images coupled to the sounds flash alternately, creating a sort of epilepsy-inducing oscillation between images. Eisenstein would have liked the way the images evoke different meanings when placed in proximity with each other, but the broad themes of the piece make you think of the 4 horsemen of Sydney’s Apocalypse—greed, envy, lust and the Olympics. You can build up quite complex layers of sound and image, and experiment with turning layers on and off.
After about half an hour of playing with this thing, you get that sweaty overstimulated feeling you get from video games or loud music and which is strangely satisfying to the adolescent in you. You begin to realise that this program was what Wade was interacting with to make the audio and video streams for his performance on opening night which you previously thought was a bit ho hum. What makes it so different? Why was the linear version a bit familiar, but the act of interacting with the same material so exciting and so fun? Maybe we are starting to see what interactive media is going to be able to give audiences that linear media can’t. Interactive media’s offer not of control but of play as an antidote to the didacticism of linear media will win every time.
With this event, dLux have gone out on a limb by concentrating primarily on the exhibition of digital works, a move which remains unpopular with many camera-using filmmakers. D.art 99, however, must be described as a successful event. It had a focus which its predecessor, Matinaze (1991–97), always lacked, and a breadth, through the programming of CD-ROMs, which D.art 98 couldn’t achieve. With the possible inclusion of a sound component next year, D.art seems to be morphing into a separate event altogether. And now that other film festivals are sweeping up all those pesky short dramas, dLux can concentrate on exhibiting digital media art in all its forms. And this is a prospect which is not at all unpleasant.
D.art 99 screenings, produced and presented by dLux media arts at the 46th Sydney Film Festival, Palace Academy Twin, June 18; CD-ROM exhibition, Artspace, June 10 – July 3; D.art 99 will tour nationally and internationally
Mark Dery has built a remarkable reputation as one of America’s leading cultural critics. With a vocabulary that would terrify Barry Jones, Dery happily dives into realms that most critics avoid like the plague. He roams the cultural landscape like a geigercounter searching for radioactive material. As J.G. Ballard has put it, “the ever growing pathologies of millennial America show up clearly on the X-ray screen of his penetrating analysis.”
His first book, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century remains a watershed work and one of the only ‘cyber’ texts to retain its relevance as the seconds tick by to the end of the millennium. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, 21*C, World Art, Suck, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone and his latest offering The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, American Culture on the Brink (Grove Press) is a tome of collected and reworked magazine essays. Its bizarre meanderings have caused a storm of debate. He has been both savaged and lauded with many mainstream critics obviously left wondering where the hell he is coming from or going to. Meanwhile Howard Rheingold, Andrew Ross, J G Ballard and Bruce Sterling have lined up alongside Dery, with Sterling writing in Bookforum that, “Given its utterly bizarre terrain, this is a very lucid book—I can only imagine the effect of these essays on, say, some bright but sheltered 17-year-old male Southern Baptist. It would likely cause the kid’s skull to spontaneously rupture. The book is also extremely funny. Mark Dery has a hammerlock on the Zeitgeist. He may be the best cultural critic alive.”
There is no doubt however that the range is bizarre; from cloning to clowns, from degeneration to digerati. There is a distinct aesthetic running through these subjects and it is decidedly morbid. According to Dery, he is “using millennial memes like the psycho killer clown, disposable archetypes like Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and media mythologies such as the horror stories about flesh-eating bacteria and ‘hot’ viruses as prisms to refract the social, economic, and philosophical trends that are shafting through American culture at the fin-de-millennium.”
Talking to Dery is spell-binding. His vocabulary is no affectation, just the expression of an individual who truly loves words and ideas. However his ideas are far from average.
“I chose the exhibits in my postmodern Odditorium (P.T. Barnum’s name for his famous museum of monsters, marvels, and patent fabrications) because they seemed like the best examples of the media freakery, postmodern fakery, tabloid grotesquerie, and increasingly gothic social conditions all around me, here in the Evil Empire,” says Dery. “For example, Damien Hirst’s cut-up meat animals, floating in formaldehyde, seem to embody our ambivalent attitude, a sort of contemptuous nostalgia, toward the melancholy ‘meat’, as the body is derisively known in our ever more virtual world. Of course, Hirst is British, so his pickled cows can’t help but remind us, as well, of mad-cow disease, the Cronenbergian horror that has become cultural shorthand for all our dearest fears of airborne pathogens and invisible contaminants in our age of product tampering and toxic Coke, multiple-chemical sensitivity and anti-bacterial scrubs.” More and more, says Dery, public space, from our drinking water to pay telephones, “teems with microbial menaces in the paranoid imagination. At the same time, the body itself is increasingly seen as a septic nightmare, its unseen contaminants exorcised through the New Age ritual of colonic cleaning. On my dissecting table, Hirst’s pickled animals become a way of talking about these things.
“As for the ‘morbid’ aesthetic you mention, it’s a conjunction of individual temperament and Zeitgeist, I suppose. We live in gothic times, as Mark Edmundson points out in his marvellous book, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic. He sees American culture as fraught with Gothic assumptions, Gothic characters and plots, from The X-Files to the O.J. Simpson trial, recovered memories of satanic ritual abuse to right-wing conspiracy theories. I’d add that we’re also witnessing the resurrection of the Gothic’s conjoined twin, the grotesque. The grotesque is the Gothic with a sense of humour. We see the grotesque in the carnival-midway mix of horror and hilarity that is a personality trait of the late 20th century—the endless replaying of R Budd Dwyer’s on-camera gunshot suicide for laughs on the web, for example.”
In an era when New York City has gone from Gotham to glisten, when President Clinton gets away with personal mayhem and announces the healthiest economy for many a year, Dery’s position, if anything, has become more extreme. It is not difficult to perceive Dery’s cultural reading in part as a reaction to political correctness.
“Don’t you mean a reaction to political in-correctness?” says Dery in response. “Namely, New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s ongoing transformation of the ‘mongrel metropolis’ into a gated community for the mega-rich, a police state ruled by Michael Eisner, while quietly shipping the homeless off to suburban holding pens, turning a blind eye on police brutality, and cutting tax breaks for the real-estate barons pricing the lower classes out of Manhattan?
“As for the ‘extremism’ of my critique, what’s the alternative? A playful slap on the wrist for a nation rotten with power and bloated with wealth that prizes B-2 bombers over prenatal care, corporate welfare over public education? A homily from William Bennett’s Book of Virtues for a country that subverts democratically elected governments and coddles dictators, rewarding the nightstick justice meted out by pariah governments like the Suharto regime with arms shipments, the better to drive striking sweatshop workers back to their posts? I may be an egg-eating rat gnawing on the tail of a Tyrannosaurus, but as a politically engaged intellectual, speaking truth to power is part of my job description.”
Dery’s approach to cultural criticism is remarkably inclusive. He scans popular culture as comfortably as high brow theory, from Disneyland to Deleuze. In this he shares a number of qualities with such writers as Mike Davis in City of Quartz, Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces, Erik Davis in Techngnosis and McKenzie Wark in Virtual Geography.
“I think we’re beginning to see the faint footprints, in mainstream and alternative journalism, of the first few graduating classes to cut their intellectual teeth on postmodern philosophers like Baudrillard, Foucault and Deleuze,” says Dery. “Erik Davis is an exemplar of these smart, young, incurably informed academy hackers. McKenzie Wark, who began as a rock critic and is now a card-carrying member of the professoriate, represents the trajectory from the opposite direction, namely academics who stage-dive into the mosh pit of popular culture and media exposure.”
There’s a precedent for this trend, says Dery, in 60s pop intellectuals such as McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Susan Sontag, Norman O. Brown, RD Laing, Leslie Fiedler and Herbert Marcuse, “all of whose stock-in-trade was typically ideas, not theory, as Andrew Ross points out in No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. (Interesting to recall a time, not so long ago, when the “critical theory” trust didn’t have a Microsoft tm monopoly on the operating system for intellectual discourse!) I think this sort of mental miscegenation is all to the good. Inbreeding, whether literal or intellectual, is a recipe for monstrosities.”
Dery comfortably hops around the cultural terrain, jumping from comparatively ‘mainstream’ subjects as the Unabomber and Heaven’s Gate to the far less publicised Mutter Museum and the grotesque comic books of Renee French.
“I’ve always been interested in unnatural history and unpopular culture,” says Dery. “It’s an obsession that springs, I suppose, from the implicitly political assumption that what’s removed from the official version, the eloquent holes left by the censor’s scissors, is more informative than what’s left in. I’m interested in the repressed truths, whether visceral or political, buried in the Freudian boiler room of mass culture: the unconsidered, like the ‘Doll Hour’ on the Home Shopping Network; the unspeakable, like the wax models of venereal horrors in medical museums; the unacceptable, like the statistics about runaway personal bankruptcies and credit-card debt downplayed by the media, lest these sour notes clash with the received truth that we’re all rewarded by the Long Boom, not just the top 20% of American families.”
Dery begins Insanitarium with the brilliant metaphor of crumbling Coney Island. It is incredibly apt for millennial culture. However one could argue in the opposite direction, that rather than the lights going out and a healthy rot setting in we are seeing the creation of soulless citadels; the cleanliness of New York, the puritanical vigilantism of Los Angeles, the plastic re-make of Singapore. It is impossible to escape the gigantic hamburger M almost anywhere on the planet and if anything the lights seem to be going on, making the ghosts and freaks scuttle away so the tourists are safe.
“Well, as your comments imply, the waking nightmare of America, late in the 20th century, with its media feeding frenzies and its copycat killings, its urban pathologies and its exurban desolation—what James Howard Kunstler calls our strip-mall, convenience-store ‘geography of nowhere’—can be every bit as scary as the night terrors of the Gothic imagination. Baudrillard hints at this in America, in his ontological vertigo in an air-conditioned Hell that exults in ‘the liquidation of all culture’ and rejoices in ‘the consecration of indifference’, an Audio-Animatronic dreamland so ghastly that even ‘dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism’ offer blessed relief. Baudrillard’s fits of the vapours are a little hard to take, sometimes, but he’s hilariously on target when he suggests that nothing is spookier than the hysterical fear of nature and the body, the mysophobic sterilisation of the unconscious symbolised by the Disneyfication of public space and the creeping corporate monoculture you mention.
“I chose Coney Island at the turn of the last century as my master metaphor because it’s a janiform symbol, embodying the dualisms that are a hallmark of fin-de-siecle moments such as ours. As I note in the book’s opening essay, turn-of-the-century Coney was 20th century America in miniature, a carnival of chaos whose trademark blend of infernal fun and mass madness, technology and pathology was quintessentially American. It was transgressive, a mad, Dionysian whirl of emotional abandon and exposed flesh, speed and sensory overload that mocked the hidebound proprieties of the vanishing Victorian era and signalled the rise of a new mass culture no longer deferential to genteel tastes and values. Steeplechase, Dreamland, and Luna Park were, in today’s parlance, ‘temporary autonomous zones’ where genders, classes, and ethnicities commingled more freely than they did outside its gates.
“At the same time, Coney was also a machine for mass-producing masses—the workers and consumers of the coming age of mass media and mass consumption. Like today’s Disneyworld, the Burning Man festival, and body piercing, it was a safety valve for proletarian energies that might have been channelled into less playful, more political outlets. It instructed the immigrant working class in the machine-age pleasures of conspicuous consumption, guilt-free waste, gadget worship, and the push-button gratification of infantile desires. This is the ‘Coney Island of the Mind’ that inspired Henry Miller’s literate, liberal shudder of revulsion, the peeling pasteboard temple of cheap thrills and vulgarian pleasures. So there was a Foucauldian mechanics of transgression and repression at work in Coney that is still in effect in the millennial America it helped beget, a pyrotechnic insanitarium torn between escapist simulation and social reality, democratic promise and corporate oligarchy, the restless rabble and the power elite.”
Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, American Culture on the Brink, Grove Press, USA, 1999
McKenzie Wark’s ongoing contribution to a contemporary understanding of Australia’s social and cultural condition cannot be underestimated. His third book, as its title indicates, paints a huge canvas and like most of his astute commentary in newspapers, academic journals and magazines, seeks to provoke reaction and stimulate further debate.
An amazing array of what at first appear to be unrelated topics make up this impressively researched opus. Both individually and collectively, the topics formulate important questions. There is suggestive analysis of the meanings generated by the likes of Kylie Minogue, Nick Cave, Peter Garrett, the Kellys (Ned and the 2 Pauls) and Natalie Imbruglia. There’s also an assessment of the “post broadcasting” era we are fast approaching, which forcefully challenges the dominance of suburban myths and values.
At the core of these matters lies Wark’s chief concern: that the ALP today has lost touch with what its constituents actually desire from everyday life. The answer lies, he argues, in an awareness and understanding of popular media-generated images through which people formulate ideas and aspirations.
Here indeed is a thinker who uses very broad brushstrokes in his view of the big picture. He examines the way new media technologies are embraced by a growing proportion of Australians as we approach the new millennium. Wark argues that being both more aware of and comfortable with cyberspace allows for a new way of seeing as well as providing newer forms of information. Yet to argue that this constitutes an end to the broadcasting age and presumably to the end of mass media is highly contentious.
There is little evidence presented here to suggest that the birth of new media automatically assumes the death or even the steady demise of old media. The internet, pay-TV and the phenomena of niche and narrowcasting may well mean that there are more choices than ever before. Yet this does not preclude the possibility that most of us will still get the majority of our news and information from traditional media sources. As he cites more and more examples of celebrity culture on mainstream TV networks, newspaper and magazine chains, Wark perhaps inadvertently proves that we are not in a post-broadcasting age.
His argument goes deeper when he proposes that those who inhabit and embrace “fortress suburbia” are largely resistant to social change in general and to new flows of information from cyberspace in particular. These citizens, he argues, are essentially inward looking, fearful of the massive changes which globalisation has brought and generally intolerant of difference. Meanwhile, those who dwell in inner city developments represent a new urban and outward looking generation who are much more adaptable to all forms of the massive changes occurring around them.
The problem with this analysis is twofold. There is no evidence presented which supports such generalisations about community attitudes, let alone usage of new media forms. A recent Rural Industries Corporation report notes that at least 20% of Australia’s regional farming community is currently online (and for longer periods of time) while the national average is 18%.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has indicated that generation Xers are leading the way in taking up rates and overall usage of the net. Wark seems to be suggesting that the propensity to embrace new media technologies results in new and dynamic flows of information which, in turn, allows forward, adaptive and more creative thought processes. Yet in very recent Newspoll findings these same 18-24 year olds are increasingly more fervent in their support of Prime Minister Howard. If he represents the most exciting and forward thinking federal politician to the most switched on media savvy generation ever known, Wark’s overall argument loses some momentum.
There is no strong evidence to suggest that spending more time with new forms of information and entertainment correlates in any consistent way with specific attitudes or behaviour patterns to do with social, political and/or economic issues. Indeed an overview of many of the most popular chat-sites around the web reveals an amazing lack of tolerance, goodwill and openness to new agendas.
I remain unconvinced that place of abode, propensity to go online or indeed age—another of Wark’s apparent obsessions (shared with Mark Davis)—have much on their own to do with the way we feel or behave. There are far too many other variables which come into play here.
Finally it is the political implications of Wark’s acceptance of many of young ALP maverick Mark Latham’s so called “third way” approaches which I find most troublesome. Much of the current economic orthodoxy shared by both major political parties is supported by Latham who goes further to urge continuous anticipation and positive adaptation to the ongoing changes brought upon us by the “natural” forces of globalisation.
These changes are somehow seen as inevitable, as consequences of the forces of nature. Those who oppose these seemingly gravitational movements are quite clearly naïve in clinging to tired, out-of-date social principles once endorsed by the Labor Party.
This brings us back to the question of how we relate to the celebrities we encounter in all vectors. Wark argues that the Labor Party must come to understand the needs and wants of its constituents by coming to terms with the meanings and messages we receive from our celebrities. But how all of this is supposed to connect to future ALP policy formation remains rather problematic.
Throughout his book Wark remains optimistic about the sweeping changes we are all experiencing. “I write for dancers not mourners”, he stated in a recent Age interview. Clearly there are many of us who remain more sceptical about the directions we are heading in. Yet while we can disagree with and be puzzled by some of Wark’s arguments, he has raised and made readily accessible many pertinent questions about crucial issues which affect us all.
McKenzie Wark, Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace; The Light on the Hill in a Postmodern world, Pluto Press 1999
Foyer: a place of impermanence, change, transition. Right now I need a coffee to settle my stomach. Black cushions, black cave; crawl into Saturday morning. Recovery via Art. Glossy fake turf; two screens beaming out licorice colours. Someone sticks their head around a temporary wall: “Excuse me, can you please tell me where the workshop…?” De-dede-de-de makes a happy kitsch-pop tune. Multimedia artist Keith Armstrong and I meet and greet each other.
We are in a space within the space of the Metro Arts foyer, Edward Street, CBD of Brisbane, an artifical space constituted by an installation of sound, vision, dance, 3D animation and captioning. The 2 of us begin to chat while lolling on cushions in the surrounds of this thing called the Transit Lounge: a world of many worlds and crazy characters. Keith: originator, digital video artist and artistic director.
Ling Change: a strong young woman who commands attention and investigates other worlds and ways of doing things.
What was the impetus for the project? I was on a Metro residency in 1998-99 and at the same time participating in the Jabiluka protests. In both instances I came face to face with the question of change, ie what are the conditions in which individuals or organisations can flourish and how are these conditions realized? This question’s also a bit of a follow-on from my previous project, Public Relations [from the IMA’s Art on Line series]; I’m interested in how systems lock together and influence their constituent parts and vice versa.
So, in the residency I wanted to look at how the tenants of Metro Arts might interact with the greater environment within which they operate so as to achieve a dynamic between diversity and equilibrium. I went around and spoke to tenants asking them open-ended stuff like, “How do your private ethics impact on your organisational management?” and “Do you play games?”
The Humatix: unemployed cleaners who live in decommissioned toilet blocks and dance to any available audience in the hope of picking up a tip
How did you focus this? Originally I was going to use the whole building as an installation but narrowed it down to the foyer, which allowed external traffic as well. And I conceived of the installation as a nonlinear world which would be affected by audience activity. So I’ve located it in an area where the environment is always changing and yet people have some ownership, however abstract, of the space.
The Cock Blockies: mummylike characters permanently coiled in lotus position in the tunnels of the honeycomb plateau
What was the authoring process? I wrote a script, with Lisa O’Neill (choreographer-dancer) in mind, and together we began to build storyboards. The script had the fundamental idea of a series of different worlds, with a description of each one. There were some adventures but it was a totally absurd piece. Some people asked me if I’d been on acid when I wrote it!
Lisa was very instrumental in the characterisation of the inhabitants of the worlds. She took it in directions I didn’t anticipate, such as giving a cartoonlike quality to the characters. We shot her in a TV studio, putting the 3D camera in the same spot it’d be in in the animated world.
I sketched the environments and then Sean Young, Andrew Goode and Ross Anderson [3D modelling animators] developed the Y-frames in 3D. It was at a later stage that we decided to render them in a cartoonish style. This wasn’t only because of Lisa’s work but also because I wanted something of that quality that The Simpsons and South Park have and, again, the ‘reality’ factor of the original renderings somehow flattened out the narrative.
Young Macduffles: suave salesmen who are forever seeking new opportunities to sell their product, the honey drink ‘Core’
Why did you develop a narrative? I wanted to play around on the boundaries of artistic and commercial design and to create an installation that had a broad appeal. Given the conceptual underpinnings, I wanted people to engage with the ‘artwork’, not just look at it. Of course, the narrative isn’t linear; this would’ve been contrary to my interest in change and how it is measured. I’d like, ultimately, to make a play station.
Old Macduffles: slaves who package ‘Core’ in the niche markets
What was the role of sound? Guy Webster [composer] came in to the project at a later point—mostly due to money or the lack of it! (We all contributed hours of unpaid labour and got a lot of in-kind support from the likes of QUT and Apple.) He basically had a responsive role although he contributed lots of great ideas. We decided that we’d go for a ‘music’ rather than ‘sound’ style, a soundtrack, this year’s model so to speak. He worked with miniatures of the animations and with Lisa.
Rinston, Bruce Canon & Dogs: preoccupied, unaware and insular neighbours of Ling Change
How did you structure the space? Originally I’d wanted to use the whole foyer. However, once you bring in the screens, you have a problem with light so Callum Lui [installation designer] created this cavelike structure we’re sitting in. These cushions invite people to relax and not have an us/artwork dichotomy. I’d intended a walkthrough space but this is contingent on the door at the far end being left open by Metro! The space is more enclosed than I’d originally envisaged; hence the turf as one way of bringing different environments together.
The large screen hanging above us shows the narrative as it unfolds, detours and so on. The smaller screen set up like a TV gives background information about the worlds and the characters, and the captioned thoughts of the main character Ling Change. It also includes a digital garden, the state of which is affected by the audience, and which in turn affects the narrative journey. So movement, temperature, sound and light make the flowers bloom or wither away, and these changes influence the adventures of Ling Change. The interactive code was created by Gavin Sade [interactive designer] on a Director [multimedia authoring] system, and the engine of it all is in the basement below the foyer.
The Fiscalities: narrow minded empirebuilders who restrict others but themselves get stuck on the honeycomb plateau.
Our conversation dwindles to its end. Keith and I sit there, watch the flowers grow, see the Humatix do their dancing-girls routine once again in sexy short uniforms and brassy wigs, give each a goodbye after a short black, and go our separate ways. In transit: on the go, between destinations, journeying into the…
Ling Change Thinks: line dancing is so passe
Transit Lounge, Keith Armstrong, Lisa O’Neill, Guy Webster, Callum Lui, Sean Young, Ross Anderson, Andrew Goode, Gavin Sade, Nat Abood, Raniah Haydar, Metro Arts (foyer), Brisbane, May 26 – June 19
In her introduction to Captured, curator Clare Stewart describes Experimental Cinema as “a contested and elastic term” tracing the parameters of her definition from Bruce Conner to Jim Jarmusch, including the Cantrills, Warhol and Len Lye, while stretching the term to suggest work produced beyond cinema, video and multimedia.
The historical relationship between experimental film and video and digital media practice, the real or potential intersection between them, has often been ignored as experimental work has become redefined in the spectacle of the digital media showcase. Captured goes some way to redress this in favour of work which does not trumpet its media novelty over other concerns.
Stewart’s elasticity is actually less than genre-busting and the works don’t exactly stretch definitions. Why not, for example, programme websites, or even a camera obscura for that matter? The programmes are also largely US dominated with a European coda. However such questions are somewhat churlish as Captured follows a distinctive and necessarily partial course, gathering some of the dominant strands of experimental film and video of the last 10 years or so with deftly imaginative programming.
It is an inspired decision to programme a mini Sadie Benning retrospective (Pixilated: The Oblique Vision of Sadie Benning). Benning’s early work with the Fisher-Price Pixelvision toy camera resembles the intimate, small scale personal documentary/drama that one encounters these days on websites using QuickCams. This teenage lesbian grrrl shot to recognition in the late 80s, the usual adolescent rites of passage skewed through a queer filter in suburban Milwaukee. From the bricolage bedroom video A New Year through to the ‘road movie’ It Wasn’t Love and the women’s health education, animated/live action hybrid of The Judy Spots, Pixilated tracks the development of a style as sophisticated as her older sisters’ (such as Su Freidrich, Greta Snider, etc). The new Flat is Beautiful consolidates this: a wry, affecting film about growing up queer in the 80s combines sharp takes on cod-pop psychology with some quite audacious character masks, as Benning transplants Chantal Akerman’s ‘flat’ approach into the ordinary flux of smalltown middle America.
The Ways of Being programme concentrates on the convergence of performance and video and the appropriation of popular forms. Joe Gibbons’ Multiple Barbie extends the pop-psychological theme in a Pixelvision therapy session framing an exorcism of a Barbie doll’s multiple personalities; a neat parody of tabloid obsession. The Halflifers’ Actions in Actions turns material-action performance into slapstick, or vice versa, the properties of certain foodstuffs taking on a new, metaphysical significance. One with Everything by Daniel Reeves is a technically polished ‘mockumentary’; a fast, iconoclastic ‘deconstruction’ of popular Buddhism. Zen-inspired punning culminates in the ‘punchline’ title. Anne McGuire’s I am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong, spoofing a desperate cabaret singer, drips with deadpan irony and pathos. Singing “a song for all of you who don’t fit in” (introducing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer), she could be Cindy Sherman doing stand-up. The threads of barely suppressed tension and humour that entwine Ways of Being are intensified by the hallucinatory psychological landscape of Nocturne, the latest in Peggy Ahwesh’s series on sexuality, violence, nature and mortality. The promiscuous Pixelvision is again used as a formal/narrative device, its high-contrast providing occasional noir-esque intensity.
Recycled: Old, Used and Abused, consisting of work from Vienna, surely the European capital of Experimental Cinema, begins with Alone. Life Wastes Andy Harvey by Martin Arnold. Arnold, a virtuoso of the optical printer, takes fractions of old Hollywood movies through extraordinarily controlled repetitive forward and reverse reprinting; microscopic moments become tics, stuttering and breathy gasps. Alone…. follows his earlier work in the exploration of the perceptual possibilities of this technique. The extended song, utterances and exhalations of the triangle of Fay Holden, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney become oedipal erotic tension in a distillation of structuralist aesthetics; a sinister reconstructive revisionism of cinematic language. Film Ist by Gustav Deutsch reworks a staggering catalogue of found footage into a lexicon of cinematic technological form and function; choreographed concrete construction transcends its research-based premise as an elegant post-humanist poetic essay. The final film of the programme, Lisl Ponger’s déjà vu, frames old super 8 holiday movies from ‘exotic’ locations with voice-over tourist stories. Accidental and naive complicity imbues the problematised relationship of the post-colonial ‘gaze’ with subtle nuanced reflexivity.
It is a credit to the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Australian Film Institute that they are respectively premiering and touring Captured; an altogether considered, coherent and accessible package, serving both as a progress report and captivating introduction to a rich seam of experimental cinema.
Captured, curator Clare Stewart, Melbourne International Film Festival, Treasury Theatre, Melbourne, July 28 & 30, Aug 3 & 7; Perth: Film & Television Institute, Aug 13 – 14; Adelaide: Media Resource Centre, Aug 21 – 22: The Art of the Improbable (forum + local experimental films), speakers: Edwin Daughtry, Margaret Haselgrove, Janet Merewether, Clare Stewart; Sydney: Chauvel Cinemas, Sept 2 & 3
Two long-legged bodies lie, hips curving under dappled light, rolling gently together; a face appears, up high to the side, like a phantom, disembodied and peculiar. It takes a while before I realise that this man, Joseph Stanaway, is producing most of the overpowering, long resonant drone and harmonics we hear. It goes on and on, the dancers’ soft movements rippling underneath like snakes at the mercy of an almost impenetrable sound.
Young Woman Glass Soul is a work of contrasts: piercing, immediate imagery alongside movement material that seems stuck resolutely in some other mindset, loaded and unrecognised. Even so, the dancers, Georgia Carter and Jennifer Newman-Preston, move well together with meticulous grace and an unforced unity of stature and timing. But because there is such polish and completeness in the production you get the sense that there is nowhere else for this work to go, as it is. It’s a full piece, seemingly crammed into a finite stage belying the complexity of the subject matter and giving it hardly any space to breathe.
A multitude of Cinderella stories, from ancient Brazilian to comic Disney, have been researched and pored-over for this production. Newman-Preston wants to unearth the richness of pagan symbolism where ashes stand for cleanliness and purification; whereas the cinders of Charles Perrault’s story in the time of Louis XIV are dirty and polluting, and only fit to be touched by those of low birth. The search for the mysterious woman who fits the glass slipper turns out to be the Ash Girl’s search for herself, her own innate wisdom.
The symbol of the serpent in the story is not so well known to us, but provides rich imagery for the dance work. With perfect grace and timing, Newman-Preston herself suddenly appears in a remarkable and insinuatingly beautiful dance, long-legged, in black high heels, bare back arching, her arms dancing lithe and intricate steps as she sidles on all fours up to a comic and cowering Cinders, rubbing her feet ecstatically in ashes.
Another striking image: a woman-serpent half climbs and half falls, a step at a time, down a diagonally pitched and precarious ladder, her looping heavy limbs dropping suddenly like the coils of a snake from a tree, and, like a snake, supporting itself by a fierce, unseen muscular grip wedged in the angled branches.
The most beautiful of all images depicts the fairy godmother, with her small white mask/face and beckoning arm, shrouded in a dark blue cape of sleep, tall and hovering over the sleeping Cinderella. A simple puppet brings an unearthly magical reality to the character.
Outside in the foyer, there are drawings by Vinn Pitcher on the wall—seen as slides in the work itself—and texts of some of the different Cinderella stories giving a stability and depth to the performance. There may be more, possibly 350, all versions of the same story: a woman’s search for strength and inner wisdom. The illustrations seem comic sometimes, trying to incorporate both the spiritual richness of the pagan cultures and our own mass market mentality and material desires. A well-edited collection of these stories and drawings would be perfect for audiences to take home.
Young Woman Glass Soul, choreography Jennifer Newman-Preston, music Alexander Nettelbeck, performers Georgia Carter & Jennifer Newman-Preston, vocal harmonics Joseph Stanaway, word Victoria Doidge, lighting Tim Preston, images Vinn Pitcher, projections Tim Gruchy, videographer Jo Griffin, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Sydney, July 1 – 10
Arc in Stockton-on-Tees in northern England is a new arts centre, a key promoter and commissioner of local, national and international contemporary artists, and a state-of-the-art digital media centre. Arc is also an example of the regions of England doing it for themselves in these times of confusion in national cultural policy-making. The Arts Council of England (ACE), the English equivalent of The Australia Council, is currently restructuring its relationship with the Regional Arts Boards (RABs), the equivalent of Australia’s state bodies. A policy of devolution of means and methodologies to the RABs has been ACE’s response to criticism of its increasing irrelevancy to and isolation from regional constituencies. The RABs, all operating divergently according to the varying prerogatives of their region, remain mostly undecided upon their interpretation of devolution.
Northern Arts Board, however, with typical Northern gusto, has wasted no time. With perhaps the most to gain from distancing itself from the London-centric policies of ACE, NAB has finished its consultation with regional stake holders ahead of its fellow RABs and will distribute its funds through regional promoters, rather than directly to organisations in 1999.
Arc is a regional promoter with strong credentials, taking over from the small scale Dovecot Arts Centre, which for 25 years battled to provide for Stockton. Looking like a UFO in its chrome and steel incongruence with this drab, post-industrial city, Arc is one of the first wave of major capital developments funded by the National Lottery. It may have opened several months behind schedule, and over budget, but it has opened on this side of the millennium and that is a triumph for the North, as other beleaguered projects, such as the Royal Opera House in London, sink ever deeper into compromise.
With the ambition which has characterised the Stockton International Festival, also directed by Arc’s Chief Executive, Frank Wilson, Arc has set its world class standards, with an inspirational programme to match its superb facilities. Arc’s curving circumference contains a theatre, a music, comedy and cabaret venue, a cinema, a studio theatre, dance studio and recording studio for community and education use, 3 bars and a health club. Most importantly, Arc boasts a digital editing suite and all the equipment needed for the production and distribution of video and multimedia arts throughout the building. These facilities distinguish Arc as one of the first venues in the UK to place new media arts in a mainstream context, and the Mirror Images programme which opened the venue in January 1999, proudly celebrated the central role of digital arts within the organisation.
The season took its name from Richard Land’s interactive video installation, which was commissioned by Arc to showcase the potential of its facilities. Triggered into action by the images of passing viewers on a monitor screen, the installation evolved over time as ghost images of previous visitors accumulated. Architect Richard Wilson’s intervention into Arc’s facade, Over Easy, was another example of the playful nature of the opening commissions. Wilson’s first permanent installation in the UK revolves in Arc’s glass frontage, inviting visitors to sample the non-stop artistic activity within. Again employing ideas of access and community, Arc commissioned Danish group Hotel Pro Forma to work with local people to create imagery and sounds for the audio visual spectacular Tall Storeys High which illuminated the building over its opening week. Marcel Li Anthunez from Barcelona performed his Epizoo mechanical masterpiece of Stelarc-like physical manipulation; Motherboard from Norway presented Maggie’s Love Bytes, an internet link up with remote international participants; and British multimedia collective Black Box set up an exhibition of interactive sound and video work in the studio. Random Dance Company presented the world premiere of their new dance and digital media production Sulphur16, featuring graphic animation and film edited in Arc’s virgin studios.
Complementing the digital season, Arc’s inaugural programme features exciting new work in more conventional media: Jumping the Waves was commissioned from local playwright Gordon Steel; The Gandini Juggling Project premiere their new piece Remembering Rastelli; amongst several visiting national touring companies, Union Dance and Northern Broadsides Theatre present Dance Tek Warriors and Twelfth Night respectively; there is an extensive music programme and the comedy, club and cinema calendars are full of events likely to bring mainstream audiences into contact with new media work. Arc’s commissions will tour internationally and artists everywhere will benefit from this pioneering approach to new media programming. Symbolism aside, Arc seems set to play an inspirational regional, national and international role.
New centres for digital arts mean new opportunities for media artists to create and present their work in conditions conducive to their appreciation. Funding from the National Lottery has significantly improved audio and video technologies in auditoria and public spaces across the UK, and in several cases, such as Arc, included digital production facilities for the creation of work on-site.
The facilitation of digital arts creation is happening across the board, in venues large and small. In 1998, The Junction, a small arts centre in Cambridge, reopened with an impressive international digital programme. The new Sadlers Wells in London included a multimedia screen and an interactive installation in its foyer and is planning a digital programme for its studio Bayliss Theatre. In March 1999, The Lowry Centre in Salford Quays opened its doors to artists from MIT Media Lab, with a programme of residencies developed in conjunction with the commercial Digital World Centre next door. Future openings, such as The Baltic Flour Mills in Newcastle or the new Tate Gallery in London promise great opportunities for digital artists, with better residencies, showcases and schemes for audience development and marketing of media arts. Existing organisations, such as arts festivals, are catching the new media wave and offering commissions to performance and visual artists to create site specific interventions, often employing the digital media they have also acquired from smaller National Lottery capital applications. There is much to excite the British media artist at the moment, and more to come.
Caroline Dunphy & Lisa O’Neill, Oily Nights in Strathcliffe
In recent years, Brisbane’s been long on shorts. Diverse events have been memorably programmed by Metro Arts, Kooemba Jdarra, Renegade, the brilliant if defunct Crab Room, Cherry Herring, Zoo, LIVID and more. Director Lucinda Shaw marks the territory of CAB/SAV II as “a group of queer-aligned performing artists into difference, making unconstrained theatre that celebrates full humanity and expresses and transcends sexuality.” In the context of what else is around, this sense of unconstrained difference just never materialised —even if the final triptych was worth the wait.
The Lisa O’Neill choreographed Lino Cuts, performed by Caroline Dunphy and Christina Koch, opened the show with something less than a fanfare. Intensely gestural and ritualistic, O’Neill’s choreography usually works its way beneath the skin but this piece seemed blunt and incomplete—an anxious duet for competing ids, Lino Cuts was well performed but too long, or perhaps not long enough, to reinforce and work its themes.
Beneath a projection of Lucinda Shaw’s tidal film Shells, Jem Coones recites his poem “Postcard From a Butcher’s Window” accompanied, and finally silenced by, cellist David Sills (playing the Wesley-Smiths’ White Knight) who in turn is silenced by a kiss. Coones himself, lolling about in a hunky, singleted kind of way inside the image of a projected shell, may have provided just one allusion too many, sentimentalising what might have been a memorable telling of sexual initiation where “the ocean’s hush spoke like a foul-mouthed poet.” A multimedia concoction rather than reconstitution.
Singer/pianist Barb Daveson, accompanied by Sills, performed a charming lament of longing and leaving from her Highways And Hangovers but was poorly programmed in the middle of a set. Daveson was followed by the Babel-esque confusion of Untitled Spoken Word by poetess (sic) Jess Godfrey whose energised performance was full of self-obsessing verve (self/alienation/self/representation/self) and included a memorable moment of retort with her own projected image.
The second half momentarily stalled with Remembering Eve, a terminal film memory by Kris Kneen, but was finally hot-wired by Lucinda Shaw performing “Everywhere I Go Someone’s Reading Poetry.” Sharp, witty, monumentally present, Shaw’s gothic take on the insouciance of art and its paradoxical capacity for banality and pain was a much needed creative call to arms.
The tragi-comic fable of porn hero Joey Stefano (sex, drugs, sex, love, loss, drugs, death) in Psycho The/Rapist #2 Joey Stefano introduced a welcome queer physic. Conceived and performed by Brian Lucas, this is the second in a series of 3 works by an accomplished storyteller whose body is as eloquent as his clever use of prologue, snatch-narrative and sound-bite.
CAB/SAV II concluded with Lisa O’Neill’s powerful Oily Nights In Strathcliffe performed with intensity by O’Neill and Caroline Dunphy (with a soundtrack by Tom Waits, Beck and powermad). Ritual, and the ritual of performance itself, is at the heart of O’Neill’s work. She and Dunphy perform like giants behind miniature picket fences, isolated and out of reach of each other’s screams, playing out rites of desperation and arousal to escape the rites of emotional atrophy. In Oily Nights In Strathcliffe performance and conceptual intelligence come together—O’Neill’s choreography lures, suspends, creeps and catapults.
CAB/SAV II promised queer concentrate but never turned itself over to queerness as an event. The conscious rejection of format, the allusion to and rejection of cabaret, caused its own problems of flagging energy, restless un-anticipation, no sense of celebration or commentary and problems with set ups which a ce n’est pas CABaret attitude might have subverted with fun and SAVvy.
CAB/SAV II, a season of short works for the 1999 Pride Festival, Director Lucinda Shaw, Metro Arts Theatre, June 30 – July 3
“Wilson: But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?
Virilio: We’ll dream of being blind.”
Louise Wilson, interview with Paul Virilio, “Cyberwar, God, and Television”, in Kroker, Arthur, and Marilouise (eds), Digital Delirium, St Martin’s, NY, 1997.
Perhaps too much has already been claimed for the benefits that new media technologies, the web and internet bring to the arts, and the media arts in particular. But a maturing audience, a growing “catalogue” of online work and resources, and the burgeoning of partially or wholly web-based media arts practitioners are gradually creating a lively and diverse online media arts culture.
And this in spite of the well-documented failings of the computer-based communications media of the internet and its colourful and noisy cousin, the web. This online culture is the seed bed for many of the most exciting developments in the media arts—the ways they’re practised, received, and ultimately, experienced or lived within a particular culture by its citizens. But it is still early days for this new form of cultural expression.
The digital realm’s ubiquitous influence extends to many media and arts practices and forms allowing the artist to create, manipulate and present work in new ways, and the audience to view and interact with work and exhibitions from anywhere on the globe. The web also presents many opportunities for the media artist and curator to distribute their works or collections widely and to new audiences.
The key change here is the aggregation, in potentially many new ways, of the relatively marginal and fragmented communities of artists and their audiences through the internet. This effect of integrating previously dis-integrated audiences, combined with technologies that enhance audience/viewer engagement and feedback (interactivity) may, in the end, have a far greater impact on the media arts than that of the powerful new technologies of media creation and presentation. Importantly, these different aspects are interdependent and need to be considered as a whole, both for the benefits, and the problems, they bring with them. However, there is currently a lack of knowledge about new distribution channels and the likely future of new media forms.
The recognition of this lack of knowledge has had a significant effect on Australian media arts culture by highlighting the need for government arts funding bodies to address the “downstream” of the production process, arts distribution, with the same commitment they have show to the “upstream” of the process.
The Australia Council, the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), the Australian Film Commission and Cinemedia, among others, have begun to grapple with the intricacies of global distribution assisted by the internet by supporting a range of media arts resource organisations, sites and marketing projects.
The National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) also has a program, Online Australia Year, to catalyse online culture, with aims that include the idea that, “artists need to be recognised as innovative contributors to the information economy. Encouraging links between cultural institutions, cultural workers and commercial content producers will help to increase the variety and quality of digital content, improve Australia’s visibility in the global online environment.”
But the internet is a vast and restless space and there are many issues that need to be taken into account in addressing distribution and access, such as:
1. The greatest issue that faces the artist, curator or arts organisations for media arts practice and culture is a simple one: access to sufficient bandwidth and resources, including sufficient knowledge of distribution and new technologies to make the right strategic and planning choices that will enhance their creativity, career and audience.
2. ‘Version 1.0’ of the internet is about to become so-called ‘Version 2.0.’ Version 2.0 will not only converge media and audiences, it will also diverge into different kinds of broad and narrow band access with different prices, platforms and audiences—just as free and pay television have become two different domains with different audiences and media forms. The low capacity internet we use today could be overshadowed or marginalised by high speed, high capacity networks that only paying subscribers can access, such as Telstra’s Big Pond. (For a rather technical but very interesting overview see the review on Ester Dyson’s site at www.edventure.com/release1.cable.html – expired)
3. To address this fragmentation of audiences as internet and other delivery platforms diverge, and failing government intervention to ensure a proportion of bandwidth and access is made available for cultural use, artists and others participating in media arts cultures online must develop online audience development and maintenance skills, or plan to work with like-minded public organisations and private companies to achieve these objectives—standing alone will no longer work, except for the biggest players.
4. To address the fragmentation of Australia’s online culture into myriad directories and independent sites (mimicking the competitive environment fostered by competitive funding policies of government support bodies), cluster or so-called cultural portal sites and strategies need to be established that bring together organisations in larger online domains that can attract sufficient audiences to gain sponsorship and support.
Visitors, customers, users or audiences come to a website primarily because of quality, innovative, unique and engaging ‘content’—not to save or make money, but to have a unique and ‘special’ experience, something artists and curators understand well, utilising theatrical and ‘entertaining’ or absorbing elements that are similar to those used in mass-market or more ‘popular’ forms. However, and most importantly, this ‘experience’ is provided in unique ways that are unlike those used by purely commercial websites.
As Stephen Ellis said recently in The Australian (15/5/99), “…brand and reputation [read identity, uniqueness and quality] may be more important on the Internet than in the [physical] world, since buyers and sellers [read the arts and their audiences] are so emphatically separated.”
Uniqueness is the media arts’ greatest resource, and used wisely and well, will ensure a future for media arts online by achieving a respect and position with audiences, government and sponsors that guarantees them a vital place in the new distribution networks, and the skills and resources to maintain this position.
* * * *
In terms of new areas for distribution, two of the more comprehensive reports are Stephen Hall’s 1997 “Performing Arts Multimedia Library: Marketing Study” for the New Media Section of DCITA (then DoCA), part of a collaborative project with Cinemedia (see www.cinemedia.net/PAML/); and the 1997 AFC report Other Spaces by Rachel Dixon (www.afc.gov.au/; to order look under “resources” and then use the search engine to find ‘Other Spaces.”
Jeffrey Cook is a director of 3V, an electronic production and publishing company. He is also a researcher and writer on media futures, an independent mediamaker and is currently undertaking postgraduate studies for a Research Masters in Art Theory at College of Fine Arts, UNSW, in digital media arts.
verve Fr, from L, verva, the head of a ram sculptured then something whimsical or capricious; poetical or artistic rapture or enthusiasm; great spirit; energy; rapture.
As I read and write I am thinking about the convergence of visual, aural and verbal literacy. Gregory Ulmer’s word/concept (puncept) for this is ‘electracy.’ He writes, “electracy is to the digital as literacy is to print technologies.” (Gregory L Ulmer, Choragraphy (a map) ensemble.va.com.au/enslogic/text/ulm_lct.htm) An electrate language would be one that works in–between oral and literate cultures. He proposes that literate thinking organised itself around shapes and forms that evolved into conceptual classification systems. Alongside literacy, electrate thinking is coming into existence via felt moods or atmospheres. Felt moods or atmospheres are the space of non-closure, generative spaces that allow a reader to write with a text, that allow an other writing.
Helene Cixous’ textual practice of écriture féminine comes into play here too. This way of writing has no exchange or market value, it falls outside of the economy of use. It suggests a writing that comes from the relationship of the body to the social world, its practice is an undoing of the limits of logic. This is a feminine that moves around, between and amongst genders and genres.
In her generous introduction in the preview brochure for the Telstra Adelaide Festival 2000 Robyn Archer notes, “In 2000 there will also be a lot of flaming rhetoric surrounding ‘new’ this and ‘new’ that.…we also need to question the new. What exactly is new? Is there any such thing as a new idea? Would we recognise it if we saw it?” This is a salient questioning that Robyn has backed up with her commitment to a consideration of writing that does not usually fall into the domain of the book. VERVE :The Other Writing, a celebration of online writing as part of the Adelaide Festival, will be an opportunity to consider the places where writing and the visual arts intersect. This writing finds its place in net art, CD-ROMs, video, film, comics, performance and music.
Derrida has asserted that writing comes before speech. Artists, musicians, performers, filmmakers, thinkers have known this for some time. What constitutes writing? In 1967 he wrote, “…we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’ (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1974).
The space and place of electronic writing is highly speculative. Many things are being played out: changes to the ways we read and write—meaning how one makes thinking. The conceptual apparatus that draws discernible lines between content, meaning and style as yet lacks the light touch necessary for a critical engagement of hyperscreen works/writing. We are participants in the process of inventing a new critical faculty for reading and writing the art of new technologies. Perhaps a digital age offers possibilities for reclaiming and inventing forms of communication that have been eroded or are not possible via systems of alphabetic logic.
A few different shapes:
Electronic writing as poetics
Poetics leaves from the middle, it writes fragments and seeks to rupture the stability of syntax, sentence and narrative. Writing in this way is like constructing an object; it is like making something sing. Current marketing strategies in book publishing do not welcome shorter formats or writing perceived as ‘difficult’ (ie neither narrative nor poem). The web has provided an opportunity to circulate poetic practices and opened up new networks of exchange. The work may exist on a single screen, the movement and associative/poetic logic happening within the writing itself. One can leave, return, print out the work and hold it close. Linda Marie Walker is preparing a piece called The Sadness Prayer. She talks about “writing as composing, in the way of making a score for musical instruments or an opera. That is with many parts, threads. It is a spatial architecture, working from the ‘inside’ out, constructing a mobility at home, an inner home.”
Electronic poetry
Adelaide writer geniwate, co-winner of the recent trAce/alt-x hypertext competition, is currently working on lost/found, a series of poems that will draw on her recent travels. Stick Figures is a component of lost/found based on childhood nightmares. In a recent email geni wrote, “As an aspect of lost/found, this would be the panic session! It would overtly draw on some part of my experiences of Asia but I’m not clear about that yet. Obviously it’s not really about Asia at all, but being a late 20th century western beast in a complex world.” In an interesting twist on ‘anthology’, components of lost/found will be published simultaneously at different sites. geniwate is good at this writing. She manages to resist the overly literal visual trickery that is fairly prevalent in other e poetry (as in jump jumps). Economic use of Shockwave files ensures a fast download ensuring the interface works well with the intent of the poems.
Cinematic engagement
Michael Atavar’s **** (four stars) has written many a long horizontal scroll. In this UK site links lead away mapping a topography of the body via its movements and practices. A possible identity is created via an inventory of objects and possessions: a ‘narrative’ emerges from a process of repetition and list making. This narrative is not closed, it has no beginning and no end. This indirect writing has the effect of creating an incredible intimacy. The text is minimal, via gaps narrative seeds are sown. (www.atavar.com/)
cipher is a work in progress by ‘collaborators’ Josephine Wilson and Linda Carroli. Email conversations are the anchor for this engagement with a rhetoric that queries the value and the a/effects (now and/or eventual) of desire in the realm of electronic communication(s). There’s a bit of detective work going on. Reading here is a process of constant folding, unfurling of the text. The writing manages to be both playful and deadly serious. Read the story of M (cipher/letterM.html) for a musing on the violent beginnings of alphabetic rule in the classroom.
Mayan hieroglyphics from a codex dated at 998AD are the source for The Plagiarist Codex by Miekal And. Utilising a playful logic, curious cartoon-like hieroglyphs are coupled with an English ‘translation’ eg “real meaning involves another’s thoughts.”
The Artist as Programmer
Australian Melinda Rackham is constructing a site around a theme of some currency. carrier is about viral symbiosis, a play between the organic and machinic. In an email Melinda wrote, “I’ve tried to create an intimacy in the language with an infectious agent applet at the bottom of the screen. This is the intelligence of the site and calls its self “sHe” and addresses you by the name you choose, questioning the user almost seductively as to their preferences, which then guide them through a specific and unique site pathway, dependent upon these answers.” The graphics and sound are mesmerising and I look forward to spending more time with this one on a machine faster than mine.
Linda Marie Walker, The Sadness Prayer and geniwate, stick figures, will be published at the electronic writing ensemble site early September, ensemble.va.com.au where Josephine Wilson and Linda Carroli, cipher, can now be viewed in-process. See page 11. Miekal And, The Plagiarist’s Codex on Gravitational Intrigue, an anthology of emergent hypermedia, CD-ROM, The Little Magazine, Albany, NY. www.albany.edu/~litmag [expired]. Melinda Rackam’s Carrier is now in preview release. www.subtle.net/carrier See page 9.
The urge to write this article as some kind of hypertext is almost overpowering. Just imagine: I could lay it out in a variety of fonts. I could zig-zag the text across the page. I could get a photo of Ross Gibson, creative director of the major exhibition space in the new Cinemedia complex in Federation Square, and I could colour his face with the reflected light from a monitor, smother it with a thousand lines of Zeros and Ones. We could all look ever so new and exciting.
But that’s not the point. At least Gibson doesn’t think so, and it’s a philosophy he wants to apply to his curatorship of the digital culture focused Platform 1.0 Gallery in Federation Square. While the foundations of the complex are currently being pile driven, eventually the entire basement will be a massive underground space dedicated to new media and operating under the overall definition of the “history of moving image culture.”
It is an approach which hopes to avoid two popular new media gallery cliches. 1) The Staple Gun Technique: in which a ‘new’ collection is attached with duct tape to the fringe of an existing exhibition or gallery space, just to prove that the curator is aware that new media does exist. 2) The New for the sake of New Technique: in which an application is made for funding or space to put together an exhibition of ‘new’ work, and once the project is given the green light the curator feels it necessary (considering his/her ‘new media’ brief) to exhibit only that work which screams out how new and fresh it is.
And while the official opening of the project is not until May 2001, Gibson has already begun negotiations with international artists and is assembling a wish list of local talent. The aim is to create an ongoing environment for art. The building itself is a synthesizer, offering access to shared resources worldwide through the web, and a chance on the floors above Platform 1.0 for seminars, workshops and public search and research facilities. It aims to be the performance of exhibited culture in time, something traditional galleries have never done well. This gallery is aiming to refigure itself in real time and although Gibson shies away from the concept of creating interactivity for its own sake, he wants to “create a situation in which production, interpretation and examination occur simultaneously.”
More interestingly, Gibson wants to give digital culture an historical context, acknowledging that even the newest work does not exist in a vacuum. One of his primary concerns is to create an historical canon for the gallery, a concept which is alien to the more traditional arts for several reasons. Firstly because new media is often not accorded any sense of history—seen instead as a kind of artistic pimple which bursts onto the scene from nowhere, says a whole lot of irrelevant things very loudly before disappearing back into irrelevance—and secondly, because it is an impossible task for virtually any other medium. A gallery of physical culture may be able to acknowledge the history of its medium, but it cannot put it on display. Says Gibson: “The museuming of digital culture is challenging the curators of physical culture who have often seen their task as limiting the public’s access to great works of art, because every time you allow people access to them, the more dangerous it becomes. Not only physically, but intellectually. Repetition devalues the work.”
This is in striking opposition to digital culture, which is often born of repetition, which accepts mass production as one of its strongest points. One of the greatest things about new media Gibson says is its “non-exclusive behaviour.” It is completely feasible to gather a collection of the best digital culture has to offer because the concept of a facsimile or copy does not apply. This is especially important with an art form which already occupies a tenuous position in the eyes of the general public. It is important, Gibson stresses, to “make sure the stuff you show is cogent…people’s opinions are low enough as it is.”
This sense of inclusiveness extends beyond the work itself, to the relationship of the gallery with other groups. Although Cinemedia’s emphasis will be its own presentations, Gibson wants to emphasise its continuing commitment to maintaining and strengthening its associations with other organizations. “If new media teaches anything, it is that communal culture is productive. New media, like pop culture, shares its power with group reference. The more the better.”
In terms of content, Platform 1.0 has no specific brief. The aim is “not to fit work to a label, but to label the work after the fact.” Nevertheless, several themes are already becoming apparent: the representation of the urban environment, of ecological systems, of surveillance and detection exist already in the work produced and will be represented in the final line-up of creators and works. However, although what exactly this work will be and how it will be presented is still a grey area this far out from the launch date, even now two issues seem particularly important: the transience of much digital culture (its location on the edge of a specific time-frame reference point to maintain its relevance) and the removal of much of the work from its native habitat (taking it from the computer screen in somebody’s bedroom and essentially hanging it on a wall). How will the gallery manage to push itself as a permanent collection of the best digital culture has to offer if the whole concept is by definition fluid? And how will the space manage to maintain the integrity of work designed for intimate, close-quarters experience in a room the size of an aircraft hangar?
In an effort to circumvent the first issue, Platform 1.0 aims for a high turn-over of work, a space in a continual state of metamorphosis. Also, the existence of lightning fast electronic delivery systems and the storage capacity of the modern computer means that work can be changed, moved and stored at high speeds. A digital gallery can display and keep work in a far more efficient manner than a traditional gallery. It has the ability to stay much closer to the pulse. Apparent transience is not necessarily a weakness either: it is also its greatest strength, and the notion of disposable or mass produced work does not lessen its value as work which can be re-analysed and re-experienced.
The second issue is more difficult. Digital media, especially on-line works, are designed as highly personal objects to be displayed/experienced on a 15 -17 inch monitor in someone’s bedroom or office. It would be impossible to recreate this environment in a public space, if only because you can’t walk around it naked at 3am with a cup of Milo and believe it or not, this does affect the work. Where other art forms have organised, institutionalised delivery systems, where painters work to be hung and writers to be bound, digital artists can find themselves refigured by delivery systems, by the setup of end-users’ computer systems, by the vastly different types of environment in which their work is eventually viewed.
This is of course not true of all digital media art—an incredibly diverse form —but is an example of just one of the challenges of presenting it. And it is a challenge which Platform 1.0 aims to counteract using the environment itself. In the design phase the space is an underground complex, a dark space, which will be built and re-built to accommodate the needs of each work on a case by case basis. I like to imagine it as resembling the simulated natural habitats at modern zoos as compared to the cement cubicles of yesteryear.
In fact this re-presentation of work in a slightly different context can be seen not only as the gallery’s greatest challenge, but also its greatest asset. It could be argued that what makes Platform 1.0 so exciting is that it will be a dedicated display of digital art not shoe-horned into a space beside other art forms. Galleries, like museums, are laced with value judgements. From their architecture down they are designed to demonstrate the worth of the objects they display. The fact that Platform 1.0 is also a large, government funded project which aims to present as ‘worthwhile’ something the general public might have its doubts about, and to allow a level of interactivity not available in other galleries, provides the space with a rare opportunity.
Where traditional galleries provide end points, a point at which people can look back at ‘great’ art and acknowledge its historical importance, Platform 1.0 could be an opportunity to acknowledge the here and now of digital art, to see it as close to its time of production as possible. A chance to put your feet in the blocks, see art in process, and maybe even start running yourself.
“if [the cartoon film] belongs fully to the cinema, this is because the drawing no longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the description of a figure which is always in the process of being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant-whatevers of their course…it does not give us a figure described in a unique moment, but the continuity of the movement which describes the figure.”
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: the movement-image, Minnesota UP, 1983
“Animation is not the art of drawings that move but of movements that are drawn.”
Norman McLaren.
Let us work with these two definitions to think about the convergence of cinema and animation that is taking place in contemporary action cinema and television, a convergence which is redefining the relations of production and post-production, and therefore the pro-filmic event itself. The first definition comes from the philosopher, film theorist, Gilles Deleuze and the second from the animator and animation theorist, Norman McLaren. Taken together the definitions indicate a point of convergence, conceptual, but nevertheless real, between cinema and animation. Gilles Deleuze’s definition of the “cartoon film” is presented in the context of a definition of the specific qualities of the cinematic image. The first thing we notice is how close it is to McLaren’s definition of animation—the first proposition of a theory of animation. It presents, I think, an essential inversion of the concept of animation as making animate things that are inanimate. The first thing we notice is how close it is to Deleuze’s definition of the cinema.
For Deleuze, cinema is defined as an art of movement, its distinguishing feature as an art; its distinct modernity is that it introduces movement into the image, “it makes movement the immediate given of the image. This kind of movement no longer relies on a moving body or an object which realises it, nor on a spirit which reconstitutes it. It is the image which itself moves in itself.” (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: the time-image, Minnesota UP, 1985) Deleuze’s definition of the cinema is “animatic” because its material is movement and movement can only be described not represented.
For McLaren animation is also defined as an art of movement, of drawing movement. This definition is an inversion of the notion of making the inanimate animate because it refers animation to the animate. It is precisely the animate that is drawn, but not in the sense of an outline or in terms of figuration, but, to use Deleuze’s term, figurally. Drawing works with movement, with transitions, with those moments when indistinction is the rule. McLaren’s definition of animation is cinematic because it throws attention onto the relation between images, into the gaps in the frames—the explicit topic of his second proposition. Deleuze and McLaren’s definitions of animation as cinema, and cinema as animation, converge on the concept of drawing movement.
It is in this sense that animation and cinema can be said to be forms of drawing and that drawing is a means of expressing the contours of things and not representing the state of things in fixed images that happen to move. The representation of objects is less important than unleashing the forces that constitute them, and which do not appear on their surfaces. This task of “rendering visible invisible forces”, an aesthetic borrowed by Deleuze from Paul Klee, is the sense in which drawing functions in both definitions of animation. And it can provide the basis of an examination of the convergence of cinema and animation which is presently taking place with the increased utility of new media technologies. Martin Scorsese often refers to the camera as a brush and the shot as a stroke. Film theory has investigated the notion of the camera as stylus. McLaren seemed to eschew the camera by drawing directly onto the celluloid, but it seems in doing so he was not so much replacing the camera as reinventing its function as descriptor not recorder.
From Clouzot’s Picasso to The Matrix
A remarkable example of what I mean by the convergence of cinema and animation can be found in Henri-George Clouzot’s film, The Mystery of Picasso aka The Picasso Mystery. This is an untimely example from film history. It was made in 1956, but it points to the convergence under discussion albeit from another direction. Clouzot sets up a unique convergence of animation and cinema by situating Picasso on the other side of a sheet of glass that is inserted between himself and the camera and which serves as a frame for the camera. Picasso then goes to work drawing in black on the surface of the glass. What is henceforth presented is not so much the process of the production of an image of a bull or whatever, but a temporal series of movements of hand and line. And it is the movement at the heart of Picasso’s drawings that emerges as the strictly artistic component of the film. Drawing is here as an art of movement. It is cinematic and animatic.
We can in fact go a step further and argue that one of the effects of new media technology is precisely the production of this drawing-effect. Clouzot’s film could be used as a model of computer animation. The upshot of this would be that the big budget action-suspense or action-adventure film (which seems to be where the more grandiose animatic effects are happening) would become more and more animated, more and more like the ‘cartoon film’ described by Deleuze and more and more the fulfilment of McLaren’s notion of “movements that are drawn.” One only needs to watch The Matrix to appreciate that bodies and objects can be presented as drawn movements. I am thinking here of the cascading code but also of the Reeves character’s ability to slip in-between and in and out of the motion of things, of the trajectory of objects, and to perceptually liquefy the space around him.
The expansion of post-production beyond the status of supplemental facility (if it ever was this) which has accompanied the rise of outfits such as Animal Logic attests to the possibility of a radical transformation of the ‘content’ of the cinematic image—a transformation which extends beyond the invention of DVD and tele-visual screens to the very definition of the image, and the pro-filmic event. This scenario would not herald the actorless cinema but rather a cinema where the actorliness of the actor is constituted at a very different level.
This is not to say that realism is dead, or even dying. Animated effects play a strong role in sustaining or deepening the sense of reality that the cinema and television are offering viewers. Ally MacBeal for instance, presents an order of mental-caricature through the animation of thought-clichés. Antz offers an infantilised notion of the colony of individuals which is Spielberg’s trademark narrative of American social formation. Animation is being used to resuscitate not only the careers of screen actors by transforming them into voice-sketch combinations but also to strengthen the claim of verisimilitude in a wide array of projects.
The convergence of cinema and animation which is envisaged through the definition of drawing movement does not take place at this level but it is clear that animation is reinvigorating cinematic realism. The Matrix remains realist to the extent that the cascading code seeks to articulate what is assumed to be already there, the matrix and the web of plug-ins, be they objects, bodies, or the actions of bodies on objects and vice versa. If I use my credit card to buy a bottle of wine from a bottlo I set in motion and interact with all manner of cascading codes, the codes of purchase, the codes of credit and debit, of stock control, the linguistic codes of the transaction between salesperson (whose name appears on the register) and purchaser (whose name appears on the bill), the codes on the label of the bottle, especially the one that reads 1.5 litre, the codes which differentiate wine from other forms of alcohol, etc. The Matrix’s use of code seems to place such things in the image, but it does not remove the image from its realist framework.
Surveying Australian animators: drawing with the computer
Let me shift focus and come at this question from a more practical perspective. In a recent survey of Australian animation companies that I conducted on behalf of the AFTRS (Australian Film, Television and Radio School) it became clear that producing reality-effects is bread and butter for a number of computer animation companies and animators. For instance the recent Australian mini-series Day of the Roses had sequences animated for visual embellishment. Sparks and flames were inserted into a crash sequence. One can surmise myriad situations where such embellishments can be used.
In the course of the study the question of drawing by computer came up again and again. Drawing with a computer is a decidedly different task from that which McLaren set himself but it is clearly an issue that confronts today’s animators.
The survey was conducted on behalf of AFTRS Research and asked animators, or representatives of the animation operations of a particular company, to answer a series of questions about their operations. One set of questions pertained to the practicalities of computer animation. What skills are animators looking for in new animators? What skills are they finding hard to get? A good number of animators stipulated that young computer animators do not know ‘basic animation’ or ‘traditional animation.’ And by basic animation they mean, drawing. They referred to modelling, and to design principles, but mostly drawing. To use the words of one respondent, “we don’t need operators, we need animators.” It is not that young animators themselves are somehow bereft of the capacity to draw, but that the amount of preparation that is required before one can even begin to animate anything by computer is forbidding. Animation (read drawing) is now also a question of the operation of new technologies with their own cascades of codes, or to put it another way, the operations which make up the process of animation have been transformed quite dramatically from when McLaren set down his propositions. Images of McLaren at work with his magnifying glass and light table reveal a quite different apparatus from images of animation students working with mouse in hand at their Macintoshes. From a distance, the students look like office workers whereas McLaren looks like a jeweller. It seems that drawing with a computer requires a different set of optics and a different order of gesture, of habit, than drawing with scratches.
It would seem also that contrary to the rhetoric of computers being machines of great speed, objects of the future, new in the strict sense of the term, that they are slow machines, that they do not make the process of generating images any easier but aid in the combination of images. This is probably saying little more than they are the technology of slow beings. McLaren after all had to draw movements frame by frame, a very laborious and slow process, or operation, indeed.
It seems that one of the few ways to see new international film and video work these days is to step offshore from time to time. The artificial and unnecessary separation between film culture and ‘new media’ culture which has occurred in Australia in recent years (due largely to funding policy) has meant that festival events are determined along media lines, which means that little experimental film has been reaching our shores for quite some time. As somebody who admits to being promiscuous (ie working across film, video and digital media) and who enjoys playing with the differences as well as the points of intersection between these media formats, I’m relieved to find some international festivals which strongly support cross-media programming styles.
A few major European festivals with film origins seem to have transcended these boundaries and are providing audiences with strong and varied film and video programming. In particular, I’m referring to Impakt in Utrecht, Netherlands, which also includes an impressive music component, and the European Media Arts festival in Osnabrück, Germany.
The 1999 Impakt featured many works which were creatively exploring the points of intersection between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, rather than rejecting one for the other. Kodwo Eshun (who also recently spoke at the Cinesonic conference in Melbourne—see RealTime 33, October-November) referred to McLuhan’s “realization that obsolete tech becomes the artform for the present.” This may be true, but many artists working with digital sampling technology are retaining a strong interest in the live performance, the screening event, and the live audience.
Likewise, I doubt that the cinema as a screening site for film and video will ever really become obsolete, since humans enjoy the act of seeing and hearing and communicating in public zones. What is the place of web-based art in this equation? A recent ‘opening’ in Sydney of work attracted a mere handful of visitors. However, at both EMAF (European Media Arts Festival) and Impakt, installation, web-art and CD-ROM managed to happily co-exist with the screening programs, with EMAF also hosting a VRML art exhibition.
Some of the themes regarding technology and degradation evident in the excellent music programming at Impakt (see our website for Merewether’s account of this. Eds) were also reflected in the films presented at both EMAF and Impakt. In Matthias Müller’s Vacancy (Germany), a meditation on Brasilia, the “city of hope”, or “ultimate utopia of the 20th century” (Eco), the filmmaker matches images from 60s feature films with identically framed shots in the present, highlighting the processes of transformation from utopia to dystopia, of the failed modernist social experiment. At Impakt, Gerhard Holthuis’s Hong Kong—HKG used stunning black and white cinematography to explore the bizarre incongruities of scale and context which occur as jumbo jets land at Hong Kong’s (now closed) Kai Tak airport. The planes are both overwhelming and ‘as light as angels’, a threatening presence as they cruise in through the rows of high rise apartment blocks.
David Gatten’s What the Water Said nos 1-3 (USA) was created by placing raw film stock into crab baskets and allowing the sea’s wave action to act upon the surface of the celluloid to create both image and soundtrack. Likewise, Jürgen Reble’s Zillertal (Germany) was created by exposing an old 16mm trailer to the weather and to chemicals, exploring the processes of disintegration and reformation of the image. Jeff Scher’s Yours (USA) also utilised a piece of found footage, a 1950s music clip, to create a stunningly vibrant film overlaid with pop iconography, wallpaper textures and painted surfaces from the period. These are all examples of process-driven filmmaking, deeply tied to the materiality of celluloid, and so much richer than the trend towards digital scratch and dust effects ‘applied’ to video footage to give it the ‘appearance’ of film.
A work which seemed to put pressure on the medium to the point of breaking, was Sam Easterson’s A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing (USA). Intriguing in its presentation of a sheep’s-view of life from within a flock, this work is one of many produced by his Animal Vegetable Video organisation, which aims to capture video footage taken from the perspective of every living plant and animal on earth (ambitious!). Other than the unusual point of view, the most interesting aesthetic quality of this work emerges from the fact that the video and audio apparatus cannot cope with the jerky running motion of the sheep ‘host’, thus when the sheep runs with the flock, violent blackouts and interruptions to the soundtrack occur. The randomness of these digital blackouts and intersected ‘baa’ sounds, caused by violent camera shake, led to an amusing level of absurdity.
Bob Arnold’s Morphology of Desire (USA), also shown at Impakt, and winner of the Best Experimental short at the Uppsala festival in Sweden last year, combined digital and film processes in its morphed imagery derived from romance novel cover art. The complex relationship between the reader (viewer), and the poster-painted romantic heroine, is wittily explored. Arnold’s use of sparse sound effects, breaking the rhythm of the pulsating heartbeat which drives the morphed transitions between images, is, as ever, curiously engaging. The finished work, with its digitally morphed transitions, was filmed as an animation, frame by frame with a Bolex camera, for the final translation back to 16mm.
A special program in Impakt, The Experience, was dedicated specifically to stimulating the body into perceiving unusual physical experiences and mental sensations, for example in Mark Bain’s Transient Vehicle, a shipping container fitted out with various oscillators, into which the audience was locked and vibrated. On another occasion, Klaar van der Lippe led groups of participants on a blindfolded tour though the city of Utrecht. Cyrus Frisch, a Dutch video artist whose work pushes the boundaries between himself as ‘director’ and his subjects, mostly disabled drug addicts, allowed himself to be hypnotised in public to exorcise some of his demons. Joe Gibbons (USA), in his 1979 8mm film Spying, forced the viewer to reconsider his/her collusion with the filmmaker, whilst participating with him in secretly spying on ordinary people in the act of, amongst other things, lovemaking or sunbathing. These varied events successfully extended the range of activities a contemporary festival can offer audiences.
Oddly enough, the most common enquiry I had from curators from the USA and Europe was “Where have all the Australian film and video artists gone?” Obviously, our funding climate, which heavily favours interactive formats, is adversely affecting the balance of local production, and has meant that filmmakers such as Paul Winkler are almost the sole representatives from Australia in these festivals. At the Ann Arbor Experimental Festival in the USA recently, Sydney films took out three of the awards, and all were self-funded by the filmmakers (Winkler’s Rotation, Greg Godhard’s Mind’s Eye and my own Cheap Blonde).
At events such as Impakt, it seems that the integration of film, video, digital media and sound/music events in the one festival encourages debate, and acknowledges the processes of cross fertilisation between formats, a dialogue, which, in Australia, does not seem to be occurring very frequently. The separation of ‘film festivals’ from ‘new media’ events is unfortunate, as digital art screenings are looking more like showcases of visual effects rather than explorations of ideas, and local filmmaking suffers from a paucity of visual ideas. In the meantime, I’ll happily continue to be suspended in the crossover zone, enjoying the best of both worlds.
You can count on an evening of discombobulation when Chunky Move come to town with their suitcases full of Bodyparts, their new dance season at the Drama Theatre in August-September.
Gideon Obarzanek gets his teeth stuck into Little Red in All the Better to Eat You With exploring “the complexities of power and abuse beneath the familiar fairytale” Yeh, yeh but we know it’s the “psychotic beauty and seriously sensual” stuff we wanna see, “the surrealist tea party cum serial killer pantomime.” Yes! “A delectable fairytale fit for the new millennium” says The Melbourne Times, to which we say, yum-yum.
There’s more discomfort in Lucy Guerin’s Zero described by the choreographer as “an uneasy work that continually censors itself, reinventing its structural identity and the individuals within it.” Using techniques of film camera operation and playback translated into a real time situation, her choreography with Darrin Verhagen’s electronic soundtrack creates close-ups, jump cuts and extreme shifts in focus.
See it on a dark night.
–
Bodyparts, The Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, August 31 – September 4.
Muto is a hyperreal planet, a hybrid of the digital and the organic. Gameplay is highly experimental, using a three dimensional navigation system, textless interface and interactive themes of creation, mutation and destruction. The user is invited to explore Muto’s simulated environments. Red represents corporeal, an environment of breathing, breeding tissue. Green represents earth, a habitat of fertile soil, and flourishing plant life. Blue represents water and the atmosphere. Black represents a world of creation on the smallest of organic molecular levels. White represents an opposing pole of digital reproduction.
Muto, a CD-ROM, began as a post-graduate project (RMIT). The major challenges have been to push the capabilities of the commercially available software (Macromedia Director) to match my vision, and to keep up with new versions of the product as the deadline blows out. Holding down full-time employment and/or freelancing within the multimedia industry during the production process has also been difficult for final completion of the project. Although the work is not yet completed, I have managed to have it exhibited in several national and international multimedia exhibitions (also a lot of work in itself), which helps drive me toward completion.
Kathryn Mew is a Melbourne-based designer. Her main areas of research include interface design, experimental virtual environments and digital culture. Her work ranges from websites to live theatre video support, to CD-ROMs and has appeared in Kabaret Internet in both Munich and Cologne, the Downloading Downunder exhibition in Amsterdam, the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, dLux Media Arts’ D.art 99 and the ARS Electronica Life Science exhibition Linz, Austria.
Completion December 1999. Australian Film Commission.
Volcano: Shifting Ground
Maria Miranda
Maria Miranda, Volcano: Shifting Ground
This installation will use the volcano and its shifting ground to explore cultural questions of uprootedness. It will play with notions of surface and depth. Volcano is also a metaphor for the way new media art shifts the ground materially and conceptually. Computers normally map geological activity and volcanism; in Volcano a fissure will be opened up by/in the technology.
One of the artistic challenges will be to find a form of interactivity that poetically expresses a shifting ground, its disruptions and eruptions, rather than following narrative paths. One of the main technical challenges is to explore the different grounds and/or materials of an image through scanning and downloading and to explore the interaction of images and sound.
Maria Miranda is a visual artist working in new media art. She was the visual artist on the award winning CD-ROM Shock in the Ear. She is currently collaborating as visual artist on the new media art installation Dead Centre: the body with organs, and on Dina Panozzo’s performance with interactive media, Monster Mouth.
Completion July 2000. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council
Wunderkammer
Anna Munster
Anna Munster, Wunderkammer
Wunderkammer is an experimental interactive for CD-ROM. Using the visual metaphor of a baroque Cabinet of Wonders, it encourages the user to explore labyrinthine digital spaces and to collect bizarre specimens. These can be used to furnish the user’s own virtual cabinet. While the user wanders and constructs, the specimens take on a life of their own displaying surprising and destabilising behaviours.
Wunderkammer uses both game and behavioural elements programmed in Director and using Quicktime VR interfaces supported by relational databases to inquire into curiosity and wonder. Technical challenges involve the smooth integration of graphics, sound and movie databases into CD-ROM format.
Anna Munster is a digital artist and writer living in Sydney. She has exhibited at Artspace, Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, Kawasaki City Museum in Tokyo, and most recently at the 1998 Melbourne Festival.
Completion April 2000. Australian Film Commission.
Archiving Imagination
Robin Petterd
Archiving Imagination is an online exploration of the process of collaboration between web authors Robin Petterd (media artist) and Diane Caney (writer). The project incorporates visual and verbal language, utilising and interrogating terms such as intertextuality, interdisciplinarity, net-poetry and the internet.
Documenting the process of collaboration is not a simple task. We have used sound, text and images to record meetings and versions in an attempt to show our thinking processes, but the enmeshing of ideas goes beyond these encounters.
Robin is doing her PhD at the Digital Art Research Facility at the Tasmania School of Art on a project that explores the relationships between what is organisation and dis-organisation. After completing her doctorate in 1997, Diane became intrigued by the medium of html. She began working with Robin in 1997.
www.archiving.com.au Completion August 1999. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council.
Uncle Bill
Debra Petrovitch
Debra Petrovitch, Uncle Bill
Uncle Bill is an interactive CD-ROM, a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Wollongong during the 1960s, based on a performance text by Sydney sound artist Debra Petrovitch. It is predominantly a sound and visual artwork set against a harsh industrial backdrop and violent domestic situation. Uncle Bill is aimed to be exhibited within an installation context. A wider audience for Uncle Bill are domestic violence groups and support networks for survivors of child abuse.
Uncle Bill includes text screens, original sound pieces, video, animations and archival footage. Director, Debra Petrovitch; interactive designer, Wade Marynowsky; producer, Julianne Pierce.
Debra Petrovitch is a visual, sound and performance artist who has exhibited widely as well as producing independent soundworks and commissioned film and video soundtracks. Wade Marynowsky is a digital artist currently completing a Master of Fine Arts at College of Fine Art, Sydney. Julianne Pierce is an interactive media artist and producer and part time Project Co-ordinator at The Performance Space, Sydney.
Completion December 1999. Australian Film Commission.
intelligence agency
Julianne Pierce
An online portal, video and performance project currently in development, intelligence agency is an interactive media project, a host site for information corruption and counter-intelligence. The participants are female identities who (under)mine data, capital and IT economy. Currently acting as a research and transmission hub, intelligence agency is a contact point for identities wishing to continue their highly visible activities by remaining totally anonymous.
Julianne Pierce is an interactive media producer, artist and curator, a founding member of the collaborative computer art group VNS Matrix, and has presented work at international exhibitions and conferences including ISEA and Ars Electronica. In 1997, she was a co-ordinator of the 1st Cyberfeminist International (Hybrid Workspace) at Documenta X in Germany. She is currently producing an interactive media project Uncle Bill with sound artist Debra Petrovitch; developing the Digital Artstore distribution project with Jeffrey Cook (3V Media). She is also part-time Project Co-ordinator at The Performance Space, Sydney and is a Board member of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and Artspace.
www.intelligenceagency.org [expired] New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council
Escape from Station E
Irene Proebsting
Irene Proebsting, Escape from Station E
An interactive CD-ROM based around the themes of industrial decay, work practices and gender issues, coupled with biological and technological experimentation. I have drawn on various ideas from textbooks, news items, cinema and historical documentation and presented them as an abstract series of events using a variety of stylistic elements from collage to sci-fi movies.
Using Macromedia Director as the main assembly program and incorporating scanned images, collage and 3D, I have created an environment which will enable the user to explore various spaces and activate animations linking different images and themes. Lingo scripting, image manipulation, 3D modelling, sound & video capture, editing & animation have been the challenges of this project.
Recent exhibitions: S8 film screenings: 1999, Ultraprojections 2, Melbourne; 1998, XLR8 Summer Salon, CCP, Melbourne, Traceable Emissions, Queen Vic Women’s Centre, Melbourne; 1997, SURPRISE International Short Film Festival, Taiwan; 1996, Dispersions, Erwin Rado Theatre, Fitzroy; Viva 8, London Filmmakers Co-op, Toynbee Hall, London.
Completion late 1999.
As I May Write
Sally Pryor
Sally Pryor, As I May Write
As I May Write is an experimental and interactive art-work about writing systems and the human-computer interface. Explores histories (earliest graphemes, “Picture Writing”), contemporary visual languages (Blissymbolics, logos), relevant theories (hypertext, semiotics), and possible applications of “intelligent” icons in an interactive media space.
My biggest challenge is that I make art in order to find out what I think/feel about something. So I can’t do detailed technical and artistic planning before starting. I have to program it, “look” at it, re-program it etc in a spiral process that works for me but makes team work difficult. The medium will probably be a combination of CD-ROM (for the bandwidth) and interactive online (for the connectivity and fluidity).
Sally Pryor is an artist/programmer and independent multimedia developer with an eclectic background including biochemistry and 3D computer animation. Her most recent work was the internationally award-winning CD-ROM Postcard From Tunis.
www.ozemail.com.au/~spryor/write.html [expired] Completion December 2000. New Media Arts Fund Fellowship, Australia Council
Præternatural aims to present a genealogical exploration of the cultural, medical, and scientific role of the monster in Western culture from the 17th century to the 20th century. Further, it questions contemporary contextualisations of the monstrous due to developments in the area of biomedical and genetic research.
Originally, Præternatural was designed to be a DVD-ROM work, a platform that would have allowed me to produce the piece without compromising on video and audio quality. Unfortunately, DVD-ROM is not so widely developed for the Mac platform, forcing me back to CD-ROM and all of its constraints.
Michele Barker works as an artist within the area of new media and her recent work on the monstrous will form part of a PhD. Exhibitions include Specimens at Artspace and State of the Heart at The Australian Centre for Photography. A former Digital Media Coordinator for the Museum of Sydney, she currently lectures in Photomedia at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW.
Completion October 1999. Australian Film Commission.
Cooking with Carmen
Tracey Benson
Tracey Benson, Cooking with Carmen
Cooking with Carmen is the latest in an ongoing project titled Big Banana Time Inc. which focuses on notions of identity and the role of tourism in promoting national and cultural archetypes. Cooking with Carmen intersects the relation of identity to self via the act of cooking, by analysing the act of consumption. This is an interactive web-based work aimed at broadening ideas around participation and collaboration by engaging responses from the audience.
There have been many challenges surrounding this project, on a conceptual and technical level. Primarily, I need to present a product which inspires participation. This is a general issue to all web developers, as is defining your audience, let alone getting them to your site.
Tracey Benson is a Brisbane based multimedia artist and curator. She has exhibited her work from the Big Banana Time Inc. project extensively to a national and international audience through exhibitions, performances and conference papers. Her new web-based work titled Bananarama2000 is currently being hosted at the new Experimenta Media Arts online gallery www.experimenta.org.
Completion September.
cipher
Linda Carroli, Josephine Wilson
cipher is a work of hypertext fiction which explores the thriller genre. The enigmatic M receives a series of mysterious emails from the equally enigmatic C over a period of ten days. With each message, M is further drawn into a web of political intrigue.
Challenges of producing online work include keeping it simple and relatively easy to negotiate; maintaining a focus on written text; ensuring that you hang on to your audience, create a readerly flow by constructing pages which download in a reasonable amount of time. Technical challenges include keeping up with what’s possible, trying to blend skills with creative development and decision-making.
Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson collaborated online to produce the award-winning *water always writes in *plural. Carroli’s writing background is critical and non-fiction, while Wilson writes primarily narrative fiction and performance.
Completion, September 1999. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council
Dream Kitchen
Leon Cmielewski
Leon Cmielewski, Josephine Starrts, Dream Kitchen
Dream Kitchen is an interactive installation. The interactive animation incorporates both 3D and stop motion techniques. It starts in an antiseptically clean “Mr Sheen” kitchen and then takes us to those areas where the moral cleansers can’t reach. Beneath the surface runs a parallel interior zone populated with inspirited objects. This subterranean zone could be interpreted in many ways: a catalogue of dread, a cabinet of memories, an archive of fantasies.
The challenge in this project has been to keep the freedom and directness of stop motion film animation while working within a computer interactive framework. Director/animator, Leon Cmielewski; producer: Josephine Starrs; programmer, Adam Hinshaw; sound designer, Panos Couros.
Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs are artists whose work includes the new media installations User Unfriendly Interface and Diagnostic Tools for the New Millennium. Both separately and together they have produced work in various media which has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Co-production with the Banff Centre, Canada. Australian Film Commission. Completion October 1999.
Los Dias Y Las Noches De Los Muertos
Francesca da Rimini with Los Fantasmos
Francesca da Rimini with Los Fantasmos, Los Dias Y Las Noches De Los Muertos
we were a cipher in the big accounts of capital…the gigantic market of maximum irrationality that trades in dignities Zapatista text Los Dias Y Las Noches De Los Muertos (The Days And Nights Of The Dead); a collaborative online project—Adelaide/New York/Rome/Chiapas. A ghost work of counter-memories, opening thresholds of impossibilities outside of pan-capitalism. A drifting carnival of souls which gathers together the spectres of late capitalism, soft conspiracies, forgotten phantoms and digital Zapatismo.
More cultural and aesthetic than technical, as the technology is relatively simple—HTML code, framesets, streaming audio, CUseeme. Cultural—developing and looking after relationships amongst participating ghosts scattered over 3 continents. Aesthetic—striving towards the creation of a new genre, neither a poem nor a film but something inbetween.
Most of my work happens online—negotiated email relationships, online communities, ghost girls and riverboys, narrative architectures. With Marco Dereriis, recently completed a commissioned work acid test for the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg, Germany. Received a Fellowship from the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council for soft accidents, an exploration of some relationships between quantum physics and Indigenous knowledge systems.
empiricosis is a net-based cycle of text, image and audio which takes as its theme some of the ways in which science and art collide, and how science is visualised in popular culture.
empiricosis is a complex amalgam of text and other media. I am starting to create multiple outcome hyperlinked poetry mainly using Flash. I experience challenges concerning download time and streaming, especially since I am keen to incorporate audio tracks into the poetry, to be played concurrently with other media. A further challenge is presented by my extremely limited programming skills.
I started writing conventional poetry in the early 90s. This soon metamorphosed into performance poetry, and then to electronic ‘poetry.’ This journey has always been about amalgamating different media.
Ambitions for the future include developing a concept of installation poetry. I recently won the trAce/Alt-x International Hypertext Competition for my project rice. www.idaspoetics.com.au/rice [ex[ire]. I work as an editor at the University of South Australia.
www.adelaide.net.au/~slick/sitefrite/emindex.html [expired] Completion September 1999. Commenced during the 1999 ANAT Summer School. Further development facilitated via an online workshop: thanks Christy Sheffield Sanford and trAce (UK).
Joovin8
Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchinson, Marie-Louise Xavier
Joovin8, Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchinson, Marie-Louise Xavier
The Joovin8 CD-ROM is an interactive narrative featuring a series of hyperreal scenes which echo the intense sensory perception experienced by the dying. The thread of one life is depicted in a series of emotionally rich moments which explore the ever present duality of decay and rejuvenation. The episodic structure imitates the selective and non linear nature of memory. This gift of perception is bestowed upon the dying.
After double clicking on the icon to launch Joovin8, the mouse need never be clicked again. Narrative development is achieved by moving the mouse only. In Joovin8 feedback is incremental, not boolean. This means that the closer the cursor is moved to an image’s focus the higher the degree of reaction and feedback.
www.imago.com.au/tetragenia [expired] Completion September 1999. ArtsWA and the Australian Film Commission.
meme_shift#0
Teri Hoskin
meme_shift#0
meme_shift#0 is an interactive website. It’s to do with an obsession with all things Japanese, as a site of the ultimate Western Other. The sources are historical, literary, philosophical, social and personal, and this environment, playing with the way we read a text, the way one can write. I’m still (always) working on and with this in the hope that a pattern will emerge. The work continues-in-process. I don’t have a deadline.
The challenge is to use the technology simply and elegantly, in such a way that tests the limits of language and meaning in a digital writing space: to push what I already know. To keep files as small as possible and to utilise all the writing spaces. Next step for meme_shift#0 is sound, simple. I want to make an atmosphere, a cinematic engagement.
Teri Hoskin is a visual artist/writer. She works with text, paper, Adobe Illustrator and a text editor (BBEdit) in contemporary gallery spaces and online. She is Editor for the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble, Adelaide.
http://ensemble.va.com.au/meme_shift An Adelaide Festival 2000 project in conjunction with ANAT, CACSA (Contemporary Arts Centre, South Australia), EWRE (Electronic Writing Ensemble).
Untitled
Matthew Johnston
The two CD-ROM projects are an interactive narrative and an interactive that depends on sound frequency and modulation. The first is a series of short scenes composed in a similar manner to a 3D crossword puzzle that allows the user to jump in-between tracks of video. The second uses frequency modulation to effect a 3D object in its environment.
The development of hierarchical structure needs to be a strong point of these projects to overcome a myopic time-line, but the most challenging aspect of both is the design of a 3D engine for the narrative’s platform and 3D modelling for the other. The programming is the most exciting aspect because of the foreign nature of V-B scripting.
Matthew Johnston originally trained in painting/drawing and sculpture at Newcastle Art School between 1994-5; over these two years he showed in a number of small collective exhibitions. He enrolled at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, completing a BFA majoring in time-based art (film and multimedia), and was part of the AFC/ABC Stuff-art initiative for 1999.
Completion November 1999.
Observatine
Zina Kaye
Zina Kaye, Observatine
Observatine is a flying machine that gives a viewer the experience and control of flying, via a bird’s eye view of the landscape. A pilot navigates by a projection on the floor. Since it is managed by a web-server, web-based viewers may be pilots and viewers.
This is an unmanned autonomous flying vehicle, and developing a completely untried system to manage it using the internet requires an enormous amount of team work from people with a great range of skills. Building a “roll your own” aircraft with respected members of the hobby community is humbling. One retired gentleman is the world’s most accomplished forager and has turned his unit into a tooled-up workshop for “greazys” and gliders. It’s like stepping into Chew’s cold room in Blade Runner.
Zina Kaye is a new media artist who uses sound composition, video and communications technologies to muse on the nature of metaphysical boundaries and the secret life of the inside. Integral to her practice is research into spatial interface and transport systems architecture. While broadcasting over terrestrial and internet radio, Kaye maintains a popular net.sound.art website with her partner mr. snow, http://laudanum.net/, housing a large collection of Australian and New Zealand sound content amongst online works and theory presentations.
observatine.net [ex[ired]will come online in August. Completion September 30, 1999. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council and the Commission for European Communities.
Neonverte
Anita Kocsis
Anita Kocsis, Neonverte
Neonverte is a web based installation built as a garden—sometimes a neon evergreen, a fluorescent terrarium or a thorny ‘K-Mart meets Las Vegas’ undergrowth sewn with an organic structure. Stuff grows and dies, gets used and discarded. I tend to weed, restore, defrag, reload, plant and graft. Neonverte is perishable. A compost of interconnections has begun through working online.
Neonverte is built predominantly utilising Macromedia Flash 4. A combination of animations, sound, and Javascripts are used. QTVR and VRML animations initially for the site have resulted in video format utilised in installation rather than sitting in the ‘plug-in’ dependent corner of the web garden.
Anita Kocsis has worked in installation and painting within a digital context. She investigates “immersion environments” with emphasis on the collisions between spatial constructs in painting and virtual environments. Her own work and collaborations as a nervous_object have furthered her interest in the prismic modality of an online practice.
Neonverte is part of the Login series of residencies at 200 Gertrude Street gallery in Melbourne. Login is supported by the Visual Arts/Craft Fund of the Australia Council and ANAT. It aims to assist visual artists in the development of web based projects.
The Neonverte residency commences August. www.anat.org.au/projects/login/anat_anita/neonverte [expired]
Mr. White’s Diary
Derek Kreckler
“Mr. White’s Diary: an incomplete view of the end interplays text and image in an engrossing unfolding of the last hours/words of Mr White: a bleakly entertaining suicide trip through diary, crumpled notes and screen messages that in another time, other media, might have been scored by a Peter Handke or Thomas Bernhard.” (Ed.)
Mr. White’s Diary is a work in progress in the traditional humanist sense. And…oh…yeh we are still working on it! We have to somehow get it to work on Internet Explorer I am sure the Netscape users will catch up but I.E. users will have to wait because these two browsers are now quite different. This work is impossible to view without Flash 3, QT3 and QT3VR plug-ins; the browser should only be Netscape 4.5+. The site uses mainly Flash and is indicative of where the web will go in the future. The site is experimental, of poor temperament, but delicious.
Derek Kreckler is Co-ordinator Electronic Arts and Information Technology Management; Chairman, Academy Research and Development Committee, WA Academy of Performing Arts. Edith Cowan University.
www.working.com/spaceinvaders/white [expired] Opened June 99, Artspace, Space Invaders. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council.
Fan Girl
Dooley Le Cappellaine
Dooley Le Cappellaine, Fan Girl
Fan Girl is a CD-ROM work. In January 1995 I began to take a photograph each day at a different time of the progress of a building going up across the street. I was waiting for something to happen. Finally it did. The building was complete, destroying half my view of the New York skyline and I began to consider moving. I noticed that due to the remarkably shallow architectural plan of the apartments across the street, the occupants were almost on permanent public display. The building took on the fascinating aspect of an antfarm and I soon had names for my favourite characters. (I don’t watch TV.) My favourite was the “fan girl.” I first noticed her on a bright early afternoon performing spectacular sex almost on the window ledge. This went on with amazing regularity always with a new partner. Eventually she found a boyfriend and gradually the performances tapered off; it must have just been a phase in her life; things change.
One of the things I had been thinking of while working on some interactive projects was how passive and ingratiating most art for walls is and also how “interactivity” is generally just click/reward/click/reward. I began to study programming in Director earnestly for a way to make the “fan girl” an artwork which would operate according to its subject matter, voyeurism. After about a year I was able to write the program: at specific times (day/month) uncontrollable by the viewer the work will change to show a different episode in the life I observed for a time.
Dooley Le Cappellaine is an artist who has exhibited internationally and curated Technophobia, the first independently produced interactive exhibition of original multimedia works on CD-ROM. She is currently curating a program of web art works at http://www.thing.net/dooley [expired]
SonteL
Mike Leggett
Mike Leggett, SonteL
SonteL (working title) is an interactive multimedia work, a prototype CD-ROM. Landscape is the mediated image, a representation central to beliefs and identity within Australian culture both Indigenous and non-indigenous. Through a dynamic and interactive process of presentation, intersections are made with interpretations and mediations about The Land. In collaboration with Brad Miller, Adam Hinshaw, Alex Davies, Bruno Koenig and Kathryn Wells.
The navigational precept involves the technically complex intersection of four Quicktime movies at any one time—sequenced images which take the user forward through the landscape, or back through the route just travelled. Or a 360 degree view visible from various key zones, panning either to left or right. This continuous pan is a morphed image of landscape which enables, as an option, access to various series of short narratives (topographies of knowledge), associated with the land, its many appearances, its many histories.
Mike Leggett has been working across the institutions of art, education, cinema and television with media since the early 70s. He has film and video work in archives and collections in Europe, Australia, North and South America and practises professionally as an artist, curator, writer, director, producer, editor, photographer, teacher, manager, administrator and computer consultant.
Prototype completed with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission in June 1999, project completion 2000.
The Glass Bell
Sophea Lerner
Sophea Lerner, The Glass Bell
The Glass Bell is a gesture-driven, audiographic installation. It comes out of stories which resonate through the lives of three generations of women in the artist’s family. It is a fictional poetic construct, an underwater archaeology which explores the role of stories as placeholders for the unutterable, for what falls between languages and places when we leave. It will comprise a large ‘touchscreen’ (about 1m x 1.5m) with water running across it. Diverse gestures on this surface will effect various changes in the audio, narrative and visual elements. The audio was developed first during a residency with The Listening Room in 1998.
There is no such thing as a touch screen that big so we have to start from scratch designing and building the hardware and the interfaces. Another challenge has been designing the software component to be flexible and modular enough to use as a compositional tool for flexible duration work, not just to stick everything together after decisions have been finalised. To be operated from a Powermac 7300 with a PC running part of the interface to the screen hardware and a K2000 carrying a fair chunk of the audio processing.
Sophea Lerner, an artist and broadcaster with a special interest in flexible duration audio works, has spoken internationally on sound design for new media and was last year’s Australia Council New Media Arts Fund artist in residence with The Listening Room. Collaborators for The Glass Bell include artist/engineer David Bartolo and programmer Ryan Sabir.
Completion early 2000. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council
Carrier is an experimental website investigating viral symbiosis in the virtual and biological domains, focusing on the hepatitis C (HCV) epidemic. A Java applet, named infectious agent, navigates the viewer along a unique site pathway, dependent upon the viewer’s interactions.
The major technical challenge on Carrier has been for Damien Everett and John Tonkin who have worked on the stable implementation of both Java and sound on the site, which has required many alterations to the original concept because of Browser, Browser Version and Java inconsistencies between the Macintosh and PC platforms.
Melinda Rackham, an artist and writer residing on the east coast of Australia, has been working online since 1995 in her domain www.subtle.net. Her earlier sites a.land, line and tunnel have been widely seen both in Australia and overseas. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate at COFA, UNSW.
The interactive CD-ROM Elementia is an allegory for our obsessive search to reconcile matter and spirit. The tale unfolds through Anax Helio’s private collection of Elementian maps: cartographs bizarre and eerie, urbane and greedy, of metal and stone and skin and luxite. Elementia is an experience inspired by Bahktin’s chronotope: “A time/space, a fictional setting, where time thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible.”
Interactive multimedia is especially demanding in its conception as both “architectural” space and time-based media. The artist needs to create discrete sequences that can connect to multiple others, and yet are integral to an overall scheme. Thinking in this modular way is easier than developing rigorous concepts and themes across linear media, and yet more difficult if one doesn’t want to create a mere patchwork. Once this is solved, “process” is still fairly uncharted terrain. We have a way to go before art IMM will have the well-tested production and technical processes of linear media.
Director/producer, Kate Richards; programmer, Ryan Sabir; designers, Chris Caines, David Lawford, Ayca Smith.
Kate Richards is a multimedia artist and producer, and an Honorary Research Fellow in New Media at University of Technology, Sydney. Current projects also include: Life After Wartime (CD-ROM), as producer, with writer/director Ross Gibson.
Completion December 1999. Australian Film Commission.
Pretty Aprons
Alyssa Rothwell
Alyssa Rothwell, Pretty Aprons
From the creator of the award-winning Three Mile Creek, Pretty Aprons allows you to ‘sew’ your way through stories and explore the lives of rural women. Narrated by a young girl, you are asked to help sew aprons as Christmas gifts for all the ladies she knows.
The emotional engagement that narrative in film can offer is something I try to include on CD-ROM. Maintaining an audience’s sense of immersion in the interactive non-linear format of the stories, and using layered sound to provide a cinematic quality, are constant challenges due to the physical limitations of the medium and the computer screen.
Coming through dance and the visual arts, Alyssa graduated from the Centre for Animation and Interactive Media, RMIT in 1996. She has exhibited internationally, was a winner of an ATOM award in 1997, and represented Australia in the New Talent Pavilion at MILIA, Cannes in 1998. Between lecturing in multimedia at UNSW and producing her new CD-ROM, Alyssa freelances as a new media artist. www.ozemail.com.au/~alyssar/ [expired]
Completion late 1999. Australian Film Commission.
The March of the Photobots
Dave Sag, Mike Cooper
Dave Sag, Mike Cooper, The March of the Photobots
The idea: small ‘artificial’ creatures consisting entirely of colour are fed an image which they use as a basic foodstuff. In a matter of days they will gather in large ‘caterpillar balls’ which act as a whole, sucking all colour and light from the image. Dave is evolving the work into two projects, one called V-Aura, a wearable networked photobot environment, and one called The yard, which is an online persistent playground for Java based life.
Dave developed the concept and wrote the specification for the bugs’ initial behaviour. The scientist, Mike Cooper, coded the photobots in Java and devised the viewer for examining the bugs in detail.
The challenges faced. Technical: the photobots can learn without having any memory, thousands of them will run within a single web page. Theoretical: conflicting theories of intelligence, machine learning and memetics. We succeeded in building creatures which can learn without having any memory of their own.
Entrant in the mcmogatk 1999 Arts on the Net exhibition, Japan. Self-funded: cheap to make, just takes ideas and a little time. The March of the Photobots exhibition is up in prototype stage at art.by.arena.ne.jp/mcmogatk/1999/d_sag [expired]
My Room Le Grand Canal
Philip Samartzis
My Room Le Grand Canal is a DVD-ROM-based project examining the specific flow, texture, space, tone and dimensional qualities unique to the city of Venice. The project will expansively draw upon these qualities in the development of a physiological, spatial and psychological portrait of a city which simultaneously acts as an anthropomorphic metaphor.
The technical aim of the project is to explore the potential of the DVD format by combining Dolby digital surround sound with full motion and full screen digital video, and digital imaging and graphics in an expansive audio visual presentation. Another aim is to combine both analogue and digital processes in the abstraction and manipulation of sound and image, so that strategies may be developed which will create a rich and unified experience of action and space.
Philip Samartzis is a Melbourne-based sound artist. He recently co-ordinated and curated the Immersion series of 35mm Dolby encoded surround sound performances. He also recently collaborated with Martine Corompt on Dodg’em, a driveable surround sound installation presented at Gallery 101, Melbourne.
Completion December 2000. Developed in co-operation with the Studio for Room Acoustics, IRCAM, France. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council.
blue in the bluebird
Jennifer Seevinck
Jennifer Seevinck, blue in the bluebird
blue in the bluebird is a computer animation loop of 6 minutes, intended for gallery installation. Concept and animation by Jen Seevinck and sound by Tim Kreger (see interview in RealTime #32).
After modelling birds in 3D computer space these were animated in specialised animation software, Houdini, as flocks. ‘Forces’ in cyberspace were modelled to animate both individual birds and the flock. Successfully integrating these layered, fluid movements inherent to the conceptual structure within the limitations of computing and rendering large data streams was a challenge.
Originally trained in architecture, Jen Seevinck has worked in theatre design, independent filmmaking, dance and digital media. Her research interest in ‘cyberplace’ complements her computer animation work and collaborations. After teaching and submitting her Masters in Electronic Arts at the Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology, ANU, she has moved to Deakin University to continue lecturing in animation and multimedia.
Completed June, 1999. Will be installed as part of the contemporary media exhibition Probe in Beijing, October 1999.
Scar tissue
Jason Sweeney
Scar tissue is a sound installation/online performance/net audio project investigating the veneer of background music, everyday noise, speech and electronic hum—one that questions systems, confronts the codes and digits, infiltrates the surface of sound construction, by breaking into the codes of the media lying at my disposal.
During a residency at Banff in Canada I will investigate, pull apart, reassemble, argue, discuss and research the nature of sound/music/noise as a tangible, changeable, permeable and highly volatile entity—taking a scalpel to technology, confronting the problems of techno-accessibility and viability of sound and performance in an online environment. The lo-fi vs hi-fi possibilities…
As an artist I work across disciplines of audio/sound art, the internet, performance and writing. My work interrogates the processes and implications of technologies of the past, present and future, technology that simultaneously throws itself in my face, without invitation, triggering me to push back and question its intrusion.
Completion mid-2000, Australia/Canada; to be developed at Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada as part of an Australia Council New Media Arts Residency.
Sensory Overload
Kevin Tham
Kevin Tham, Sensory Overload
Sensory Overload is an experimental, promotional, multimedia CD-ROM for Senses Interactive Pty Ltd. Filled with an array of animations, text, sound, video and special effects, it utilises the latest in digital video technology to create a fully realised Video Interactive (VI).
In attempting to create a full screen moving, Video Interactive, we have had to completely re-learn and rethink the way we usually create multimedia. We are utilising a combination of Director, Videoscript and Custom code to enable full screen video interaction, working out seamless video menu loops and transitions, multi-layered video scripting, quality compression and data rates, multi-video masking and animated video rollovers.
Kevin Tham, New Media Designer/Interactivist, Bachelor of Design degree, College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Trade shows and conferences, software packages, broadcast TVCs, CD-ROM Magazines (This! Zine Issues 0,1), CD Case Studies, CD Tourism interactives, interactive banking, corporate and government sales presenters and demos.
Spatial Emergence
Paul Thomas
The concept behind the project is the transphysical city, an exploration of the spatial intervals and boundaries between autonomous architectural structures. If one was to view the buildings within the city as words, then the street could be seen as a sentence. The spaces, or pauses, between the words give the sentence added meaning. Due to telecommunications, architectural infra-structures no longer need to remain in their present form. The ability to renegotiate perspectival constraints is vital research for artists at this point in time. The work is completed in its CD-ROM form but is also linked to its own developing website: www.imago.com.au/spatial [expired]
Technology has assisted in articulating the range of emergent spaces subtly operating within every metropolis, exposing and revealing them. The challenges to visualise this were many, for instance understanding various software packages and creating video, sound, still images in an interactive format. As well there was the challenge of making the work crossplatform and having the CD-ROM link to the internet to access the website as well as download images.
My art reflects a conscious and unconscious construct of dislocation. This sense also appears in my work as social and cultural critic. Works include Media-Space (1981-86).
www.imago.com.au/spatial/spatialdir/ss.dcr [expired] CD-ROM project funding: New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council.
A Grand Unified Theory of Self
John Tonkin
John Tonkin, A Grand Unified Theory of Self
A Grand Unified Theory of Self is a study of complexity theory. Interactive data analysis and visualisation tools will correlate personal details (amount of sleep, consistency of faeces, heart rate at moment of orgasm) with global indicators harvested from the web (Microsoft’s stock index, barometric pressure in Cairo).
I write software using languages such as C++ and Java. For this project I will need to develop Java-based data storage, analysis, charting and visualisation software. This will draw from source code and reference material available on the web, and involve consultation with research scientists from the Supercomputing Lab, ANU. The medium will be an interactive (Java based) online website but will also be exhibited as a more technically sophisticated installation with realtime 3D graphics and live data feeds.
John Tonkin began making computer animation in 1985. Animations include air, water parts 1, 2 & 3 (1993-95) and these are the days (1994). meniscus (1995-99) is a series of works exploring ideas relating to subjectivity, scientific belief systems and the body (http://207.225.33.116/meniscus -expired).
The project is the major component of John Tonkin’s Australia Council New Media Arts Fund Fellowship. Completion mid 2001.
memo
Sarah Waterson, Anna Sabiel
how can I touch you if you’re not there…
memo is an experiment about taking a performance installation environment and its incumbent physical experiences into a virtual environment. Conceptually memo draws upon ideas of physical memory and image triggers that are felt or interpreted in the body.
Through a VRML scaffold structure, memo presents short vignettes of image-based movements triggered by the users or, more accurately, the cursor’s proximity. memo is also an audio environment with specifically located sound. The user is immersed in a virtual ‘instrument’, their movement triggering a unique soundscape and mix depending on the path chosen. memo consists of multiple nodes branching out from the central scaffold structure. At present there is a VRML textspace with spatially presented hypertext links. Other nodes are planned to extend the present scope of the work.
Sarah Waterson is an installation/multimedia artist whose work deals with possible cyborg futures and the influence of electronic technologies on subjectivities. She is a lecturer in digital media, UWS Nepean and was a participating artist in the Brandon Project, Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA. Anna Sabiel is a Sydney-based performance/installation/sound artist. The interaction between body/movement and the production of sound has been a major concern of her work. Works include Tensile (originally devised for SoundCulture 1991) and Internalised Cities series (with Sarah Waterson and Shane Fahey). Currently Sabiel works authoring and designing educational CD-ROMs for the Board of Studies, NSW.
www.artspace.org.au/spaceinvaders/memo [expired] Launched June 99, Artspace, Space Invaders. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council.
bodyssey
Gary Zebington
Gary Zebington, bodyssey
bodyssey is a CD-ROM (metabody phase 2) about corporeality’s meanderings through an ecology of post-and-pophuman ideas. Body forms transmute to thoughts and utterances encountered in a space of technological and wordly wanderings.
One challenge is to coax patterns or schemes of text/body relations from the intertwinings of a number of elements—vrml, responsive text, text-to-speech, speech recognition and non-linear sound. Another is then to let the schemes wander freely.
Gary Zebington arts and programs technological semi-fictions at travelling outposts and rarely encounters steering committees. Fellow bodyssey collaborators are Mary-Anne Breeze (mez), electrostatic artist and hypertext wordsmithess, and Andrew Garton, sound and media artist who creates net and generative works.
We were reminded early in the day that art and technology were once one and the same in the Ancient Greek ‘techne.’ Project 1 was an intensive, one day Online Australia forum for cultural organisations and web-developers. As Federal Minister for the Arts Peter McGauran put it in his opening address, “Project 1 aims to encourage dialogue and interaction between the cultural and the online sectors. Ideally today’s workshop will produce new partnerships, new opportunities…”
The forum was timely, lively and sometimes overwhelming as vocabularies were shared, upgraded and our mental spellchecks failed to recognise. In the morning keynote speaker Tiffany Shlain, Executive Director & Creative Producer of the Webby Awards and President of the International Academy of the Digital Arts and Sciences (US), defined online culture and panels of speakers briefly commented on their online cultural and business goals and experiences. In the afternoon, small, informal groups gathered in 45 minute Breakout sessions to discuss topics posted by those attending the forum. Any one of these sessions could have become the subject of at least a half day’s discussion. To this extent, Project 1 provided for artists and cultural organisations starting points that warrant continued consideration and debate. Also evident was the disparity in levels of knowledge, not just between business and the arts, but within the arts where the range of experience with new technologies runs from naive to expert. At the end of the day the most frequent comment heard was, “We need more of this.”
Putting the words together
Project 1 was an intense wordfest, a word wrestle, a yoking together of terms and concepts not often used in each other’s company. In the red, plush comfort of the Sydney Opera House’s The Studio, words that we thought we knew lunged at us like dark strangers, others fell apart like drunks, some staggered about high on overuse (what industry other than the net describes its customers as users, someone asked) and metaphors got dangerously cocktailed. Strangest (though who should be surprised as we dizzily fight off ever recurring bouts of economic rationalism) was the way key words from the communalism of social responsibility and the kingdom of capital overlapped and intersected or crossed the line or put an uncertain foot in each camp. Words like community, trust, heritage, cultural identity and diversity served all-comers, and mixed it with brand, industry, delivery, value-adding, currency, bonuses, marketplace and consumer, though more than one speaker stumbled over ‘arts industry’ and ‘culture’ stuck in a few voice boxes.
After setting the scene—“The development of communications technology this century has done much to weave the tapestry of Australian society by combatting the tyranny of distance which we inherited so long ago and bringing Australians together in new and often unexpected ways”—Peter McGauran coolly brought home the dialectic—”…in this increasingly globalised world we must ensure that all Australians continue to participate in our diverse cultural life and heritage”—which we worried at the rest of the day along with the business/arts tussle.
Back(s) to the future?
It was a day in which time as well as language was subject to delirium. How many times were we told that everything would be okay when we got the bandwidth we wanted, any day now, or later than we hoped, much later. Or that the arts online were three years, no five years, ten even behind business and that Australian business was five years, no seven, eight, behind America and Europe. Keynote speaker Tiffany Shlain mused that we were enjoying a New Renaissance, one analogous to the first, but with our technology at last matching our stream of consciousness. Others painted bright futures of community and access and profitability, some of it already here, some of it Australian and battling big US counterparts. One speaker gloomed that it was a future for some, but not for others as “the big five” prowled, buying up the future—small media arts companies. The same speaker, Jeffrey Cook (Director, 3V & Merlin Integrated Media), took us back to the idiosyncratic emergence of the Australian film industry (and our current international film reputation) as a model for working the net. At that moment Cook and McGauran seemed unlikely allies. Cook said, “Australian film is unique” and, by analogy with what can be achieved online, “that’s all that can save us in the future.” McGauran had declared, “our challenge is to ensure a distinctly Australian voice is heard amongst the hubbub of global discourse.” We all looked back to look forward, we looked in to look out.
Facts? What facts?
Statistics also eluded us with their instability and unavailability. It seems that the arts (the ABC aside) in this country have no idea at all who their audiences are. Business, however, does know its clients. But when it comes to the net, even business in Australia develops websites but will never market them. Peter McGauran said, “At present it is estimated that 70% of internet content accessed by Australians has been sourced overseas. It’s clear therefore that we have to develop new ways to promote our culture to ourselves and the rest of the world.” Peter Naumann (Manager Multimedia & Public Program, National Gallery of Australia) said that 50% of visitors to the National Gallery of Australia’s online gallery were from the US, 70% overall from overseas. Victoria Doidge (General Manager of the impressive Chaos Music online store, our first serious taste on the day of e-commerce for artists) said they were doing impressive business nationally but also with overseas customers (how many?).
Of course, thanks to email, to its engrossing sense of intimacy and communality, we have a means of finding out like never before who’s out there. And the AFL (Australian Football League) is right into it, engaging millions with pure information, including a weekly injuries list. Could theatre companies offer the same (instead of the atrociously quaint newsletters they print)—updates on hoarse voices, sore backs, critical thrashings. It seems the online means are there to find out more and more about our audiences and to project potential markets, but the work on it in the arts has barely begun except with some film organisation and youth culture programs.
Social good and capital success
‘Intimacy’ and ‘community’ resonated across the day with overtones of social good and capital success as we learned of the desire to belong that the net fosters through news and gossip and sensitively constructed list server levels of access (‘trust’ again). A new subjectivity emerged too, amplified in an advertising scenario where we no longer have to project onto archetypes. No. We are scanned into promotions as ourselves, like Martin Lindstrom’s (Executive Director, Zivo) story of a NY child’s face mapped onto a Barbie doll purchased through the net, and his own image (sent to him online) adorned in the latest fashions after he’d been scanned in a fashion store.
Equity and social justice occasionally surfaced from their steady subtext, humble Davids toppling corporate Goliaths in winning Shlain’s Webby Awards—anyone can succeed and it doesn’t have to be with every plug-in in the book. On the one hand, there was a happy free market belief in the power of individual will and creativity, on the other a serious concern to create systems responsive to those with “only a phone and a microwave” or the cheapest of computers. Email, said Tiffany Shlain and Ruby Blessing (Group Creative Director, Spike), was seriously under-utilised. Occasionally there was a myopic globalism—we’re all in this together, it’s universal, we’re all speaking the same language (html)—oblivious to the new class lines defined by who has the technology and who doesn’t, and to the millions in the world who have never seen a telephone let alone used one, and then there’s UNESCO’s recent report on the limited global uptake of the net. But the curious mix of laissez faire energy and the drive for social responsibility in the context of apparent technological inevitability kept issues on the boil and one’s vocabulary on red alert.
Speaking each other’s language
Key words kept recurring all day—partnerships (tied to bartering), value-adding (along with bundling and bonuses), community (whether referring to a social group, a virtual one or company employees, and tied to intimacy and trust), access (how to reach as many people as possible with the simplest technological means), currency (keeping your site ‘fresh’, or what you can barter with—’the arts are sexy, business needs you’—I never quite believe this), portals (are they working, how can we make them work for us?), lists and filters (helping direct users to areas where they can then make choices) and branding (arts companies having to look beyond their logos). These fuelled much of the afternoon discussion. But there were other words used approvingly like ‘chaos’ and ‘junk’ that reminded us of a net free of ‘convergence’, of creative mess, and, as several speakers noted, work on the web as an ongoing experience, an evolution, something unfinished.
It was a day of anecdote, hyperbole, vision, caution and timewarps, and a wobbly lexicon—not a bad thing when you’re trying to get a handle on a newish world, and not a little Shakespearean when the language is rich, silly, technical, pliant, shifting and often barely defined. Not that I left Project 1 happily branding and value-adding: I guess I like that tension between the arts and business. If we have something to learn from each other, Project 1 was a glimpse of some intriguing possibilities needing further thought and more dialogue. True to the promise of Project 1, web developers and business managers met with artists and members of arts organisations in a dialogue worth continuing. Of course there are many artists who are web designers by the very nature of their online work and more than a few intersect the worlds of commerce and art.
Go online for more of Project 1 [no-longeer available]
. It includes a detailed account of keynote speaker Tiffany Shlain’s address on online culture and how the Webby Awards work (for one thing as another kind of filter, she suggested), plus summaries of talks from Richard Fidler (panel chair, writer, performer, TV host)—“the lovely thing about the web is that it’s such messy business, genuinely chaotic. Business men want to impose some elegance on it”; David Thompson (Senior Consultant, Deloitte Touche Tomatsu)—“creativity in new media hasn’t yet delivered…hasn’t hit on a winning formula”; Claire Byrnes (Producer, ABC Arts & Culture Online)—the need for “a content that everyone can see, therefore not reliant on plug-ins…”; Tess Dryza (Creative Director, Multimedia, Open Training & Education Network)—the task of building online communities generating trust and intimacy; Ruby Blessing (Group Creative Director, Spike)—“define different groups within your database rather than using a blanket approach”; Martin Lindstrom (Executive Director, Zivo)—“Now it’s a matter of the customer becoming the star. I’m the centre”; Victoria Doidge (General Manager Chaos Music)—“we’re selling Australian music to the world and it’s working well for us—the top 5 on the chart are Australian independents. We create a web page for them for each of their products. They can go in and manage that page and link it to other sites and list performances”; Jeffrey Cook (Director, 3V & Merlin Integrated Media)—“For years I’ve been trying to get cultural organisations to work together. That’s supposed to get a laugh…If we had one arts portal—not a damn government one—everyone would go to it! e-commerce you haven’t seen anything yet.” Peter Naumann (Manager Multimeda, Australian National Gallery)—“The gallery has 100,000 works in store rooms, has launched 5,000 on screen, and by the end of year will have 10 – 16,000 accessible.”
Also in the online report from the afternoon Breakout sessions is a detailed account of the discussion of the future of the Australian Cultural Network which included issues of research and marketing, mega-portals, the success of the AFL site and why the Australian Cultural Network includes Skippy and Neighbours sites (thousands of hits for them). Very briefly summarised too are sessions on youth culture online, regional needs and branding, along with a few of the notable provocations including, “Only Victoria is forward-looking in new media—the rest are casualties”.
Project 1 was presented by OnLine Australia (a project of The National Office for The Information Economy) in partnership with the Australia Council, RealTime and the Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts.
A lush, futuristic action adventure set in a privatised fully automated institution for minors in state care. Three children struggle to stay together in a climate of rapid change, a culture of fear where the young have come to represent the perpetrator, the icon of a society out of control.
The screen is often used as a backdrop in performance, but a performance that truly engages notions of screen culture in its evolution is much more challenging. Eat Your Young plays with the notion of real time by creating inherent formal questions in the viewing of the work. These questions are asked via a seamless vision mixing between the projected pre-recorded and live image (shot on robotically controlled tracking to allow precision repetition of X and Y axis pathways through space and time), design integration, live and pre-recorded vocal dub, computerised show control and continued use of mixed high tech and low tech aesthetic allowing effect and machination to be read simultaneously. Main challenges—our appetite exceeds our purse, clarity of dialogues across collaborators.
Arena Theatre Company aims to create multidisciplined performances that reflect the complex multiple nature of human experience. Arena’s manifesto cites young audiences at the fore of new cultural expression, fluid in their skills of deconstruction and symbolic comprehension. Recent work includes the anthroPOP trilogy AUTOPSY, MASS and PANACEA. Winners of the 1999 ASSITEJ International Honorary Presidents Award.
Completion March 2000. Arena is funded triennially by the Australia Council Theatre Fund and annually Arts Victoria.
Triple Alice
Tess de Quincey
Lake Mungo, 1991
photo Heidrun Löhr
Lake Mungo, 1991
A gathering in hard space and virtual space, Triple Alice engages with Australia’s Central Desert as a burning point in its mapping of the future of artistic, cultural and media practice. Held over three years 1999 – 2001, Triple Alice convenes a forum and three live, site and temporally-specific laboratories staged over three weeks each year.
We are finding that remote broadcast and networking demands a cultural delicacy but also a technical capacity which as yet is under-resourced in its ability to meet the vision of this event. The KOZ online Community Publishing System will be fundamental to the project. Linked to the main site, KOZ creates an online congregation minus html phobia, and gives each visitor or, rather, ‘online resident’ their own web page and email address.
Triple Alice is initiated by Tess de Quincey, current recipient of the Australia Council Choreographic Fellowship. She has worked extensively in Japan, Europe, India and Australia as solo performer, teacher and director.
Triple Alice is a partnership between BodyWeather, Desart, Centre for Performance Studies (University of Sydney) and The Performance Space.
www.triplealice.net [expired] September 20 – October 10. Workshop component Australia Council funded.
Humanoids in progress
Arthur Wicks
Arthur Wicks, Humanoids in progress
This is the early stage of a mixed media work where a group of “humanoids” are mobilised by remote control. The next stage of the project is to implant sensors which respond to a variety of inputs. The humanoids will then be able to interact relatively independently with an audience. Control of the physical servo mechanisms will be through a series of micro processors programmed to relate sensor input to specific physical responses. This phase of the project requires collaboration with an electronic engineer and the testing of stronger and more intricate physical servo mechanisms (such as those used in aerodynamics). This will enable the humanoid to perform more intricate physical responses over a longer period. Project time frame approximately 1999 – 2002.
Arthur Wicks has been involved with performance since the early 1970s. More recent works have involved the construction of machines which are “barely engineered, nearly built, narrowly operative. They teeter on the edge of collapse.” (David Hansen on Wicks’ Last Work,The Daily Advertiser, 1992)
Tower of Light
Melbourne Workers Theatre, The Institute of Complex Entertainment
Tower of Light explores gaming culture and corporate responsibility in a world where winning is everything and losing is invisible. It incorporates live performance and music, community groups, large scale puppetry and soundscape with projected digital video, slide and other electronic media. Director Susie Dee, visual media designer Chris Harris and lighting designer Nathan Thompson explore the role of immersive media spectacle in creating the illusory promise of gaming culture. They have been working in close collaboration with the writer, musical director and set designer to create an environment of images designed not only to seduce and dislocate, but also provide another effective layer of truthful communication within the performance itself.
The challenge for the creative team has been to use technology to build an environment of light and projection which successfully interacts with all the other elements and maintains the performance’s integrity.
Chris Harris studied sculpture at the SA School of Art and was a core creative member of desoxy Theatre for four years. He now works in Melbourne as theatrical stage and projection designer and a production manager. Nathan Thompson runs The Flaming Beacon, a small lighting design office in Melbourne. He has created lighting designs for performance, architecture and new media in projects on 5 continents. His recent piece with Christian Möeller, Audio Grove, installed at the Spiral Gallery Tokyo won a prize at last year’s Prix Ars Electronica and was re-mounted for Cyber 98 in Lisbon.
October 17 – 30, Melbourne Festival, Royal Melbourne Showgrounds. New media component funded by New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council
White Collar Project
Nerve Shell
A sound/performance installation to take place on a rooftop site in Sydney’s CBD. A hybrid of telecommunication devices, dance, spoken word, film and soundtrack. The audience, issued with personalised aural receivers, will experience a relayed series of live mixed and ever changing events emanating from remote performance sites. Primarily driven by the sound, the performance will implicate the invisible traces of the digitalised human and the gridded exchanges of the millennial city.
Among the challenges for White Collar Project are ways to immerse the spectator in a constructed world using real architecture, sights and sounds in a responsive way so that the prefabricated elements spark ‘incidents.’ Some of the challenges will be purely practical: negotiating fierce environments for access to city space during 2000; sourcing the most flexible technology: and interlacing, through live mixing, all the strands of this experience.
Nerve Shell is Caitlin Newton-Broad and Gail Priest. Together they created Dead Girls’ Party (The Performance Space Gallery 1997), a sound performance installation exploring the lost lives of famous artists’ wives. Caitlin is a writer/director. Gail is a sound designer/performance artist. Other artists contributing to this event include Samuel James, Shane Wynter, Regina Heilmann, Joel Markham and Ben Rogan.
April 2000. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council
To Eat Flowers and Walk on Glass
Salamanca Theatre Company & syt (salamanca youth theatre)
A performance and installation with video,To Eat Flowers and Walk on Glass resulted from an 8 week creative development process involving STC artistic director Deborah Pollard, guest installation artist from Indonesia Hedi Hariyanto, Sean Bacon, Sally Rees, Poonkhin Khut and other emerging Hobart artists. The title is inspired by the Javanese trance dance called Jatilan in which the male dancer falls into trance and become possessed by horse spirits. The horse spirits are fed flower petals. The project will examine the many subcultures that exist within contemporary youth culture and compare them to some traditional counterparts.
The work will stylistically explore the interface of live action (tattooing and piercing) in relation to pre-recorded and live video. The ability of the video eye to digitally bring the action to a scale that is larger than life will be pitted against the effect of real action in real time. The installation will take place over 4 hours. Just as a tattoo slowly transfigures the body, video installations will create an atmosphere of constant transition as they imperceptibly change over the course of the work. A constant beat drawn from myriad trance cultures will continuously build and subside. The sound installation comprises live mixing and percussion.
CAST Gallery, Friday 27 August. Hedi Hariyanto courtesy of an artist-in-residence program, University of Tasmania. Australia Council, Arts Tasmania; with support from CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania).
States Of Kinship
Doppio-Parallelo, Sustenance Productions
Lynne Sanderson, States of Kinship
States of Kinship was created as an adjunct to Doppio-Parallelo’s live theatre performance of the same name, written by Melina Marchetta. Based on a journey of cultural/personal discovery, the website relates to the rites of passage of the main character, Francesca. Enhanced by animated images and sound, the user explores her inner world. The script is set someplace between sleep and waking, between the physical dimension of live performance and the virtual space accessed via technology.
Beyond the technical difficulties of multiple platforms and browser differences was the challenge of condensing and distilling the essence of the script into a website to complement the live performance. We wanted to look at new approaches to performance writing and ways of engaging our communities in both urban and rural centres. In 1998 we brought a national group of cultural workers to our On Contested Ground public seminar at Ngapartji Multimedia Centre to discuss the notions of kinship, memory and racism—themes that are influencing our work over the next few years. Discussions were held with both real and online communities about what these issues mean to them today in Australia.
With the support of the Australian Film Commission, Ngapartji, Media Resource Centre and Australian Network for Art & Technology, a research group called Rosebud was established to undertake study regarding narrative and interactivity for performance. This group would later inform the practice for the States of Kinship project.
As Sustenance Productions, Lynne Sanderson (Digital Artist) and Peter Sansom (Sound Designer/Composer), have collaborated on computer animations Need and Primal Debug which have been exhibited extensively including MTV Australia and the touring exhibition An Eccentric Orbit which opened at MoMA, NYC and is currently touring nationally. Other works include the multi-screen installation …mutant!… exhibited at the EAF and the website Somnolent Fantasies (www.unisa.edu.au/sleep/art/title.html) created during a residency at the Centre for Sleep Research, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Adelaide. http://sustenance.va.com.au/-Sustenance Productions
www.doppio-parallelo.on.net [expired] States of Kinship, the performance, July 26 – August 7 1999, EDS Centre, North Terrace, Adelaide. Australia Council and ArtsSA.
Monster Mouth
Dina Panozzo
Dina Panozzo, Monster Mouth
A live performance with CD-ROM. In a state of psychic torment, a woman searches the internet for spiritual guidance. Along the way she encounters a female Jesus, a ghost turned body snatcher and finally her own personal apocalypse.
For the writer the challenges have included negotiating the different languages of computer graphics and text for a live performance. A sketch for a scene involving the snatching of my body almost wrote itself when I saw Maria Miranda’s images. For Maria, creating a trashy net-like world as well as a set of surreal images for large scale projection meant stretching the capacity of her low-end equipment to the limit: “For this scale of projection it’s all silicon graphics these days, but I enjoyed pushing Photoshop to do something wilder than normal. And the fact that the work is not timed for an interactive user but for an audience watching a live performance has sometimes meant more precision in the design.” Yet to be encountered is the challenge of Greg White’s programming and his sound design as they relate to the rhythms of spoken language and Elena Katz-Chernin’s music, followed by the interactions of live performer, a very large screen and an audience.
Dina Panozzo is a performer and writer living in Sydney. Her performance work with live video camera, Varda Che Bruta…Poretta (Look how ugly she is, poor thing) was produced with Open City in 1995, premiered in Sydney and toured to Adelaide and Melbourne.
Creative development of the CD-ROM component funded by the New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council. Dramaturgy and administration, Open City. Additional support from Playworks.
Hellen Sky, Company in Space, Architecture of Biography
Architecture of Biography
Hellen Sky, Company in Space
Architecture of Biography (working title) is a multiform interactive performance work and installation constructing metaphorical relationships to architectural space and universal biographies.
Collaborating artists: Hellen Sky, concept and direction; John McCormick, computer systems, design; Margie Medlin, image & light; spatial design, Simon Barley; dramaturgy/text, Margaret Cameron; sound design, David Chesworth; performers, Ros Warby, Louise Taube, Alan Widdowson, Margaret Cameron.
The challenge is in collapsing traditional relationships between movement, text, image, space, score, and in defining appropriate digital interactive systems, audio and image, and their methods of delivery through traditional and responsive digital means.
Hellen Sky, Co artistic director Company in Space, is a choreographer, performer, image maker creating performance and installation work using dance and new media. These works have been extended as telematic performances, bringing new relationships between performer, audience and site, most recently in Escape Velocity at IDAT ‘99 (International Dance and Technology), Arizona/Melbourne. Hellen is also Co-artistic Director of Dancehouse.
Completion 2000. Collaborative development funded by New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council.
Lampscape Fate
Cazerine Barry
Cazerine Barry, Lampscape Fate
Tools: 1 dancer, 1 computer, 1 camera, 1 video projector. Psychological evocations of the historically infantile. Technically speaking, this is a solo performance; the use of projected multiple performers, however, leaves the audience with the impression of a much larger ensemble. Ethereal and layered images are projected into the performance, literally and conceptually. Sequential video images are used to create a spatial context for the movement while simultaneously exploring temporal and spatial distortion.
Challenges. 1. To perform by myself and sustain interest. 2. To create an image-story in seamless and illusory partnership with the performance. 3. To employ a process which alternates between digital and performance creation, allowing each to reinform the other. 4. To be realistic about the time it takes to adjust moving image compositions that could have taken days to make. 5. To defer the yearning for more time, money and hard-drive space.
Cazerine Barry is a choreographer, performer and video artist. Awards have included a Scholarship to the American Dance Festival, Australian Cinematography Award for FEAR co-produced with Adrian Hauser; an Asialink Fellowship and a residency with the Australian Indonesian Institute co-directed with Kate Mackie. New Media Fellowship, Choreographic Centre 1998.
Work in progress performance, KYKLOS cultural event, September 3 – 4, North Melbourne Arts House. Complete performance for Tokyo International Festival of the Arts, October 1999; Taipei and Hong Kong for Little Asia Tour produced by Hirano Pty Ltd and Melbourne City Council.
At Home Not Alone
John McCormick
An interactive online environment (developed out of company in space’s The Pool is Damned) allowing a global audience to construct the realities of four characters and the effects of power on their lives. Realities are constructed in realtime by choreographing gestures and rhetorical audio soundtrack.
Challenges: to maximise global audience interaction through web TV delivery systems; to ensure sound and video environment are malleable over the modem; to create a multi-user environment allowing more than one person to communicate through the site simultaneously.
John McCormick Co-director company in space and currently a visiting artist at RMIT Interactive Information Institute. John has been designing interactive dance works and computer systems allowing performer and audience to influence outcomes in the work. He is currently researching networking systems, ISDN and WEB Broadcasting for current and future projects.
Completion September 99. Arts Victoria and AFC New Media.
Norie Neumark and collaborators, Dead Centre: the body with organs
Dead Centre: the body with organs
Norie Neumark and collaborators
This sound/performance installation explores and plays with bodily organs as they are being reconfigured in computer culture. It explores computers as one particular incarnation of organs. The work also plays with the way art, not just science, can create metaphors through which we understand and interact with the biological and technological world.
Collaborators: Norie Neumark, sound, direction; Amanda Stewart, text, vocals; Maria Miranda, images; Greg White, sound design, programming.
A conceptual and technical challenge was to have complex, integrated but dynamic sound including composed, performative, and interactive sounds. Another was to create an affective interactivity that is a tendency rather than a trigger. It was also a challenge to have non-representational visuals that respond both to the sound and ideas.
Norie Neumark is a sound and new media artist. Her CD-ROM, Shock in the Ear, won major awards in Australia and internationally. Amanda Stewart is an experimental poet and sound artist. Maria Miranda is a visual artist. Greg White is a composer and programmer. (Maria and Greg also collaborated on Shock in the Ear.)
Completed July 1999, exhibited at The Performance Space, Sydney. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council, NSW Ministry for the Arts.
Marine
Rodolphe Blois, Randall Wood
Marine is about our ambivalent relationship with water, the emotions it inspires of attraction and fear. A collaboration between soundscape composer Rodolphe Blois and filmmaker Randall Wood, Marine is in the early stages of creative development. It combines electro-acoustic music, cinematic and theatrical elements—a 50 minute “cinema for ears” work. Projected onto 3 screens almost enclosing the audience, the images are being constructed in response to electro-acoustic compositions from abstracted or anecdotal views of water showing natural or techno-based fluid qualities and the movements, reflections and distortions of forms and sources. Marine questions conventional relations between sound and screen and the omnipresence of visual images in cinema, proposing an alternative by giving the sonic dimensions a richer and more prominent role.
Randall Wood is a documentary filmmaker and a visual theatre projection artist. He produces documentary films with a social and humanitarian focus for education and television. His most recent film production is Selo! Selo! for SBS TV (see OnScreen in RealTime #32). His visual theatre work integrates large multi-image projection with dance, puppetry and drama. He is a key collaborator with Brisbane based visual theatre company Brink Performance (Under the Big Sky 1997).
Completion 2000.
The Invisible Songs Project
Steven Ball
Steven Ball, The Invisible Songs Project
My current work in progress researches ‘digital materialism’, a term coined to suggest the ‘raw material’ of media, and translating the code between sound and image. The animated results will be integrated with investigations of the nature of particular places as a series of short video ‘songs.’ An extensive treatment of this work can be found in the latest Cantrills Filmnotes (no. 91/92, 1999).
As an unfunded (to date) project the working process is necessarily opportunistic and utilises whatever available resources I can freely access. Consequently the biggest technical challenges are largely practical and logistical ones of the storage and transportation of large files and finding enough time to work on it.
I have worked as a film, video and installation artist intermittently since graduating from an English art school in the early 80s. For some years I was closely associated with the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group and produced a large number of films in that gauge. In addition I have worked as a writer as well as curator and administrator with a number of local screen culture organisations
the building that speaks is a public art project proposed by Robyn Backen and is at present in the development stage with its principal commissioner, the Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts. This project focuses on the facade of the building. the building that speaks has an interior and an exterior. The exterior utilises the existing windows/portholes on the boilerhouse facade as a frame from which to blink Morse Code out towards the city. The interior will house a computer which will host the messages. One of the possible messages may be the final Morse Code transmitted by a French vessel (1997) “calling all, this is our last cry before our eternal silence.” The public will also be able to send messages from the computer to the facade.
The interior and exterior will be married by a computer interface. The facade lights will be generated by a computer interface and a Morse Code translator/switcher. Director will synthesise texts generated by the interaction of members of the public with a touch screen. These texts will be displayed and compiled into histories.
Robyn Backen is a Sydney-based artist focusing on installation and public art projects. She is one of the artists commissioned to develop a public art work for the Sydney Sculpture Walk; this work is in its final stages of completion. Robyn Backen is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.
Likely completion: early 2000. Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts.
Amor Veneris A is a breath-activated installation (hard disk, breath sensor, various electronic media). A woman’s face is viewed through a magnifying glass which is installed on the top of a wooden box. The spectator can activate/awake her by blowing against her face using the breath switch which protrudes from the box and connects the spectator with the screen woman.
To use the breath switch to activate the quick-time movies, adaptations had to be made due to the fact that the switch was initially designed as an assisting device for people with paraplegia. These adaptations were implemented by means of a differential communications interface (RS-422) in a fully custom made electronics box. Breath sensor (switch) supplied by Enabling Devices-Toys for Special Children, NY, USA.
Mari Velonaki lives and works in Sydney. In a series of installations she aims to engage the spectator with the digital character in an interplay activated by sensory triggered interfaces (speech recognition, eye-tracking, breathing/blowing). Her work has been shown at Artspace, PICA and Ton-Bild Spectakel/Greifensee. Amor Veneris A is a derivative of Amor Veneris, Herringbone Gallery, Sydney, Mardi Gras, 1999.
MAAP 99, Science Centre, Brisbane, September 3 – 12.
A very Pentatonic Scale
Damian Castaldi
Video, installation and tuned aluminium bars. “The video plays the instrument” as light intensity levels vary depending on the changing video image of Curl Curl rockface and the spectator’s body movement between the screen and five transducers (mounted on a pentatonic scale).
The challenge is to program a MAX patch that will successfully coordinate the triggering process. This involves translating source data from Low Level 2 transducers to an analog to MIDI digitiser and outputting to actuators which play the pentatonic scale, to create an intriguing synergy between video, body and acoustics.
Damian Castaldi’s work explores audiovisual and instrumental crossroads between gesture-based, interactive audio systems and digital image for installation and the web. He was the 1997 recipient of the Australia Council New Media Art & Technology partnership with the ABC and works independently and in collaboration with the national artists’ collective nervous_objects.
Completion August 1999.
self remembering—optimal viewing distance
James Verdon
This is the 4th in a series of digital screen based installations interrogating memory and the electronic viewing screen as utilising common technologies of re-presentation and simulation. The installation seeks to articulate connections between memory and the electronic screen as viewed through the sieve of these technologies.
The primary technical challenges relate to the use of relatively unproven digital video delivery technology. The project utilises broadcast quality random access digital video and audio data from dedicated “black boxes.” This data is mixed with live video feed signal and lighting controls all triggered by a visitor’s jumping through a hopscotch court. No one in Australia has used this particular hardware before, and so the project has been a series of steep independent learning curves.
James Verdon is an artist working primarily with electronic media and emerging technologies, often utilising light as a primary interactive element. He is Course Coordinator and teaches theory and studio components of Electronic Design and Interactive Media (EDIM) in the Arts Department at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne, August-September 1999. Australia Council.
Facemen
David Cox
Utilising small ‘panasonic’ video LCD projector, commercial doll, video camcorder and face peep hole, Faceman is an installation which uses a small video projector to project the face of the onlooker onto a small puppet. By placing his/her face in a peep-hole cut in a flat surface the viewer then sees a puppet figure with a video-projected face. The work examines the complicity of the viewer in the form and nature of spectacular society.
In playing along with the implicit request of the work (to poke one’s head through the hole) the viewer automatically finds her face and speech transposed onto the symbol of manipulation—the puppet. The work aims to playfully examine the complex relationships between viewer and work, and by extension the role of video imagery in society as a whole.
The work extends ideas explored in earlier work, such as my 1990 black and white film Puppenhead. This and my 1998 film Otherzone examined the overall themes of identity, paranoia and technophobia. David Cox is Digital Screen Production Lecturer, Griffith University, Brisbane.
Talk about working the screen! By the time MAAP99 (Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific) Festival hits Brisbane and the Asia Pacific region from September 3 – 12 the organisers will have considered over 180 proposals (quadruple last year’s content) for more than 50 projects showcasing the latest in digital arts in the Asia-Pacific region. From over 60 submissions from Australia alone, the curatorial team selected 4 artists who have been supplied with Macromedia and Metacreations software valued at nearly $10,000. MAAP will bring the artists to Brisbane to participate in the festival.
The work in MAAP99 covers a range of art forms and practices with an emphasis on interactive multimedia, web, video, animation and projects integrating new media. It encompasses a range of public events, online projects, cinema screenings and exhibitions both on-site and online and forums addressing issues of audience awareness and critical engagement with artists working with technologies and screen-based media. MAAP99 is the ultimate co-mingling of the real and the digital, satisfying both physical and cyber-needs.
As you’d expect, such an ambitious project requires major support and MAAP99 has this from Online Australia, an initiative of the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) promoting the development of information technology throughout Australia. They’re also partnering the Third Asia Pacific Triennial’s Virtual Triennial exhibition which will be APT3’s official online art content and screen culture provider. Macromedia is again a major sponsor making available just about every tool they produce including Generator. With help from Firmware’s Generator server, live image and text updates to the web will be used extensively during the month-long online festival.
SEE, SEEK and SPEAK
The program has 3 streams. SEE is the national and international screening program at The State Library Cinema, September 4, and Queensland Art Gallery, September 5. It includes recent works from Korea, Malaysia, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Feng Mengbo from Beijing will present recent video and web interactive works. Videotage features the One Minute Video Festival, a selection of works from China curated by the Hong Kong Video and New Media co-operative. D.art is the annual showcase of experimental film, digital video and computer animation from dLux media arts in Sydney. Visual artists are creating short works for television to be broadcast in Art Rage. The Art Rage For Kids edition is available to schools as an introduction to creative uses of new technologies. The Samsung Project from Korean artist Young-Hae Chang will feature in a narrative program session titled Strange Stories; Self-Made Cinema. It incorporates recent works from Hong Kong curated and presented by Jo Law and will be toured by the West Australian Film and Television Institute. Digital Degrees features showreels of current digitally produced projects by multimedia and design students from Singapore, New Zealand and Australia.
SEEK is the interactive exhibition program including gallery, public spaces and online exhibitions. net.works/ MAAP99 Australia/Asia Artists Exchange is an online residency project aimed at generating dialogue, exchange, and collaboration between Australia and the Asia Pacific. Rather than run ‘real’ residencies which result in artists making works for the web, net.works/… is a habitation of the web, where the internet is used as a beginning point, a space from which to proceed, to commence a dialogue, to speak an idea, to live and work. It’s hosted by Multimedia Art Asia Pacific for the MAAP99 Festival and funded by the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council. Feng Mengbo (Beijing); Young-Hae Chang (Seoul); Rick Vermey (Perth); Tina Gonsalves (Melbourne) are partnered to interactively create joint on-line work.
Xi’an/Ipswich: Double Happiness is a unique cross-cultural internet exchange program with young web explorers from Australia and China. The project involves the joint design and construction of a website that will help create a link across cyberspace and between cultures. The project is managed by Arterial and Global Arts Link in association with the Bremer TAFE and the Xi’an Translators College with software support from Macromedia.
SPEAK comprises a conference, forum and training program. Presented by MAAP99 in association with ANAT and the Queensland Art Gallery, the conference Collapsing Geographies will take place at the Brisbane Exhibition Hall and Convention Centre on Saturday September 11. The focus will be on 3 artist exchange projects involving over 15 web artists from the region. MAAP is sponsoring international guest speaker Naranjan Rajah (Malaysia) at a forum discussing current and future strategies for digital art networks. This is part of the Asia Pacific Triennial Conference, Beyond the Future. As well, at the 30th World Congress of INSEA (International Society of Art Educators) MAAP will present an address and series of workshops to highlight the uses of technology for arts educators.
A real/digital night out
Opening night is Friday September 3 where special guests and late night shoppers will mingle in the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane’s CBD. The program includes large projections and a special opening program netcast live on the web. Melbourne curators Shiralee Saul and Helen Stuckey will present Pre Fab: Invisible Cities and Photon Palaces comparing and contrasting the digital architectural practices currently being developed by Australian artists and architects with those of their Asian peers. This virtual architecture exhibition will be projected onto buildings in the mall area. Cyberpoet Komninos will perform and project his poetry onto the main wall of the Queensland Performing Arts Trust. This will be netcast on the web. There’ll be computer games for those wanting to test their motor coordination. MAAP has also been trying to lure an international pop-star to Brisbane for this high-tech evening. “Diki”, the virtual pop star (originally from Korea, but often holidays in Japan) has promised a new world release for the MAAP 99 opening!
Stay online
Events physically held in Brisbane and in other parts of the region will be available to view from any location with a series of netcasts on the internet. Forums, artists’ live performances and intimate interviews will stream through the MAAP99 festival site to achieve a web festival experience. Each day of MAAP Month an online art project will be launched onto the MAAP website. Thirty online projects have been selected to enliven the web festival experience.
Fame too is on offer with The National Digital Art Awards staged at the Institute of Modern Art. And participation: a “People’s Choice” page will be housed on the MAAP website for judging the best Artist’s Website. These awards are open to all computer artists working in any digital format. Submit entries to the IMA.
MAAP99 is the perfect stay-at-home festival for the avid onliner but it’s also a seductive program for see-ers, seekers and speakers who want that special in-the-body festive experience. RT
MAAP99, Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific Festival, Director, Kim Machan. Brisbane and online http://www.maap.org.au/, September 3-12
Video clip. Animation: Ian Haig, 3 mins. Psychotronic grind….two headed transplant mutants, 50s monster movies, flying saucers, creatures from black lagoons, laboratory experiments, brain operations, invaders from Mars and lots of fuzz…
The biggest technical challenge in this project was working with Atomic Fuzz, because of their recent brain surgery.
Ian Haig is a media artist working across the areas of video, computer animation, and installation. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at VideoBrasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Pandemonium Festival of moving images, UK
Completion September 99.
Tracking
Denis Beaubois
Tracking is an installation exploring the reading of an event through the facial expressions of the viewer. The response of the viewer formulates its own narrative which we, as observers, attempt to decode. It questions the role of documentation as representation and in its place suggests a process of translation.
The proposal is to devise a system of video monitoring which makes use of infra-red technology and night viewing equipment to scan and record audiences viewing performances. The video signal will be relayed in real time to the front of the venue and displayed outside (in the street) via a monitor. All who pass the theatre at the time of performance encounter a real time displaced electronic audience symbolically observing the pedestrian and transient traffic.
Born in Mauritius in 1970, Denis Beaubois lives and works in Sydney. His practice includes performance, video and photography. He has performed and exhibited throughout Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United States. He has also worked as deviser and performer with Post Arrivalists (1993-95) and Gravity Feed (1994-99). His work titled in the event of amnesia the city will recall… won the Bonn Videonale 8 in Germany. He is presently working in Germany as Artist in Residence at the Artist Unlimited Group in Bielefield.
This work was tested as part of Space 1999 in May this year. It will be presented in Germany in October 1999.
Please Wait Here
Dominic Redfern
Please Wait Here is a video which also forms the central component of an installation piece. It takes as its subject matter daytime television, daytime talk in particular. It examines TV as a sort of campfire onto which we project our thoughts, drifting in and out of the content. The work is not, however, a negative critique of daytime TV’s opiate qualities. It seeks rather to embrace and explore some of the possibilities for a contemplative mode of awareness while in the viewing state.
The work took about 6 months to complete, pushing my home system to its limits, often taking up to 23 hours to preview minor changes to a minute or less of work. A 24 hour working method developed in which I would set the computer to render and then go off to bed, setting the alarm for a time when the computer predicted it would complete its rendering. Once completed the work cannot be backed up as a single file due to it’s size and has to be reconstructed from component parts each time I wish to copy it.
Dominic Redfern is a lecturer in Video Installation at RMIT in the Media Arts course area. He has exhibited work in galleries such as First Floor, Project Space, @lt TV and Westspace, and the Sydney Film Festival, Melbourne International Festival and the Anemone Program (WA).
To be screened at the Film and Television Institute of Western Australia and tour regional galleries as part of the Art’s Edge touring program.
Helen Herbertson’s new dance theatre work, Delirium explores the schism between the worlds of sleep and waking. “The disciplines of dance, improvisation, theatre, music, visual arts and film inform Herberton’s work. However the language she creates”, says her press release, “is something quite unlike any of the original stimuli. It’s a personal approach, deeply embedded conceptually in an emotional and physical world and brought to the surface via a delicate interaction and collaboration with several other artists.” In this case the collaborating team includes some of the best in the country—performer Trevor Patrick, writer-director Jenny Kemp, optical illusionist Ben Cobham and composer Livia Ruzic.
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Experience Delirium at the National Theatre, St Kilda, August 19 – 27.
RealTime issue #32 Aug-Sept 1999 pg. 37
“If new media teaches anything, it is that communal culture is productive. New media, like pop culture, shares its power with group reference. The more the better.”
Ross Gibson*
It would be right to say, the tiredness of the metaphor aside, that there has been an explo- sion of new media activity in Australia, an enormous amount of it online. It’s hard to keep up with, hence the importance of Working the Screen to help anticipate new works and com- prehend the breadth of activity. But explosion is not the right word. In her critical survey of the nurturing and development of new media, Sarah Miller argues that there’s been a great deal of teaching, learning, researching and experimenting going on for a very long time, and, despite funding cuts and some curious spending directions, artists have created many sig- nificant and innovative works throughout the 90s.
When we sent out messages requesting information from artists all over Australia about their works-in-progress the response was immediate and overwhelming. (It was interesting to read recently that the number of new media submissions for MAAP 99 (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific) quadrupled when compared with last year’s figure.) For Working the Screen, over half were works online, the rest installations (working from hard drive), CD-ROMs, a DVD-ROM, films and videos. There were also submissions from artists working in performance, spec- tator-activated installations, public art, dance and sound. Among the creators of the works- in-progress detailed in this liftout were some who once called themselves visual artists but are more likely now to label themselves media artists.
We were unable to contact some artists (overseas, too busy) and some felt that their projects hadn’t developed sufficiently to be reported. However, there were enough queries after our deadline passed to suggest we could immediately produce Working the Screen II. Jack White, producer of Museum Victoria’s Digital Planetarium (Scienceworks Museum, Spotswood) emailed us recently to report that “The new Melbourne Planetarium is cur- rently preparing a series of productions for its opening in September. We are employing 6 local digital artists and a couple of programmers for the job. The new facility is equipped with a 16 metre dome, 3D Star projector, 3
Barco projectors motorised for motion paths, a heap of slide and sfx projectors and six channel surround sound. The visuals are driven through DVMs. Production elements include 2D and 3D animation, multi-layering and all types of compositing, 3D star render- ing etc.”
We’ve just received Chunky Move’s CD-ROM (reviewed in RealTime 32), an Australian dance first exploring the collaborative creation and performance of the dance work C.O.R.R.U.P.T.E.D. 2. It was developed in collaboration with Peter Hennessey and Drome. Sound artist Nigel Helyer is working with Lake DSP in a 12 month partnership to create a 3D audio space with artistic and commercial potential. Justine Cooper, winner of the 1998 National Digital Art Award for Rapt, is developing a Biological Maze, with ramifications artistic and medical. There are also a number of dance new media projects by Jesse McNicholl, Chrissie Parrott and the new artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre, Garry Stewart, that we hope to follow up soon.
We also received many requests for reviews, given the limited availability of critical responses to new media art works, and even a job description redirected to us from recode: “A project between the Song Company and Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith to develop and write a new multi-media work exploring the scientific, ethical, social and political aspects of biogenetics and genetic engineering using the 6 singers of The Song Company and real- time computer processing of sound and images. The project URGENTLY seeks expressions of interest from artists working with video and multimedia wishing to contribute to this project. Further information: Roland Peelman, c/o Eugene Ragghianti.” Don’t hesitate.
We hope that Working the Screen excites interest in the range and complexity of new media work in Australia both as part of our rich screen culture but also right across the arts.
Our thanks to the Australian Film Commission, in particular to Kate Ingham and Julie Regan, for initiating Working the Screen, and to Brendan Harkin and Thea Butler of Online Australia (The National Office of the Information Economy) for their support.
Online Australia is involved in an astonishing range of initiatives, partnerships, forums and peak events, across business, government and culture. Amongst its cultural patnerships and sponsorships are the following: MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific), the online multimedia festival emanating from Brisbane in September is supported as one of its peak events. Online Australia hosted Project 1, a one day coming together of arts organisations, web developers and online business (see page 10). It has also declared the Apple-sponsored Fourth National Entertainment Industry Conference (Sydney, August 6 – 7) as The Peak Music Event of Online Australia Year. The National Cultural Festival Online (see page 7) is another cultural event supported by them.
Online Australia Year 1999 is a Commonwealth Government initiative designed to: help Australians succeed online; build Australia’s online communities; involve Australians in determining and participating in the nation’s online future. Online Australia 1999 comprises a national program of events and activities from March through November 1999 which will focus national attention on information economy developments and issues.
Each month of Online Australia 1999 has a theme, based on key areas identified in the government’s Strategic Framework for the Information Economy. From March to November these themes are: Information Economy; Regional and Rural Development; Small and Medium Business; Government Online; Employment Skills and Y2K; Education and Health Online; Culture and Communities; E-commerce; Australia and the Global Economy.
Here is a selection from Online Australia’s program for August – September:
August. Education & Health Online; Internet World Australia 99, Sydney, Aug 2 – 4; Telecommunications Online Forum, ACIF, SPAN & Telstra, Sydney, August 4; Fourth National Entertainment Industry Conference, Sydney, August 6 – 7; Royal College of Nursing Expo, Sydney, August 14; DTV & Datacasting: TV’s New Dawn, Sydney, August 19; Business/Banking Working in Partnership, Melbourne, Aug 20; Interact 99 Asia Pacific Multimedia Festival, Melbourne, August 20 – Sept 3; Online Australia Agenda Series: Education Online, Sydney, August 26; Health Informatics Summit, Hobart, Aug 29 – 30; Health Services CEO/PECC Forum, Hobart, August 31. Also in August, State Departments E-Health & Telehealth Workshops, Hobart, Perth Darwin, August; and Skills for the Information Economy, National.
September. Culture and Communities: Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Festival 99, Brisbane, Sept 3 – 12; Adult Learners Week: Seniors Online Day, National, September 7; Online Australia Agenda Series: Culture Online, Brisbane, September 9; Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, September – January. Online Australia Agenda Series: Access & Participation, Melbourne, September 21; Business to Business Trade Show, Perth, Sept 21-23; Online Australia—SBS Multicultural News Portal, Online, September 24; Communication Research Forum, Canberra, September 27-28; Community Networking/Networking Communities Summit Ballarat, Sept 29 – 30; Online Field Day, Ballarat, September 29 -30; The Australian Virtual Centre for Women and the Law, Online, September; Australian Schools Web Challenge Winners Announced, National, September; NOIE IT & T Skills Website launch, Online, September; Online Australia National Cultural Festival Online (see page 19)
Online Australia is coordinated by The National Office for the Information Economy within The Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.
For more information visit: www.onlineaustralia.net.au [expired]
3V Media is developing the Digital Artstore: a distribution outlet for Australian and international digital arts and media work, primarily CD-ROM based, but also including DVD, video and other media forms. The aim of the Digital Artstore project is to provide specialised online and physical channels for the promotion and distribution of digital arts and media work, including work funded by the AFC, Australia Council and other work distributed by other local and overseas organisations and artists. The project is to be carried out in collaboration with leading Australian independent book stores which will provide the physical exhibition and sales points supported by special e-commerce websites.
We are also currently seeking work for the Digital Artstore. If you are aware of work that should go into the Artstore, or working on a project, we may be able to assist you in distributing that work, locally and globally.
The Artstore is part of an Australian Film Commission initiative to develop distribution strategies for digital arts and media work. Completion December 1999. In the interim, some work is already available through the gleebooks global online bookstore www.gleebooks.com
Enquiries: 3V@media.com.au or visit www.digitalartstore.com [expired]
Traditional art forms have embraced new media in varying degrees, at different speeds. In most, progress has been stop-start, cautious, moreso than with artists who work direct to screen without the variables of, say, performance to take into account. New ways of working (programming, scoring), of presenting work (positioning screens in a performance space, in an installation, in a gallery, in relation to the bodies of performers and audiences), of researching, have had to be learnt from scratch by many artists wanting to explore the multimedia effect of other forms on their vision.
The term ‘multimedia’ has been challenged, at least in principle if not in usage by ‘intermedia’ (Darren Tofts, “Cutting the new media umbilicus”, RealTime/OnScreen #27), suggesting the importance of interplay (rather than the mere multiplicity) of forms and new technology, of the material and the virtual, and the importance of open-ended collaboration.
Under these circumstances, traditional forms blur, intermedia experiments generate hybrids and new works become difficult to categorise. For example, works by Norie Neumark, Philip Samartzis, Nerve Shell, Rodolphe Blois and Randall Wood promise striking visual and environmental experiences but have sound well and truly at their centre, framing and driving their works. It’s not surprising that the word installation has risen to such prominence (and been treated with such critical wariness). The installations listed on these pages are variously sound or video responsive but require participant movement, hopscotch or breath (quite different from the interactivity via mouse and click listed elsewhere in Working the Screen).
In dance and performance, the number of intermedia ventures is steadily multiplying, with notable contributions from Arena Theatre Company, skadada, The Party Line, Company in Space, Brink Visual Theatre, Salamanca Theatre Company, Doppio-Parallelo and others. Dance company Chunky Move have just released a CD-ROM, and choreographers Garry Stewart and Chrissie Parrott are engaged in new media investigations. Visual artists have not been slow to turn to the screen: galleries and contemporary art spaces have become first homes for a large number of new media works, either with one-off exhibitions like Mike Leggett’s Burning the Interface for the MCA, or Artspace and PICA’s continuing hosting and curating of new media shows, or the Bendigo Art Gallery’s current exhibition, byte me, with conference (speakers: Troy Innocent, Jon McCormack, Kevin Murray, Patricia Piccinini, Darren Tofts, James Verdon, Peter Hennessey). There’s Globe e the online journal/gallery. Michael Keighery explores ‘digital ceramics’ at the University of Western Sydney. And recently there’s been an impressive surge in innovative writing ‘in’ the web (tracked in RealTime’s regular hyperfictions and writesites pages) with some significant Australian contributions, prize-winners, and an Adelaide Festival presence in 2000. Public art too has taken to the digital with Patricia Piccinini’s Protein Lattice—Subset Red, 1997, a huge digiprint on a Melbourne building; Robyn Backen’s work-in-progress, the building that speaks, detailed on these pages; Melbourne’s Federation Square outdoor screens; and David Chesworth’s sound installation for the Olympic site (see Keith Gallasch, “Game to play” RealTime #29 page 42). The promise of new media across the arts is steadily being realised—we offer only a few of the many works to be seen shortly.
Ferocious debate characterised the third international dance and technology conference, IDAT ’99, before it even began. Hosted by Arizona State University in Tempe, this event sought to maintain its status as the foremost international platform for this ever growing field of work—on a tiny budget. So the dance-tech internet mail list blazed for weeks in advance with dramatic vitriol from far-flung artists, angry at the lack of bursaries and fees.
In the event, the international turn-out was impressive, with a strong Australian contingent done proud by Company in Space’s sublime telematic performance in the internet cafe, and the intelligent debate of artists such as Sarah Neville of Heliograph. Whilst there were many Europeans, in particular Brits, who appear to have suddenly woken up to new media in dance, there was naturally a preponderance of Americans and an overdose of academics, so that many of the panels deteriorated into navel gazing. Fortunately the pace of the conference was hot, with 3 events occurring simultaneously at every slot throughout the weekend, so those with an aversion to semiotics were able to busy themselves with workshops and demonstrations.
The potential for creativity offered by pre-existing or artist-invented technologies was clear in the diversity of the performances. The scale of quality was equally well explored. In well-equipped studio and theatre spaces, the presentations ranged from Troika Ranch’s now seminal demonstrations of their patented MidiDancer suit, which alters images and effects in live performance, to the work-in-progress sharings of emerging artists, such as Trajal Harell, dabbling with gadgets in their relation to his mature choreography. There was overwhelming poetry in The Secret Project, a text and movement solo in a Big-Eye environment created by Jools Gilson-Ellis and Richard Povall. The quirky Geishas and Ballerinas of Die Audio Gruppe from Berlin struggled onto a bare stage, to interpret the deafening feedback created by their interaction with Benoit Maubrey’s home-made electro-acoustic suits.
Isabelle Choiniere from Canada offered a terrifying neon-lit Kali figure in her full evening performance, Communion, which scored high for sound and fury but low for the slightest discernable meaning. Local hero, Seth Riskin, took his Star Wars styled sabres to their logical conclusions in Light Dance, an Oskar Schlemmer styled series of tableaux vivants which traced an instructive attention loss curve, where the decline of audience engagement was predicated on the initial impact made by each newly introduced effect. The more we saw, and the more dazzling it at first appeared, the more quickly we grew bored. Jennifer Predock-Linnell had a crack at the good old partnership of dance and film, with strong imagery provided by Rogulja Wolf, and Sean Curran made a small concession to technology by tripping his virtuoso solo in front of some projections. Ellen Bromberg provided the choreography in a collaboration with Douglas Rosenberg and John D Mitchell, and yet her production suffered for its all too well integrated media and fell somehow, slickly slack. Sarah Rubidge and Gretchen Schiller both created touchingly personal environments with responsive performance installation works, and Johannes Birringer and Stephan Silver opened their interactive spaces to marauding dancers in a workshop context.
Many other excellent performances added to the impression of an energetic and abundant art-form, encompassing a dizzying array of practices. There were few shared starting points to be found in any of the events, and this became even more apparent in the debates, which stirred up some exciting disagreements. A panel of artists took on the provocatively titled, “Content and the Seeming Loss of Spirituality in Technologically Mediated Works.” Presentations demonstrated a grounding in the sensual (Thecla Schiphorst’s enquiries into touch and “skin-consciousness” through interactive installations) and the religious (Stelarc’s shamanistic suspensions.) There was talk of the potential for abstraction contained in digitally mediated realms. The informed exchange inspired as many “back-to-basics” anti-technology comments as it did eulogies for hard-wiring and hypertext. Much was made of the fact that new media work in progress is often forced into the guise of finished product, when really it is only the start of a dialogue. The debate polarised; the artist should just dive on in, only this “hands-on” approach will get results; the artist must always approach technology with an idea in mind; technology can only ever facilitate, never create.
At the round table titled “The Theoretical-Critical-Creative Loop”, British artist Sarah Rubidge nailed her struggle to make work and theorise simultaneously by inventing the phrase “work-in-process.” Rubidge is searching for a new way of thinking about the evolving dynamic of productions such as Passing Phases, her installation which offers a route out of authorial control and into the newly imagined realms of genuine audience interactivity. Something innate to the complexity of the technology and its intervention into the experience of the viewer has taken Rubidge’s choreography out of her hands. Still struggling to escape her analytical roots and wary of the ‘inflatory’ language appended to much theorising about this work, Rubidge presented a tentative and thoughtful approach to her parallel roles as artist, academic and writer.
Another British choreographer, Susan Kozel, dissected her approach to the potentially restrictive technology of motion capture. Strapped up with wires, Kozel explores the margins of the technology, testing it to its point of failure. She spoke lucidly about artists working intimately with technology to counteract the idea of depersonalisation. The radical individualism of her appropriation of the motion capture system (to the extent that the bouncing cubes of the animated figure could be “named” according to who was wearing the sensors) was evidence of the vigour of the relationship between the body and technology which she believed to be at the heart of all the work on show in Arizona. There was no shortage of strong opinion at IDAT, and none of it simplistic. Let me leave the last word with a cynical critic from the fiery final panel. Her double-edged sword summarises the conference experience, by provoking exasperation and exhilaration in equal parts, “The more I see of technology, the more I thirst for live performance.”
IDAT 99, International Dance and Technology Conference, Arizona State University, Tempe, Feb 22 – 29
Geoffrey Dunstan, Kate Fryer & Rudi Mineur in Risk Reduction
photo Angela Bailey
Geoffrey Dunstan, Kate Fryer & Rudi Mineur in Risk Reduction
RealTime and Next Wave jointly commissioned the writers to talk to the artists and to attend rehearsals and presentations of 4 festival works-in-progress.
Alex Hutchinson:
Adam Broinowski’s Hotel Obsino and Geoffery Dunstan & Kate Fryer’s Projections of Fear
A description of the promo for inVISIBLE energies. A single piece of coloured cardboard, the promo is surprisingly subdued for a youth-related project. It avoids both the spastic application of Photoshop and any of the usual painfully deliberate misspellings which so often haunt similar projects.
A Biography of Adam Broinowski. As a performer Broinowski has worked for many companies, including Stalker (Blood Vessel) and Playbox (Thieving Boy/Like Stars in My Hands) for which he received the 1997 Green Room Award for best lead actor. Work as a devisor/writer includes Gherkin and Bucket of Blood Hotel.
An initial impression of Adam Broinowski. He sits with his legs crossed on the armchair at Bar Open, his fringe rising up from his forehead like sea grass. He talks fast and uses his hands a lot. He seems like the kind of guy you could take home to meet your mother, although you probably wouldn’t want to take her to his play. More on that later.
What is Hotel Obsino? Hotel Obsino is a play based on the real-life Hotel Hotham which squats in the heart of the city on the corner of Flinders and Spencer below a 5 lane train track beside the Yarra at its most effluent opposite Crown Casino and an active police station. The Kennett government wants to demolish it. Broinowski wants to write a play about it.
Where Hotel Obsino is at about a month before the work-in-progress presentation at the North Melbourne Town Hall which takes place about a year before the final presentation in May 2000 at the real-life Next Wave festival. Actually that last part is a lie. Broinowski has already written a play about it. Most of a play, anyway. He describes it as a portrait of an inverse Dante’s Inferno. A hotel populated by retired alcoholics on the ground floor, rising through middle-aged ex-cons to peak at young addicts. He says it’s about another time, another dimension, a sanctuary from Kennett’s dynamic Victoria.
A Biography of Geoffery Dunstan & Kate Fryer. Dunstan and Fryer have performed for various circus theatre companies in Australia including, between them, Circus Oz and Rock‘n’ Roll Circus. They have formed a new company, Dislocate, to create “quality narrative driven productions that combine acrobatic and aerial work simultaneously with text.”
An initial impression of Geoffery Dunstan. Geoffery Dunstan isn’t certain why he’s talking to me at all. It’s a work-in-progress, he says, and the article will come out after the presentation. What is this publicity actually doing? I tell him it’s all about process, about giving people a look at how a project goes from almost nothing to something. That seems to placate him. One of the first things he tells me is that he’s currently working as a body double in a circus themed Neighbours spin-off. I find the idea vaguely terrifying.
What is Projections of Fear? For a start, it might not be called Projections of Fear at all, but could in actual fact be titled Hug Your Monster or Risk Reduction. It’s a performance piece which combines writing with circus acrobatics in an effort to take a different look at the world around us. Dunstan talks about interviewing psychologists and the distance between traditional theatre and circus, and how there are groups on both sides who’d like to keep it that way.
Where Projections of Fear is at about a month before the work-in-progress presentation… Dunstan has just finished a week talking story with his navigator, playwright and director Michael Gow. He says he wants to find a way to create a more physical type of theatre while still hanging on to a sense of narrative. He wants to physically express ideas of social dislocation and try and uncover who it is that the city trains us to be. “Look at kids. From day one they’re taught that everything is terrifying. If people want to contain themselves, that’s fine, but when society does it…”
A note about Navigators. Each of the groups is assisted by a navigator. For Broinowski, this is filmmaker Tony Ayres. For Dunstan and Fryer, this is Michael Gow. Their roles vary. To Broinowski, Ayres is somebody to discuss the play with. For Dunstan, Gow takes a more active role. It’s his job to thread a story through Dunstan and Fryer’s acrobatics.
What’s so fascinating about process? It’s a question posed in various ways by both parties. Says Broinowski “Looking at another’s ‘process’ or the workings/mechanics of something fascinates people. Revealing things, uncovering things, showing the making of things, deconstructing things, pulling things apart.” Maybe it’s the next step along from selling productions by pushing the story of the author not the story itself. Now we can sell the story of how the production was put together. Maybe soon we won’t even need a final product.
Where Hotel Obsino is at a few weeks later. Broinowski’s biggest problem is finding a way to convey the essence of the finished play in a reading. While the final production will be fleshed out with movement, the performance at the Town Hall will be static. “I’m torn between linking the passages with summaries of what would happen there, and just telling stories about the 10 days I spent in the hotel.” Perhaps the most interesting point Broinowski raises is that before he went to the hotel it seemed to him as though the occupants really lived, “unconcerned with careers etc because that had been taken away from them. But afterward, I realised that it was a world I could never be a part of.”
Why show a work-in-progress at all? Broinowski: “In relation to Hotel Obsino, it seems to be very democratic to show a first draft to an audience and to listen to their responses. It gives the maker a feel for what they feel, gives the audience an option to voice an opinion before the work is done and brings a wider opinion than just the maker into the making. Anti-auteur I guess you could say.”
Where Projections of Fear is at a few weeks later. The preparation for Projections of Fear has been cut into 3 parts. The first involved Michael Gow and Dunstan sitting in cafes for a week, getting down on paper what was in Dunstan’s head. It was Gow’s role to build a narrative from Dunstan’s chunks of story. The second stage was Dunstan, Kate Fryer and Rudi Mineur working at Circus Oz, figuring out what they could and couldn’t do together physically. The last period was spent selecting the best aspects of each.
Part of an email from Broinoswki the morning of the presentation. “[Hotel Obsino] is still about poverty and fear in Australia, and the invisible distance between the classes—you could still say Alice in Deroland but less overtly ‘magical.’ It’s another perspective on Melbourne, on life. One that is authentic, though translated through the writer’s eyes. You could say the project has become less about humour, although I have concentrated on keeping it in there, and more about fear, more than I initially expected. And when I think about it I’m not surprised. We’ll see what you get. See you tonight.”
A Description of the North Melbourne Town Hall. A high-ceilinged, wood-floored, typical inner suburban town hall. Not quite a lecture theatre, not quite a stage. All the chairs are portable. The stage curtains are heavy and sea green. There is a kind of Juliet balcony jutting out from the back wall. Dips and cheap red are served at every interval. Thankfully there are no gym mats.
An interesting but mostly irrelevant tidbit about Michael Gow. His greatest fear is becoming an artistic dinosaur.
Ruth Bauer & Katia Molino in Hotel Obsino
photo Angela Bailey
Ruth Bauer & Katia Molino in Hotel Obsino
What the canary yellow photocopied flyer says about Hotel Obsino. Apparently Broinowski is confirming a “present day underclass of political zealots, junkies and assorted dispossessed souls” and has “taken these authentic voices and is interested in moving their stories beyond documentary into his own work of drama.”
What the canary yellow photocopied flyer says about what probably won’t be called Projections of Fear. “Fully integrating acrobatic and aerial work with a narrative”, Projections of Fear explores how “fear affects the way youth relate to society and how the city space informs these fears.”
Hotel Obsino. Filled with foul mouthed fuck-ups and presented in a series of vignettes, Hotel Obsino is dominated by religion, pornography, requests for cigarettes and a character called Nigel. Nigel moves through the work as a kind of initiate, progressing from wide-eyed novice to the point where he begins to take on the strange and wayward logic of the hotel.
More a portrait than a deconstruction, Broinowski pulls out some of the filthiest (and funniest) caricatures of various pieces of human flotsam you’re likely to see. The scariest thing is they were probably not caricatures at all.
The reading by Ruth Bauer, Katia Molino, Ross Thompson and Broinowski is loud, heavily accented and pretty damn good. Although Broinowski says that “the next draft will focus less on the words and more on the theatricality of the events in the play”, there’s already enough there to get your teeth into.
Projections of Fear. For the first half hour Michael Gow summarises the sad, pathetic tale of Country Boy and his unhappy (and sometimes imaginary) relationships with Hitch and Mr Muscle. Using physical confinement to symbolise the emotional and intellectual constraints imposed upon Country Boy by the city, Gow describes an attempt to act out acrobatically a very intellectual deconstruction of the role of society in shaping our personal phobias.
In the physical section of the performance, Country Boy is forced to board a vertical tram after his car breaks down by standing on Mineur’s shoulders. Hitch boards by standing on his. In a nice touch, the rope hanging from the ceiling has 3 real tram hand straps attached. He has elaborate fantasy sex on a photocopy machine and flees an enraged human-sized cockroach. All the while Mr Muscle attempts to protect him from the dangers of germs, bugs and contact with other human beings.
Heavy on the acrobatics and light on the dialogue, it’s a high-energy display of (mostly) non-verbal ideas, and it works. The tiny snippets of dialogue reinforce the acrobatics and better still, the acrobatics actually contribute to the story. Although the performance will likely change before it’s finished, there’s already a lot to be excited about.
A Post-Coital Moment. Afterward Broinowski complains that the audience didn’t talk about the content of the work. All the criticism and suggestion was aimed at the structure and form of the piece. I say maybe this is an extension of people’s fascination with process. Maybe because it’s a work-in-progress presentation the audience feels like it’s on the inside. They all think they’re editors. Fuck that, he says. Did they like it?
A bizarre objection recounted to me by a strange woman in a kaftan after Hotel Obsino. Apparently somebody had left the Town Hall with the following complaint: It just hadn’t been what they expected at all. They wanted a more obviously youth production, more verve, and apparently a much shoddier production. Quality and a decent story weren’t in keeping with the work of people under the age of 35. Apparently.
What You Should Take Away from this Article. There are 2 points I want to emphasise. One: The productions I saw were great pieces which just happened to be put together by young people, not young people’s work being sponsored merely because they were young. And two: There’s a long way to go to May 2000, but please try and remember.
Viviana Sacchero’s Innate
photo Angela Bailey
Viviana Sacchero’s Innate
Clare Stewart: Innate and City Blood
This is the way the Concept-city functions; a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machine and the hero of modernity.
Michel de Certeau, trans. Steven Rendell,
The Practice of Everyday Life University of California Press, 1984
Let me get this perpendicular: I am a grid girl. I choose a cartesian lifestyle because it satisfies certain fundamental requirements: it keeps me centred. At any point in time I can say “I know where I am”, which substitutes for “I know who I am.” Questions of identity have always disturbed me. A reference point—like map 1A, coordinates G7—is all people really need to think they know me. Leaving Melbourne’s CBD, I experience an immediate sense of vertigo. Taking the No. 57 seven stops to North Melbourne Town Hall for this series of works in progress makes me nervous, disoriented.
The city (its true name) is the topography of my imagination: I live its everydayness and love it as Ideal. In my laneway people dream, fuck, piss, die. People sleep and shoot-up in doorways. People watch each other watch TV. People design lofty visions for future cities. People give birth and bring up children. In my laneway buildings transform, house, leak and crumble. Buildings give surface on which the sounds of occupation and pleasure compete. Buildings block and reveal light. Buildings define the space I name ‘my laneway.’
In this city of people and buildings I am a pedestrian, a resident, a worker, a player—I move in the city and the city moves me. I am part of its machinery and it is my hero. I am part of its process and it is the result.
Viviana Sacchero and Carl Priestly share this sense of citizenship. It is manifest in Innate and City Blood, their respective works for inVISIBLE energies, the city in performance in development. Sacchero’s movement work and Priestly’s soundscape take ‘the City’ as material. They understand it as a physical space and an intellectual concept—they transform it into an object of study and a subject of representation. The city is not backdrop, it is not locale—it is the fabric of the work. Sacchero’s collaborative vision and Priestly’s individual noise do not mess with ideas of utopic or dystopic cities: they put forth clear, valid, interpretations of the city as it is experienced.
Viviana Sacchero’s Innate
“In approaching the curatorial brief of ‘the city’, I wanted to address the pervading sense of things ending—virally, atomically, philosophically…” Sacchero tells me. She is working with 10 movers aged 15 – 24. We are meeting while the work-in-progress is in its first stage of development. I ask her about the group’s perception of the city and she says: “I do not identify with this postmodern notion of ending. The young people on this project have their projections, memories and desires for the future. Dance culture and raves create a very exciting time for movement.
“Innate gives form to the city as a battery of design, icons and iconography and rhythm. It’s about the imprinting of culture, of thoughts and projections, walking, space, medic forms of communication, the ebb and flow of the city, and the idea that the city turns over.” Collaboration is central to the development of Innate. Sacchero worked previously with this youth ensemble on Distance for the 1998 Next Wave festival. Distance was itself a collaboration between Danceworks (director Sandra Parker) and Stompin Youth Dance Company (director Jerril Rechter). [RealTime 26 p. 8] Sacchero’s experience on that project as performer/facilitator led her to choose Jerril Rechter as navigator on this, her debut work as choreographer. She is careful in elucidating her position as a young person developing a piece with this ensemble: “I’m working with 10 young people. We are not participating in this project because of the semantics of youth arts, we are valid cultural participants.”
It is this idea of the ensemble as cultural participants, as citizens and artisans that motivated Sacchero to develop a piece through workshopping: her role as choreographer is to “cut and paste” the experience of the performers. The individuals in the group bring their own ideas of the city to the overall work: Fiona—the experience of the individual and the mass; Elise—the criminal underbelly; Damien and Kyle—the signposts of culture, graffiti; Kimberley—the shadows, the cyclical nature of light; Duncan—the architecture, the permanent edifices of culture; Jasna—the city defined by the interaction of its participants. Sacchero tells me: “their bodies are inscribed with the city and its forms. This document is relevant to the 10 bodies performing it—it does not matter where it is located, it belongs to those bodies.”
This sense of ownership is evident in rehearsal, and even moreso in the staged piece. These movers are not flawless, but they understand what their work is about: a very visible energy, an interpretation and structure that emerges from everydayness and that gives form to difference.
I see the huddle of transport in peak hour, the long shadows of the buildings as they stretch and fade in magic hour. I see the habitualised stamping and stowing of incidental objects. I see danger and pleasure. I see a city defined temporally, spatially. I see narrative in these bodies: the narrative of a lived day, of the strategies and tactics a body uses to negotiate the city. This is not some grand, totalising narrative—it is inclusive and provisionary. Innate makes me feel like moving through the streets of my city.
Carl Priestly with Philip Brophy, City Blood
photo Angela Bailey
Carl Priestly with Philip Brophy, City Blood
Carl Priestly’s City Blood
The raw material of City Blood is gathered through pedestrian activity, through communing with real sounds. Priestly tells me: “the use of location recording and surround sound are very important choices. I wanted to capture sounds that would be sonically imprinted, that would activate memories—visual and spatial.” We are meeting toward the end of the first stage of development. I ask him about the importance of location to the staging of the sonic event, concerned about positioning the audience for a sound work. “I want to set up the piece so that sound will move left-right, forward-backward establishing the audience as a relative point, in the same way that an individual in a city is a relative point.
“City Blood configures the pattern of visiting, of arriving, travelling through and leaving a city. This is the pattern of young people, it is my experience of the city. It is experience through a filter: iconic sounds are transformed digitally into metaphoric sounds.” Priestly is a graduate of the Media Arts faculty at RMIT. Over his years at RMIT he has been influenced by his chosen navigator on City Blood, Philip Brophy. During that period, his work has gone through a transition from rock’n’roll to the musique concrète form that City Blood appropriates and reworks. “City Blood reflects on the ‘natural’ sounds of the city, which are not what might usually be considered ‘natural’…what I’m doing is kind of in opposition to new age stuff which takes natural sounds out of context and puts them in a sterile environment. I’m taking machine sounds and making them natural.”
We discuss the limited opportunities for presenting soundscapes, the barriers pushed in order to get work heard, and understood. It is important that City Blood is perceived as a sonic event. Although Priestly has finished recording, and almost finished the pre-performance mix by the time we meet, he points out that the work is not complete until the moment of the live mix. This is essential to the project: “The work takes the body as its central metaphor of the city, especially arteries. It attempts to transform city sounds into neurological information…it is important that City Blood capture the life energy of the city.” The performance enacts that life, that energy—a synchronicity of the pulse of the mix and the mixer, it defines the ‘eventfulness’ of the piece.
I hear the mediated babble of railway announcements, the lurch and blur of traffic momentum. I hear the fetishised hum of communication, the distortion of faxes and modems transferring information. I hear ritual, collision and fear. I hear the city insinuate itself: speak its functionality and its history. This is the expression of the city as a body: morphing and fluxing. This is the city so abstracted, it becomes readable, recognisable. City Blood makes me feel I am walking the streets of my city.
City limits: inVISIBLE energies debated
Innate and City Blood have been developed and presented in a very specific context. The City of Melbourne’s endorsement of Next Wave, its message to its constituency, is that projects of this kind “nurture a culture of contemporary ideas into the 21st Century, support the work of a new generation of artists and encourage young people to engage in the arts” (Cr. Peter Costigan, Lord Mayor, City of Melbourne, Next Wave 1999 program brochure). inVISIBLE energies is itself a political strategy, a component part of the metanarrative of urban and cultural planning. However, the complete project title—inVISIBLE energies the city in performance in development—has so many qualifiers, its position is rendered ambiguous. On the one hand, it wants to make visible the work of young and emerging artists (I take “inVISIBLE energies” to refer to both the idea of surfacing artists and to the subject of the works). On the other hand, it (the title and the project support material) polishes the semantics of youth arts with the rhetoric of the urban designer and practically apologises for the provisionary nature of work in development. It is my disposition to find this precautionary language irritating, to read it as an attempt to contain the participating artists within the boundaries of the project. The problematic nature of this contextualising mode was ardently addressed in the panel discussion, “The Ubiquitous Program Note and Other Working Dilemmas”, where artists, navigators and audience members passionately dissected the difficulties and benefits of developing and presenting material within this framework.
This is Next Wave’s historical (and perhaps, inherent) contradiction: it provides a solid infrastructure for the presentation of new work, an infrastructure designed precisely as a safe zone for young and emerging artists to push limits and test ideas. inVISIBLE energies takes this one step further, using Next Wave’s downtime to construct, and financially support, a space for the development of such works. Next Wave transforms this contradiction into something to live with. It allows practitioners to tactically employ the City’s strategy to their own end, secure in the knowledge that the City requires them in order to be able to celebrate its diversity, in order to be able to lay claim to the political by-line: Melbourne, City for the Arts.
This dynamic was further addressed in “City Views: Where We Live Today, How We Want to Live Tomorrow”, the first of the 2 panel discussions which took place over the 4 days of the presentations (putting North Melbourne Town Hall to good civic use). Fiona Whitworth, Project Officer for the City of Melbourne, put forth her view that council policy positions itself as a concerned guardian or parent, “containing young people and their use of the city.” She cited the CBD skate park as a key statement in the development of a “youth precinct”, the provision of a safe, but not sanitised, space for young people. This is a space (or ghetto) endorsed by urban planners and policy developers rather than everyday users. The small, but vocal, audience argued that skaters would always transform the obstacles designed to deter their activity in public spaces (stepping, benches, ridges etc) into props for new tricks and moves, that they would continue to use the city tactically, illicitly.
Let me get this straight: the act of skating, like walking, “affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects etc the trajectories it ‘speaks’ (Michel de Certeau)”. Skating and walking are urban tactics which appropriate and transform the space they traverse. Innate and City Blood use movement and sound to articulate the myriad of narratives these appropriations and transformations create. Sacchero and Priestly have actively, and creatively, protected (through representation) the concept of the city as a site of difference and diversity. They have employed the framework of inVISIBLE energies to develop performances which knowingly give form to the city as everyday and Ideal.
“If we never meet I hope I feel the lack…”
James Jones, Thin Red Line
Fingers poised on the keyboard. Ready. Set. Log in. These days I have to wear a wrist support when I work: this body is making a protest about speed and repetition. Internet Relay Chat and email are fast and random. Channelling through the limited bandwidth of online communication text prevails in email, IRC, MOO/MUD or Website, shifting the vernacular of the ‘written’ word if not its preponderance. Online communities are most obviously communication-based and driven, formed of meetings which emerge from these hectic flows.
In 1998, the Adelaide-based Electronic Writing Research Ensemble produced a project called Ensemble Logic, curated by Teri Hoskin. As an introduction to online writing communities, it presented an opportunity to venture into unknown writing terrains with a cohort of like-minded strangers. For 4 months, Ensemble Logic engaged theorists, artists and writers to consider an electronic poetics. They presented ‘lectures’ and met regularly to discuss, participate in and produce writing. All of these activities took place online. Throughout the project an email list was maintained for ongoing discussion, investigation and writing. Running through the telephone lines connecting the machines at which we worked and mused, a writing nexus developed.
There are faultlines and we cross them, making connections, affinities. In this context, the ‘virtual community’ is formed, as Sandy Stone claims, as “a community of belief.” (Michael Benedickt, Cyberspace: First Steps, 1992)
In Ircle, the command for entering a chatroom is ‘join.’ Meeting convened. Chat bounces between a half dozen or so writers: an extract from an Ensemble Logic Internet Relay Chat lecture/discussion:
Sue: do you think the web offers new opportunities…
Sue: for writers to experience fiction for real?
mez: makes for confused email pardners;-)
amerika: yes, definitely
amerika: without it I never meet any of you & that would be a much less interesting life!
tink: i agree…
ti: im wondering how some conceptual artists see this environment, clipper, got any ideas on this one?
mez: art m-ulating write m-ulating life m-ulating…..?
clipper: im thinking of 70s events and happenings
ti: yes, the connectivity is very important
Writing. Community. Virtuality. Each word catalyses and interacts. Virtuality, as some kind of ontological register, seems to renegotiate traditional and generational ideas about both writing and community. Simultaneously, I am sympathetic, nostalgic and agonistic. I use the term ‘community’ sceptically and charily.
Community is a term I distrust even though the values it evokes—participation, belonging, trust, civility, etc—appeal to me. How do you measure a value? Founded on assumptions about consensus, rationality and collectivity, community seems to be a calcified myth of rational society which privileges and edifies the normative and unitary. An unnecessary tension exists between the individual and community. Virtuality traces and splits difference along paths.
And writing? It confounds me. Operating as a communicative contingency, the virtual writing community forms (in and as) a networked environment, a cyberspace for writing with no horizon. For Donna Haraway, “this is a dream…of a powerful infidel heteroglossia (Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 1991).” Through and across this space we experiment with and negotiate connections, networks, collaborations, difference, language, writing, virtuality. These experiments are undertaken under the auspices of community for the purposes of writing: to boldly go where? McKenzie Wark argues in his recent book, Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace, “cyberspace contains within it many possible forms of community and culture that have yet to be actualised” (Pluto Press, 1999).
Writing communities, public forums or online writing resources are established as adjuncts to university programs: courses are conducted or resourced in part or whole online. These days, so many universities are offering online programs. An example is the Networked Writing Environment (http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/writing/nwe.html – link expired) at the University of Florida where Gregory Ulmer works and consults (http://www.elf.ufl.edu/~gulmer – link expired). Another example is the Hypermedia Research Centre (http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk), a loose collective of artists, writers, academics and designers developing hypermedia as an artform. Partly, such initiatives are the result of funding restraints, decentralisation, R&D, open learning and flexible delivery. They are also driven by the promise of pedagogical and cultural innovation and inquiry offered by online environments; the opportunity to adapt and divide the culture of higher education. Universities can be considered ready-made ‘communities’, so the shift online can seem supplementary, a means of extending a collaborative, learning and communicative environment via email list and IRC or MOO into virtuality, attracting new or different ‘markets’ or constituencies. As well, publics tend to form around various journals, e-zines, homepages and other cultural ventures. Seemingly, these nodes become organising, connecting or focal points for a multitude of networks.
While based at a university, trAce Online Writing Community (http://trace.ntu.ac.uk – link expired) is an independent writing environment and resource delivering a range of programs courtesy of lottery-generated funding (US$500,000) from the Arts Council of England. trAce operates out of 4 rooms in Nottingham Trent University in the UK. It sustains a global community in real and virtual space for writers and readers. trAce’s Director, Sue Thomas, has been writing inside the text-based world of LambdaMOO since 1995. MUDs and MOOS are designed to encourage the shared construction of an environment in which writers/players can interact with others and with objects. The environments are immersive, collaborative and polyvocal. People come and go.
At trAce, interactive technologies are used for multiple purposes. While there are MOO rooms, hosted by LinguaMOO, for engaged writing, there are also online lectures, meetings and tutorials, writers in residence, conferences and a discussion email list. trAce also publishes the online journal frAme and hosts webpages and projects including the Noon Quilt and the recently announced trAce/alt-x International Hypertext Award (see WriteSites). For the uninitiated a range of linked resources and instructions explaining MOO are a link away. trAcespAce at http://crash.tig.com.au/~garu/ts.htm – link expired) is a site dedicated to representing the experiences and interactions of trAce members. During Ensemble Logic, Thomas delivered ‘Imagining the Stone’, a MOO-based presentation and tour of 4 rooms:
.nathan. says, “one also has to be electrate too…”
dibbles says, “virtual disappeared faster…..almost faster than the eye can read”
teri says, “the transcience, the timeliness”
spawn says, “a girl (or two) could very easily get left behind in this conversation”
You [Sue] say, “this idea of electracy – can you explain it for posterity and the cap file?”
dibbles says, “there is no trace… pardon the pun”
smile dibbles
You smile at dibbles.
teri says, “[Greg] ulmer writes that electracy is to the digital what literacy is
to the book”
teri says, “that is, we must become literate in the peculiarities of this environment”
You say, “let’s move to the next room and hear your thoughts”
teri says, “and maybe learn to touch type:-)”
You say, “type on”
Emerging from these encounters are practices which are ‘grammatological’, which interrogate Writing, Community and Virtuality from within. It’s so tempting to put some kind of mathematical symbol between these words which adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides or equals. It’s tempting to turn them into an equation for a better life that strives towards an idealised ‘other-world’ rather than live, make, imagine and play with them as part of this multifaceted and networked world. Writing, Community and Virtuality are apprehended in lost and found ways in a lost and found world.
Linda Carroli is a Brisbane-based writer, visual artist and curator whose works and work-in-progress can be found at http://ensemble.va.com [link expired].
An m-pression of interacting online at trAce by Teri Hoskin. Source: trAcespAce. Reprinted with permission of the artist.
Peter Sheedy & Csaba Buday, II (two) video capture
Peter Sheedy and Csaba Buday have worked together before, but never like this. As the Choreographic Centre’s first Fellows for 1999, they had a few weeks to explore the national capital, workshop their ideas, and then bring it all back to the studio to create II.(two) New to Canberra, they brought a keen eye for the strange quality of the place—the beauty, the linear/circular nature, and even the sterility. Choosing sites of interest, they worked with composer Ben Walsh and video artist Bridget Lafferty.
Airport. A visitor’s first impression, the Canberra Airport is captured here by night in an opening video. From a static vantage point, the camera picks up the blurry lights of the runway and the distant trucks and cars as they move slowly across the screen.
Railway. They sit, backs to each other, on 2 standard railway platform benches, waiting, fidgeting, thinking, never making eye contact. When movement begins, it is small but rapid, startling in the scene. Balancing on the back rim of the chair, suspending the moment, before flying into each other. As they confront each other through increasingly daring eye contact and physical closeness, it’s athletic, aggressive even. Their heavy breathing carries through the tiny space, hanging over the stillnesses in between the energy.
Brickworks. The film projected on the back scrim shows one of the many caverns in the disused Canberra Brickworks. Buday and Sheedy appear, sweeping the sand with their feet. The pace escalates as they kick the sand and it goes flying, and they seem to jump up the walls. The score uses sounds of machinery, bells clanging and hollow rumblings, evoking a sense of the history and atmosphere of the site. Then they are in the space, in reality, with the projected image of the Brickworks hovering behind. They use contact work that progresses to visual contact only, with Buday’s shadow playfully exposing and covering Sheedy.
Sculpture Garden. Projections of the Fiona Hall garden in the National Gallery of Australia illuminate the space. Sheedy’s solo is first. He hangs from a crude set of monkey bars, one arm holding his limp body, feet dragging beneath him as he twists to spin himself from the structure. He climbs, jumps, and falls sharply; the momentum increasing and diminishing randomly. Buday uses the space differently, with sculptural movements between the shadows and projected images. Both men have an awareness of the quality of their every movement and how this relates to the performance environment.
Olympic Pool. Fully clothed, with goggles, Sheedy and Buday are filmed from within the Olympic Pool at the National Institute of Sport. It’s a playful, absurd moment: they run in a distorted slow motion, move about ridiculously, Sheedy checks the time on his wristwatch, and it all happens to a remix of Elvis’ Suspicious Minds. II (two) works well for these unique choreographers, in many ways thanks to the rare luxury of research and development provided by the Choreographic Fellowship.
Peter Sheedy and Csaba Buday, II (two), The Choreographic Centre, Canberra, March 18 – 20
Brisbane Riverside development—a maze of boardwalk, white cement, grey bollards, busy eateries and granite steps. A deep melancholic note like a foghorn at world’s end draws my attention to a phantasmic pair of Gothic characters (incongruous in the midday bustle). With a hauntingly lyrical flourish from vocalist Christine Johnston and a desolate jangle of her beckoning bell, the Gothic heralds (with Lorne Gerlach on trombone) wordlessly lead us off on a tour of the dance life that abounds in the crevices and crannies of this unlikely habitat, thanks to Cherry Herring’s Dance Week offering, Cityscapes, 5 site-specific works by 5 choreographers bringing dance to a public space.
First stop: a deserted beach. Barely washed ashore, a half submerged human corpse shudders, and gropes, rising from the shallows, tearing at the plastic bag that contains its head, dragging itself from its swampy death. So far Brian Lucas’ Golum has me convinced. Standing now on the river bank, Golum moves, Golum dances, Golum even points its toes. Now something gets lost; the piece flickers between dancer, Lucas, and swamp-monster Golum. Aside from intrusions of contemporary technique, Golum is mindful of his stagecraft. Odd. From our off shore position we observe from afar Golum’s private moment of returning to the world of the living. But Golum the dancer turns back towards the water from whence he came, to face his audience, to dance to us, before stalking off, away from us, into the city…This crepuscular being, who might have emerged from the Paris sewers, is glimpsed again later, more sustained, haunting the tour, still capable of invoking a chill spinal response despite the executive workaday atmosphere.
Jean Tally and John Utans use contemporary vocabulary in more conservative ways. Tally utilises a shallow moat of ankle deep water in a beautifully lyrical, if safe, formalist expression of the aesthetics of wind and water. Less dancerly and self conscious, Utans’ Boardwalk proves memorable in its simplicity; an unaccompanied celebration of movement in particular spaces. Viewed from a distance, the exploration of perspective and architectural feature becomes the viewer’s role. On a second viewing, I am disappointed to find that its ‘a capella’ effect was due to technical problems. With its intended soundtrack of contemporary music (inappropriately positioned behind the audience) Boardwalk loses much of its subtlety.
Katie Joel abandons technique for comedy. Her Cinderella-cum-luxury car ad gone wrong certainly amuses, amongst others, a black suited tableaux preset on the steps of the Brisbane Polo Club—4 matching executives who, a theatrical setting in themselves, become implicated by chance into Joel’s choreography. After all, we are outside the lobby of Brisbane’s most prestigious corporate address.
Around the corner Lisa O’Neil emerges from her ultramarine satin hoop-skirt and threatens to dive into the lobby fountain. With signature Suzuki physical control, she advances toward the glass exterior wall. Facing us from the inside, her staccato duet with the window uses contrasts, repetition and a strong sense of rhythm and playfulness to evoke desire, frustration, and resistance until, stalled in her repetitions, swamp-man reappears to carry her limp body away. A brilliant sense of drama inherent in movement detail and dynamics informs this well-crafted performance by a consistent and self-assured choreographer. Then the whole is closed by a requiem hymn for trombone and voice from our Gothic hosts.
Except for O’Neil’s Foyer, contemporary dance vocabulary was the bottom line here. One wonders what different juxtapositions might have been precipitated had a more diverse movement language been explored. Reflecting on Cityscapes, I can’t help feeling that contemporary technique, like guitar music, is one of the great beige equalisers of performing arts.
Cityscapes, The Cherry Herring, curator Shaaron Boughen, choreographers Brian Lucas, Jean Tally, John Utans, Katie Joel, Lisa O’Neil; performers Christine Johnston, Lorne Gerlach, Brian Lucas, Joseph Lau, Michelle Spearman, Danae Rhees, Glen McCurley, Sara Toso, Samara Skubij, Katie Joel, Phil Knight, Helen Prideaux, Lisa O’Neil, Riverside Centre and environs, Brisbane, April 23 & 30
The Mercury Cinema was the venue to host the final manifestation of bergbau, a 4-part series of chance-based art events held at the Lion Arts Centre in Adelaide’s west end. Presented by elendil, MRC’s new media coordinator, bergbau and its ensemble of local sound engineers, filmmakers and artists set out to experiment with the synergism of sight and sound through developmental combinations of old and new media technology.
Throughout the performance I felt myself shifting restlessly from anthropologist to engaged participant. The dexterous display of geekery from the technical crew hunkering around elaborate consoles in the shadows beneath the screen, was often far more captivating than the hypnotic streams of light and sound resulting from their adroit manoeuvres. After attempting to consciously collude with the gaudiness of the techno-wizardry going on around me, I began to grow weary, reaching for fleeting windows of escapist immersion.
Picture theatres invite a physical lethargy that forms part of the entertainment, as cinema audiences trade the vulnerability of their static bodies for the sanctified and total engagement of mind. To wilfully partake in this hoaxing of consciousness we require the complete collaboration of the senses. Theatres harbour the ritual grafting of external narratives to the individual experience of self through the acquiescence of bodily comfort and safety. If the collaboration of body and mind is in any way interrupted (if your bladder is about to erupt or someone in front keeps rustling that chip-bag) it is impossible to attain that state of lethargy required to really transpose your conscious beliefs into the psychic space the film is attempting to invoke. Filmmakers have made their life-work out of convincing audiences that what they see and hear occurs simultaneously and without mechanical intervention. The artists within bergbau, however, attended to the amplification of mechanical intervention within the duration of the performance, creating a noticeable rift between the cueing up of sensory input and the delivery of sensory output. The quilting of archived film snippets with what appeared to be live web-cam grabs and DJ’d sound generated some gorgeously bizarre dialogue: the resulting compositions made for some delightful aural and pictorial experiences. Unfortunately, the architecture of the Mercury Cinema made little contribution towards sustaining the audience’s involvement or augmenting the atmosphere bergbau would have attained, had the audience been able to move around within the space. I felt it may have been interesting, given that the ‘operation room’ of the show was exposed, to display the images appearing on the screen in reverse, as if we, as an audience, were tapping into the back projections of a spectacle directed at an audience on the opposite side of the screen.
Within the context of a rave, revealing the performative ‘means of production’ of sound artists, musicians, visual and performance artists is a major part of the art itself. In the context of a sit-down theatrical event, however, I feel that the experience of those audience members within the physical parameters of bergbau may have been sacrificed for the benefit of a remote audience receiving a live stream of the event across the internet via r a d i o q u a l i a. As often is the case with art ‘happenings’, fixed and catalogued documentation will hard-wire the forms our memories seek to recreate them. The documentation of bergbau (http://www.va.radioqualia.com.au/
bergbau) would make for an exquisitely beautiful aural/pictorial if treated not as false advertising but as another plateau for the work to spread.
If the installation Shock in the Ear (Artspace, 1997) and the subsequent CD-ROM of the same name are anything to go by, Dead Centre: the body with organs, a new installation from Norie Neumark and collaborators should entertain, disturb and certainly make you think—re-think, that is, your relationship with your body and with computers. The usual analogy between brain and computer is out. Norie Neumark thinks that scientist often get the analogies wrong. What if we thought of the computer as a body instead of a brain—we feed it, it ingests, digests, processes, absorbs, erupts, excretes. What if we re-thought our bodies instead of living out the Anglo model of bodily experience. As Lynn Payer in Culture and Medicine has described it, the British are bowel centred, the French look to their livers, the Germans to the heart and the circulatory system, the Americans see the body as a machine, the East is elsewhere altogether. As for Australians, that’s something to reflect on, but it’s not surprising that Neumark has invoked the Dead Centre. She has written: “I first understood my body as cultural one day when, after overeating in Italy, I complained of a stomach ache, but my Italian friends bemoaned their livers. How did they know where their livers were? I wondered…a decade later and thanks to acupuncture, I not only know where my liver is but experience its symptoms and can even track it to various tender points on my feet and legs.” Historically and culturally our organs travel about. And therefore one of the key figures in Dead Centre is travelling, the other is the computer as an organ of digestion and transmission.
To encourage this reconfiguring of our metaphorical habits, Neumark works through stories she’s collected, performances, sounds, still images and projected animations, “that fracture the ‘natural’ body.” The images by digital visual artist Maria Miranda entail X-Rays, scans, the skeleta of the computer and body organs, but avoid the literalness of western images of the body. The vocal track (pre-recorded by sound artist/performer Amanda Stewart to text by Neumark but also performed live improvising with herself on several occasions during the installation’s gallery life) also fragments and transforms. Stewart, a distinctive poet, reports that she’s enjoyed the rare process of working to someone else’s text and is looking forward, says Neumark, “to reacting in a lateral way to a mixture of memory systems.” Composer and programmer Greg White, writes Neumark, “creates the pulses which hold the room/machine together and has designed special software to enable the complex sound design.” Neil Simpson lights the space in which Miranda’s image-printed sheets of copper and silk will hang. Six loud speakers will “express the organs”, drawing on Stewart’s performance and sounds from the Dead Centre sound art piece Neumark produced earlier for ABC FM’s The Listening Room.
I ask if the radio work forms the template for the installation. Neumark says yes and no, a lot of other things happen as the work transforms from one medium to another. She likes the creative accidents that happen The one thing that is constant, she insists, is her preoccupation with sound. For all the visual appeal and drive of Shock in the Ear and Dead Centre it is sound which is at the heart of these works. The voice too is of the body and carries its own cultural baggage. An important part of Neumark’s ongoing project has been to see how sound artists can work with visual artists. In a few months, Neumark, a Senior Lecturer in Media Arts Production, University of Technology Sydney, will return to the United States for a year on a Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, teaching a course she’s designed and doing a lot of work on her next project, about the envelope making machine—her grandfather invented the device and also the envelope with window—and the genealogy of email. It’s a work about the desire to create ‘envelopes’ and the culture of invention.
Dead Centre: the body with organs, The Performance Space Gallery, July 8 – 22. Live performances with Amanda Stewart July 8, 11 & 18.
Working between the ‘physical’ space of the gallery and the ‘virtual’ space of online environments is something I expect we will see more of as visual artists seek to inject some of the differences and possibilities of online environments back into the gallery. As a website Diagnostic Tools Corp.™ effectively utilises the now familiar corporate interface to offer the user an array of well plotted paths. The critical intent is quite literally stated with all the hyperbole of intrusive and marginalising www advertising. Autocratic questionnaires construct consumer profiles for your future shopping ease; banner ads flash their banal messages begging you to ‘up’ their ‘hit’ counter; the promise of all—the return of little.
The much vaunted ‘interactive interface’ (ie a form) invites the user to ‘input’ a paranoid episode to the Paranoid Poetry Generator. Text gleaned from user submissions return in the gallery as sound bytes emanating from the Paranoid Interface. This imposing black edifice reminiscent of large machines built to view small things (or Darth Varda perhaps) is replete with conspiratorial surveillance theories. The viewer climbs the black rubber clad steps and looks through a distressed-metal framed slit and beholds an eye. One could hope that this horribly beautiful eye in the centre of the inky black was actually winking, but I think it is a little more sinister than that.
Four large light box panoramas (Blueprints for Diagnostic Tools for the New Millennium) are mounted on the gallery wall. The composite images aptly summon what Paul Mann in “Stupid Undergrounds” calls the “whole dumb hollow of culture.” Online they exist on a smaller scale as Quicktime VR files (Quicktime VR places the viewer [by dint of their mouse] at the pivotal point of the picture. The pivot is central). Each panorama has a sales pitch, for example “‘Technologize’ nature and ‘Naturalize’ technology with this bi-directional consciousness filter. Blur the boundaries between the two, collapse the categories and profit from the undifferentiated mess.”
“FUZZY LOVE DIAGNOSTICS…confirming that technologically enhanced love is logical and data dating is the future love vector.” The Fuzzy Love dating service for both gallery and website visitors (dis)functions differently in both spaces. Details can be entered in either environment. The gallery interface is more complex and entertaining. The prospective client can devise their own ‘image’ (depending upon their imagination as to how best to meet the eye in the eye so to speak). The snapshot then joins an array of flickering portraits of other fuzzy clients. Within firmly set paradigms (the quintessential being the assumption that net users are chiefly in search of love) one can construct an identity based on values and sexual preference. Without a net connection the gallery service fails to deliver a result. This is by design but perhaps this intention is a little overstated and unnecessary.
As an indication of how quickly things change in the domain of internet parlance, the 1997 work comes across as slightly dated. The artists’ intent in the gallery was to isolate the user and stress the solitary nature of these love match pursuits. It becomes instead a site for light relief and chat (of the flesh kind) amongst those who wish to break with the dead-end narratives of humanism’s losses represented by the other works. It is quite likely that new networks amongst gallery goers would actually be made if, charged with a wine or 2 and the encouragement of flesh world friends, you could follow up on your perfect match immediately. Perhaps now Diagnostic Tools has finished its round of gallery tours (Adelaide was its last stop after Berlin, Canada and Sydney) Fuzzy could be developed into a fully functional web dating service.
In the realm of utility Diagnostic Tools for the New Millennium could be very useful for teaching. The hands-on critical approach to the colonising of the web by the corporate apparatus is unique. Here every component of the monstrous culture machine is a device or a tool. The project revels in the bipartite realms of private/public (inside/outside); original/copy (intellectual property/information wants to be free); flesh world/virtual world (innocence/culpability). Binaries are always a good place to leave from.
Diagnostic Tools for the New Millennium, Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, Experimental Art Foundation, March 25 – April 4, online at http://starrs.banff.org [expired]
Comparing each artist’s entrance, I watched the tiny envelopes of ideas unfold in those first few seconds. Jennifer Monson made a racket climbing down a ladder in the dark, a hand-held light bouncing off chunky bare legs, strong feet; but also a feeling of precariousness, a rattling looseness, of missing her step. Ishmael Houston-Jones did not want us to see him at all, yelled to make the lights go out, sang a song in which he called a moth, “Here mothy, mothy, mothy.” He calls our focus to his voice. Trotman and Morrish entered with all the subtlety that epic minimalists might muster, quietly opening doors onto soft cross-roads of light, their de rigeur portent and tracksuit pants making us immediately remember every dance workshop we’ve ever been to.
In Keeper, Monson extends physicality into sound: vocalising and resonances like slurping, blowing raspberries, whistling, laughing, breathing, stamping, humming, guttural and animal-like. Her movement often seems comical, burlesque. We wait for the punchline but there isn’t one; the dance itself is that. Her sounds give her movement a feeling of clarity and form. At first, with a kind of childish simplicity and demand, she plays at the obvious, wanting grand gesture, practised physicality. A child’s imagination might aspire to finding form, making sense of things that way; an adult might want innovation and breaking that form up in order to find sense. Monson has captured both these levels.
Her movement can be fast, powerful and complex, integrity without a falter. Sometimes she finds soft, peculiar muted sounds, odd archaic movement, more fantasy than animal. At one point she is dancing with her shadow on the wall, not with that abstracted visual artistry that we have seen before at The Performance Space, but with the kind of immediate, gutsy demand for attention, a foil for high art.
In the Dark, Houston-Jones’ first work, gives us the sound and effort of movement, boots crashing round on the floor, uneven breathing, his voice telling us about Darryl who could only criticise dance in purely visual terms. We can’t see his body, but the amount of distortion in his voice and breath shows what sort of energy there is. We know where he is; we have images; there are things going on. Rather than invisibility, the work seems more and more to be about exploring what is revealed.
Rougher is really softer. Wearing a blindfold, he sees only by the direction of light and the shadow of his hands in front of his eyes. He randomly switches a hand-held light off and on, illuminating parts of his body: palm, calf, chest, under-arm. He swings it around, shifting the shadows, creating lines, setting up images of flesh, fleeting art. In a spotlight, we watch as he lifts his long shirt to reveal his crutch, a peculiarly vulnerable gesture.
In Without Hope a heavy concrete brick becomes a tool with which Houston-Jones vividly illustrates a series of horrific injuries suffered by some fragile human. He speaks clinically, an autopsy report, but the weight and roughness of the concrete is real and felt. Sometimes it pins him down; it is cradled, kissed, drunk from, dropped. Sometimes he lies over it, as supplicant or penitent we’re not sure.
Other no-win, no-choice stories: a New York law—if someone is dying, then doctors may prolong that life by mechanical means. But then, removing that mechanism amounts to manslaughter. Frida Kahlo’s text provides the title, “Without Hope.” Her suffering, while sometimes thought to be self-inflicted, is still real, both subject and impetus for her work.
As a subject of scrutiny, a body that is just itself, flesh, nerves, hormones, is defenceless in a way, open to whatever description an audience provides. To be scrutinised, to come face to face with mass judgment, does not seem to be a choice that ‘people who do gigs for a living’ can make. It is a heavy weight to bear if you know it can also destroy you.
Lastly, we see his eyes for the first time, looking up, engaging. His gestures are protective, indicating exposed jugular, glands, areas of fragility. It is then we know that this body, substantial, weighty, but full of the delicacy of nerves, breath and blood, is a vulnerable thing, capable of immense complexity, but easily damaged. The reality of humanity is not something one has a choice about.
Peter Trotman and Andrew Morrish, Avalanche
photo Mark Rodgers
Peter Trotman and Andrew Morrish, Avalanche
The practice of ‘reverend awe’ and a sense of the ‘moral high ground’ have often been visible aesthetic qualities to which serious students of new dance apparently aspire. The wit of Trotman and Morrish lies in their expert physical capacity to reveal such idiocy, having an eye for every pretentious nuance and cliché in the new dance and theatre improvisation hand-books. Epic meaninglessness, vacuous intoning, deeply felt superficiality, or just standing round looking enigmatic, are faithfully reproduced in Avalanche, along with impeccable timing, flexible structure, compelling story telling, and some really good tricks with imagery, which make Trotman and Morrish’s commentary priceless.
All deal with more than the visual. Images and ideas coming to the mind’s eye give substance to the works. The tail ends of these pieces have brought us quite a way from their beginnings, but always with that palpable feeling of the body moving, causing, acting, creating.
Femur: Jennifer Monson, Keeper; Ishmael Houston-Jones, In the Dark, Rougher, Without Hope; Trotman and Morrish, Avalanche: The Convolutions of Catastrophe and Calling, the Creeping Spectre of Chaos and Collapse; Antistatic, The Performance Space, March 25 – 27
The 2 installations presented at antistatic consisted predominantly of film screenings. Anderson, Bram and Doig’s films were projected onto entire walls, Medlin’s films were scattered throughout the space in conjunction with lighting features and sound, and Everitt’s films were projected onto 3 screens as a triptych accompanied by a soundscape.
A common element across the works was architectural structures and space which interweaved tightly with the filmic dimension throughout. The situating of action within architecture, the projection of the work onto the walls of the building and the incorporation of structure as sculpture (including Doig’s staircase and arch which fractured the projected images) created a striking theme. I thought about dancing bodies I have seen drawn into a purely filmic space and live dancing which rigorously reworks the body’s surrounding space and the contrary tensions represented here—space and movement, volume and elasticity come up against each other in these works rather than integrate.
Medlin’s Choreography of Space exemplified this effect with its multiple approaches. She managed to convert the entrance hall into a cinematic simulacrum, the flickering lights combined with the progression along the corridor mimicking the cinematic apparatus with the participants/spectators themselves becoming the ‘moving image.” Upstairs and in the foyer Medlin created encounters with oversized body parts; an arm that beckons, appearing on a dark wall like a miracle and writhing across it before retreating and repeating; huge feet that measure out the guttering above the foyer.
A beckoning arm (or is it shaking off?) again becomes an anticipated moment in Everitt’s triptych, A Simultaneous Retracing. It reaches out of the dark centre screen towards the audience, disembodied and plastic, before withdrawing. Another theme emerges now—the representation of the dancing body. The dancer in this case is Rebecca Hilton who also almost appears in Doig’s work. Libby Dempster is the dancer in Medlin’s piece and Lucy Guerin features in Anderson’s Black and White and Animation. In all these cases, the dancers are subsumed into a choreography of images, providing articulate body parts, singular gestures and abstracted dancing figures within fields of motion which cover structural and sculptural surfaces.
Bram’s film, Kuala Lumpar 1998, is a landscape dancing with micro movements created through fast-motion. Anderson’s Eisenstein-esque montage featuring stone statues brings a kind of impetus to the static through rhythm. Hilton turns a corner again and again in Everitt’s work, figure and landscape hammered onto the same plane through repetition; beside this a hazy view of a room shaded from afternoon light imbues the domestic space with potential action. Collectively, these fields of motion seduce the spectator into participation—moving around the rooms, up the stairs, catching beginning/middle/end.
Doig’s The Other Woman featured alone before the Clavicle programme. Its sculptural dimension—a staircase and an arch—produced odd details; Doig’s painted lips in a close-up came to rest on the lowest step of the stairs. Close-up shots featured heavily in determining this ‘woman’—an-other woman who Doig plays in various guises. The close-up turns her face into a plastic surface whose micro movements constitute a kind of disembodied field of activity. She appears in harshly fabricated places; fake bricks and astro-turf provide a background for her heavily made-up and bewigged characters that seem caught mid-scenario. In striking contrast to Doig’s appearances in this work, Hilton is a faceless body moving through an indefinite space. She ‘dances’ in this work in a full-bodied, rhythmic way not seen in the other collective installation and the treatment of Hilton here brings to a head issues relating to ‘the dancer’ in such work.
The dancer is removed in these installations from a live performance space but included in an investigation and reconstruction of a performance space, putting the dancing body into a kind of productive crisis. This results here in disembodiment, fragmentation and transformation, a play with appearance and disappearance and a dispersion of the figure to become one amongst other moving elements. These observations arise due to the context of the installations within a dance festival. The conscious play with motion, space and the choreography of bodies and images explains their inclusion in antistatic and they represent an important interdisciplinary area of development. My question—why dancers—is perhaps about the fascination of the figure in such work and what the skills of the dancer bring to that.
Doig went some way towards answering this question in her discussion of The Other Woman as part of Atlas—a mixed programme of talks, screenings and the antistatic workshop showings. Doig said that she had brought Hilton into her project to develop a series of gestures for Doig’s characters, gestures demanded by the melodramatic tone of the work. The links between melodrama, movement, gesture and dance are logical but Hilton’s performance within the work sits outside this system. Doig explained that she wanted to keep Hilton anonymous so as not to complicate the already profuse collection of characters. All this amounts to an interesting and telling play within this work between drama and dance, face and body, character and movement.
Lisa Nelson, in discussion with Rosalind Crisp, spoke about what video has offered her as a dancer. Nelson picked up a camera when she stopped dancing for a while. When she returned to dance, she says that what she took with her from that experience was a new awareness of choice-making processes. From using the camera as an eye she developed an acute sense of focus and frame which informs her improvisational work—the imperative to move, to follow, to change. “Movement” has come to equal “choice” for her; she has worked her way back to this point. During the supper discussion later that night, the “thought” involved in this “choice” became the focus as she spoke of a “mind-body-dance” and joked about the intelligence going on behind the “narcissistic display” of dance performance—an intelligence that has had to be “outed.”
The struggle between movement and a verbal or written account of it which Nelson signals here (Nelson is co-editor of US magazine Contact) was an issue which developed further throughout the supper discussion (and indeed into the next day). Jennifer Monson struggled to speak—she provided a clear, straightforward voice throughout the festival for me—settling on dance as her ‘language.’ This reminded me of her comments at Susan Leigh Foster’s lecture at UNSW where we had worked our way back to a body released from technique which was heading towards being released from habit. Monson intervened to save the dancer’s own specificity—the peculiarities of physical language which make someone like Monson the remarkable performer she is.
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Margie Medlin, Stephen Bram, Jacqueline Everitt, Ben Anderson, Elasticity and Volume, The Performance Space Gallery and surrounds, March 25 – April 4; Adrienne Doig, Rebecca Hilton, Peter Miller, The Other Woman, The Performance Space Gallery, April 1 – 11
Atlas: Tracie Mitchell, Adrienne Doig, Surething; Vikki Quill, Rosalyn Whiley, MaryAnne Henshaw, LayLeisurelyLay, The Performance Space, April 10
I remember when I started as a lecturer at Macquarie Uni in 1990 coming across some research on the effectiveness of the lecture format which informed me that students on average retain around 10% of what is said in a lecture, more (around 30%) of how it is said (intonation patterns, delivery, timing…) and much more (around 60%) visuals (how the lecturer looked, their gestures, what images they presented etc). This underscored what I’d always thought about the lecture format, not just that it had to be performative, but that it was, in the eyes of its audience, already a type of performance and that those of us who were going to engage in lecturing as a mode of transmitting data were also (perhaps even more so) to be engaged in mobilising a perceptual framework about performing that we needed to take on board.
Jump forward 9 years to Susan Leigh Foster’s 2 recent Sydney gigs (lecture performances or the other way around) and I found a thoroughly planned and impressive model which responds to this very dynamic. Anyone present at these events at TPS on March 28 and UNSW’s School of Theatre Film and Dance on the 29th was forced to confront the lecture space as a kind of pedagogic mise en scene where the lecturer’s words were interrupted by sudden though rehearsed movements and gestures which sometimes underscored a discursive point and sometimes undermined it, manifesting a playful irresponsibility of language to its objects and of the authority figure to their underlings in the crowd. Irresponsible because the response is not obvious, only a hybrid response will do justice to the performance. A simple registration of the data will not help in understanding what is at stake in this type of lecture. One must enact a creative response of one’s own. I find this a very generous style of communication not least because the lecturer has placed their own physical capacities on display, but because a plurality of focus points emerges depending on the specific concerns of each spectator. There was plenty to look at and to think about even if you were losing the thread of the argument.
Other receptions of these pieces were not as enthusiastic. Some argued the obvious point that it was hard to just listen to the words, others said the words were too prescriptive of the moves she made (and presumably that she shouldn’t have been speaking at all), others said it was comical, “like John Cleese lecturing on movement while doing his silly walks routine”, others said the movement was too technically precise and that while the pieces were exploring a hybrid form their choreographic elements paradoxically served to reinforce traditional modes of moving which were unemotive, detached, purely formal displays of technique. In my view one shouldn’t begrudge Professor Foster her training and in any case, the variety of moves she made suggested something other than pure formalism, eg moving through an audience and taking pens, bags and personal objects from the spectators then redistributing them throughout the space. Neither was the text purely discursive. Often language was used in an explicitly performative sense. In the TPS lecture the audience was asked to stand up, run on the spot, stand close to someone, stumble, stretch, duck, balance, pose, run stealthily and touch someone’s hand…nor was it possible to ignore the generous spirit with which she engaged with the varying audience reactions to her work, reactions which sometimes verged on the bloody minded not to say bizarre.
In her 2 performed pieces in Sydney, she presented the performance of knowledge as something more than a bombastic parading of facts or a bewildering discharge of concepts; as an embodied array of learned and unlearned behaviours which seem to permit more freedoms than they constrain. In this model spectators can choose elements of the mise en scene to focus upon, and elements of the text to listen to, triggering a sense of lightness in the learning situation, rather than the weighty, dour and humourless lecturing styles which we have all been exposed to and wish to forget. In short it is a knowledge performance which expresses a desire to animate debates, a crucial pedagogic task in the age of the info-byte.
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Middle Ear: Susan Leigh Foster, Kinaesthetic Empathies & the Politics of Compassion, Antistatic, The Performance Space, March 28
Choreographer, dancer, writer, Susan Foster is Professor of Dance at the University of California campuses of Davis and Riverside. She is author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, and Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire. She is also editor of Choreographing History and Corporealities.
In Russell Dumas’ Cassandra’s Dance, at the Opera House Studio, one sensed the enormous discipline, focus and specificity. Dumas located this dancing in a visceral sound score by Paul Healey and in a provocative set of references—columns (suggesting Greek architecture), the walls and floor of the Opera Studio (a space which profiles high art) and in relation to the myth of Cassandra. Watching this dance I reflected on art as doomed prophecy, classicism as a relic and the frailty of the body, knowledge and history. Could performance be an intense, agitation that passes all too quickly? This was a rich offering.
In Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham’s work, morphia series—Strike 1, light partnered the dancer, at times barely illuminating her and at other times framing her. Watching this dance was like that stumble from sleep when the house seems strange and part of a dream. Herbertson, like a wind-up doll, moved and stopped, changed rhythm and her stiff gestures, and was intriguingly, beguilingly flesh and mechanical at the same time. Cobham sat in the large space and brought to life this picture show on the distant stage. I was drawn into some sort of relationship with my own terrors and childlike wonder. Again a specific cultural heritage was invoked; this time, German expressionism and its troubled relationship to fascism. I also recalled Gordon Craig’s vision—the performer as uber marionette.
In contrast, works by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Trotman and Morrish in the opening program have the impulse to yield ‘an effect’, in particular for the speech of the performer to direct the audience’s experience. In this kind of improvised storytelling performance I feel drawn into a social relationship with the performer. I feel obliged to laugh, be entertained or empathise. Interestingly, Eleanor Brickhill deliberately invoked a specific social context, the cocktail party, to speak about the act of performing. I enjoyed the juxtaposition and conflation of these 2 places of interaction. I was reminded of the pleasures and discomforts of both settings and of how difficult it was to ‘simply be’ in either. However the text and dancing were arranged in such a way so as to allow my relationship to the event to keep shifting. I was glad never to feel that ‘pinned against the mantelpiece’ party feeling.
In KunstWerk, Alan Schacher searched as if hunted, feeling his way, fitting in, moving on to an industrial soundscape by Rik Rue. This image of a body mapping a place which offered no rest, an alien place, resonated with me. It came close to an image of my current experience of watching performance.
I like dancing to be framed. I like dancing to conjure up a field of references and associations, to provoke reflection. I don’t like to be too specifically positioned by my, or the performer’s, personal history. I don’t seek nor trust ‘empathy.’ I want instead that shock of having a feeling I didn’t expect. In a world where I am asked to empathise continually I want something more from live performance. I fear I have, as Philip Adams describes it, compassion fatigue.
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Russell Dumas, Dance Exchange, Cassandra’s Dance, The Studio, Sydney Opera House; works by Herbertson, Brickhill, Schacher, Antistatic, The Performance Space
Here is a metanarrative-free text which is seriously intertextual, idiosyncratically fragmented and dangerously challenging notions of authorship. It wouldn’t be stretching the point to make claims for its flavours of bricolage, (re)appropriation and even the ludic. While (sadly) lacking in irony, parody or camp, it is possible to detect an ecstasy of excess, an inferno of intergenericity, a nose for nostalgia, a quire of “quotations”, a ream of repetitions, and a penchant for pastiche.
A Baudrillardian wetdream? A work by Imants Tillers? The poster for The Truman Show? Nothing so obvious—but you might turn to another article if this one began by revealing the text in question as Get The Picture, the Australian Film Commission’s 5th edition of their biannual “essential data on Australian film, television, video and new media” (AFC, Sydney, 1998). But if statistics, pie charts and line graphs are not your accustomed fare, postmodern or otherwise, don’t be put off. Where else could you discover the media facts and figures to dazzle your friends? Did you know, for instance, that Australian women beat their menfolk by 6 percent in terms of bums on cinema seats? That our consumption of popcorn and cola represents a mighty 17 percent of exhibitors’ income? Or that while Sydney television viewers in 1997 preferred True Lies and Speed to Muriel’s Wedding, in Melbourne they sensibly opted for Muriel and the Crown Casino Opening Ceremony in preference to either Schwarzenegger on a bad day or Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock on an even worse one. This may all sound like media trivia to you—but to the industry it’s life and death.
To everyone who cares about the future of screen culture, reliable data about production, distribution, exhibition, audiences, overseas sales, ratings, video rentals and sell-throughs and awards is crucial. Without it, wheels will continue to be reinvented, mistakes remade and, perhaps even more potentially disastrous, successes turned into persistent formulaic codes and conventions.
The AFC and the editors of Get The Picture, Rosemary Curtis and Cathy Gray, should be more than congratulated on this excellent book, they deserve to be hugged. This is a model book of its kind. It proved to this normally chart-allergic cultural analyst that the mantra ‘style equals content’, ritualistically chanted to media students and cultural producers, applies to sets of statistics as much as it does to films, television programs, videos, digital media products, or any other text.
The book provides overviews of each chapter, a beautifully simple cross referencing system, enough historical background to make sense of the present, and clearly designed visual material in the form of charts, graphs and columns (plus the occasional production still) to make browsing an attractive proposition. In addition, the introductory sections are written with verve and style—in particular those by Sandy George, Garry Maddox and Jock Given. In short, the data collected in this book is peerlessly presented, can be effortlessly acquired and understood and provides a comprehensive survey of our screen industry and culture.
So much for the formal characteristics of Get The Picture. But what, as Grace Kelly crucially asked of James Stewart after he had (somewhat tediously to someone wanting to be kissed) adumbrated a series of observable, empirical facts in Rear Window, does it all mean? For without this question there wouldn’t have been a movie—not a movie worth watching. This point is raised by AFC Research Manager, co-editor Rosemary Curtis, in her introduction:
Then there is the issue of what the data means—what it is telling us. This question is not unique to Australia—there are few international standards of performance indicators in this area—but it is vitally important. While the breadth and width of the data collection must be maintained, the new task is to develop methodologies for analysing and contextualising it.
This, of course, is where the fun (or pain) begins. It is perfectly possible to draw complacent conclusions from the array of data about the state of the industry a couple of years ago. Total employment in the media industries had increased since 1986 by 53 percent. The size of the industry in number of business terms had expanded by 70 percent since mid-1994. The number of feature films produced in the 90s was almost double what it was in the 1970s. Screens and admissions have both steadily increased over the past years. On the whole, the data apparently provides cause for celebration.
But we can’t ignore what the data doesn’t (or can’t) reveal. Worrying tendencies or patterns are emerging. There may be more women employed in the screen industries than the average for all industries, but there are also more women earning less and more women working only part-time. Who knows if this is from choice? Feature film production may be almost twice what it was in the 1970s, but it’s down—and decreasing—from the 1980s. Is this the result of increased budgets in an unsuccessful attempt to compete with mainstream blockbusters?
It may be precipitant to celebrate the increase in screens and admissions: in 1995 the number of US screens per million population stood at 106 while we had only 64; Americans visited the cinema an average of 5 times a year while we went merely 3.9 times. Clearly growth in Australia has to be carefully nurtured if the stasis the US is experiencing is to be prevented.
What can be deduced from the fact that between 1993/4 to 1996/7 the number of films classified MA rose from 8 percent to 18 percent? Does this mean excessive classification criteria or more violent movies? What is the significance in the levelling off of video rentals and the increase in sell-through purchases? Might this lead to fewer video classics as some fear?
Nor does data alone shed light on Australian screen tastebuds in terms of both production and consumption. There seems little to celebrate in the reduction in the number of Australian movies in the top 50 from 2 in 1996 (Babe at 2, Shine at 20) to one in 1997 (The Castle at 13). Undeniably, the films themselves leave some screen culture analysts with an unpleasant aftertaste and raise questions about the commissioning and funding process which no amount of data will answer.
As Rosemary Curtis states, the bringing together of an extensive array of information and commentary on Australia’s audiovisual industries—film, video, television and new media (as she quaintly calls what is, by now, a medium fast reaching maturity)—is part of the effort to develop methodologies for analysing and contextualising the data. She is clearly aware, by her use of the plural, that there is no single thought-frame for any industry or government body to adopt. It would be disastrous if we failed to espouse a pluralistic approach to either the production and funding processes or the analysis of our screen culture.
Get The Picture: essential data on Australian film, television, video and new media, 5th edition, Australian Film Commission, Sydney 1998.
Cyberspace is the ostensible topic of this book. It is really a kind of Cook’s tour of space as it has been conceived and visualised through the ages, from the soul-space of Christian theology to the hyperspace of multi-dimensional physics. It is important to keep any discussion of cyberspace within a historical framework and Wertheim has done an admirable job in providing an extended cultural history into which cyberspace can be situated. Her argument is a fairly simple one and, as the title of her book suggests, it measures cyberspace against a quasi-Christian view of space as being transcendent, immaterial and other. “Cyberspace is not a religious construct per se”, Wertheim suggests, but “one way of understanding this new digital domain is as an attempt to realise a technological substitute for the Christian space of Heaven.” There is nothing particularly innovative about this suggestion, as cyberspace has been theorised elsewhere as a “spiritualist space” (Michael Benedikt’s “Heavenly City”, William Gibson’s Vodou pantheon in Count Zero). What perhaps is new is the sociological spin Wertheim puts on the emergence of cyberspace at the end of the 20th century: “Around the world, from Iran to Japan, religious fervour is on the rise.” But Heaven is something to be put off for later, so I will return to this issue directly.
How has the West configured space? This is the question that shapes Wertheim’s discussion and the book is structured around a series of discrete moments in the history of space. It is a very linear, tidy history, beginning with the theocratic world-view, as articulated by Dante and Giotto, which, via the Copernican revolution, Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian relativity, incorporates the outer reaches of contemporary cosmology. As earthbound physicists such as Stephen Hawking contemplate the infra-thin spaces of quarks and virtual particles, they once again turn our attention to the sphere of abstraction that exists beyond the physical world-view that has dominated consciousness since the Enlightenment. Wertheim’s contention is that with cyberspace we have returned to a realm not dissimilar to the Medieval conception of “Soul Space.” Consistent with the transcendent motivation of this space of spirit, Wertheim refers to “cyber-immortality and cyber-resurrection.” Enter the “cyber-soul.”
There is a certain kind of logic in Wertheim’s account of a re-emergence of a conception of space that dominated an earlier age. However I have a number of problems with her anachronistic misuse of cybercultural terminology. For instance, Dante does not represent himself in The Divine Comedy as a persona but as a “virtual Dante”; the Arena Chapel in Padua is a “hyper-linked virtual reality, complete with an interweaving cast of characters, multiple story lines, and branching options” (the italics, which are telling, are not mine); Medieval thinker and theologian Roger Bacon was “the first champion of virtual reality.” To be fair, such throwaway lines detract from what are otherwise interesting discussions of the ways in which the techniques of representation yielded to the pressures of verisimilitude and the desire to create in the Medieval viewer/worshipper a more vicarious sense of presence, of actually being in the scene or space being described. This is in itself a fascinating issue, for as writers such as Stephen Holtzman and Brenda Laurel have suggested, VR concepts such as immersion have a respectable ancestry and their logic has hardly changed. This doesn’t give us licence, though, to return to the Middle Ages armed with cyber labels for our predecessors and certainly not with such abandon (The Divine Comedy “is a genuine medieval MUD”). Giotto was without question a pioneer in the “technology of visual representation.” He was not, though, our first hypertext author. We can perhaps claim that there was something hypertextual in the way the narrative is presented in the Arena Chapel, but we have to evaluate this against the rigid, hierarchical manner in which the Medieval mind read the world. Wertheim is sensitive to this, but fails to account for it adequately. She also fails to note that just because we have hypertext it doesn’t follow that it represents an episteme or way of seeing that residents of the late 20th century all share. Most visitors to the Arena Chapel today would more than likely read its narrative as a causal sequence of events. More to the point, they would presume that there was one.
The other major problem I have with Wertheim’s argument is the contention that cyberspace is “ex nihilo”, a “new space that simply did not exist before.” Contrary to Wertheim’s surfeit of space, I simply don’t have the space to take issue with this position. However as a statement it points to a worrying element of contradiction in her argumentation. In the same chapter we are informed that with cyberspace “there is an important historical parallel with the spatial dualism of the Middle Ages” (we are also informed that television culture is a parallel space or consensual hallucination and that Springfield, the hometown of the Simpsons, is a “virtual world”). In a book that attempts to synthesise such parallels and account for cyberspace as a return to a Medieval type of space, it is odd to read in the penultimate statement of the book that “Like Copernicus, we are privileged to witness the dawning of a new kind of space.”
The book is very distracting in this respect and it testifies to an unresolved tension within Wertheim’s assessment of cyberspace. While she is sensible and articulate in her delineation of space as it has been figured throughout history, she is still caught up with the novelty not of cyberspace, but of cyberspeak. There is not enough analysis of what type of abstraction cyberspace involves and how we actually relate to it spiritually or any other way. Too many of the familiar themes of cybercultural discourse are simply recapitulated, such as the possibilities for identity and gender shifting in MUDs, the liberatory potential for “cybernautic man and woman”, of avatars and interactive space and the hackneyed whimsy of downloading the mind into dataspace—et in arcadia ego. Any force that is generated by Wertheim’s main theme is lost as a result of the book’s straying off into the already said. How is data-space like the Christian concept of Heaven? This is an interesting question, but beyond the tropes of cyber-dualism and cyber-transcendentalism; nothing original in the way of a convincing answer is forthcoming.
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace is consistent with much cyber-utopian criticism in its evaluation of cyberspace as a positive, therapeutic phenomenon: “There is a sense in which I believe it could contribute to our understanding of how to build better communities.” Well, I suppose we are still waiting to see if this will be the case or not.
In the meantime, how do we account for the fact of this new space? In response to this question, Wertheim advances her least convincing argument. Unsupported by any research and reliant entirely on speculation, Wertheim suggests that at a time of global religious enthusiasm “the timing for something like cyberspace could hardly be better. It was perhaps inevitable that the appearance of a new immaterial space would precipitate a flood of techno-spiritual dreaming.” As sociology The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace just doesn’t cut it. Despite the reservations I have with the book, it is nonetheless a useful study of the contemporary fascination with space and the historical legacy of Christianity, the history of ideas and the visual arts.
Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, Doubleday, 1999, ISBN 0 86824 744 8, 336 pp.
The primacy of the body as matter for thought has become a tenet of poststructuralism. Likewise the notion that embodiment is a form of knowing. Philipa Rothfield’s ‘thought experiment’ at Dancehouse was to bodily explore these ideas, by allowing a little ‘Pensive’ reflection to take place in performance. She and dancer Elizabeth Keen began with a right turn logic that marked out a progression of squares on the floor—their soft footfalls diminishing lines to perimeters. Keen speaks of Descartes, who else? For isn’t he the man who caused the problems…He asks “what then am I?” Keen watches. Rothfield is an arm/arc/archipelago. She is more beautiful than Descartes in her shimmering shot fabric, fake fur and leopard spots. She is a lioness while ‘he’ observes and speaks—utterance seems to defy movement.
Soon the 2 find moments of overlap. There is a licking, sliding, pawing—they become a conjoined woman. A Siamese twin with 2 heads, 2 hearts, 2 hands, 2 feet—how does she think? This is a problem for psychology—‘both hands are holding the mouse of the computer’—but would philosophy have them torn apart? The dancers are locked and knotted through and around until their heads appear to rest, one against the other. They are like-in-like with a certain coyness about their private discoveries. Their gaze is direct and beyond reach but not far away. I am struck by an intentionality in their looking which suggests a certain kinesphere—a thought realm that can be held in and around the body. It stays quite constant throughout, the way that thoughts venture forth only so far and then return.
Dancing separately, there begins greater variation—thoughts exist in contradistinction, thinking like no other, thought in a hand held up or thought holding itself in a cupping at the back of the head. The body and mind we are told is a ‘fissure’, a word-sound. Possibly a wound, or possibly something to be filled. Their final duet is a reply to this gap in thought—but it is filled with ugly words that end with -ity or -acy or -ility and -ation. They hook toes and elbows, they investigate ‘incorporation.’
The piece was like a hieroglyphic—sketches of women, eagles and crescents drawn in sandstone and therefore, a little flat, following a single narrative line leading us from proposition to proposition with interludes of wonder in between. I am very fond of Descartes’ thought meditations and although we might be troubled by his conclusion “I think therefore I am”, there is a wonderful delirium in his questioning of self, of God and of reality—in his writing he lets himself go to the limits of thinking through his body. Pensive suggests a more measured contribution to thought and it seems that Rothfield’s work was the preliminary sketch of a meditation that is still to ‘hallucinate’ the dialogue between an I and a body. The conclusion with its postmodern emphasis—an incantatory resolution drawing the binaries of bodies and thought together—arrived too soon, historically and artistically, to shift the influence of Descartes from this self-conscious dance work.
Another approach to the problems of the cogito, the defining of the human subject by the thinking I, is evident in desoxy Theatre’s DNA 98.4% (being human). This major work asks the questions ‘what thinking has made the human species regard itself as above all others?’ or more directly ‘what makes the human genetically different from other animals?’ Their answer is not so pretty, in fact what you watch is disturbing, if also funny peculiar, as Teresa Blake and Dan Whitton become ape, reptile, bird and transhuman. This project has been reworked over 4 years and the complexity of the research shows in the extraordinary bodies of the artists, androgynous but even less than sexual, andromorphic. What they do on the horizontal and vertical planes of movement confounds categories—climbing walls as a body of upper or lower legs or looping over themselves in a spiral of links in the chain between DNA and the exoskeleton. At one point they put on genitalia to distinguish man from woman, with their converse heights presenting a further confusion of sexual roles. They enact a courtship dance—the fundamentals of mating are necessary after all to further the species but the distance between our socialistion of those needs and their function is immense. The more disturbing reality is that it could be dispensed with altogether if the scientists of the human genome project advance their supremacist biological thinking. Suspended in cocoons, desoxy await their dying so that the human DNA can be incubated for future generations. I am confronted by the work to consider evolution, its inexorable hold on science and its relationship to humanness.
There is too much to take in, to absorb in ideas and in looking from desoxy’s sometimes didactic presentation of this material; but I am grateful that they are artists whose living is to make art that asks seriously hard questions. It seemed ironic that this production which played to small audiences was pitted against the Melbourne Comedy Festival—will we really laugh ourselves into oblivion.
For more on 98.4%DNA, see Mary-Ann Robinson, “Double helix of tricks and ideas”, page 32
Pensive, Writer/deviser/performer Philipa Rothfield, performer Elizabeth Keen, designer Like Pither, costume design Heidi Wharton, Dancehouse, April 23 -25; 98.4% DNA (being human), desoxy Theatre, David Williamson Theatre, Swinburne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, April 13 – May 1
Jenny Weight’s Rice is an assortment of cultural odds and ends—dominoes, spearmint chewing gum wrapper, a portrait in a red checked shirt, calligraphy, television coverage, 4 year-olds and Shockwave animations. “The time has come for action” says a United States president and it’s American imperialism full steam ahead with a voice I do know—Jimi Hendrix—and a journey into archives of memory on war. There’s a sense of displacement. A woman screams in the early morning in a hotel room. She won’t stop.
We’re in North Vietnam now, listening to the static, “In Vietnam/we swallow the future whole./But digested/is different/from dead.” The dominoes start to topple and we become “the supertourists. We stand outside, bigger than our own history.” Vietnamese fighters and quick hopping doves. An endlessness of clicking, cameras, keyboards keys, dirt and heaven. Like a game of patience, surprises are turned up and over, yet framed in circles by distance. Images are ambiguous, nothing appears as it seems, but each link lays a brick, solidifying speculation.
“If you are childless/and you visit Vietnam/it is best to lie…” A cybertourist, too, wants the authentic experience. Rice plays games with our need to know, vomits up images of truth and desire, tampered with, and then punishes us for believing. Its jewels, “the beauty of junk”, the collected past makes, and is resistant to, us. We continue searching for the poem factory in a creaky cyclo.
The Unknown
While Rice looks out from Australia, the other competition winner, The Unknown, in typical United States fashion, looks deep within, into the bowels and beyond. We’re all goin’ on a…another road trip folks and we’ll take up where Kerouac and De Lillo left off…to frontier fiction with a special travel itinerary, with 3 academics who can’t change a tyre, on a book tour to flog The Anthology of the Unknown. (Who says that Americans don’t understand irony?). Starting from write-about-what-ya-know (downside: “we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance”—Thomas Pynchon quoted), The Unknown is a satire on publishing and promotion as well as a tough and funny look at the nature of creating hypertext: “the reader becomes a sort of satellite taking photographs of a huge and varied terrain.”
Largely text based, the site cleverly uses audio of the ‘writers’ speaking at conferences, debates topics as crucial as that criticism can be as much an artform as literature (okay, so they are laughing hash-hysterically at this point). Hilarious shots of 3 suit-and-tongue-tied men dwarfed by huge public sculptures add to the rich subversive mix. They even criticise one of the trAce/alt-x competition judges Mark Amerika (they meet him at Tennis Home, a Rehab centre for Hollywood starlets and hypertext dropouts). The live readings with audience murmurings and applause which play throughout give the work a sense of movement and wit and, although this territory has been traversed before online, what Americans excel at is BIGness and this mammoth chunk of cyberspace defies, and plays with, expectation and The Dream: “I sat up and stared at an American landscape we had not yet named.”
Rice (Jenny Weight) and The Unknown (William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton, Frank Marquardt) were joint winners of the trAce competition. Jenny Weight lives in Adelaide. She received a new media artist residency at Media Resource Centre to develop Rice.
The trAce/alt-x hypertext competition prize is for 100 pounds. 152 entries were received including many from Australia. Submissions had to be web-based with high quality writing; excellent overall conceptual design and hyperlink structure; and ease of use for the average web surfer.
The above winners can be found on the trAce website http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/ hypertext/ [expired] with further information on the competition. Three sites also gained honourable mentions: *water always writes in *plural by Josephine Wilson & Linda Carroli, (Australia), Kokura by Mary-Kim Arnold (USA) and Michael Atavar’s calendar (UK). The competition will re-open at the end of 1999.
Joyce Hinterding and David Haines are Sydney-based artists who have been exhibiting internationally for over 10 years. With an eclectic background that includes a diploma in gold- and silversmithing and a trade certificate in electronics, Hinterding is best known for her work with installations utilising electricity, electromagnetics and acoustics and for the manufacture of idiosyncratic aerials which render visible innate atmospheric energy. Haines specialises in combining apparently incompatible elements into works exploring landscape and fiction and presenting a “constructed world of the imagination.” His work includes painting, video installations, soundworks, computer-generated pieces and text-based conceptual work.
Last summer, Haines and Hinterding arrived in Tasmania for a 3-month residency at the lighthouse on South Bruny Island, south of Hobart. Bruny is a small unspoiled bushland island. Accessible only by vehicular ferry, it has a limited permanent population but is a popular holiday destination. Like the entire southern coast of Tasmania, Bruny is often described as being “as far south as you can go—the last stop before Antarctica…” Haines and Hinterding share a passion for the landscape and the environment so the South Bruny Lighthouse was a logical location for their residency, which was commissioned by Contemporary Art Services Tasmania.
The lighthouse site was made available by the Tasmanian government’s Parks and Wildlife Division and the Arts Ministry, providing a series of artists’ Wilderness Residencies throughout the state. As local arts administrator Sean Kelly notes, the scheme is very appropriate—if somewhat overdue—and should permit a variety of artists, from different backgrounds and disciplines, to work within and from a wilderness base. It could also extend the discourse on landscape art in the state and counteract its tendency towards the purely representational.
Joyce Hinterding describes the lighthouse as a place “where sky, sea and land meet in a space of watchfulness, beacons and signalling.” She explains that the aim was to “create an environmentally low-impact work that involves the use of fictive and imagistic elements directed by environmental data to create a meta-world, an interior and contemplative space, affected by the surrounding environment.”
In essence the work uses the sensitivities of the local environment to “activate an interior space of the imagination”, the interior of the lighthouse containing a light and sound work generated, created and affected by the passing of all sorts of weather and technologies.
The installation utilises computers, data projectors, a sound system with mixing desk, wind monitoring and radio scanning equipment, a digital video camera and editing system plus assorted microphones, modems, data and antennae. The work monitors and decodes the automatic picture transmissions from passing polar orbiting satellites, translating the data into a sound event and a triggering mechanism for other elements of the installation. Wind-monitoring equipment on the lighthouse determines the speed of footage shown, so that shots are shorter and sharper when the wind is strong and more meditative when the wind is low.
Sound and video footage taken from the local landscape is composited with 3D generated systems where the natural world collides with synthetic imagery. The work grows and evolves over the time of the “exhibition” as the database of real and 3D footage increases. Haines and Hinterding regard the work as a contemporary slant on the tradition of remote landscape works, existing outside the gallery system. In effect, the whole lighthouse becomes a multi-layered high-tech installation artwork, a sort of shrine to the possibilities of new media.
During their residency, the artists became part of the Bruny community, welcoming numerous visitors to the site and interacting with the Hobart arts fraternity. The project coincided with the 2-week Curators’ School in New Media organised in Hobart by CAST and ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology). The 50 participants from all around Australia visited the artists at the lighthouse to observe the work in progress, an experience highly regarded by all involved.
At Hobart’s School of Art the pair participated in the weekly public forum (in which influential and interesting contemporary artists, designers, curators and arts administrators, both Australian and international, discuss their work). These sessions are usually enlightening, but Haines’ and Hinterding’s presentation, in which they spoke about the residency in the context of their earlier works, was certainly one of the highlights in the forum program to date. With their self-deprecating humour and enthusiasm, the artists were able to take a difficult, even obscure, science-based, specialised subject, expound it to an arts-and-humanities audience, and make it accessible, intelligible—even entertaining and amusing. Like the installation itself, this was quite an achievement.
All quotations from the artists’ statements.
New Media Residency and Installation by Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, CAST, Bruny Island, Southern Tasmania, March – April 1999
Lucy Guerin in 25 Songs on 25 Lines of Words and Art Statement for Seven Voices and Dance
Described by Felber as “a music/theatrical installation for seven voices” this work explores the liminal zones at the edges of sculpture, painting, dance, sound art through a playful reinscription of Ad Reinhardt’s 25 Lines Of Words On Art: Statement of 1958 into a late 20th century hybrid aesthetic combining retro fit design invoking both earlier avant gardes and contemporary cutting edge graphics. The audience enters a Futurist mise en scene of huge swinging steel rods with light bulbs at the end of them and 7 steel tubes suspended from the ceiling each broadcasting one of the voices from Elliott Gyger’s composition. But one of the most effective elements is the video projection of Lucy Guerin’s 3 movement pieces which haunt the space silently, interrogating the audience from the floor beneath their feet.
The opening of the event featured a live performance from Guerin, one of Australia’s most sought after dancers, whose choreography also echoed elements of the Reinhardt text (#16 verticality and horizontality, rectilinearity, parallelism, stasis). The space (not designed for live arts) was absolutely packed which meant that for most of the performance parts of the audience were unsighted. This resulted in a strange theatre of frustration where members of the audience shrugged their shoulders, huffed and puffed, rolled their eyes, unconsciously entering the piece as they unexpectedly reacquired their bodies in the absence of a line of sight. Reinhardt would have loved it…#24 the completest control for the purest spontaneity.
Though all the disparate elements of the work arise from a reading of the Reinhardt text, no attempt has been made to force them into a hokey mimetic relationship. They simply accompany each other and gaze at each other disinterestedly, allowing room for an audience to move, at least in an intellectual sense…The piece is accompanied by a beautifully finished book which features interviews with the artists and reproductions of Felber’s images, stills from Guerin’s dances and the musical scores for the 25 songs with a CD. Credit Suisse (among others) sponsored this piece and you can see where the money went! Thankfully it has been put to good use.
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25 Songs On 25 Lines Of Words On Art Statement For Seven Voices And Dance, artist Joe Felber, composer Elliott Gyger, dancer/choreographer Lucy Guerin, curator Victoria Lynn, AGNSW, March 28 – May 2. The work will tour other galleries throughout 1999 and 2000.
As part of antistatic, choreographer-dancer Julie-Anne Long and I created Rememberings on Dance, a performed conversation in which we attempted to harness a little of the electricity generated by the event. Looking at the ways memory operates in performance and its reception by audiences, we began by admitting to personal lapses: when Julie-Anne is taken by a particular movement, she has a strong desire to see it again and finds it difficult to see the rest; whereas I retain overall atmosphere and feel but rely on conversation to recall precise moves. We spoke from a table covered with books (about memory and dance), notes, pens and markers. Julie-Anne had a knot around one finger with a large ball of string handy beside here. At one point she rolled up her sleeve to reveal more reminders scribbled in biro.
We began with “Doing a Dumas”, a conversation about Julie-Anne’s recent experience working on Russell Dumas’ Cassandra’s Dance which opened antistatic. I quoted Russell from an interview in Writings on Dance: “(The dancers are) not trying to produce how they’re being seen. The trick is to have the work just out of grasp so that the dancers’ focus is just on doing the task rather than displaying the task or mastery of the task.” In answer to my question about the task, Julie-Anne demonstrated a fragment of the process:
JAL “Well, okay, you might take a move like this (SHE LIFTS WEIGHT ONTO THE RIGHT LEG, LETTING THE LEFT LEG ROTATE BEHIND AND SWING BACK OUT TO THE SIDE). We’ll go over and over it for hours, days to learn where the weight is, how the muscles respond to this particular way of moving. The next day, Russell might come in and teach the move in an entirely different way as if the other had never existed.”
VB So you’re forgetting at the same time as working towards a deep memory of the moves…And is the audience witnessing your remembering?
JAL Once we enter the frame we concentrate fully on executing the task. The audience is peripheral.
Along with memory in performance, the idea of the audience and its acknowledgment in the works presented at antistatic became a focus for our talk. In “Susans”, we concocted a conversation which might have occurred following the performance of Ros Warby’s original home. The conflicting memories of 2 women with almost the same name competed with Dionne Warwick’s of Always Something There to Remind Me.
Susan: I felt I had entered some strange terrain in which time had stopped. The bodies had forgotten themselves. Movement was absolutely ineffectual.
Suze: I remember something unnaturally “natural” in which 3 performers were either totally uncomfortable or too comfortable.
Later I confessed to a theory I’d started hatching as I watched original home. One of the pleasures of events like antistatic is the opportunity to see a lot of work and suggest some connections.
VB When Shona Innes rolled across the floor and landed against the wall and seemed stuck there as though she’d forgotten what happened next I was wondering why dancers would be feeling forgetful about their bodies? Why now?
JAL Oh, I think they’ve been thinking like this for a while—too long I’d say.
VB Thinking what?
JAL How the dancing body feels to the dancer, simple as that.
The ensuing awkward pause in the conversation forced us into the next section, “Something else”, in which the hazy memories of one were prompted by physical clues from the other. The topic—Rosalind Crisp’s work proximity.
VB I took a friend who said to me afterwards—(SHE STOPS AND JULIE-ANNE GESTURES WITH HER EYES) “I’ve never seen a dancer so self-absorbed. She almost didn’t need an audience”…I was shocked. Then she said this didn’t mean she hadn’t enjoyed the work. On the contrary she admired the dancing…it’s strength and lightness.
JAL Why would that shock you?…The audience watches the dancer…(VIRGINIA FEELS HERSELF ALL OVER)…feeling how her dancing body feels to her.
In the same program, Lisa Nelson’s remarkable work Memo to Dodo produced more divergent memories.
JAL I couldn’t work out whether this was Lisa Nelson or a personification of something else. Was she looking at us, was she seeing us as those eyes shifted in and out of focus…
VB This one added some more to my theory. So did Ros Crisp’s “dead hand” as you call it. Lisa Nelson’s body looks like it’s asleep…it’s alert, then barely conscious, forgetful. It moves to instructions from an invisible presence on a crackly recording.
JAL The movement is expert but it has no ulterior purpose.
VB Meaning bounces round the room, just out of grasp.
(Later in the week, Lisa Nelson said of this work “My dances are vision-guided, not eye guided. At first I saw this as a way to flex my visual muscles and to stimulate the imagination in my body. The muscles, the lens—it’s the full orchestration. I just have tremendous sensation there. I always have had, ever since I was kid.”)
Jude Walton’s elegant Seam re-surfaced in slow stabs at memory—screen, film, pen, hand, writing, hysteria, translation, paper, pins, breathing, a body beneath, breathing, a curtain revealing, red, screams red, slip, screen, ocean, endless ending…
Whereas our memories of Helen Herbertson’s Morphia Series—Strike 1 tumbled over each other.
VB That sense of senses deprived. Forced to peer, squint into the dark, into the ghostly glow of the proscenium and…
JAL Love, love, LOVED the fire!
But when we tried to remember precisely—
VB Do you remember what Helen Herbertson was doing? How she was moving?
JAL (ATTEMPTS THE MOVEMENT BUT CAN’T CAPTURE IT). Whatever it was, I know I just loved it.
To elicit a bit more detail from our memories of the Femur program which featured highly memorable works by Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson and the improvising duo Trotman and Morrish we tried Lisa Nelson’s workshop technique in which dancers create complex improvisations triggered by a set of instructions (Enter, Play, Reverse, Repeat, Exit) called from the sidelines. We improvised with a set of sentences, discovering our memories of these works were less conflicting.
JAL They take the space. Demand our attention.
VB Her body is charged, circuits kicking in, synapses snapping. Body at full stretch.
JAL Presentational. Acknowledge the audience. The dancers stood in front of us. I settle when I feel that.
VB She goes about her work, as we watch. Like that song, “Busy doing nothing working the whole day through, trying to find lots of things not to do.” Occasionally she acknowledges us. Just enough. Dean Walsh swears she winked at him.
In the final sequence in the performance, “Butoh Memory”, we substituted objects on the table for memories of the performances in Spur.
JAL Needles in eyes (scissors).
VB Speed contained (a book of matches).
As we lifted each object/memory we placed it in a bag and left the room and the table empty.
As always, the conversation continues. Julie-Anne’s memories affect my own recall of antistatic as do other conversations had at and after the event. At the dinner conversation on the penultimate night, Lisa Nelson talked about the dilemma of people being able to look at dance. It’s “so removed”, she said. She thinks dancers need to re-invent, reframe the ritual and share some of the incredible things that happen in a dancer’s body-mind, to show the intelligence at work behind the movements. Dancers need to ask themselves, why do that? Why add another move? And sometimes, “Oh, God, take some away!” The aim should be to make something visible not to support “an illusion of necessity.” She says, “Sometimes it feels like it’s important to someone but it’s hard to say why. And sometimes, let’s face it, it’s hard to watch someone so….committed.”
On the same night, Ishmael Houston-Jones talked about performing his work Without Hope. “It’s changed a lot. Sometimes I find it too emotional to tell about my friend who’s dying. Suddenly one night I find myself talking instead about a picture I’d seen about what elephants do, how they go off by themselves to find a place to die…” Having felt the power of his performance, such a significant change was at first inconceivable. And then it wasn’t.
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Axis: Julie-Anne Long & Virginia Baxter, Rememberings on Dance, April 11
Georgia Carter, Jennifer Newman-Preston in Young woman glass soul
photo Debbie Taylor
Georgia Carter, Jennifer Newman-Preston in Young woman glass soul
Young woman glass soul is a multimedia work conceived by Jennifer Newman-Preston in which dance is the governing thread with puppetry, illusion, images, sound and words as integral elements: images are by Vinn Pitcher; words and storytelling by Victoria Doidge; music by Alexander Nettelbeck with vocal harmonics by Joseph Stanaway; projection by Tim Gruchy, video scripting and direction by Joanne Griffin. Young woman glass soul explores the Cinderella fable for contemporary resonances taking on no less than six versions of the story—the goddess Isis; a Brazilian fable in which a sea serpent plays godmother; a Cinderella variant in the context of a Muslim women’s ritual; the German folk tale of Aschenputtel or Ash Girl; Charles Perrault’s “The Little Glass Slipper”—commissioned by Louis XV—as well as the Walt Disney version. Young woman glass soul opens at Bangarra Theatre July 1.
These dancers seem to be moving away from those pleasantly concordant relationships particularly with sound and light design, of simple support and elaboration. In Clavicle, there’s a real hybrid growth in the fusion of those elements with choreographic design, so that new things are being said. Particularly in the first 2 works, original home and morphia series, the collaborations produced a brilliantly intense language of action and imagery.
Inexplicably, I found myself describing original home as the South Park of dance, prompted by its oblique cartoonish humour, gangly truncated demeanour, randomised interruptions of gesture and dissipated gravitas. The performers seemed to have composed themselves accidentally in a hail of instruments, objects and events—a rock rolls off-centredly across the floor, small rattling gourds, snare drums, a bowling ball, a piece of rope, cymbal, a small one-stringed instrument, pieces of wood—all exquisite, self-made, found or outlived, dancing included, which spill over the stage with a tightly orchestrated nonchalance, into an endless array of both finely-tuned and careless disturbances of space.
In morphia series, there are sudden contrasts: black-out, yellow flames, black hair and fabric over white glowing skin, concentrated stillness and fast-forward flickering sequences. Ben Cobham uses the light source like a camera, producing grainy, black and white, film-like effects on the small framed stage, revealing Helen Herbertson’s actions with textural variations, sometimes thin and stiff, too fast, not life-like, or else the image appears as if through a window, with small inexplicable, ambiguous gestures, but solid and 3 dimensional. Is she repeatedly washing her hands or warming them by a fire? Sound seemed elemental: a tinkle of bells, rain on a roof, a single light clicks on, tiny bird calls, the click of fingers, once, twice; you might see her eyelash flicker; the soft billowing light of wind-blown flames.
In Lisa Nelson’s Memo to Dodo, it’s the seeing, the visual sensing, the cycling of perception in and out through the eyes that holds your attention. The audience is implicated in her dance, you feel; a strong link, but just what that relationship is, it’s hard to know. She is holding something firmly, placing it just right, sorting things, noticing in the periphery, perpetually catching sight of something in the light; small registers of awareness, working it like breathing. Not insubstantial space, but there’s something solid she’s making from what’s around her. She sends it back in direct and exact parcels of energy.
Another section, a voice playing an old game, telling Nelson to halt, continue, reverse, repeat actions, while still carrying on that breathing in and out of light and shadow as she moves: small deliberations, holding, placing, delicately weighting a stick in hands and arms, making the windings of her body around it sometimes difficult to undo.
Graham Leak & Ros Warby, Original Home
photo Mark Rodgers
Graham Leak & Ros Warby, Original Home
Compared to Nelson, Warby and Herbertson, Rosalind Crisp’s dancing in proximity is fluid, romantic, with a softly restrained dramatic abandon. There’s elegance in her physicality, and an emotional luxuriance more pronounced than in previous performances. Elegance too in Ion Pearce’s rarefied soundscape, dry and windy at first, but in the second section, strident, piercing. Simplicity and measure settle over the work, with a single stream of light falling across the stage onto Crisp’s moving hands as if they are in water. They seem close up, in focus. Later a handspan, 2 arms’ lengths, the reach to feet and floor. Like Nelson, Crisp works with her eyes, encompassing the details of limbs and what they surround: side by side, near and far, measuring the course of her action before she’s been there, and the traces she leaves behind.
Jude Walton’s Seam (silent mix) is full of white and black, a heavy curtain and white screen side by side, and shocking red splashes in the fabric of costumes. It’s full of text (Mallarme’s notes on the poem Les Noces d’Herodiade: Mystere) which I read long after the rest of the work was seen, and an echoing English/French vocal mix; it seems not designed for immediacy. Now I don’t recall the words. I recall how conscious I became of my own breathing as I watch a film of pinned paper seams pull and rip apart as my own ribs expanded, and edges reunited in relieved exhalation. I remember the luminous white foetus-like flesh of dancer Ros Warby, as she manipulated a tiny camera over her body, the image like an ultra-sound of something internal, soft and vulnerable, not quite formed. I remember her red dress against the black curtain, pulled back. I remember the ocean, washing over the screen in increments of flowing tide, rising higher and higher up the wall of the screen. We wait for the seam blending one wave into another, finally with a kind of inevitability, until the screen, and our minds, are somehow complete, the pieces put invisibly together.
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Clavicle: Ros Warby, Shona Innes, Graeme Leak, original home (returning to it); Helen Herbertson, Ben Cobham, morphia series – Strike 1; Lisa Nelson, Memo to Dodo; Rosalind Crisp, Ion Pearce, proximity, sections 4 and 5; Jude Walton, Ros Warby, Jackie Dunn, Seam (silent mix), Antistatic, The Performance Space, April 1 – 3
Elements similar to Susan Leigh Foster’s were at work in the set of events comprising Spur in which Tess de Quincey’s Butoh Product #2 – Nerve showed how to stare down a crowded room while text effects splashed around her, courtesy of performance poet Amanda Stewart’s textual montage and projection. In this as in other of Stewart’s works the sounds and images of words are collapsed back on themselves and we have the bare material of language on display. De Quincey worked within a similar paradigm to return the performing body to its being on stage. Standing squarely, facing off the spectators, holding ground until the impulse to move took over…a more powerful performance presence is hard to imagine and even without locomotive movement the pulses of the body’s capacities for movement are in evidence. Jeff Stein and Oren Ambarchi’s Aphikoman re-staged the audience/performer dynamic with a dada style theft of the performative moment. Hidden beneath the seating Stein stole personal objects, then dumped them on the stage forcing the spectators to leave the darkness and claim their property. This was done with great humour and energy which carried the concept along though there wasn’t much else to experience in this piece.
Alan Schacher’s spasmic movement piece came with an industrial noise sound track by Rik Rue. This was not a harmonious technoshamanic ritual but a pulverising attack on the body. Schacher’s body duly sought out dark spaces as if to hide from the technoscape which threatened it and emerged into the light only to express its crisis. This was a strong and unsettling piece which again revealed the capacities of body, light, sound to sustain an audience’s interest without the supplementation of excess effects. Yumi Umiumare and Tony Yap provided an antidote to the harshness of the Schacher/Rik Rue collaboration in a lucid and meditative dance in the TPS studio space. Commencing in a chair seated on top of one another the pair slowly extended past the flickering laser beam guarding their resting place and into the audience. Yumi’s laughter caught me by surprise but suggested that the human core in this work was at peace with itself. I noticed something I had missed in their earlier work which is that these 2 can control their movements and lyricise them at the same time in breathtakingly subtle ways.
Stuart Lynch closed the night with the equally breathtaking but totally unsubtle Without Nostalgia, a virtuoso piece staging, among other things, his concern with TBS (Total Body Speed) as the centre of the actions which determine his performance work. The notion comes from his connection (through De Quincey) with Mai Juku in Japan but also reflects the emphasis on speed in contemporary considerations of bodies (Deleuze) and culture (Virilio). It is spectacular to witness an artist engaging at this level with current theoretical debates in media and performance studies. I hope we get to see this piece in another context as it is packed with ideas that only a repeat viewing could adequately process. In a way this piece represents the opposite of Foster as a conceptual interrogation of cultural forms through movement and image rather than through text combining with gesture. Both are hybrid forms with a different emphasis but you wouldn’t want to do without either of them. The praxis of performance, which ever way you receive it, got a real boost from these events.
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Spur: Tess De Quincey, Butoh Product #2 – ‘Nerve’; Stuart Lynch, Without Nostalgia; Alan Schacher with Rik Rue, Kunstwerk (Trace Elements/Residual Effects – part 3; Jeff Stein with Oren Ambarchi, Aphikoman; Yumi Umiumare & Tony Yap, How could you even begin to understand? Version 2, Antistatic, The Performance Space, April 4
The workshop showings were an appropriately informal affair and gave non-workshoppers an insight into the work of the 3 imported practitioners—Nelson, Monson and Ishmael Houston-Jones—who we had seen in performance and had been the focus of much discussion. The showings unfolded for the audience like a game of charades we were invited to view but not participate in; each artist had developed tasks, methods and rules that the viewer could attempt to decipher or merely watch the results of. The similarities and differences became striking.
Nelson was the first up and the ‘video’ commands she had used in her performance, Dance Light Sound, were employed here en masse, dancers either participating in the “stop”, “reverse”, “play”, “replace” commands or waiting and watching. The choice to participate or not became as interesting as the choices about moving, and the role of the ‘commander’ began to slide around the group. The dancers often had to move with their eyes shut becoming instantly tentative, exploring the space around themselves anew. The participants kept to the back of the performance space engrossed in the details of their tasks.
Monson’s group made more of a spectacle of themselves in the exciting way Monson can in her performances. The display of energy and contrasting dynamics were relentless and the participants completely engrossed. It was difficult not to follow Monson here whose self-confessed attraction to the comic had her flitting about the space in pseudo-balletic hysteria. There was an energy-engagement between the dancers and an awareness of the observers that sparkled with possibilities.
Houston-Jones’ group showing was an “almost-performance-piece” made up of a succession of ideas. Music was introduced to the proceedings (Ishmael giggled as he DJ’d behind us) and the dancers moved closer to the audience. Language was also introduced as something more than functional, introducing narrative and emotional registers, and was interrupted through yet another system of spoken commands (“shut-up”). Movements became correspondingly more gestural and scenarios appeared; the group posed for a camera, revolving slowly as they changed positions, drawing out the moment of ‘presentation’; a line-up of apparently expert botanists described their favourite flowers over the top of each other and the line began to sway organically.
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Atlas: Workshop Showings, The Performance Space, April 10
antistatic as a whole event exposed, problematised and critiqued the current and ongoing negotiation within dance between movement and words. This project has become central to new dance practices and is a significant area of investigation which dance is pioneering within the broader context of the performing arts. The relentless necessity to reveal dance—to provide commentary on the display—described by Lisa Nelson and the newer necessity for the community to move from the defensive and assume its role as innovator in this regard, could be traced through the festival from Foster’s experiments combining movement improvisation and empirical discourse, to Monson’s incoherent vocalisations in Keeper, to the very format of this eclectic event.
The last day of antistatic, Atlas, was like a culmination of this apparent, but perhaps implicit theme. A combination of performances (incorporating texts, choreography and or improvisation), presented papers and the less easily defined “performed commentary” by Julie-Anne Long and Virginia Baxter, exposed most lucidly the curators’ task. How can dance remain the primary discipline, its conditions and knowledges the most influential forces, when combined with discourse and all this entails? To slide across types of language, methods and modes of performance provided the curators with one answer.
While Anne Thompson used language and theory (particularly psychoanalysis) to consider a notion of spectatorship (in which she found empathies with contact and ideokinesis) in relation to the work of Pina Bausch, Yvonne Ranier and Robert Wilson, Sally Gardner probed the implications of language itself in relation to government peer assessment documentation to ask Can Practice Survive? Gardner described the Australia Council’s “philanthropic” activity as creating not a shelter from the mainstream marketplace, but a new economy, which deals in reductive terms: “innovative”, “independent”, “creativity”, “pioneering.” She provided an interesting alternative economic option; rather than putting money into publicists, why not just pay the audience directly?
References to Australia’s lack of historical context for terminologies such as those outlined above circled back to a notion of Australia as suffering from a condition of “lack” or “ignorance.” Surely official language cannot represent the actual situation within which work is produced and received in any country. Performance aritist Mike Parr, in challenging the academic approach of Thompson’s paper to Bausch’s work, assumed, I would argue incorrectly, that most audience members had never seen her work live. Russell Dumas, in a later session, revisited this subject of context and Australian audiences by criticising the “guru” status he believed antistatic’s visiting artists to have been granted. The arguments represented here are recurring within the dance community and assume a condition of inadequacy in our audiences and practitioners, which in turn suggests an authority “elsewhere.” Such assumptions stagnate discussion and progress by rendering the majority of participants deficient.
A later discussion grouped together 3 practitioners whose solo works were performed as part of Axis; Eleanor Brickhill, Julie Humphreys and Susie Fraser. Unfortunately I missed Fraser’s piece, Stories From the Interior. [In this work-in-progress, Picking up the Threads, Susie Fraser retraces a dancer’s body changed by childbirth and motherhood. Her recorded voice speaks eloquently from a tape recorder. When asked afterwards why the speech is in the third person, she says “Sometimes it feels like that.” The illumination for her subtle movement comes from a video monitor running home movie footage. Meanwhile stretched across the back wall are the beginnings of her video manipulations into a painstaking choreography on the family from her place within it. Eds.] Brickhill provided the most satisfying combination of spoken word and movement in antistatic, The Cocktail Party. Her analogy of a party was accurate; she tentatively entered the space and presented a dance and a kind of commentary: “What is that…it looks important…why don’t you just say it…I know where that comes from…” A dance about making a dance, in her words. Words revealed movement revealed words in a moving and strikingly personal confrontation of the two. In the discussion Brickhill said she was “trying to write while thinking of dancing.” Fraser said she had tried “writing from movement” but “needed another pair of hands.”
Long and Baxter had the last say in event and left everyone speechless; an attempted closing discussion was aborted after valiant attempts from the Masters of Ceremony, Trotman and Morrish, which were met with a request for alcohol. The irreverent tone and attitude of Long and Baxter was a welcome change from the earnest intentions of the weekend, but their performance was an odd experience seated as I was between Lisa Nelson and Jennifer Monson who were not spared the duo’s humour.
What they dared to do was admit to other preferences within performance, both through their comments and their mode of delivery, which provided a healthy intervention within a relatively homogeneous festival. Not to deny the vast differences in the approaches of say Houston-Jones and Crisp, but antistatic engaged framing notions of dance which created an exclusive environment. Long and Baxter’s piece suggested other ways of dancing and performing which, at the same time, displayed a real engagement with the proceedings. A certain frustration was aired here but always with good humour, such as Long’s comments on the Clavicle program that it all seemed so “Melbourne” and her exposition of exactly what “doing a Dumas” entails. Even Russell Dumas was rendered speechless.
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Axis: Susie Fraser, Stories from the Interior; Sally Gardner, “Can practice survive”; Julie Humphreys, Involution; Anne Thompson, “Rainer, Wilson and Bausch as markers in a mapping of the border terrain called dance theatre”; Helen Clarke-Lapin with Ion Pearce, Alice Cummins, Rosalind Crisp, Orbit; Eleanor Brickhill, The Cocktail Party; Julie-Anne Long & Virginia Baxter, Rememberings on Dance.
Eleanor Brickhill asked Ishmael Houston-Jones about his impressions of antistatic 99.
I often feel like a member of a band of vagrant minstrels, criss-crossing the worldwide countryside of postmodern dance. We steal into a town, dance for our supper and a place to sleep, and then move on. Because the friendly villages are few and well-known to members of my merry band, we invariably run into each other at semi-regular intervals. I might see David Z in Havana, then David D in Glasgow; I’ll have a dance with Jennifer M in London, and the other Jennifer M in Northern Venezuela; I’ll watch a performance by Lisa in Arnhem, and she’ll watch my dress rehearsal in Sydney. This has been my life for 20 years.
Of course New York is my home. It’s where the answering machine is. It’s where the cheques with a variety of postmarks come. It’s a city that inspires and drains me. It is a city, however, that will never support me, nor the majority of my downtown dance compatriots. Thus roaming from small festival to small festival has become a necessary pleasure for survival. While the road can sap as much energy as being broke and over-stimulated in Manhattan, it does make it possible for me to make my work.
In April 1999 I travelled midway around the world to take part in the second antistatic festival in Sydney. As a safe haven for dancing, this turned out to be a welcoming and genial way station. The production of my performances at The Performance Space was done with exacting professionalism combined with compassionate attention. The programs were well curated. While audience size varied, it was clear that the organisers had done a lot, through receptions, an attractive flyer and other publicity, to bring out the New Dance public in Sydney.
The workshop I taught, “Dancing Text/Texting Dance”, were well run by antistatic. It attracted a near perfect assortment of those interested in sharing my process for the 2 week period. The “dancing paper” presented by Susan Leigh Foster was thought-provoking and added a context for the work that was being presented and taught. The events attracted (curious) reviews in the mainstream press.
As an antistatic participant, I feel the main fault of the festival was its overabundance. During the 3 weeks, there was very little downtime or space for processing. With workshops running 5 days a week for 6 hours a day, and a variety of shows, showings, lectures etc taking place in the evenings and all weekend, I often found myself feeling tired and stretched (or guilty for skipping out on an event). This may have had to do with the fact that this was my first journey to Australia, and I wanted to get a little sight-seeing and night life into my itinerary. Also suffering from this being my virgin voyage Down Under, is my ability to adequately critique the breadth of the local work. The program of which I was a part also featured pieces by fellow New Yorker, Jennifer Monson, and the Melbourne duo, Trotman and Morrish. This program was varied in its scope within the narrow frame of “new dance.” The works evocatively contrasted one another, while they seemed to accidentally provide some complementary subtext for the evening.
The works on the following weekend were a different story. Although Lisa Nelson is from the United States and Ros Crisp is from Sydney, several of my students described the program as a “very Melbourne evening”. While the works varied greatly one from another, they had a disquieting similarity of tone. I found this to be most true with the “the gaze” and how it was used, or not used. Except with Nelson, the only non-Australian on the program, there seemed to be a determined effort to not acknowledge the audience through any overt eye contact. This lent an air of “art school lab experimentation” to several of the pieces. Again, I’m not sure if I’ve seen enough local work to justify even this stereotype, but this inward focus did seem to be a less refined echo of the performance personae of Russell Dumas’ dancers, whom I saw as part of antistatic at The Studio at the Sydney Opera House.
Ishmael Houston-Jones, Rougher
photo Mark Rodgers
Ishmael Houston-Jones, Rougher
What I found different about antistatic, as opposed to, say, The Movable Beast Festival in Chicago, was its lack of both artistic and ethnic diversity. In 1998, at Movable Beast—a small festival of new dance in its second year—I performed 2 of the same pieces I did at antistatic. But while there was an emphasis on “pure movement” pieces, there were also works that veered toward performance art, multimedia spectacle, spoken word, drag, cabaret, and site specific. The latter 2 genres were encouraged by having multiple venues for the festival. While the main performances took place in a traditional black-box theatre, each festival participant was required to also present “something” on a tiny stage in a jazz club between sets, and also to make a site specific work for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 24 hour Summer Solstice celebration.
Another difference was that all performers taught, and there was a lot less teaching by each person: 2 days apiece for the visitors; one day for the Chicagoans. While this greatly lessened the intensity of the workshop experience, it did allow for the participants to take one another’s classes, and for the students to get a taste of many different approaches to making work. I think something between the antistatic workshop stream in which a student signs up for one teacher for the entire 2 week period, and the Movable Beast’s workshop sampler would be preferable.
A striking difference between the 2 festivals was in their ethnic make-up. This is influenced by my American perspective, but it is not likely that such a festival in the States would ever be as “white” as antistatic was [Yumi Umiamare and Tony Yap were also antistatic participants. Eds.]. There were no international artists involved with Movable Beast, but besides myself, there were African-American, Asian-American and Hispanic artists teaching and performing. Several were gay. The teacher/performers came from 5 states outside Chicago. Like the audiences and artists of new dance, the majority of workshop students were white, but there was some ethnic diversity in most of the classes. While I try not to place an over-arching significance on these statistics—and of course I realise the demographics of the 2 countries are very different—I still feel that some creative outreach to different populations allows a festival to be more richly diverse and less restrictively insular.
antistatic was a very positive experience. It allowed me to present my work through performing, teaching, and discussing it with a new community in a very nurturing environment. It can only get better as a festival by widening its embrace of new dance.
antistatic 99…on the bone put on substantial flesh (the programs were labelled Femur, Clavicle, Axis, Atlas and, interestingly for the contemporary performance component, Spur) over its 3 weeks with performances, installations, talks and workshops, bringing a welcome intensity and added intelligence to the Sydney dance scene. Guests from the USA and Melbourne added bodies and dance cultures in perspective. As you’ll read, a few observers and participants thought antistatic’s focus somewhat narrow, ‘homogenous’, lacking in ethnic and aesthetic diversity. In the case of Ishmael Houston-Jones’ querying the cultural breadth of the event, he applies the word festival, which in fact might not fit the event model of antistatic with its focus on very particular dance issues, forms and, inherently, independents and their innovations (as opposed to, say, MAP’s deliberate coverall approach in Melbourne in 1998). For all of its probing, essentialist leanings, antistatic nonetheless displayed some remarkable hybrids, artist and reviewer anxiety over text spoken in performance was much less in evidence than a couple of years ago, and collaborations with composers and lighting designers had clearly made considerable progress with greater integration and dynamic counterpointing of roles. antistatic might not have been a festival in the conventional sense, but it certainly was a feast. Appropriately, one of its highlights was an on-the-floor meal and discussion shared by performers and audience on the penultimate evening of an intimate and open dance event.
Kirsten Krauth interviews RealTime’s new hyperfiction editorial team Teri Hoskin, Terri-ann White, Linda Carroli and Dean Kiley about defining, creating and reading hypertext.
KK When did your interest in hypertext begin?
TH If hypertext is related specifically to writing practices online, about 1996 with the Tableau project for ewre (electronic writing research ensemble). My art practise has always been text based…there has always been an interest in experimental writing that seeks to ‘worry’ given notions of how we make meaning. So this ‘hypertext’ is a word that snuck up on me. The work of some of the poststructuralists, like Derrida and Kristeva on language, Barthes on Death Of the Author, Cixous’ ‘ecriture feminine’, have signalled for some time the possibilities of deconstructive/generative writing practices. Digital environments present possible spaces for this to play out.
TW I came to hypertext with my work in an entirely opportunistic way when I was invited to apply for an ANAT (Australian Network Arts Technology) residency. That encounter helped me to move along a whole range of concerns about form in a writing project I had been immersed in for 3 years…it liberated me off the A4 white page and into extensions: ways to look at and consider my set of interests and characters and stories in the ‘family saga’ I was writing. I learnt about my original project and why I was doing it by embarking into this concertina-shaped space of hypertext.
LC Hypertext contains everything that I have done before—broadcasting, writing, conversation, visual art, video, curating, graphic design—and poses a new question or possibility in terms of my practice/s and its multi/hyper/inter/media. In 1997, an essay I wrote about online collaboration was published in leonardo and the IMA recommended me to ANAT for the *water residency. That experience consolidated my thinking and my practice, gave me the space and time and reason to interrogate in a research/writing oriented way and to do it with a writer as special as Josephine Wilson.
DK I suppose (he says, settling into the couch, trying to appear relaxed), like most such problems, it began with my Mother. She could only ever conceptualise university work as a series of breathlessly-researched high-school essays strung together on a word processor. Then there was my honours supervisor, who had roughly the equivalent view of How A Real Thesis Should Work. My thesis looked at the construction of Elizabeth Jolley and I wanted some way of analysing (& doing diagrams of) but also demonstrating (& doing working-models of) the range of media and discourses around a given writer, and lo! My early nerdy interest in HyperCard (in the baby versions bundled with early Macs) redirected me to the later versions, at once a filing/referencing system, a slide-show with special effects, a graphics program in which to stage animations of various theoretical models, a commentary toolbox for footnotes and footnotes on footnotes, a concordance for correlating quotes from Jolley and her critics/reviewers, a studio for my voice-over soundtrack, and a searchable textual database.
My supervisor delighted in playing with the end result, but thought of it as some kind of quirky bloated screen-saver, with no relevance to the thesis. It was, in fact, intrinsic to my analysis of literary criticism as a cybernetic and hypertextual process. I had to re-do and re-submit the whole bloody thesis but I had also realised the possibilities of the medium, and—more importantly—that you didn’t have to be an overtrained tech-head to allow critical understanding to be generated from a conversation with an interface (rather than the memorisation of a manual).
KK There have been many attempts to define and categorise hypertext. Mark Bernstein in “Patterns of Hypertext” says the problem is not that hypertext lacks structure but that we lack the words to describe/criticise hypertext. Do you see such definitions as crucial? What are the differences between hypertext/hyperfiction/hypermedia?
TH I have some problems with this word hypertext. It tends to collapse all forms of writing into one—as long as there are links, something is hypertext…it doesn’t acknowledge a continuum, that there has been multi-layered, fragmentary writing that resists closure, that works across mediums for quite some time. The digital environment presents fabulous opportunities to develop these forms of writing. But often ‘hypertext’ means the writer will just pop in a few links to perk up a fairly standard unchallenging narrative. To consider and acknowledge differences between writing practices on the net is crucial, perhaps then we can get rid of the ‘hyper’.
TW While I am excited by what is possible in new paradigms like the activity on the web, I always want to broaden the discussion beyond the medium. That gives me more patience for the less satisfactory attention to the text-bit, to the writing, by many hypertext writers whose work is currently available.
LC The problem with Western culture is that it demands and expects and imposes structure where none exists or is needed. Yes, our [critical] languages for chaos and complexity are ineffectual, worrisome and anxious, although we are also developing tools and modes of thinking which do accommodate that: deconstruction, feminism, postcolonialism. This fragmentation is telling us that we don’t necessarily need definitions (the meta-) and that there are myriad ways of looking at, experiencing or knowing. Personally, I don’t see such definitions as crucial or necessary, but as a critical writer they are useful and have value in terms of discourse.
DK The emphasis on definition encourages the schizoid split between the 2 main, equally-dangerous inflations of rhetorical bombast: cyberhype and cyberdebunking, which could be summarised by the catchphrases ‘The book is dead’ and ‘You can’t take a laptop to the beach’, both of which are wrong…What often gets lost in this emphasis on the product (‘what is a hypertext?’ ‘how do you know a piece of hypermedia when you see it?’) is the crux: not product but process—hypertextual ways of reading and writing, designing and experiencing. I’d agree with Bernstein about the lack of good close, focused analysis and criticism, but not because we haven’t generated a full set of Lego jargon terms, or decided on the ‘proper’ academic idiom, but because academics are generally too busy processing hypertexts through ‘legitimating’ disciplines, neologising cute new buzzwords, and constructing unsustainable, mass-produced-plastic comparisons and contrasts.
KK Carolyn Guertin comments on the ability of hypertext to privilege multiple voices. How does hyperfiction invite collaboration?
LC Working together is always going to be about having a relationship and all the things that entails. Josephine [Wilson] and I enter into our work with a real commitment to process, in the spirit of friendship and with a great respect for each other’s work, input and ideas. Everything is always open to negotiation; some of that touchy-feely stuff has to come into play because a computer can’t make a collaboration possible in an emotive sense, in a personality sense. We rely on IRC and email to talk; the computer mediates that. It requires a great deal of work. You have to compensate for what the computer can’t do—for example I don’t know if Josephine is sobbing or scowling. After a year of working together we have begun to develop a shared language; it does contain cues. I suspect it’s a mode of communication that would not work if we were face to face.
Working across distance is an interesting thing—we live in 2 time zones, 2 climates, 2 households. In a practical sense we resolve conceptual and structural issues and then set ourselves tasks and give each other enough scope to pursue tangents and be experimental and then we swap notes. It’s always hard opening your work up to scrutiny, but I believe that collaboration produces something that would not have been produced otherwise. Neither of us is so conceited that we believe in myths of creative/individual genius. Hyperfiction/text does accommodate multiple voices…voices can switch in really subtle ways…layering and texturing a work to create interest.
KK What programs do you use when constructing hypertext? StorySpace, software that allows writers to create a visual map of a story’s links and pathways, is being used by many university writing classes. Do you think such programs restrict creativity? Make output homogenous? How does technology limit/extend the writer’s imagination?
TH I use a text editor, Photoshop and Illustrator and a couple of great programmer’s references. I prefer to work this way because it gives me more control over how a page will perform/look. Writing html is meditative and as a writing practice rather odd. There are 2 results: the immediate text before your eyes and the delayed text, the objects the code builds. Like any technique one can become ‘stuck’ in a certain way of working. I guess it’s up to the writer/artist to work out a way to shift sideways, to keep the work challenging.
TW I’m a dag who has no experience of programs beyond PageMill. I’m reliably informed that I’m at the same level as early high school students.
LC We use wysiwyg software with html editors to construct pages and then plot the links and flows in our heads or on scraps of paper. We have considered storyboarding and think that would be a really useful way to construct hypertexts; my way of storyboarding is scraps of paper blu-tacked to the wall with scrawling notes. All computer technology has limitations in the sense that there are things it can’t do. Writers have to make decisions about how they use a computer for hypertext: what audiences they will cut out when they load up on special effects…I prefer a more democratic response which privileges accessibility, entails faster download, minimal plugins, text-based—it’s kinder to the reader on a chuggy little machine.
DK If it’s stand-alone hypertext I would normally work in StorySpace and if necessary export the results to html format so I can make a website. If intended for online consumption, I use a digital camera, scanner, PhotoShop, PhotoDraw and Paint Shop Pro for the imagery, CoolEdit for the sounds, WWW Gif Animator and Animagic for the simpler animations, Director for sophisticated animations and interactive components, Netscape Composer for draft web documents, and then Notepad to edit and add html code.
On the basis of 3 years of using Netscape and StorySpace in teaching, [these programs] certainly don’t result in homogenous output. Quite the reverse. StorySpace extends the writer’s imagination to the extent that a whole range of possibilities for representing, modelling and simulating reading and performance experiences are opened up; it can be an immediate aid to brainstorming, plotting, structuring, scene construction, and developing multiple voices; it encourages play, experimentation and risky writing; and—even if the final result is still a story-on-the-page—it stimulates writers into editing and re-editing and redrafting rather than placing trust in a quickly-fiddled-with second draft. It almost demands a design ethic that is more visual and focused; and enables a more intense mixture of formats, modes and genres.
KK There appears to be more critical theory on hypertext than actual examples of hyperfiction. Competitions held by Salt Hill Journal and trAce online are encouraging new works. Are Australian writers in general slow to catch on to these opening possibilities for innovative writing?
TH Australian artists/writers lead in this area. In digital environments we have to consider writing as a coalescence of image, sound, word and design. As a filterer for the trAce alt-x hypertext competition I found the entries from Australia to be on the whole the most sophisticated conceptually and technologically, the most willing to experiment with design, to move across registers/genres/discourses.
TW I don’t think it’s just a matter of Australian writers being slow. Most of the good work is in critical theory. Much of the hyperfiction is not invested well enough in the writing yet…people are dazzled by what they can make and the writing lags behind. My list of good, interesting work from Australia would be fairly small and covered already by you: Josephine Wilson, Teri Hoskin.
LC Online writing (hyperfiction and hypertext) as a defined practice (and there’s that problem of definition) is kind of marginalised and nebulous even though there is heaps of locally produced web-based artwork (eg Di Ball www.thehub.com.au/dibbles and Tracey Benson www.thehub.com.au/~traceyb – link expired) and a really positive exchange between artwork and writing. Positive things happen through events like MAAP and volt: they start to generate interest and focus and curators like Beth Jackson (who initiated and worked on wonderful projects like shoreline http://www.maap.org.au/shoreline – link expired). There’s a lot of energy and interest which is kind of diffused, sporadic and hidden; other Queensland content includes cyberpoet komninos and sound artists low key and nude (who did a beautiful sound and spoken word piece with alt x). The web and hypermedia/hypertext introduces so many possibilities that people are kind of in a bind about what to do with it: is it a tool, a medium, a genre? Is it writing, visual culture, screen culture? What all that means to me is ‘experiment’; let the work make the definitions, not the critics.
DK The short answer (to are Oz writers slow to catch on) would be: how would we ever know? The number of venues for onscreen narratives (in any format) to be published/displayed is: very small, for “official” venues with some literary legitimation; or quite small, and dispersed and hard to find, for zine-y venues. It’s mostly the latter where really-engaging-experimental hyperfiction happens, where the dimensions and capabilities of the medium are exploited rather than merely demonstrated. Writers have been slow to take up the new possibilities, but editors have been appalling, and often either conservatively repetitive or plain luddite and reactive. Some of the best hypertextual narratives being produced in Oz at the moment are in print zines and occasionally as anarchic pockets of university student magazines, and in the student galleries of Creative writing/Multimedia courses at universities…work which remains plaintively dispersed and un-findable, never further developed for, or even submitted for, publication.
KK Finally, do you enjoy reading hyperfiction? What are your favourite hypertext works?
TW I enjoy reading hyperfiction just as I enjoy reading other fiction and poetry: the writing has to engage me and will if it has a clarity…uses language in an exciting way…has an integrity to its project of making something. There are more writers following traditional modes (on paper) producing more exciting writing than I’ve found on the web. But that can change.
LC I am a regular visitor to mark amerika’s AltX and Gregory Ulmer’s site, and I really enjoy some of the works on ‘mystory’, trAce and the ewre (a really important Australian-based initiative…the work that’s been done is really defining in terms of an approach, an ethic and an interpretation; a starting point).
DK The pieces I’ve responded to most passionately are one-off works appearing in web journals, that disappear within 6 months: ones that refract every design element through the narrative, without resorting to an often-clumsy single central literal metaphor. Philip Salom and his partner Meredith Kidby have managed some terrific, compact hypertexts based around narrative poetry (http://www.netspace. com.au/~psalom/mmm.html) and Meredith has produced eclectically enjoyable material available on CD ROM [There’s also] Wishing by Gregory Ulmer and Linda Marie Walker for the startling electrical quality of the writing; and, finally, of course, mark amerika’s Grammatron opus, for its verbal exuberance, self-conscious eccentricities, sheer scope, and good ol’ yankee audacity at presuming itself the first and biggest and best.
Current projects: Teri Hoskin’s meme_shift, a consideration of how Western and Japanese cultures construct each other as Other, will be published on the trAce site; Terri-ann White is completing a novel; Linda Carroli is collaborating with Josephine Wilson on a new work cipher (work in progress http://ensemble.va.com.au/cipher) addressing the performativity of writing online; Dean Kiley is the editor of eXtra, a web journal associated with Overland.
Adrienne Greenheart’s Six Sex Scenes www.altx.com/hyperx/sss/index.htm
announces itself as “a novella in hypertext” (why do online writers feel the need to state the obvious? Is it because they are insecure about the value of fiction on the internet?). It traces a woman’s brutal childhood and its effects on her current relationships. It works as a journal, the sometimes stodgy writing of personal memoir. Oral sex (a curious rendition by the Yeastie Girls), lesbianism (to be or not to be), Jewish identity, incest; they are all covered. Negotiating the spaces of most couples, and with a spiralling devotion to Sylvia Plath, the hypertext structure is simple. Links at the bottom of the page branch out, gradually sinking deeper into the character’s obsessions, building on our friendship.
Gradually her skewered reality is revealed. The family’s power struggle is brilliantly conveyed in the descriptions of game playing. Strategies of Scrabble. The art of letting your parents win. In her childhood she asks for a chair so she can sit near the window to look out on the street all afternoon. Her parents send her to a psychiatrist. In her teens she plucks her eyebrows and goes to school with bloody holes and scabs. In her 20s she attends a poetry reading and, with Dorothy Porter-esque cynicism, stabs at the “god-of-all-liberated males” who gets off on reading poems about battered women (with proceeds of his book going to a women’s shelter); he is not the only one who eroticises violence.
Like films such as Female Perversions and Welcome to the Dollhouse, Six Sex Scenes is uncompromising in its exploration of what it means to grow up female, a site worth sticking with for the complex way it treats sexual abuse and incest.
Where the Sea Stands Still www.illumin.co.uk/ica/wsss/ [link expired] is, in contrast, a minimalist hypertext based on a highly structured poetic sequence by Yang Lian (cybertext transformation by John Cayley, English translation by Brian Holton). Lian aims to translate his Chinese characters to the screen, investigating the creation of meaning through visual arts, space, and cross-cultural representation.
The mahjong tiles—blue pixellated waves, calligraphy characters, black and white rooftops—dump text deposits onto my screen, “lust’s blank water on noon’s black bed sheet/the further from blood ties the brighter it is”, a flotsam and jetsam of the shore, the contracting line between nature and city. A series of snapshots where we are constructed, erected, opened up to Peter Greenaway decay, where we become “kids sliced by long dead light.”
New River http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/newriver [link expired]
continues the watery theme, an excellent hyperfiction/media journal, offering a small but innovative selection created purely for the web, and a good introduction to how hypertext has evolved in the last few years. Back issues feature Stuart Moulthrop’s Hegirascope 2 (“what if the word will not be still”) and Edward Thacker’s fleshthresholdnarrative. In the latest edition Curtis Harrell’s hypermedia poem Nightmare Wonders Father’s Song successfully takes on a “dream logic.” Sitting in the dark with a pitch black screen, there are no words, and as you move flashes of story, images, come out of the night and disappear. You are, as in dreams, attracted by the light, this night-poem delicate, childlike, grasping, feeling its way, blind at times, evoking death and dragons, fairytales and lost child(hood). At a page titled Quick I play hide and seek with words that tease and taunt (trying to catch them with my mouse) and become the predator, entering the city at night, an architecture of rhythm and fear: “In their sleek cars, people/Are migrating/from anger to homicide.”
New York, New York. So new, so not: thanks to our global televisual mind, Manhattan seems as familiar to me as Sydney. Just how new can my travelling eyes be?
The hugeness of America—its landscape, language, art collections. Bigness is big here. And still, a baby flirting on the underground turns smiles; or, crawling minute amongst a room of huge Hopper canvases (sole people in desolate places), she is hailed as a work of art. This big and little place.
I leave my regards in Broadway as we sprint past its success and neon signs. Winds peeling off our caps, yester-snows melting into sludge, ice-air making us cry. Head to smaller venues: the Joyce (200 seats) celebrating Altogether Different, the Danspace its 25 years. Little is big, but here too the new is so old you wonder how new new can be. This is where much modern dance kicked its own arse into gear, and the bruise of this pleasure shows. Like an echo in the bone of old sorrow, the arc of an arm splaying old joy. Do we break all the ice in new dancing? But I ask the wrong question: we move not just in the moment, but within all time. Sometimes, we glimpse the future.
Sean Curran, Irishman, older than his troupe, dancing perhaps so he and another man can kiss, dancing perhaps so that his feet and mind can talk to each other. Whose Irish jig is this? I’ve had it with you, Paddy (and Michael), the riverdance broken by a boy skitting stones across the water, water heading towards the falls. Curran is an imp, a questioner, a choreographer who in ensemble can make his dancers meet Brahmakrishna as much as Flatley (via Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane); a soloist who can strip back his mask (and fooling) to lay open the doubts of his mind: If I move like this, if I make my body thus follow my mind, what does my mind follow? A sudden vista of Tibetan calligraphy projected huge across the back wall folds him bare…whilst still, the feet patter, the torso erects, the arms fling. This is Irish, and not Irish—melded with the histories of his suffering, his addictions, his loves, his training-grounds. Eclectic, mad, tender, nuggetty and vulnerable; he is crying and laughing.
Kevin Wynn is arcing limbs, Alvin Ailey, white and black American history. His dancers wear sexy leotards and spread their thighs. He renders a 20-strong ensemble as individual yet complexly cohesive as a grand railway clock. I am tired in the complexity of the watching. I am invigorated as well, exercised as in a class. His beauties are only “viscious” [the work is titled Viscious Beauties], perhaps, if you watch from the viewpoint of classical ballet, but they’re strong, quirky, eruptive, their organs (lungs, livers, spleens) dance. To the live jazz band, their feet tamp ground. And then, in the solo, quiet—because you have to stop the music to hear old scream. The black dancer spirals out, a yearning colonial dream played out on husks of corn. Protest breaks into grace; the vigour of the body breaks a new world.
Meredith Monk’s Celebration Dance leaps back to what harvest ritual might have been before New Age sacred niceness took its hold. Extracts of songs and music from various Monk works is interspersed with an eclectic range of texts from Basho to Rumi and tribal and initiation songs. Here, and always beneath our feet, what sacredness. Sometimes I hear and see the earth splintering open, turning on its axis; at others, the performers enact a soft bowing splendour to the soil. They fidget, like mice, or horses, or children, thanking the grass and the stars. The physical movements are so simple that I actually hear people objecting to the dance. But I object to this objecting, as each performer moves with dignity, and unselfconsciously according to their means. They do, move, sing. And till the soil, with the minimal finesse but huge skill that soil-tillers use. This is sharing harvest, not watching form. And the audience adores it, adores Meredith, roars her in, because of the sheer and audacious joy with which she fills the space. She told me she wondered if she could get away with it, but she did.
In Melbourne, Russell Dumas’ brave new work Oaks Cafe/Cassandra’s Dance exhibits his characteristic virtuosity alongside the awkwardness of a new world cutting in. It’s interesting and provocative that Russell chose to work this time with actors as well as dancers from his familiar stable. What I see is a difference in their feeling about dancing, an intensity with more emotion from the actors (how grim that turn, how self-amazing that supporting action) to a kind of perspex translucency from those of dancer-background. A difference of the colour of their histories. In the moves of greater virtuosity, perhaps the dancers fare better; but Russell tells me afterwards that virtuosity requires amnesia—a forgetting of how they got there. We do not share their sweat. Perhaps for an actor it is harder to forget: memory is a part of their technique. The actor’s Method: Who is it, what is it, where is it, when is it, why is it: the quintrivium of questions that perhaps never can quite leave your dancing mind.
So, we have some re-membering, some forgetting, hearts on their sleeves or transferred to the space between limbs. But there is also another membering here: Dumas examining his own making, a history of his works in continuous enlarged projection, beyond the back of the stage visible through a door into the next room. Glimpses of old moves, echoed or ignored in the dance of bodies on the floor. This is unprecious history, giving a freedom to our looking. So, too, in the open side door and unshuttered windows, letting the late afternoon light in, letting it sink, letting our watching roll over into night. Night watching, the time of thinking about the dance, after the dance, here becoming the same moment with the dance. This is a gift of time. And the audience is full of children, perhaps watching something they already recognise. (There were no children in the New York halls. Are they risk? They might have fuzzed the edges of the made.)
In that struggle with our memory, that edge between re-membering, dis-membering, letting the past fall into death or stay honoured in the colour of how we move, lies the turning over into the terrible possible world. Being has teeth. The awesome contradiction of it: inheritance cuts its edge in every mouth and helps the young tear into new food. And words, form, quickly follow on. Like Cassandra, talking (in)to the future—but perhaps this time being heard. (“Danthing”, lisped one young one from behind, before her repetitions became more voluble and her mother took her from the room. Her futures, seeing, lisping, wriggling into other pushing pressing needs, lay here and beyond the room.)
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Altogether Different Festival: Each of Both (1998), Symbolic Logic (1999), Folk Dance for the Future (1997) [ensemble]; Five Points of Articulation (1994-5) [solo excerpts], Sean Curran Company, choreography Sean Curran, visual design Mark Randall, The Joyce Theatre, Jan 5; Three World Premieres: Viscious Beauties, Black Borealis (solo: Giovanni Sollima), To Repel The Daemons, The Kevin Wynn Collection, choreography Kevin Wynn, music Peter Jones, Phillip Hamilton, lighting Roma Flowers, David Grill, Jan 7. “Silver Series”, Danspace Project, Meredith Monk and vocal ensemble, A Celebration Service, conceived, directed & composed by Meredith Monk, texts compiled by Pablo Vela, Jan 9, Joyce Theatre, Soho, NY. The Oaks Café/Cassandra’s Dance, director, principal choreographer Russell Dumas, performed & co-choreographed by Danielle von der Borch, Sally Gardner, Keith March, Trevor Patrick, Colin Sneesby, Cath Stewart and Kerry Woodward, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Feb 7
For Chunky Move’s contribution to the Woolmark 1999 Melbourne Fashion Festival Lucy Guerin’s group work, Zero, is a sophisticated and daring piece. Made for the entire company, it is an episodic but not literal progression of large and small group and solo sections, comprising a work that makes for compelling viewing. Guerin has set up a formal but abstract structure that defies our expectations. There are continual surprises—your attention is drawn from one part of the space to another, from big movements to tiny details. Sometimes a trio in a downstage corner is mirrored in the opposite corner upstage. Sometimes the ensemble work is crisp and tight, other times it is looser.
The work subtly builds to its conclusion when Phillip Adams and Luke Smiles perform a virtuosic duet. Adams manipulates Smiles, asserting his power by containing and constricting Smiles’ movement. They remain physically connected and confined to a tight square of light centre stage. The dependency play is riveting and one of the more obvious emotionally charged moments.
It is clear in Zero that Guerin’s decision to work without a theme has actually freed her to make more potent choreographic decisions than in her last work, Heavy (1998). However, I was acutely aware of every lighting cue and change in the soundtrack tempo, which I found distracting.
In complete contrast to Guerin’s abstraction and clarity comes Gideon Obarzanek’s All The Better To Eat You With, a late 20th century panto-style presentation of Little Red Riding Hood. Dancers sporting exaggerated character costumes recreate the narrative through mime and rather hackneyed interpretive movement sequences. Given the desensitisation of us all (children included) to violence and death through accessible popular culture forms, this interpretation of what is a scary children’s story goes no further than the basic expectations of how this story could be read in current cultural context.
It is literal and simplistic in its storytelling and lacks the dynamic movement vocabulary we have seen in some of Obarzanek’s previous works eg Bonehead (1997) and C.O.R.R.U.P.T.E.D.2 (1998) The set, however, is stunning. Also designed by the choreographer, it is a series of simple, stylish aquarium-like installations, that bubble, slosh, reflect and absorb light, complemented by a large pool table-sized slab of light—sometimes used as a screen and perpendicular to the floor, sometimes horizontal, hovering above. It tilts, turns and creates a fascinating diversion to the live performances happening around it.
Obarzanek’s effective design for That’s Not My Movement, But this One Is (a short work with Guerin) also provides much of the interest for that work. Small, candle-lit perspex boxes clustering near the 2 dancers, but gently swaying, exude a warmth that does not exist in the unsatisfying solos these choreographers have created for each other. The sense of incompleteness leaves me wondering why the clarity of the design is not as apparent in the movement.
There were some breathtaking and believable performances, especially from Fiona Cameron, Luke Smiles and Phillip Adams in Zero, but I missed the worldly understanding inherent in the performances of Obarzanek’s first Chunky Move ensemble. The loss of key performers like Narelle Benjamin and Brett Daffy, who have been replaced by some technically able but less experienced performers, has created a less individualistic approach to the performers’ interpretation of the work. The strength of Chunky Move in the past has been this sense of the personal within an ensemble setting.
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Chunky Move, Bodyparts, choreographers Gideon Obarzanek and Lucy Guerin; performers Luke Smiles, Lisa Griffiths, Phillip Adams, David Tyndall, Byron Perry, Fiona Cameron and Kirstie McCracken; collaborators Damien Cooper, lighting designer Audra Cornish, fashion designer Peter Haren@TDM, composer Darrin Verhagen, costume designers Laurel Frank, David Anderson; Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, February 16 – 27
A trio of objects begins the piece, their arbitrary motions engendered by some offstage intentionality. An oval stone rolls onstage, wobbles, rolls, wobbles and finally rests. Quiet reigns. The passage and beauty of the stone’s journey says it all about this piece, wherein a setting was created which made space for the contemplation of this simple, moving object. We slowly meet the protagonists in this medley of objects, both animate and inanimate.
original home is improvised. It has movement, objects and sound; 3 people and many artefacts, both natural and constructed. Graeme Leak is credited with the sound objects but all the performers use them. Ros Warby stood on a weathered stone, a limpet extending her limbs against a white canvas. Shona Innes wielded enormous seed pods, ridiculous weapons in a comic duet. The objects made music but they also sang their own presence. I almost felt the plethora of objects was too much—transported on and off stage—they tended to break with the chaste atmosphere of the space. But then I decided that their transport was like a Brechtian device intended to mark the boundaries between particular sections of the work, and to allow the performers to be their ordinary selves.
The performance space had been reconstructed for the event, an interior layer of walls, gaps, pleats, and a wide rectangular window at the back from which spilled darkness and light. Warby stood against the window, not doing all that much. So much is conveyed in-between. Leak’s sense of musical timing was voluminous, allowing for an interweaving of kinaesthetic content.
The 3 performers made duets and trios, showing their year’s work together. Yet they didn’t blend into one another. At one point, Warby and Innes were bent over, each with one arm up. One arm so different from the other, animated according to 2 distinct corporealities. Innes’ opportunistic humour—lapping up the possibilities of the moment—was not mimicked by anyone else. The performers coalesced in the space of a single performance whilst listening to their own muse.
The trace of Deborah Hay’s recent visit was manifest here: no rush to get anywhere, always already there. Although it could be argued that all dance is a form of improvised movement, when you watch an ‘improvised work’ there is a sense of something over and above established choreography. Perhaps the difference lies in the observer. But the felt quality is of indeterminacy, a lack of predetermination, of multiple and not singular pathways. The point at which this is conveyed is when nothing is happening—for in that moment there is a vacillation between freedom and anticipation, between future and past, a pair of extremes which is only ever resolved in the present.
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original home, (returning to it), director Ros Warby, choreography/composition /performance Ros Warby, Shona Innes and Graeme Leak, lighting design Margie Medlin, design Ros Warby, Margie Medlin; Dancehouse, Melbourne, February 5 – 14
Tess de Quincey is a choreographer and dancer who has worked extensively in Europe, Japan and Australia as solo performer, teacher and director. The strongest influence on her performance came from her work over 6 years (1985-91) with Butoh dancer Min Tanaka and his Mai-Juku Company. Tanaka founded the term and philosophical basis for Body Weather, a broad-based and comprehensive training that embraces and builds on concepts of environment. Body Weather proposes a philosophical but also practical strategy to the mind and the body that is not just for ‘professional’ dancers or performance practitioners but is an open investigation that can be relevant for anyone interested in exploring the body. Drawing on elements of both eastern and western dance, sports training, martial arts and theatre practice, it is a discipline that develops a conscious relation without conforming to specific form. In solo and group works as well as her work with sculptor-dancer Stuart Lynch, Tess de Quincey proposes this practice within a contemporary western perspective as a training that can be applied as a pure body/mind research or aligned to dance and/or performance training.
De Quincey’s major solo productions, Movement on the Edge, Another Dust and is.2 have toured extensively in Europe and Australia and among her group pieces, Square of Infinity, a film and large-scale performance work, was the culmination of reflections on the specific time and space of the dry lake bed of Lake Mungo in the ACT. De Quincey/Lynch’s recent site-specific and time-based works include The Durational Trilogy, a series of pieces lasting 6, 12 and 24 hours) and Compression 100, a series of collaborative performances in and around Sydney.
Currently recipient of the Australia Council’s Choreographic Fellowship (1998-99), Tess de Quincey has initiated another large scale project focused this time in Australia’s Central Desert. The Triple Alice Project in partnership with Desart, the Centre for Performance Studies (Sydney University) and The Performance Space spans 3 years (1999-2001). It involves a forum as well as 3 live, site- and temporally-specific laboratories staged over 3 weeks of each year. The forum and laboratories are accessible through an interactive website, www.triplealice.net which is formative of and integral to the event.
Triple Alice 1 (September 20-October 10 1999) is a laboratory focusing on contemporary arts practices of the Central Desert and brings together Indigenous and non-indigenous artists from the Northern Territory and local guest speakers to contextualise the site. It includes a 3-week intensive Body Weather workshop in which participants will make sensory and experiential mappings of space—in this case, the landscape 100 kms north west of Alice Springs at Hamilton Downs in the MacDonnell Ranges. “The workshop involves some strenuous workouts to develop strength, flexibility and a strong physical grounding. The ground work provides insight into the different speeds of the body and the function of time. These practices also aim to sharpen sensorial focus, spatial awareness and coordinative perspectives”, says de Quincey. The workshop will be joined by a dance-performance unit and theorists and writers will maintain an onsite theoretical debate. The website will transmit the laboratory and invite remote participation—a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary meeting of theory and practice.
Triple Alice 2 in 2000 will involve a number of collaborative artists creating performance for web and screen. This second laboratory will build on the experience and language developed in the first and invite a wider range of responses, particularly from new media artists through physical attendance at the lab as well as remote interactive networking with it. Participation from remote sites will include live interstate linkups with art venues in the major cities. The emphasis will be on performance and art works specifically designed for electronic media.
Triple Alice 3 (2001) is an online international laboratory, seminar and festival. This event will correlate ideas of space and time in the different traditions of artistic practice and performance work with those of other disciplines including astrophysics, philosophy, astronomy, military research and navigation. In parallel with this exchange, live online performance and artworks will synthesise the results of the first 2 labs.
Pink Floyd, God Flesh, The Beach Boys, Canadians David Cronenberg and comic book artists Seth, Chester Brown and Joe Matt. This strange alliance of music and cinematics is typical of the diversity of works that inspire Tasmanian video artist Matt Warren.
His most recent piece is a video installation titled I Still Miss You, which has only recently finished showing in the new gallery belonging to CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania). The work occupied a corner of the main gallery as part of the exhibition Transmission, curated by Jennifer Spinks, featuring the work of Sarah Ryan, Troy Ruffels, Leigh Burnett, Matt Calvert, Kate Warnock and Warren.
Within a screened-off section of the gallery, a suspended video projector beamed deep into a darkened 4 by 6 metre space carpeted with road metal an inch thick. A step onto the heavy gravel, and I was confronted by the amplified crunchings of my footfalls issuing from speakers in the ceiling. Here I stopped, turning my attention to the pool of flickering images on the wall.
Backed by a deep thrumming chord with an almost metallic edge which completely filled the space, the video unfolded as a series of impassioned monologues enacted by a man and a woman in a car in heavy rain. We see them from a distance at night, and yet cannot hear their dialogue. While the camera position remains stationary, the view closes in to focus on each face, sometimes pleading, sometimes ranting, while all the time washed by red and yellow sheets of light sprayed from the night traffic spilling past, periodically punctuated by a convulsive strobe that lit up the cockpit of the car like the wing of an aircraft.
A series of hypnotic sequences evolve that explore the dynamics of what seems like a relationship break down, all held in the tight confines of the steamy domestic sedan. The entire drama is seen through a foreground of luminous waves animated by the sweeping pulses of the wiper blades across an incandescent ocean that is the fish shop window of the windscreen.
A central thematic of Matt Warren’s’s work is an investigation of his own experiences of absence and loss, through a subtle and confident manipulation of his medium. Both of the characters occupy the driver’s seat in the argument (physically and metaphorically), and this device is used to explore a series of alternative developments of the conflict. The viewer realises the arbitrariness of his/her own narrative assumptions, and this results in a process of reflection upon one’s own existence, and beyond to the link between Warren’s own work and the autobiographical montage of the comic artists mentioned earlier.
Warren has been working with video and sound composition since he taught himself to edit with 2 VCRs while at Hellyer College in Burnie, and his qualifications now include a BFA in Painting and a Graduate Diploma in Video, both from the University of Tasmania. Warren has just been offered a Samstag Scholarship to undertake postgraduate study overseas, and he is currently negotiating with Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to pursue an MFA in Interdisciplinary Practice, beginning late 1999. I have no doubt the Samstag Scholarship and associated travel experience will add to Warren’s eclectic nature, and I’ll be very keen to see how new influences enhance the elegant processes of layering and synaesthesia that characterise his work.
See review of Matt Warren’s short film Phonecall which screened as part of the recent Multimedia Mini-Festival in Tasmania,
original home is the second in a series of works by Ros Warby, exploring the possibilities that lie within (or between) music and dance.
At first there is the question of how to begin. A double question. How to begin to make the work and how to begin the work. When neither sound nor movement are privileged, nor developed separately. Right from the beginning they are allowed to interact and to cause events to happen, crossing over from one discipline to another. A kind of cross-stitching.
The rhythms and ph(r)ased collisions of sound and bodies, are both decidedly musical and intensely human. There is an interchange of impulses. We meet the body as composer in its purest sense.
There is a question of how to begin and there is a question of how to proceed. It begins quietly, or at least the space is quiet, or at least empty. There are sounds coming up from underneath the floor, underneath the seating. Instruments warming up, air being forced down a long tube. This is theatrical. Someone is waiting in the wings. We fall silent.
And then a rock rolls across the floor. This rolling stone (rock) is awkward, unsymmetrical, noisy. There is a certain rhythm. Its trajectory is unpredictable. The rolling of the rock gives us a direction as to how to enter the work. The haphazard movement of the rock suggests that anything might happen, where one sound or movement does not predict the next and cannot be fixed. A work premised very much on receptivity.
The dancers are placing objects against the side wall. These objects are treasures. They have a history, detailed histories of their own. A seed pod was found in the Queensland Botanical Gardens and brought to Melbourne. The seed pods with their promise of new life, dried and clattery on the wooden floor. There is on old drum, and the head of another old and broken drum. Some of these objects have been waiting for repair for years, broken and (apparently) of no use. They have been broken and taken apart. Other instruments have been built out of them and these bits of wood are the offcuts.
The objects (instruments) are brought in without caution. The dancers are dropping things, without reference to the sound they make. Without reference or reverence or caution.
Objects remain on the floor where they have landed, silent now. Once or twice they are kicked out of the way. The debris on the floor is never really abandoned. But it is nevertheless scattered, dropped, strewn across the empty floor. The objects are treated with a certain carelessness, something (very) difficult to achieve.
One of the dancers lies on the floor, alongside the (other) objects. She becomes one link in a chain (of objects). Bodies and objects are transferable. I remember standing next to the sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, at an exhibition in Perth. I was tempted to talk to them, such was their human presence.
Drum sticks fall like fiddlesticks onto the wooden floor. Dancers step in between the sticks, careful not to cause movement, careful not to allow a stick to move. Just as in the game, you can remove the sticks so long as others do not move. In this case if one stick were to move it would betray itself. By making a noise.
She moves along a straight line, her footsteps are marked, in time, by the sound of two pieces of wood being struck. The spinning ring, like a small miracle, grows louder as it comes closer to the floor. It makes a kind of crescendo before it lands, stops, falls silent. The whining of the bowed metal plate, reminding us of Pierre Henri’s saw. Its weary lament.
The rock is one brought back from Europe in a suitcase. “Has this got rocks in it?” There is a question of weight.
I am thinking about contact dancing, only here it is to do with things, or more exactly the sound(s) of things. Contact dancing involves the shifting of weight from one body to another, sharing the weight and moving according to the shifts between these two bodies. In original home, the sound, as body, could be imagined as the other partner, whose materiality could be trusted and lent on as the body of another. Sound as body, body as composer. This play between sound and body points to the weight of sound just as did the weight of the rock. The rock rolls for a second time. It makes a(n unintended) direct line for the back wall and crashes into it. Again it takes forever to settle. A kind of balancing and falling at the same time.
There is a stillness as one of the dancers perches on the rock. Her stillness is allowed to crack and she falls and moves on. Against the back wall she balances on a disk. This back wall is miked. She whips the wall with an electric extension cord given her by the composer. Slapping the electric cord against the wall. She lifts the rock steadily while balancing on an hour glass shaped drum. As she stands up the objects fall over, knocked over in her carelessness. There are abrupt endings and unexpected linkages. Objects, like ideas are dropped when no longer useful, and without ceremony, you move on.
The final image is one of breath. At first we hear a long drawn out blurt, a kind of Tibetan blasphemy. The breath is being forced through a long metal tube. We see the man lifting a made-up instrument of 3 pieces, almost too long to hold, almost out of reach. With the introduction of some small valve or flute into the core of the tube, the sound transforms into a fragile, wavering, sliding, musical line. We hear the frail wanderings of the breath, as the lights die down.
We are reminded (again) of the fragility of being human, of the body, of our closeness to death. We feel the frailty of the human body, with all its limitations and fallibilities.
Imagine that, still alive, after all these years.
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Ros Warby, original home, performers Ros Warby, Shona Innes, Graeme Leak; sound objects, Graeme Leak; Dancehouse, Feb 5 – 14
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx spoke famously of the “tradition of all the dead generations weigh[ing] like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Similarly, there is an overwhelming sense in which the video works of Peter Callas possess an electro-organic force, one so imbued with the archive of mediatised debris of geo-political and popular culture that the ecstasy of an encounter with his video works might lead to meteoric apoplexy in perception on the part of the viewer. This, if you will, is but one constellation of a dialectical imaginary that negotiates the complexities between the premodern and the (post)modern in Callas’ topo-videographic lessons on history.
Peter Callas: Initialising History is a 3-component national touring project centred around Peter Callas, electronic media artist and curator. Produced by dLux media arts, the project features Initialising History, comprising 12 of Callas’ video works 1980–1999; Peripheral Visions, a selection by Callas of contemporary international video art and computer animation; and An Eccentric Orbit, a 3-part survey of Australian video art made during the 1980s and early 90s, curated by Callas and produced by Ross Harley and touring internationally since its launch in 1994 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
The short black & white video Singing Stone (1980) holds a curious pivotal position as the opening piece in the Callas retrospective. Prior to embarking into the world of video art, Callas trained at the ABC as an assistant film and then sound editor for TV news and current affairs programs. He then studied printmaking and sculpture at art school in Sydney. Singing Stone seems to translate some of the technical and ideological properties of these otherwise distinct media into the poetics of video art. For almost the entire duration of this work, we hear a harsh scraping discord as we see a hand brushing a stone in a circular motion. The image of the hand and stone literally disintegrates, recomposing as a mutable collage of imaginary terrains anchored by noise which eventually folds over the obliterated image to include a veritable murmur of voices and honking traffic intruding from the street. At least that’s how I heard it.
The layered dimensions of sound and imagery in Singing Stone are made possible by the unstable nature of magnetic tape as a recording surface, yet one assumes these layers are the result of the place of a kinaesthetic between the hand and the stone. As such, a metaphor is created on the dialectic between inscription (or representation) and the contingencies of history. In yet another way, the work can be seen to refuse the fragmented spectacle of TV news images held together in a universal order by the voice-over of a news reader or reporter. The referent seems to speak itself.
In the context of a selected retrospective, Singing Stone can perhaps more crucially be approached as anticipating some of the recurring stylistic motifs and critical concerns Callas’ later works present. First, there is a recognition of the instability of representation: Callas shows that even images unfolding in real-time—that supposedly ‘unmediated’ time not subject to the intervention of the ‘edit’—are, however, subject to the peculiarities of a communication technology and the way historicity is attributed to cultural phenomena. Secondly, is the way a grid of manga warriors or shifting troupe of dancers appears to emerge in the regenerating images of Singing Stone. (Callas himself hinted as much in his introduction to Initialising History at the Festival of Perth’s ART(iculations) symposium, and revealed in the discussion after the screenings that he sees the bearded face of a Chinese man.) An apocryphal dimension attends such a readerly desire to enact order out of chaos. Indeed, Singing Stone invites uncertainty, or rather the certainty of differentiated perception —for both operate as a dialectical trope across the Callas oeuvre.
Callas’ ‘singular style’ developed while living in Tokyo during the ‘bubble economy’ of the mid 80s. In this harmonious correlation between cultural production and imagined economies, video artists were commissioned by department stores, with electronic billboards and shop display windows operating as potential conduits out of urban environments for the passer-by. The staple icon articulating the animated brilliance of Callas’ multi-dimensional work from this period is derived or, as Scott McQuire aptly puts it, “mined” from the ubiquity of manga culture in Japan. The use of techno-hybrids of traditional and popular music as an editing strategy is predominant in these signatory video works. As Callas commented during the Perth screening of Initialising History, the structure of music dictates the editing of images; what distinguishes these works from pop music video clips is the situated resonance of history reconfigured. Callas alleviates a possibile rigidity in the dialectical image by deploying sound to create a fluid dimension for political expression.
Bilderbuch für Ernst Will (Ernst Will’s Picture Book): A Euro Rebus is one of Callas’ last works produced using the Fairlight CVI (Computer Video Instrument)—the primary tool through which Callas honed the complexity of fusing disparate cultural histories into topo-videographic arrangements. Made in Sydney and Tokyo from 1990 to 1993, Bilderbuch für Ernst Will follows Callas’ earlier work and doesn’t conform to any apparent narrative structure. Instead, as Rudolf Frieling suggests, Bilderbuch… is a work of “possible logics of construction and perception that need to be explored through multiple viewings”. Herein lies a paradox of Callas’ video art: while these texts can be seen as a highly aestheticised and at times horrific and sublime pastiche of images referencing a mass of art historical, pop culture, and what Ross Harley astutely calls “ideogrammic objects” of US mediatised culture (Art & Text 28 (1988), p. 78), his texts nonetheless resist the easy digestibility of aesthetics we often associate with recent digital and photomedia artworks. Within this tension between familiarity and abstruse syncretism, the problematic of history and memory is once again foregrounded as a politicised terrain. Moreover, Callas contributes to cultural debate the importance of reconsidering the critical place of aesthetics. And he’s been doing this for some time now.
An attempt to unravel the encyclopedic histories intricated throughout the video work by Callas can only be an interminable one. And herein lies the pleasure of his work. In any case, the program notes by Rachel Kent, read in conjunction with the essays by McQuire and Frieling in the forthcoming monograph, have to be commended for their critical acumen.
I’d like to finish by turning to Callas’ current work in progress, Lost in Translation. During the ART(iculations) symposium, Callas made frequent mention of what he observes as the institutional and commercial outmoding of video art by digital media in many contemporary art festivals. A pressing concern for Callas involves the cultural, social, and memorial implications that come with the excision of one communication technology as it is replaced by another. A fundamental question emerges: what happens when the communicative forms of cultural articulation are ‘exiled’ through instituted means? What is lost (and what is found) within new terrains of expression?
The syncopated “architectronics” emblemised in Callas’ CVI work are extended in Lost in Translation, where smooth transitions in 3-dimensional space envelop 2-dimensional planar images. A considerably slower pulse tracks a refiguring of ‘magic realism’ usually attributed to Latin American writers and photographers—the labyrinthine tales of Borges, epic parables of García Márquez and poignant images of Alvarez Bravo spring most immediately to mind. With claims nowadays that the novel is long dead, and the reality-effect of photography no longer tenable, it is perhaps no surpise that Callas’ translation of Brazillian history through and within the spatio-temporality of digital media evokes questions of ‘truth’ as it pertains to the mode of representation and the position of the observer.
Lost in Translation is by definition a work in progress, as it will always be. This is not to say this current project will remain incomplete. Rather, its purpose is the creation of a fractal universe in which the singularity of the event is registered in the multiple dimensions of a history on Latin America in which the perception of the viewer is folded into its topology.
Peter Callas: Initialising History, commissioned and produced by dLux media arts in association with Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Festival of Perth, PICA, February 10 – March 7. Program touring nationally: ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Melbourne until May 2, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from May 27.
The Hobart Fringe Festival was set up several summers ago as a means for performers and practitioners in the experimental and non-mainstream arts to gain greater exposure. Tasmania has a rich vein of talent, across all the arts, but rather too few opportunities for these talents to be showcased. This goes for the experimental arts in particular. The entire Fringe Festival functions on a lot of enthusiasm and goodwill and a limited budget. Happily, the organisers are able to bring together a variety of smaller arts events, some of which would be taking place in any case, giving them a wider profile by including them within the Fringe, which runs for 2 weekends and the intervening week.
One of the best resolved and most professional events within this year’s Fringe Festival was the Multimedia Mini-Festival, curated by local video and performance artist and musician Matt Warren. Warren, current recipient of a Samstag Scholarship, will soon undertake MFA studies in Canada. Over the past few years he has been very active, statewide, in presenting individual, collaborative and specially-commissioned innovative public arts events combining elements of performance, sound, video and installation.
With few film events currently being held on any regular basis in Tasmania, the Mini-Festival was a terrific opportunity for artist-exhibitors and audiences alike. We have only limited opportunities to study film and video making in any depth—and professional openings are rare—so the existence of an enthusiastic culture of film and video artmaking and appreciation is doubly impressive.
One of the highlights was Film & Video on the Fringe, a well balanced evening screening of short films and videos, by mostly local artists, held at the theatre at the Hobart School of Art. (At the School of Art itself, the popular and well equipped Video Department, run by highly regarded video artist and musician Leigh Hobba, has been for some time teetering on the brink of threatened closure, ill-advised and unpopular though such a move would be.)
The stand-out works included the video Where Sleeping Dogs Lay by Peter Creek, looking at the consequences of domestic violence. Its absorbing 2-hander dialogue format is jeopardised by a tacked-on bit of drama, designed (probably) to provide some visual variety and ‘action’, but not a total success. Tony Thorne’s amusing animation Serving Suggestion is a subversive piece about consumerism and physical stereotypes. Its humour is from the South Park bodily fluids and functions school of wit, but it manages to present its own, original take on this well-worn theme. The closing credits are amongst the most fascinating and well executed I’ve seen.
Prominent emerging local filmmaker Sean Byrne’s Love Buzz takes a familiar if far-fetched plot device and makes it fresh and credible. There is some interesting—and deliberately self-conscious—dialogue, marred, however, by the technical limitations of the soundtrack. Dianna Graf’s short (3 min) video-collage of still photographic images is a simple idea seductively brought to fruition. But perhaps the most engaging work is Matt Warren’s short video, Phonecall, another very simple concept actualised, in this case, into something Kafkaesque in its disturbing unreadability.
It is night and a pyjama-clad Warren has clearly been woken from sleep by the ringing phone. The audience then simply listens as he responds; warily, laconically, impatiently and so on, to whatever is on the other end of the phone (which is never revealed). Something a bit suspect seems to be being discussed, but we can never quite tell; nothing is spelt out or explained. As in a genuine phonecall, there is no concession made for eavesdroppers; we get this tantalising, one-sided conversation, a monologue in effect, delivered by Warren in exasperated tones that hit just the right subtle comic note. The work is at once cryptic (in its spoken content) and familiar (the scenario of being summoned to the phone at an inappropriate moment, or for an unwelcome encounter). A minor masterpiece of observation and commentary.
Another interesting festival event was the setting-up at Contemporary Art Services Tasmania of a small video/digital art space, to remain in place after the festival, with a changing program of high-tech work. For the Mini-Festival, this multimedia room presented interactives and a quicktime movie along with examples of websites, all by local artists. For artlovers less than familiar with new media, this engaging program was a good introduction to the web and to computer-generated and interactive works. It is pleasing that CAST has taken the initiative to provide permanent exhibition space for this popular artform which is rarely shown at commercial or major public galleries. In its main gallery, CAST featured a challenging group show, Transmission, with the high-tech arts represented by Matt Warren’s hypnotically atmospheric video, I Still Miss You, minimalist digital prints by Troy Ruffels and intriguing lenticular photography from Sarah Ryan.
Arc Up, a rave party featuring a multimedia presentation It felt like love (music and film projection by Stuart Thorne and Glenn Dickson, with animations by Mark Cornelius and ambient video by Matt Warren) completed the main Multimedia Mini-Festival, but a Super 8 Film Competition and the event Celluloid Wax, held at the quirky cabaret-style venue Mona Lisa’s, also helped ensure that media arts had a high profile as an important component of the Hobart Fringe Festival.
Festival curator Warren observes, “I jumped at the chance when I was asked to curate the multimedia segment of the 1999 Hobart Fringe Festival because it’s my area of expertise and I thought it would allow me to check out lots of new stuff I hadn’t seen before. This new work needs to be seen and a festival is the ideal way to draw attention to it. The Film and Video on the Fringe screening attracted a full house and the Mini-Festival at CAST had a steady stream of visitors, so I believe my area of the festival—like the Fringe overall—was a success.”
Despite the difficulties confronting new media in Tasmania, the outlook is encouraging: connoisseurs can look forward to the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s 2-week masterclass/seminar in new media curating and theory to be held in Hobart in April. A highlight will be the associated exhibition of work by up-and-coming Tasmanian multimedia artists curated by Leigh Hobba, for the Plimsoll Gallery at the Centre for the Arts.
Film and Video on the Fringe: The Fringe Multimedia Mini-Festival, curated by Matt Warren, various venues around Hobart, January 30 – February 7.
The laugh starts somewhere deep in the body and you can hear it on its journey through the chest and throat before it bursts out of the mouth of the artist like an alien creature. Then it vanishes and you wait for it to re-appear. The famous laugh of Stelarc has a life and reputation of its own, paralleling that of the artist himself. It seems natural enough but can he produce it at will? Is it the body’s natural expression surfacing or a performative behaviour designed to counter the expectations of a contemporary audience desiring outrage, extreme technical detail, physically dangerous actions and any of the other provocations associated with Stelarc’s work over the last 20 years. These questions of the performative are repeatedly raised in his work and they surfaced again at his presentation to the recent dLuxevent at the Museum of Sydney where Stelarc presented elements of his most recent work and offered the assembled a reading of it in his offhand, almost apologetic way (maybe it’s because he knows that the laugh is imminent…).
Despite such a distinctive laugh, Stelarc always depersonalises the experience of his body; he always refers to it as “The body” rather than “My body” and this is consistent with his sense of it as an organisation of structural components infused with intelligence, a smart machine. But what separates his thesis from, say the discourse of VW Kombi owners, is the idea that the body is not simply a vehicle to transport a disembodied consciousness through space/time. As Stelarc said, “We’ve always been these zombies behaving involuntarily” and this is partly why we have such endemic fears about the discourse of the body that his work opens up as it exposes the primal fear of the zombie, bodies animated by a distant alien intelligence (Descartes for example) in our imagining of the body and its function. On the other hand he raises the anxiety of the cyborg, for instance in his most recent explorations of the physical system in his Exoskeleton project which features “a pneumatically powered six-legged walking machine actuated by arm gestures.” The clumsy but alarmingly sudden movements of the machine compose the sounds it makes with those of the body into a kind of live soundtrack. This merging of the body’s sounds with those of the mechanical milieu into an ‘accompaniment’ to the performance is a signature element of Stelarc’s aesthetics in recent years and underscores his interest in the cybernetic potentials of art and behaviour.
One of the topics raised in the panel discussion (Chris Fleming, UTS; Jane Goodall, UWS; Vicki Kirby, UNSW; Gary Warner, CDP Media) following Stelarc’s presentation centred on the anxiety his work seems to provoke in audiences. Both the figure of the zombie and that of the cyborg disturb insofar as they seem to displace our sense of the humanistic self. Stelarc relentlessly pushes this concept to the margins and the space he opens in the field of body imaging and performance is breathtaking and a little scary for humanists because it is a field of future possibility and becoming rather than being and nostalgia.
Stelarc’s ideas were presented to his usual packed house—no doubt attributable to a combination of his appeal and the dLux organisational flair—who were shown video footage of recent and projected future work including Extra Ear. Much more will be said of this extremely controversial project which involves the ‘prosthetic augmentation’ of the human head (Stelarc’s) to fit another ear which could speak as well as listen by re-broadcasting audio signals, or just “whisper sweet nothings to the other ear” as Stelarc said so disarmingly. His other work-in-progress is the Movatar project which is an attempt to extend the use of digital avatars (virtual semi-autonomous bodies) to access the physical body (Stelarc’s) to perform actions in the real world. In this event, the body itself would become the prosthetic device. Yet none of this would be the same without the presence of the artist himself, with the big charming smile and booming laugh, animating a discussion which is sometimes too close to a tech-head’s wet dream. There is a necessary embodiment here of which Stelarc, as a performer, is acutely aware: “These ideas emanate from the performances. Anyone can come up with the ideas but unless you physically realise them and go through those experiences of new interfaces and new symbioses with technology and information, then it’s not interesting for me.” For Stelarc it is the task of physical actions to authenticate the ideas.
In her excellent and encyclopaedic study of contemporary performance art in Australia, Body and Self (OUP), Anne Marsh situates Stelarc in the recent history of the body in Australian performance in terms of a deconstructive journey from the opposition of body as truth/body as artefact, based on a dichotomy separating the natural from the cultural, to the place where these boundaries blur. From catharsis to abreactive process, from technophobia to the cyborg. In fact Stelarc is emblematic in this trajectory. Yet he has been widely misunderstood and misrecognised: as an uber shaman, who talks of the end of the organic body while performing elaborate rituals of pain and transgression of pain on the body in his 25 body suspension events (“with insertions into the skin”) of the 70s and 80s; a kind of electric butoh practitioner in his Fractal Flesh and Ping Body events; and more recently a “nervous Wizard of Oz strapped into the centre of a mass of wires and moving machinery.” (The Age, January 1 1999)
Stelarc has consistently challenged the way our culture has imagined the body, whether it is seen as a sacred object, a fetish of the natural, an organic unity…and the culture hasn’t always kept pace with him. Marsh’s book is also guilty of this as it attempts to situate Stelarc in terms of an enunciation of a particular subjectivity rather than reading it in its own terms. While Stelarc is certainly of the generation of major artists who have used the body as the work of art itself (Jill Orr, Mike Parr), manipulated it as an artefact rather than as a biological given (and therefore a kind of destiny) he is more concerned with the cybernetic body than with subjectivity, and more involved with pluralising and problematising the ways we speak of bodies and imagine them, and how we get them to do things and how they might move differently.
But I wanted to ask Stelarc and the panelists about what animates us? What of the emotive as well as the locomotive? These are questions of affect and energy which this type of work cannot really address and maybe we shouldn’t insist that it does because in so many other ways it is pushing us into new territory. Instead Jane Goodall raised the notion of motivation in relation to movement and suggested that Stelarc disconnects the links between them, so that motion becomes mechanical rather than psychological and does not reflect the motivation of the mover. A manifestation, she said, of the unravelling of evolutionary thinking.
So is Stelarc a post-evolutionary thinker? Well perhaps he is a post-evolutionary artist…As he is fond of saying, Stelarc is interested in finding ways for the human system to interact more effectively with the increasingly denaturalised environment this system finds itself in, and extending the body’s capacities for useful (and useless) action. And don’t forget this latter point. It’s easy to get caught up in Stelarc’s spiel, brilliant and provocative as it is; it is nonetheless an artist’s statement and the suggestive utility of much of his thinking should not stop us enjoying the spectacle of a genuinely creative mind at work and a laugh which is so richly suggestive of Stelarc’s profoundly ambiguous view of the world.
The laugh returns us to the basic contradiction of all Stelarc’s actions in their return to the image of the artist’s body in a way which reinforces the effect of its presence and its adaptive capacities. If the body really were obsolete, Stelarc would be of no greater ongoing cultural relevance than Mr. Potato Head. Adaptivity is the real message but Stelarc knows that obsolescence is a better long term sales strategy.
Stelarc: extra ear | exoskeleton | avatars, presented by dLux media arts and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Museum of Sydney, February 20
A major aspect of technoculture comes from “mystical impulses behind our obsession with information technology.” That, in essence, is the central thesis of an ambitious tome entitled TechGnosis by San Francisco writer Erik Davis. Davis has written numerous snappy articles in this field for Wired, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, 21 C, Lingua Franca and The Nation. However in TechGnosis he attempts to touch upon the entire history that connects the spiritual imagination to technological development, from the printing press to the internet, from the telegraph to the world wide web.
In the process Davis discusses in detail myriad cultural and religious figures and movements, from Plato to Marshall McLuhan, from Jesus Christ and Buddhism to Timothy Leary and Scientology, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson. What is surprising is that, despite the density of ideas in this tome, it is always readable, inspiring The Hacker Crackdown author Bruce Sterling to comment that “There’s never been a more lucid analysis of the goofy, muddled, superstition-riddled human mind, struggling to come to terms with high technology.”
According to Davis, “TechGnosis is a secret history because we are not used to dealing with technology in mythological and religious terms. The stories we use to organize the history of technology are generally rationalistic and utilitarian, and even when they are cultural, they are rarely framed in terms of the religious imagination.”
On a general level, says Davis, this has to do with modernity’s “ultimately misguided habit of treating religious or spiritual forces solely in terms of the conservative tendencies of various institutions, rather than as an ongoing, irreducible, and indeed, irrepressible dimension of human cultural experience, one that has liberatory or avant-garde tendencies as well as reactionary ones.”
Davis’ ability to shift from popular culture to historical fact peppered with pop terminology fits an intriguing trend in cultural studies. TechGnosis sits comfortably alongside such books as Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, Mark Dery’s Escape Velocity, Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, Andrew Ross’ Strange Weather and Darren Tofts’ Memory Trade. In this regard TechGnosis narrowly escapes the categorisation of being a book about ‘spirituality.’
“Although I deal more sympathetically with religious material and ideas than most of those authors, I feel far more affinity with their approach than with more self-consciously ‘spiritual’ books, which tend to deny the role of historical, economic, and political forces”, says Davis. “I just happen to be drawn to that peculiar interzone between popular culture and the religious imagination.”
That interzone inevitably draws Davis towards some dangerous realms where ‘popular culture’ and ‘imagination’ are all too prevalent. While Davis carefully explores the genesis of such movements as Scientology or the Extropian movement and points out the totally bizarre substance (or lack) of both, he manages to avoid the pitfall of making harsh value judgments. “When I embarked on this project, I decided that developing a cogent critique of spirituality would add yet another layer of complication to an already dense investigation”, he says. “Confronted with a curious belief system, I am more interested in how it works than I am in criticizing it; I wanted to allow the power of the various world views to arise as fictions.
“It’s like camera filters: what does the world look like if you momentarily wear the lenses of a conspiracy theorist, a UFO fanatic, a conservative Catholic? By allowing eccentrics and extremists their own voice, I hoped to lend TechGnosis a kind of imaginative force that more explicitly critical works lack.”
In the burgeoning world of ‘secret histories’, the shadowy figure of ‘sci-fi’ author Philip K. Dick looms as a major influence. Dick’s work, riddled as it is with visionary belief systems tinged with perpetual paranoia, never sat comfortably in the cliche-ridden world of pure science fiction. “I emphasize the visionary acuity of his works, which have influenced me as much as McLuhan or Michel Serres or James Hillman”, says Davis. “I am especially drawn to his ability to treat religious ideas and experiences in the context of late capitalism and our insanely commodified social environments.”
Similarly, McLuhan is a “complex figure, full of bluster and brilliance”, says Davis. “He deserves a complex engagement, and I certainly distinguish myself from Wired’s simplistic recuperation of McLuhan, which turns on the same sort of selective sampling of his work, only in reverse. For one thing, McLuhan nursed vastly darker views about electronic civilization than most people believe—his global village is an anxious place. But unlike most of today’s media thinkers, he considered himself an exegete rather than a critic or theorist. That is, he wanted to uncover the spirit of electronic media rather than provide the kind of structural political critique that people are more comfortable with these days. To do that, he used the imagination of a profoundly literate (and religious) man, allowing analogies as much as analysis to lead him forward. He read technology, whereas most critics describe or deconstruct it. And though he said a lot of stupid stuff, and participated too willingly in his own celebrity, he laid the groundwork for our engagement with the psycho-social dimension of new media.”
The power of the word runs throughout TechGnosis—from Guttenberg’s printed Bible to the study of the Kaballah, from Gibson’s Neuromancer to the use of hypertext on the net.
“A troubling aspect of the new technologies of the word is the invasion of technological standardisation into the production of writing”, says Davis. “Behind this problem lies an even larger one: the invisibility of the technical structures that increasingly shape art and communication. As we use more computerized tools, we necessarily engage the structures and designs that programmers have invested in those tools. Then there is the issue of the internet; an immense writing machine that, for all its creative power, encourages sound-bite prose, superficial linkages, and the confusion of data and knowledge. The Gutenberg galaxy is finally imploding, and we have yet to come to terms with the psychic and cultural consequences of our new network thinking.
“Of course, invisible structures have always been shaping thought and expression, in one form or another. The trick now is to explore ways to let the creative, recombinant and poetic dimension of language express itself in an electronic environment where the monocultural logic of a Microsoft can hold such enormous sway. I still think that hypertext and collaborative writing technologies have enormous potential, but in the short term I see a rather disturbing dominance of standardisation, as American English continues to transform itself into an imperial language of pure instrumentality.
“It’s my hope that the net will enable us to move through the gaudy circus of superficial relativism into a more serious engagement with the ways that different institutions, practices, and cultural histories shape a truth that nonetheless hovers beyond all our easy frameworks”, says Davis. “The way ahead, to my mind, involves the synthesis or integration of many different, sometimes contradictory ways of looking at and experiencing the world. The endless fragmentation of (post)modernism is boring: we ourselves are compositions of the cosmos, a cosmos we share in a manner more interdependent than we can imagine, and that cosmos calls us to construct new universals. Perhaps they will be universals of practice rather than theory; if you do certain things, certain things will happen. A new pragmatism. If we need religious forces to bloom in order to feel our way through this highly networked world, so be it.”
Erik Davis, Techngosis, Harmony Books (Grove Press), 1999
Retarded Eye Team (Vikki Wilson and Cam Merton), Radium City: Harvesting the Afterlife
“The only living life is in the past and the future…the present is an interlude…[a] strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness we are living.”
Eugene O’Neill, Strange Interlude, 1928
In the 1970s, “Suture” was a popular term for procedures by means of which cinematic texts would confer subjectivity upon their viewers. Not only a medical process, it was also a way for thinking through constant audience reactivation through sequences of interlocking shots. Although no one doubts the capacity of new media art to activate an audience, that activation has all too frequently been one-dimensional: either cool data processing or hot-palmed mouse clicking. The Future Suture exhibition at PICA (Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts) for the Festival of Perth was surprisingly different. This engaging, difficult and exciting web art installation by 4 Perth artist collectives took an unexpected turn into humour. Clearly that is their bandage for the haemorrhaging hubris of our strange interlude.
Future Suture is no eye candy, but hard chew multi-grain mind cookies. Audiences had to work hard and fast to make sense of and gain enjoyment from the work that was interlocking the old into the new. With imaginative stitching all 4 installations explored ways of sewing previous subjectivities to the gash opened by the technological transformations of future horizons.
Horizons (http://www.imago. com.au/horizons – expired) was minimalist in terms of room decoration, but big on intertextuality and cultural resonances. Malcolm Riddoch, one of the artists, explained that “the site’s basically a self-reflexive boys’n’their toys kind of thing, linking militarism with a specular approach to knowing and perception through a games interface, but fully web functional.” The project works on a number of levels and has some fascinating things to say about time, indiscriminate targets and horizon theory. On one level this is a simulated geo-scopic rocket launching game resplendent with nasty voiced instructions for nose-coned views of hyper-intertextual destructive scopophilia—part Operation Desert Storm with hay-wire meteorology, and part firecracker home video—with a fair whack of Heideggerian theory as payload. Yet this rocket game also resonates with the naturalised absurdity of scud missile video playback and so-called radar targets that are in fact schools. Participants select a site on mainland Australia and launch a rocket at it gaining a view of the world from the rocket’s nose cone at 500m. The indeterminacy of the target acquisition is sublime. The program blurb proclaims, “Horizons is a non-profit public service funded by the Federal Government of Australia and freely available to all Internet citizens world-wide.” This is satanically perceptive. The Federal Government does in a sense facilitate the technology for launching attacks on Australia from anywhere in the world. But of course we can now stand proud that the attacks are self-inflicted and that our technology still calls Australia home.
In contrast, Radium City (www.imago.com.au/radium_city – expired) by the Retarded Eye collective achieved a funky juxtaposition between installation and screen. The setting was welcoming techno-boudoir baroque. In one corner sat a little Mac storyteller, the rest was dominated by an enormous Italianate bed with mirror and 2 TV monitors showing male and female soap stars getting deep, while below them the electronic bedspread pool was swelling with aerial urban images stitched through with endless binaries. The project sought to position the viewer as a sleepwalking flaneur via science fiction scenarios of the virtual future city that continually re-wrote themselves via a digital process of automatic writing. Here new technologies were mixing it with old techniques on a constantly refurbished palimpsest. The ideas were a heady mix. The pull of binaries was a buzz. The bed and the multi-plot storybook became 2 magnets. The interlude between was strange, but the text kept rewriting itself, mutating over time.
Of all the installations, Project Otto (http://www.imago.com.au/otto – expired]) was the most dependent on physical presence and manipulation of the environment. This huge and hungry hardware project was a dynamic bandaging of an unusual combination of old and new technologies. The networking interactions spiralled through radio, image, sounds, web and the tactile stimuli of a metal trolley on a rough-hewn floor. The stunning images of bodily close-ups sprawled across the wall like a Persian rug were activated by a mobile antenna trolley that picked up different radio frequency emissions from seven overhead disks that in turn generated sequences of deeply textured soundscapes. The images could be further engaged via a Dr Who-like console box. This was a good sweaty interactive space. It was damn sexy the way the installation totally activated a tactile, aural and intimate subjectivity that stimulated the imagination. The mix of radio and web, the old and the new, people in the gallery space and the site on the web, was tangible. As is the enormous potential of this project.
Tetragenia is aptly described as a “trojan web site that accumulates consumer profiles under the guise of ‘caring’. Participants are harassed in a prolonged, strategic email campaign.” Our hell is excess data, corporate-speak, dietary ethics, common sense advice for life, electronic surveillance and technological abuse. Tetragenia turns this into an art—ridiculing the new human face of corporations, the wealth of waste and electronic intrusions. At the same time, it offers eminently reasonable nutritional and ethical suggestions that loop in on themselves showing something a little less benign. It’s a call to the consumers of the world to unite to promote ethical trade practice; and it cuts a fine line between a new seriousness and a classic piss-take. This absurdist installation tests the limits of the traditional ethics of privacy and marketing with harassing emails and data-frenzy. It is exciting to finally come across web art that not only engages with the contemporary info-excess but also does so with great comic timing. However, the timing of constant server breakdowns was deeply aggravating but, as Marshall McLuhan once said, “If it works, it’s obsolete.”
When it comes to imaging future horizons, as Malcolm Riddoch ruminated, the “horizon is the rocket eye view of the world. The spatial limits of the horizon is carried with us so that the horizon can never be reached.” This can be seen as a cautionary metaphor for rocketing into future shock. But if we consider that by looking back, the past becomes another horizon—does this mean that we can never remember the point at which we were, or at which the horizons looked broad and welcoming? Or that history’s horizons are carried with us but cannot be seen from the present and can never be reached in the future? This made me wonder, what’s the big deal of getting to the horizon? Then again no one is happy to stick around in the strange interlude of the present. The problem is that if the future is not sutured to past horizons, sun-blindness is inevitable. Future Suture’s solution is to bandage these wounds with some serious humour.
Future Suture, curator Derek Kreckler, joint initiative between FTI (The Film and Television Institute) & IMAGO Multimedia Centre Arts Program, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, February 11 – March 7; links to 4 projects at http//www.imago.com.au/future_suture [expired]
As I have noted elsewhere: “Screen Culture—the nomenclature is out there. A conjugation designed to expand the parameters of moving image organisations and their exhibition practices to incorporate multimedia and the digital arts and to encompass the output of all practitioners ‘working within the screen frame.’” I confess to an unhealthy predilection for creating and dissecting definitions. Seeking out ‘screen’ in a (generally less preferred) lexicon, I read: “a smooth surface, such as a canvas or a curtain, on which moving images etc may be shown.” I become obsessed with the idea that the subject of my current project is this ‘etcetera’. It troubles me, I lose sleep over it. I consider that Funk and Wagnalls may have put the etc in the wrong place. It is my goal to reposition it. So, I’ve packed up my theoretical premise and hit the road. I have named my axiom expandingscreen and I’ve just spent 30 hours on the way to Helsinki cleaving the title.
Subject: Muu, Helsinki; Date: Oct 17, 1998
Happy to discover that my visit coincides with Helsinki’s annual herring festival, I cross the marketplace each morning on my trek from Katajanokka island to Kiasma for the MuuMedia Festival.
Muu (‘other’ or ‘something else’) is staged by AV-arkki, an organisation which provides facilities for Finnish media artists and represents their work. The event began a decade ago with the Kuopio Video Festival in eastern Finland and has developed into one of the largest events of its kind in the Nordic countries. Like many organisations and festivals originally intended to represent video art, MuuMedia and AV-arkki are in the process of expanding their program in order to accommodate web art, CD-ROMs and interactive media installations. The necessity of creating appropriate exhibition environments is accentuated by the location of the festival within several spatial realms: museum space (Kiasma: Museum of Contemporary Art), gallery space (Otso), collective art space (Cable Factory) and continuously contested urban space (Mobile Zones). The special focus of MuuMedia 1998 is ‘global and indigenous’ a framework addressing issues of globalisation, indigenous culture, power and networked information.
The prominent and dynamic architectural design of the newly opened Kiasma provides the festival with its centre. A contemporary art museum, purpose-built in an age where exhibition practice is undergoing considerable transformation, Kiasma attempts to reorder art and information hierarchies by creating a responsive, anticipatory space for the reception of art in all its forms. The emphasis on communication flow and active or dynamic reception is conceptually expressed in the name itself which has its roots in chiasm: the intersection of 2 chromosomes resulting in the blending and possible crossing over at points of contact and also the X-like commissure which unites the optic nerve at the base of the brain. Despite its desire to embody these forward thinking principles, Kiasma in operation is not proving adequately equipped as the site for the screening component and the digital gallery. Dreadful acoustics (which equally impact on the media art in the permanent collection), bad projection design and handling, and an under-informed staff are resulting in loss of audience—the hundreds of visitors drawn to the building each day are not made properly aware of the festival and the committed audience are battling through a haze of interruptions and cancellations.
The Mobile Zones project is proving to be the most successful component of the festival. Curated by Heidi Tikka, the various works explore the possibilities of art as activism, examining the urban landscape and its transformations. Helsinki is busy with preparations for 2000 when it will simultaneously celebrate its 450th anniversary and its reign as European capital. Nick Crowe’s deliberately lo-fi community web project A Ten Point Plan for a Better Helsinki (find link at Kiasma site) required the participation of citizens who contributed proposals for the redesign of a controversial public space near Kiasma, while Adam Page and Eva Hertzsch investigated anxiety zones in urban space with their demonstrations of Securoprods, a transfunctional security gate/revolving door.
Subject: ZKM, Karlsruhe; Date: Nov 8, 1998
Three hours in the gardens surrounding Karlsruhe’s Schlossplatz (the only site to recommend the town aside from ZKM and a temporary beer exhibition) and I am still scrawling notes on Pavel Smetana’s The Room of Desires. Images in a darkened room are generated in response to information received from sensors bound to my wrists and forehead. Something allows me to recognise the constructedness of it, but this just serves to increase my anxiety at seeing my ‘psyche’ projected. Though private, the zone has the potential to become public, and the sense of surveillance is heightened by those white-coat clad attendants who swabbed me and taped me up.
The Room of Desires is one among many interactive installations that comprise the temporary exhibition Surrogate, the first showing in situ of work by artists in residence at ZKM’s Institute for Visual Media. The ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie | Centre for Art and Media, www.zkm.de) is the realisation of an 8-year development project whose premises in a transformed munitions factory were opened in 1997. Consisting of 2 exhibition departments (the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Media Museum), 2 production and development annexes (the Institute for Visual Media, the Institute for Music and Acoustics) and an integrated research and information facility (the Mediathek), ZKM adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the presentation, development and research of visual arts, music and electronic media. Ex-Melburnian, artist and director of the Institute for Visual Media, Jeffrey Shaw, tells me that the departmental proximity “creates an environment where the museums reflect an ongoing, inhouse creative identity”, a dynamism enhanced by the potential for “the production zone to be transformed into a public space.”
I find pleasure in the Mediathek, a veritable treasure chest for an archive rat. A centralised database establishes instant access to 1,100 video art titles, 12,000 music titles (with an emphasis on the electroacoustic) and a comprehensive collection of 20th century art and theory literature. Download from what is probably the world’s largest CD-ROM jukebox system (soon to be converted to DVD) and receive at any of the 12 viewing stations (designed by French-Canadian media artist Luc Courchesne) or the 5 historically significant listening booths designed for Documenta 8 in 1987 by Professor Dieter Mankin. After indulging myself on a self-programmed Bill Viola, Tony Oursler, Gary Hill retrospective, I took some literary time out to read Donald Crimp’s On the Museum’s Ruin. In a study of Marcel Broodthaer’s Musee d’Art Modern series of installations/exhibitions which radically investigate the position of the museum, Daniel Buren is cited as claiming, “Analysis of the art system must inevitably be undertaken in terms of the studio as the unique space of production, and the museum as the unique space of reception.” ZKM is an institution formally enacting this kind of analysis.
Subject: AEC, Linz; Date: Nov 17, 1998
Watching snow fall on the not-so-blue Danube from the offices of ARS Electronica Center in Linz (www.aec.at). Spent the train trip from Karlsruhe to Salzburg reading Derek Jarman’s (sort-of) autobiography, Kicking the Pricks (Vintage 1996). Speeding through the Black Forest on his accounts of making-out at the old Biograph watching German soft core featuring semi-clad damens running through said geographical terrain. In 1987 Jarman says: “the Cinema is finished, it’s a dodo, kissed to death by economics—the last rare examples get too much attention. The cinema is to the 20th century what the Diorama was to the 19th. Endangered species are always elevated, put in glass cases. The cinema has graduated to the museum, the archive, the collegiate theatre…”
Jarman argues the case for the cheapness and immediacy of video. What strikes me, is the degree to which the moving image has impacted on the tenets of museology in the decade since Jarman establishes the museum as a static place. Paradoxically, the contemporary art museum is precisely the location of video art and media installations, and (in most cases) instead of the museum subduing media art, the development of new technological forms has necessitated a vast rethinking of the museum as a space of reception.
ARS Electronica Center is conceived and operates as the antithesis of Jarman’s museum. It services local and global industries, artists and educational institutions in addition to presenting and maintaining a museum space designed to anticipate the future of what commentators (and I guess that includes me) like to call “the information age.” Its integrated approach, which actualises the whole concept of convergence, produces an environment where the application of everything from virtual reality through computer animation to video-conferencing is applied in all disciplines in a manner that promotes practical and theoretical discourse between commerce, media art and education. Co-director of this ‘Museum of the Future’, Gerfried Stocker, tells me that the emphasis here is on process and “how to give things a value without a history.”
This radically challenges traditional systems of value and analysis in a manner that is arguably appropriate to the rapidity with which new technologies emerge. I find it difficult to assess a lot of high-end media art, and this has never been more the case than both here and at ZKM where the technology is so impressive in itself that the core elements of a work may indeed be the science of its construction rather than its artistic endeavour. I still favour works which don’t foreground the technological achievements over content. At ARS Electronica, a work like World Skin (winner of the 1998 Golden Nica for Interactive Art in the Prix ARS Electronica) by Maurice Benayoun and Jean-Baptiste Barriere will endure the potential redundancy of the environment within which it is conceived and produced. Enter the CAVE (AEC’s permanent 3-walled virtual reality environment) armed with a stills camera and move through a virtual landscape—a photo-real collage of images from different wars. Start to ‘shoot’, take images with the camera like a ‘tourist of death’ and you (visually) tear the skin off this world. It transforms into a white void, only shadow traces like cardboard cutouts remain. The experience is strangely connected to and distant from the bloody (non-virtual) reality of war.
Subject: etc; Date: Dec 6, 1998
I am allowing myself to be in process. There are not yet conclusions to be drawn. Perhaps the etc would be better positioned after “or a curtain.” Halfway through my research tour and I am suffering from the desire to see the debate which should be surrounding the planning of 2 moving image centres in Australia (Cinemedia at Federation Square, Melbourne, and the Australian Cinematheque at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney) become more urgent and more public. In the meantime, I am expanding my waistline on gluhwien, cheese and root vegetables.
Clare Stewart is Exhibition Co-ordinator, Australian Film Institute. Expandingscreen has been enabled by funds from the Queens Trust For Young Australians, the Australian Film Commission, Cinemedia and the Australian Film Institute.
Of related interest, see “Finnish shortcuts”, Melinda Burgess, RealTime 28, December 1998 – January 1999.
When I spoke to Javier De Frutos he had just finished his season of The Hypochondriac Bird which was part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival. Our discussion covered the production itself, his career as a London-based artist with Venezuelan origins and seemed to constantly veer back to what he sees as a crisis in dance at the end of the millennium.
Geography—Community
A lot of people who see my work find it difficult to place as a product that has come out of England. Although I am an unequivocal member of the British community I am an outsider—all communities have outsiders and all immigrants, no matter how hard they try, are always outsiders. Countries need that. I don’t know if it’s an outside perspective—I never pass judgement on the things that I am experiencing. I’m very direct so I’m always at odds with ‘Englishness’, yet I think that is the very reason why I have remained in England, even while not liking it—the confrontational nature of my work and people who cannot deal with it.
I think I understand the pace of a country like Australia that has more beneficial weather. I’ve never produced my work in Venezuela, my native country—always in cold countries and I think that conflict shaped the work. The tension works because the work is so autobiographical. I’m not very happy about sharing happy things but dealing with more anguished moments. Then somehow the work becomes an outlet. Happy moments are so few I don’t know if I would share those.
In the context of Mardi Gras I’m becoming more aware of how diverse as a community we are. I had a great big sense of pride when I came—I caught the launch at the Opera House and I was surprised at how political it was and how attentive and interested those 20,000 people were. I am also surprised at how—mainstream is not the right word—it is a major festival in this city.
The Hypochondriac Bird
I’m actually sorry that it was the first example of my work here because it comes without any preparation. It’s probably the least direct work that I have produced. But there’s a line in the work that deals with the absolute boredom of a long term relationship. As Wendy Houstoun commented, it really looks like the 2 of us had different books of instructions for this relationship and suddenly, having read the books, we realise we’re not even in the same library, the same bookshop.
I think there is a threshold of pain in (the sex scene) that one has to go through because we [De Frutos and Jamie Watton], as performers, go through that in the work. The more we did the sex scene the more bored we were with it and we started to match the way the audience felt. The audience is a very contagious source of energy. Together, we had to reach that level where nothing is happening any more, which happens to relationships when they are on their way out. Someone commented on the structure of the piece where the climax of the work is not a climax, or such a long climax that it stops being a climax and becomes an anti-climax. It introduces a new sense of structure. So the work starts as representational, becomes high melodrama, then the ‘installation’, then the drama again. That meant you had to pace yourself which caused problems with the audience.
It’s also quite brutal and realistic—when you look at the vocabulary we had to go for a more realistic range and it’s tough because it doesn’t necessarily satisfy dance-goers. And it goes back to the whole question of what is dance anyway? This is probably one of the most danced works I have ever done. From beginning to end it’s non-stop dancing. It might not be recognisable as that qualified thing that we know as ‘dance’, which is frightening in itself—that we cannot move on.
I think there was a mistake in the Mardi Gras’ publicity. I never did a version of Swan Lake—it was a piece that used Swan Lake’s score because those ballet references are close to me—the sound. Music is very much like perfume. My mother used to wear Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche in the beginning of the 70s, and when I smell it my mind just goes back—I see the bottle, I see the bedroom…the music does that to me. What does it do for the audience? If you have a sound that is immediately recognisable like Swan Lake you go for the narrative you know and the layers start—you try to match what you see with what you think you know—and it becomes an interesting exercise for those who allow it to happen. The Mardi Gras adds another layer——the choreographer is gay and what you’re seeing is a gay love story. So you go to the theatre with all that information—perhaps too much.
Design
The Hypochondriac Bird was the first time I was working in a very clean, clear looking space—I always work in very black spaces. My partner, an Australian Terry Warner, is the set and costume designer and Michael Mannion is the lighting designer. They are the oldest members of the company and it was something we wanted to work on. When you work in a black space you have the possibility of making the space smaller or bigger with lights—the magic of the black box. When you work on a white space you never forget how large the space is and psychologically it gives it a grander context, emphasising how irrelevant to the order of the world the lives of these 2 people are.
The point with the design (a aquare of illuminated clear plastic pillows) was to make things that could be everything and nothing and it was up to the audience to decide what they were seeing. I realised that the works I had done in the past had a sort of half-finished architecture. (I studied architecture for about a year and abandoned it.) There are always marks on the floor that could be a laid out plan. The original design was a half-finished house—every clear plastic pillow becomes a brick.
Movement and Meaning
I’m a great believer in first of all creating an atmosphere—the movement can be quite unimportant but if the atmosphere is right then the movement can be right. In a workshop years ago this playwright got this actress to do the same scene, peeling potatoes, in many different places in the house. It became so clear. Dancers say ‘my character wouldn’t move that way’ or ‘that movement doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t signify’—like 32 fouettes signifies a lot anyway—like, ‘thank god for the 32 fouettes, now I get it, now I know what she’s feeling!’ So suddenly it was clear to me that the movement wasn’t important but the context of the movement and the intention of how you did the movement. So describing it means nothing—she’s peeling potatoes—and suddenly the physical action changes in her muscles and peeling potatoes becomes the medium to express something else—she could be stabbing someone in the stomach. I can’t bear the idea of trying to find a movement that’s going to mean something. What’s the point of looking for something that’s going to look like a kiss when the kiss is such an effective thing to do?
Dance
This piece has been a major turning point for me in regard to the effectiveness of dance. At one point we have to stop looking at the museum pieces and the function of the body. I’m so terrified now that most dancers I know are concerned about whether their lower back is aligned with their neck and there’s nothing else. Something that was only meant to be a tool for you to feel better physically suddenly became an aesthetic goal. It seems to be the only branch of the arts that doesn’t want to suffer. If you’re really worried about a healthy body and healthy mind you’re not an artist any more—just let it go. Go and teach aerobics or something, but you can’t just go on stage and tell me how aligned you are because I’m not going to connect with you at all—certainly not with my own alignment.
What happened with the underground scene—it’s just completely gone. Some of the so-called underground productions that are happening in London are frighteningly similar to commercial productions but with less money so they don’t look as good. Does anyone have anything to say for themselves any more? Who wants to be second best? Is it some kind of millennium bug that suddenly we have to go into more direct ways of communicating, that dance is starting to lose its touch? People don’t read poetry any more, they read newspapers.
The Hypochondriac Bird, choreographer, dancer and music Javier De Frutos, dancer Jamie Watton, music Eric Hine, lighting design Michael Mannion, set and costume design Terry Warner; The Seymour Theatre Centre, Sydney, February 10 – 14
Trotman and Morrish are like those old couples who have cohabited for decades—they know how to share a bed (read stage). Although they are very different performers, they slip in and out of each other’s narratives with ease, turning the tables and reversing predicaments. Each successive performance extends the work of the previous night (the season runs to 6 performances). The spoken commentary by Morrish proceeds like the automatic writing of the Surrealists, uncensored, and full of free associations. Morrish happily assumes maniacal, arch and eccentric characters and does so in this somewhat apocalyptic piece. By contrast, Trotman’s guileless persona creates trouble and amusement only indirectly. His speedy movement is light and elfin, his little looks to camera are wide-eyed and open.
Avalanche has much more ‘dancing’ than their last piece, The Charlatan’s Web, perhaps because there is greater usage of music. Trotman and Morrish are not trained dancers but they move with commitment and personal style. In fact, their lack of training produces a certain sort of critique of masculine ways of moving—they are not sporty men, they are not men ‘doing’ dance, they are happy to be laughed at, and they cover space in unusual ways, neither seeking nor rejecting grace. The effect is of seeing men work together and co-operate with a mind to the work at hand. Avalanche will be shown as part of Sydney’s antistatic dance event this year.
Avalanche, Peter Trotman and Andrew Morrish, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 5 – 14; antistatic, The Performance Space, Thursday March 25, 8pm.
How did you define yourself when you were starting out in dance? What points of reference did you use? Who was there to help you with your next move? There can be significant turning points for young dancers which either assist to transform them into professional dance practitioners or help them to realise a life of dance may not be quite what they had expected. Ausdance responded to these issues in youth dance in 1997 with the inaugural Australian Youth Dance Festival.
Creating the right environment for the facilitation of creative development is an important emphasis of the Australian Youth Dance Festival which this year is being held in Townsville, Queensland from June 27 to July 2. The initiative brings together youth interested in or already practising dance to gain further knowledge and to formulate networks of peers across Australia. The program is based on workshops, forums, discussions and performance.
Catering for all levels of dance, the festival has 3 major strands; one for young dancers who are still students, one for new dance graduates and independent artists, and one for youth dance leaders and teachers. Youth, for the purpose of the festival, is defined as being anyone from 10 to 30 years of age.
Festival tutors have been selected firstly for their specialised knowledge in a certain field and secondly for their ability to work with people of differing age groups and dance knowledge. Students who have had little dance experience will be able to participate and enjoy the festival equally with those who have studied dance technique intensively. Technique sessions will be available every day in many different dance styles.
Some of the festival’s scheduled workshops cover dance education for teachers; skills development for young dance writers and youth dance leaders; and choreographic, film and new technology workshops for independent choreographers and dancers. Panel discussions and forums will be presented by emerging artists on such topics as the processes behind choreography; how cross cultural works fit into the landscape of Australian dance; gender in dance; the moving body in relation to film; the importance of dance research; the relationship between traditional and contemporary dance practices; and dance and meaning. As well as emerging artists, more established artists such as Chrissie Parrott will deal with topics like Motion Capture and the use of technology in dance.
To play host to a major national youth dance event is an exciting prospect for the Townsville dance community. For this reason the Festival’s performance component has been integrated into the local community as much as possible.
Local residents and the many tourists in the region will be able to enjoy free lunchtime outdoor performances presented by young people, in the centre of the town throughout the week. The Townsville Civic Centre will host 2 large public performances on June 28 and 29 featuring the Festival’s resident professional dance company, Dance North and its youth counterpart, Extensions Youth Dance Company and international and interstate dance groups like Steps Youth Dance Company from Perth. A range of new work by independent choreographers will be presented on a daily basis.
Young dance students (10 to 15) will be involved in a special component of the program, the Community Dance Project which will focus particularly on dance and art making processes. Victorian choreographer Beth Shelton and visual artist from Tracks Dance in the Northern Territory, Tim Newth, will lead this project with the participation of the Mornington Island Dancers. Beth and Tim have previously worked together on large-scale community projects with young people and are able to work with students at many skill levels. Other dancers and visual artists will assist them in making the work, which will be shown on Magnetic Island on the last afternoon of the Festival, Friday July 2.
As its contribution to the celebrations for Dance Week 99, One Extra Dance presents Inhabitation II directed by Tess de Quincey with sound design by Panos Couros. This is a work for a company of young performers, in which “the environment of the body negotiates and uncovers the structure and sensibility of the site, investigates a sensory level of existence.” It has grown from de Quincey’s investigations into the process called Body Weather which she is exploring with the group in a series of workshops organised by One Extra in partnership with the Seymour Centre. For DeQuincey, the project builds on the 12 hour performance, Epilogue and Compression with Stuart Lynch at the 1996 Copenhagen International Dance Festival and her choreography for 24 dancers on the chalk cliff coastline south of Copenhagen as part of Transform 97, a festival of site specific dance works. The performance of Inhabitation II is a free event and will be held in the Seymour Centre Courtyard, corner City Road and Cleveland Streets, Chippendale on Saturday and Sunday May 1 – 2 at 6.30 pm each evening.
Dance Week (organised each year by Ausdance) grew from a celebration of International Dance Day observed throughout the world on April 29. Other highlights of this year’s event in NSW include the outdoor dancing extravaganza Streets of Dance in which 100 tertiary dance students join professional artists in an “audacious outdoor program.” Another 200 will take to the football field for the Sydney Swans home game. There’s lunchtime dancing in Martin Place and a Festival of Dance at Darling Harbour. All the major companies will be contributing works and the ever expanding Bodies program kicks off on April 28 with work from contemporary and classical contemporary choreographers as well as a week dedicated to Youthdance. The Australian Institute of Eastern Music’s 3 day Festival of Asian Music and Dance at the Tom Mann Theatre (April 22 – 24) includes eminent South Indian dance specialist Dhamayanthy Balaraju performing for the first time in Australia.
Dance Week 99, Sydney, April 24 – May 2. For further information on Dance Week activities in your state contact Ausdance.
Action Situation, Deanne Butterworth, Kylie Walters, Jo Lloyd
photo Kate Gollings
Action Situation, Deanne Butterworth, Kylie Walters, Jo Lloyd
Ideas are multiplicities: every idea is a multiplicity or a variety…multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system.
Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference, Athlone Press, London
I cannot tell you what this piece is about. I can only write and in so doing produce another text: a re-iteration destined to become something other than the work itself. Action Situation foregrounds the fact that repetition becomes, inevitably, a moment of difference. Not only was there little replication between the 3 performing bodies, but the work itself highlighted the gap that lies between different, yet related, artforms.
Action Situation is an assemblage of music, script, movement, lighting and space. Each of these forms retained an integrity such that they did not blend into homogeneity. Not only was the music, for example, a distinct yet influential strain but the script also held its own character quite apart from the movement. In other words, Lasica does not choreograph to the ‘beat’ of the music, nor is her movement a mime of an underlying narrative. And yet, the differential participation of these elements did not lead to cacophony. There was a certain cohabitation between sound and movement. Similarly, there was a sense that some kind of narrative was manifest in the dance.
Were we archaeologists, we might be able to unearth the original script that instituted the narrative structure of the work. The ordinary viewer, however, is offered little by way of clues or references. No Rosetta stone is offered to translate from the hieroglyphs of moved interactions into some sense of the everyday. For example, there were times when one, sometimes 2, of the performers trod on the prone mass of the third. Was this a gesture of dominance, aggression, dependence or something else entirely? We will never know. Similarly, movements were performed under the watchful eye of one or other of the performers. There was a sense of bearing witness to an activity, that the performers shared a world, but what that world consists of is anybody’s guess. The only signification I can be certain of was when the 3 held hands during the curtain call. That gesture of naked camaraderie contrasted with the complex, interesting, detail of movement and interaction which comprised the substance. As far as movement is concerned, this is a very dense and satisfying work.
Although there were a variety of actions which could be interpreted as derived from some human strain of interaction, the work had an anti-humanist character, almost post-human. Rather than inhuman, it did not subscribe to any lyricism nor make reference to an instantly recognisable world. Although the audience has to work hard to take the work in (like looking at abstract painting), this is also its strength. Were there to be obvious references to ‘relationships’ or ‘communication’, the central premise would be lost, for Situation Live is about the abyss which lies between different modes. The music interacts with the movement; it does not mirror it. By the same token, narrative is not something to be illustrated by dance. Dance is able to form its own narrative, to be both inspired by the script, but not a servant to it.
Mimesis presupposes a sameness across forms. Action Situation is about difference. Even the language we use to speak of it becomes alien to the work itself. It cannot emulsify the disparate elements. Rather, the textuality of the written or spoken word can only add another layer to this already complex work.
Action Situation, directed and choreographed by Shelley Lasica, performers Deanne Butterworth, Jo Lloyd and Kylie Walters, music Francois Tetaz, script Robyn McKenzie, lighting design John Ford, costume design Kara Baker; Immigration Museum, Melbourne, February 12 – 20
There are those who have seen Deborah Hay perform and wondered why others in the audience seem to be getting something they do not. A recent review of Hay’s solo, O; The Other Side of O, noted that “Australia’s numerous devotees appreciate her ability to be absolutely present in a theatrical moment” (Kim Dunphy, The Age, December 8, 1998). Even though I would count myself as one of these “numerous devotees”, I do understand why her work leaves some people unmoved. I have, at times, been unmoved. It has to do with looking, how one looks, and what one looks for. We watchers of the dance are used to the corporeal delights of kinetic display. Dance is, more or less, a kind of physical action, a nuanced flow of bodies in movement. What, then, are we to make of a performance which offers so few physical tidbits to its audience?
Hay’s performance work is totally stripped of dancerly display because she wants something else to shine through. That something is the bodily manifestation of an intense form of perceptual practice. Although some people might call it a play of consciousness, I think this detracts from the bodily aspect of her work. The meditational quality of her perception and the mantra-like status of her utterances should not lead one to think her work is not in and of the body. The title of Hay’s forthcoming book, My Body the Buddhist, gives an indication of the sense in which the body is seen to be the ground and source of her work. But it is in the context of her teaching that these matters attain clarity.
Whilst Hay is utterly committed to the experiment of her own learning, it is her teaching which has made the greater mark in the world. This is partly because of her own immersion in the practice that she tries to convey. She is not someone who knows so much as someone who tries and is willing to share in that trying. Over the years, she has worked with and on certain epithets—the body as 53 trillion cells at once perceiving; the whole body as the teacher; invite being seen; now is here is harmony. Whatever constitutes her own practice is offered to her students. In turn, they attempt to make sense of these thoughts in action. One of the features of her workshops is the effect of working in a group. Her community dances are often very large, and the experience of working with so many people creates a certain energy. Added to this is Hay’s exhortation to observe others as if they are similarly committed to the work.
This leads me to another issue: the question of truth. Hay does not claim that her utterances are ultimate verities. Rather they are strategic puzzles which may or not be productive. This rather postmodern approach—that practice is strategic rather than representing some essence—nevertheless aims towards particular goals with rigour. It is not a case of anything goes. Rather, that which is aimed at is a quality of perceptual engagement within movement (and utterance). There is an attempt to de-centre subjectivity (imagine your body is 53 trillion cells changing all the time), to multiply the number of perspectives which may attend movement, and to be utterly present, focused and open to inspiration wherever it may come from. Of course, no one manages this all the time. There are frustrations, disappointments, at best an intermittent focus. Hay herself claims there is nothing (no-thing) to “get.” Rather, we are all students of this kinaesthetic form.
That said, Deborah Hay does seem to maintain her own focus more often than not. Her dancing often inspires others, and the workshop sessions can become very charged. It is not particularly easy to keep with one’s movements, not to daydream, fantasize, let alone remain open to change at any point, whether initiated from the multiple sources in the self or inspired from beyond. Nevertheless, this is what she attempts in her solo work. No attempt is made to distract her audience from the perceptual, kinaesthetic, focal nature of the work, resonating Yvonne Rainer’s “No to spectacle no to virtuosity…no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer” (TDR, T30). Having cleared the space of these expectations, Hay hopes to be seen dancing to another tune.
Deborah Hay Returning, A series of workshops held in and around Melbourne, including The Art of the Solo, Zen Imagery Exercises, Conscious Community Dance and Choreographic Theatre, October – November 1998
West Ryde. Sydney. Australia. Noon.
Through rented white lace to a clumsy rusted clothes line. Dark colours in a harsh New Year’s light. Petunias fighting with weeds. A roaring herb garden, salad smells, lemon balm, Vietnamese mint, laksa dreams, pennyroyal. Green tomatoes staked yesterday and zucchinis big enough to kill. Milka’s beans snaking through from next door. Our garage roller door is shut. Hiding unused, secretive, bought-on-a-whim things. A brick barbie covered in Wandering Jew, native trees—bottlebrush and banksia—give no shade. Green lawn as long as a terrier’s fringe. Still. Waiting for cool change.
The Noon Quilt, trace online writing community, (http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/quilt/info.html – link expired) is a java patchwork of time impressions, a delirium of techno-hippiedom, the irresistible idea of words and moments linked around the globe. Singapore. Brisbane. Arizona. Paris. Brazil. Japan. Manchester. I am touched and transfixed at noon on this hot day.
A world view made of little windows: Trevor Lockwood sees a “fat publisher” who confronts writers at the end of his driveway, begging to be seen in print. Simon Mills writes from the basement. No windows. About his cat who fell off the window ledge. Fell a few storeys, “landed unscathed yet embarrassed.” Val Seddon sees the bench on the patio, where her father used to sit, “lit and warmed by memories that are my protection too.” The teenager forgets to do his English homework and creates a funny and dark view. Phil Pemberton feels like a detective, “Marlowe-like observing the crowds but never getting no closer to the girl.”
There are many women contributors; quilting was always women’s work and there is thought in these patches, a binding of stories, of light and dark shades. I am careful unravelling this hand-me-down, slowly savouring the stitches of time and memory
Helen Flint. Bournemouth. UK. Noon.
At exactly noon, Bournemouth this Seagarden Paradise is upright, shadowless; my front Boycemont Ericstatue and goldeneyed fishpond proscenium the porch I sit on, ten doors from the Channel between fuschia chapters I have just written. And parading past me go paleskin families or solitary on-the-prowl bods dragging huge inflatable plastic moulded floats; oh, 4 hours later they will much slower return floating back up my road, their angry red skin deflating and scorching them.
Some writers, like me, take the view literally, wanting to preserve my frame, where I am right now, my nondescript backyard. Others move cleverly to other frames, the television set, the photograph, a computer screen or a fictional window onto other lives. People use constricting wall views to leap off into imaginative air. Sue Thomas constructs her view in a LamdaMOO, floating “adrift in the endlessly shifting landscapes of a thousand virtual imaginations.”
Characters emerge and re-emerge. An old man drags his feet. Drags cartons of beer. Drags a trolley loaded with corrugated iron and timber. Where is he going? JD Keith finds “empty buildings, idle trucks, and peopleless homes indicat[ing] the Exodus.” Where have they gone? There are unresolved narratives…and notes of new beginnings.
Riel Miller. Paris. France. Noon.
At noon I see tomorrow forming, a tear drop shaking its way down, nourishing the earth, feeding the sky, rushing along twisted pipes, quenching desire, a trickle of satisfaction.
The Noon Quilt trace online writing community, http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/quilt/info.html [link expired]
And then Princess Di is barrelling towards me, head down, Uzi cocked, the veil of her coronation dress streaming back from her face like a dirty grey curtain. There is death in her pixilated eyes. And I know: She’s gonna wax my republican ass. So I panic. I’m not afraid to admit it. I slap the keyboard, switching from a pistol to something with a little more visceral kick: something involving missiles. I punch the space bar. The launcher exhales. But Di is too close, and even as she detonates (tiara spitting jewellery and giblets in equal amounts) my modem disconnects. I’m dead. (Again). I’ve been soundly thrashed by some 10 year old kid from Arizona. (Again). My only satisfaction lies in the thought that at least I took the ‘People’s Princess’ with me.
It’s about 5 a.m. I’ve been online for almost 3 hours, alternately trudging through the occasionally (read: hardly ever) interesting Australian arm of Ultima Underworld online and slaughtering foreigners with portable artillery in Quake 2. To most people, no part of those last 3 hours had anything to do with hypermedia, the arts, or (worse) self-expression. To me, electronic entertainment is as valid as any other art. To a trained psychologist, thundering about a 3D maze dressed up as a deceased member of the royal family has a lot to say about that 10 year old kid from Arizona.
The idea that hypermedia is limited to extensions of the (more) traditional arts is to limit an already excruciatingly misunderstood idea. Hypermedia as an ‘interactive’ medium which offers the reader/user pathways as opposed to linear narrative should be more than a series of static pages connected like a Choose Your Own Adventure novella. Add pictures and we still haven’t gone very far. Even a Quicktime movie and a soundtrack are nothing but bells and whistles on what is essentially still a piece of ‘straight’ fiction with pretensions.
Hypermedia should give the user a new way of interacting, not merely a new way of reading.
Note: This is not a complicated way of redefining the question so that I can shoehorn video games into a discussion of hypermedia. I can do that easily enough under current definitions. Here goes: Online capabilities in video games are fast becoming standard on the PC, even beginning to bleed over into the lower-end game systems. Sega’s upcoming 128 bit console, the Dreamcast, will have in-built online capabilities allowing users to network and play anywhere in the world.
An important thing to remember is that video games were born on, and exist only on, computers. Unlike pure text, they are the rightful heirs of the digital age, not its bastard children. The ‘links’ between text fragments become the doorways between rooms rendered in 3D. The text ceases to describe or refer to the image, and begins interacting with it, fleshing it out, giving it greater depth. Your average game player becomes blind to the fact that s/he is making choices between fragments, and their reinterpretation of the game becomes fluid. S/he ceases to be an external force acting on the text and becomes another facet of it.
Moreover, unlike hypertext, more than one user can be involved in the same piece at one time. The user passes other users. Their experience is altered by the experiences of others, the ‘text’ moves in more than one direction at one time. The screen updates—unlike new ‘scenes’ created by following links—are invisible, and choices are made on the fly.
To an extent, video games become more hyper than hypertext. As well as offering users the chance to interact with a text/art ‘world’, they allow them to redefine themselves and re-experience it. That kid from Arizona may go for a mock-up of Prince Charles next time. He not only chooses how to interact with the text, but who interacts with the text.
Note 2: Most new first-person shooters (Unreal, Syn, Dark Forces 2, Quake 2) allow the user to download or create their own ‘skins’ for online characters. Fan sites offer homebrew characters for other players to use. (I once saw a naked man streak past me, weapon at the ready. I once saw Gandhi.) These alterations come complete with changing in-game perspective, weapons and sound effects. A selling point of these games has become their flexibility and user definability.
However this choice of personal representation can become far more complex than what ‘skin’ to use. Ultima Online, although flawed, expensive and generally tedious, is a prime example. It allows players to create a character and then ‘live’ it for as long as possible, in real time. The world inside their computer progresses, unlike traditional role-playing games, at the same pace as our own. If you don’t go online for a month, you’ll miss a month of activities. Your house could be burned to the ground by brigands. Your pewter Royal Wedding souvenir mug stolen. The attractive element of the exercise is that you don’t have to follow traditional role-playing staples. You don’t have to be a ‘thief’ or a ‘brigand.’ You could play as a farmer. You would have to buy seed, plant crops, work the field, harvest them, and then find a real person to buy your food. All in real time. Hopefully someone else has chosen to run a shop.
Ultima Online has been heralded as the first of a new generation of games, but it isn’t. It’s really only a step up from the MUDs (Multi-User-Domains) of yesteryear, in much the same way that hypertext is a step away from pure text. MUDs were/are text based adventures which allowed players to move freely, with other users, through a world based around blurb-style descriptions of places and events. Like Ultima Online, there are people, ‘Avatars’, whose job it is to make sure that people a) play in character and b) don’t play like jerks unless (of course) their character class was ‘jerk’, in which case they have to make certain that they play like jerks.
To that extent, MUDs can also be seen as among the earliest and best exercises in hypertext. Their stories are alive, active, and involve hundreds of other players concurrently. I had friends who disappeared into the weird innards and politics of MUDs, never to return. Testament to their addictive qualities and, better yet, to how real a few lines of fictional text (when typed by some ‘real’ kid in Arizona) can become.
Video games in hypertext, like genre fiction in mainstream literature, will probably always be a little uncomfortable. More people may use them and they may often do a better job than their bigger brothers, but that same popular appeal means they’re unlikely to be acknowledged. Perhaps hypermedia, populated as it is by the (hopefully) techno-literate, will take the opportunity that any discussion of ‘new media’ brings, go have a look at their kids playing Nintendo in the basement, and see it as something that could be a little more than a drain on the Christmas budget.
I’m back online. I’ve been doing finger weights. I’ve had a lot of sleep. There are 3 empty coffee mugs beside the monitor. Out of the corner of my eye I see the Queen Mother. She has an anti-tank launcher taped to the crossbar of her walking frame. A bald globe swings back and forth overhead. She looks left and right down a deserted intersection, undecided. The chrome on her walking frame catches the light. She hasn’t seen me. I swing around behind.
The Ultima Online website can be visited at: http://www.owo.com/ [link expired]. There are a slew of online gaming sites; one of the best, Heat Net, can be salivated over at: http://www.heat.net/ [link expired]. Get yourself some new skins, mod files (levels) and patches for your favourite games at http://www.fortunecity.com/underworld/quake/370/filez.html [link expired] (for Quake 2) and http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dunes/6250/downloads/index.html [link expired] (for Dark Forces 2).
You could never envisage all the camera has seen, countless images scattered at random in time and space like the fragments of a vast and ancient mosaic…you will never comprehend the totality of such a fabulous and excessive montage…
Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity, Sage Publications, London, 1998.
It is hard to think of this year’s Dance Lumière program as a totality. So different were these shorts that I started to wonder what it is that characterises the “dance film.” This year’s curator, Erin Brannigan, spoke briefly before the showing, delineating 2 forms of classification. One of the categories is a performance which has been filmed, a dance documentation. Many of the films in this category were reminiscent of those Royal Shakespeare Company films of plays staged on sets. The setting is usually the original performance space, the staging the same as that for the performance. An exception to this was Scenes in a Prison (Jim Hughes, Graeme McLeod). This work was (re)located in a prison, admitting a plurality of perspectives upon the unrelenting nastiness committed by its “inmates.” Another notable exception to the staged paradigm was Falling (Mahalya Middlemist and Sue-ellen Kohler) which played with the temporality of the movement, turning the work into something quite different from live performance. Falling comprised a sepia tinted fractal of movement, progressing as if frame-by-frame, the fluidity of movement reduced to staccato images. What I loved about this film was the space for thought created in its snail-like progress. The rest of the filmed performances—Elegy, Body in Question, and Subtle Jetlag—were interesting because the performances looked interesting, not because of their being films.
The other espoused form of classification was the “Dance Film”, that is, a film specifically made with dance. One would expect these films to offer more in terms of a cinematic aesthetic. Perhaps so, but they certainly did not ascribe to the same cinematic values nor to the same interpretation of dance. Some of the films shared a sense of dancerly composition: Sure (Tracie Mitchell, Mark Pugh) showed a beautiful warp and weft of dancing bodies, and Dadance (Horsley, Wheadon, and Elmaz) a surreal 1930s play between visual art and dance. But others, such as Hands (Jonathan Burrows, Adam Roberts) and Greedy Jane (Miranda Pennell), involved urbane forms of movement which were carefully crafted and represented.
What is it that film brings to dance? Film can do things performance cannot. The perspectival nature of the camera, the suture of film montage, the reduction to black and white (Sure), the enhancement of particular colours (Greedy Jane), the distortion of time and motion (Falling, Dividing Loops) are specific features of the filmed image. Added to this is the fact that we are viewing a conjunction of dance and film. Perhaps alchemy is a better word, for it suggests that a transformation has taken place. Film is not merely the camera ‘recording’ dance. As a medium, it has its own character, its own form of corporeality, texture and temporality. It is out of this body, the body of the film, that the more familiar dancing body emerges—perhaps defamiliarised, transfigured, hopefully enriched.
Dance Lumiere, Luminous Movement: Dance Created for the Camera, curated by Erin Brannigan, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Dec 12, 1998
EB Through your experience travelling and collaborating with people around the world, how do your experiences in Australia differ? In your Writings On Dance article (Issue #14), you talk about travel as an opportunity to test the flexibility of your perception. What “new muscles” of perception did you have to flex here?
LN My work explores how we use our senses, how we have built our survival skills, how these habits influence and underlie our movement, our dancing, our appetite for moving, for being seen dancing, and how we develop our opinions, what we like to see and do, how we compose our realities. In the exotic (to me) dance subcultures that I’ve had the good fortune to share this questioning with, this dialogue has been met with enthusiasm. I’m always fascinated when there appears to be a consensus of desire or opinion in a temporary, incidental group of dancers.
For the most part I dare not make comparisons, for each gathering is so context-laden. Yet I can’t help but notice…One thought I had on my return trips to Australia was how a people who perceive themselves as living in a relatively isolated culture make a lot out of a little. I’ve run into that cultural self-image in various parts of the world, in Hungary and East Germany shortly after the walls came down, in the Midwest and rural US, in Argentina and mainland China just last year.
We can imagine that ‘having little’ can lead to a habit of mining a deep mine, going way behind or beyond the surface of things. And it can provide a vast, blank canvas for the imagination. I found that willingness to dig and the facility to imagine striking in the students I worked with in Australia each time, in 1985, in 93, and 97. This was a great pleasure. As was speaking English to English speakers for a change.
EB I’m particularly interested in your thoughts on performance—the engagement between performer and audience. How did you feel this engagement differed, if at all, in Australia?
LN My visits have been very short, and until last year I’d had little exposure to performance work down under, other than the work of Russell Dumas who I first met in Europe in the early 80s. I have seen his work on 3 continents and think of him, most certainly, as a dance artist with a thoroughly international perspective. I was curious, in 1997, to see how the perceptual flexibility and imagination I enjoyed so much in the workshops would manifest in performance, and I got my chance during the Festival of the Dreaming and Sidetrack’s Contemporary Performance Week in 1997. However, in this first exposure, I found it hard to look beyond my own familiar Western references and sources—which is not a surprise—but I am curious to see more…to begin to perceive the character, direction and purpose of Australian dance and audience behaviour in relation to its own history.
EB We recently had a conference in Melbourne where the hegemony of ballet in this country was discussed—a notion that makes Writings on Dance and antistatic rare public forums for discussing ‘alternative’ dance practices in Australia. Did you have any sense of this situation during your visits here?
LN A quick note about dance thinking and support for the arts: I’ve been co-editing and publishing an alternative dance journal, Contact Quarterly, out of the US for 22 years now. The writings all come from dancers and movement artists themselves, and except for a very few years, the readership is the sole support for the magazine. The labour for producing it has almost been entirely volunteer and it seems to sustain itself by the unflagging need for dialogue outside of the institutions.
I always have my eye out for writings by dancers and have been reading Writings on Dance (WOD) probably since the first issues when one of its editors, dancer Libby Dempster, whom I met in the mid 70s in England, sent me one. I’ve found it to be a remarkable archive of analysis of the new dance practices which have been, and continue to be, extremely marginal, and at the same time significantly influential to the mainstream Western dance over the last 20 years or so. In WOD, it has struck me, that often (not always) the source or tools of analysis are semiotics and feminist criticism, both academic approaches and somehow a very narrow base when applied to dance. I often wondered why this emphasis and yearned for more personal and wider sources in this elegant publication. I gathered on my last visit how much dance comes out of the university system in Australia, and that dancers learn to validate their work based on these systems of analysis. I imagine, somehow, this dominant way of thinking enters the work they make. Yet there is also something that has come through WOD’s effort to put dance in print that is helping to create a body of thought and stimulate the field beyond the continent of Australia.
I read RealTime for the first time on my last visit and noticed a similar language in much of the writing, however I was thrilled by the range of voices and sheer volume of activity and desire to be heard. These are precious publications, evidence of passion, discipline, self-criticism, and practice “in the face of…” It seems that personal voices and developments in dance, theatre and performance in the West have demonstrably not developed through institutionalised training and support.
Young artists usually have enough fuel to push through lack of support. The tragedy comes when artists have to quit before developing into maturity, leaving few models, few inspirations, and all that implies for the culture. We try to survive the same stupidity in the US.
Bodyworks is Dancehouse’s annual curated event, a 3-week season of works by established choreographers. The content of each season ensues from a set of choices made on the basis of applications, many of the works not yet made. As such, Bodyworks has the ability to take risks, and the works themselves the opportunity to achieve a range of outcomes. There are many ways to look at a work and the notion of outcome—the work as a completed entity—is only one of them. I found that some of the works this year invited a perspective more related to their sense of project than of outcome.
The Castle of Nothingness, by Zjamal Xanitha was one such work. Coming from a deep place, both personal and spiritual, this piece attempted to convey the profound nature of ritual, quest and journey. The dilemma that the piece faced was how to achieve such a goal: whether to give the audience an experience or description of such matters. Zjamal’s intentions seemed to waver between these 2 poles. In experiential terms, this work tended to leave its audience behind. I don’t think people actually felt they were taken on a journey. There was, however, a certain richness which came from observing Zjamal’s own journey. In the end, the work was the journey of making a work, one both heartfelt and revealing.
The other piece which communicated itself most strongly in terms of its endeavour was Negative Space by Deanne Butterworth and Alicia Moran. The title derives from the visual arts, where negative space is the field which surrounds a drawn subject. In this work, negative space was the space not occupied by the simultaneous performance of 2 solos. The aim of the work was to somehow transform our sense of negative space in virtue of that which is performed within, as it were, positive space. An alluring idea, a great deal of effort was required of the audience in order to comply with the intentions of the piece. There was, by and large, a lack of synergy between the 2 solos, leaving the viewer to do the sums to work out the negative space. More time and direction could develop a piece yet in its infancy into something quite remarkable.
The last piece which suggested itself as a project was Rosalind Crisp and Ion Pierce’s Proximity. Emerging from a sustained period of improvisation, Proximity purported to play between proximal (near) and distal (far) forms of motion. Proximity consisted of a series of kinaesthetic essays which played with various points of the body compass. For example, one section involved rotations around a spinal axis, ending with a meditation upon the peripheral play of fingers. The proximal or distal character of the various body parts was partially conveyed by the dancer’s facial forms. This led me to wonder whether the head itself is considered distal, away from the trunk, or proximal, a centre of movement. Our head is so central to where, how and who we are, not to mention its housing for the brain. Yet, nowhere is the entire body more a multiplicity of centres than in dance.
The Long March, by Sally Smith, juxtaposed the uniformity of a calisthenics team with the conformity and dissent of a singular body. These Foucauldian, docile bodies were both hilarious and fascinating. I found myself drawn to one member of the team who kept looking at the audience when all but she looked straight ahead. Such inadvertent non-conformity was even more intriguing than Sally’s own conscious departure from the group because it challenged the apparent stability of calisthenics’ universal sameness from within.
Watershed by Sue Peacock and Bill Handley was a polished, entertaining duet on and around a bed. Its most exciting moment was at the start when a film projection of Handley was superimposed upon his actual body; a virtual Doppelganger sprung from loins made of flesh. What followed was a series of carefully crafted, beautifully timed and danced interactions. Plots, Quartered and Suspended was a group work (Whitington, Santos, Davey, McLeod, Papas and Corbet). This was a landscape of simultaneous performances, each interpreting “plot” in its own fashion. On a pleasant stroll around the space, between the works, moving on at will, the audience itself was given a great freedom to make choices about viewing, walking, resting and chatting. Finally, Silent Truth, a posthumous exhibition of the life’s work of Jack Linou who died of AIDS, curated by his brother, Christos Linou. Paintings, video clips, even a notebook placed under perspex, the pages turned daily. What to make of a life lost, of the remnants of creativity, frustration and despair?
Dance works generally invite viewing somewhere towards the end of their lives. Or at least that is what the idea of the work as a product would lead us to believe. Some works, however, convey a sense of not yet being fully developed. Others look like they have changed pathways from different modes of presentation, perhaps more improvisational. On the one hand, performance is a finality, a presentation but, on the other, as a representation, it is just one facet, whether in the lifework of its maker(s) or in the more complex setting of danced culture.
Bodyworks 98: Festival of Moving Arts: O and The Other Side of O, Deborah Hay; The Castle of Nothingness, Zjamal Zanitha; Watershed, Sue Peacock, Bill Handley with Graeme McLeod; Negative Space, Deanne Butterworth with Alicia Moran; Plots, Quartered & Suspended, Cherie Whitington, Tim Davey, Nick Papas, Shaun McLeod; The Hard March, Sally Smith; Silent Truth, Jack Linou, Christos Linou, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Nov 26 – 29, Dec 3 – 6, Dec 10 – 13.
Viewing a lot of dance videos while in London recently, I decided that solo dance on film was my favourite. The intimacy specific to the camera is best employed dealing with these discrete subjects, who may not have spatial relations to anything but the camera (become its very own creature). Seeing Wendy Houstoun perform her new show, Maid to Drink presents Happy Hour, first at Jackson’s Lane and then at the Purcell Room at Royal Festival Hall in London, I realised that solo dance itself is the intriguing thing, with or without the camera. A spoken monologue on film or stage has words hanging in the-space-between; the solo dancer, particularly the performer/choreographer, invites you in closer to where, in the best examples, the body cannot lie. By the end of the show, I had Houstoun’s particular physicality tucked away as if we had actually spent endless nights making the most of Happy Hour. She had become my very own creature.
Houstoun had me peering through the dark, straining to close up the space in an effort to catch every nuance of her intricate dance. As has happened before, my eyeballs dried out with looking. Choosing the theme of drinking, she is able to explore a range of movement that is located beyond normal motor-sensory activity. A technically virtuosic performance, Houstoun recovers and plays with action from the place beyond physical control.
What is also remarkable about Happy Hour is that the spoken word dances as well, has the same qualities—half-formed, murmured, lost phrases and words, carefully chosen and deployed. When Houstoun invites us into the piece—“what’ll it be…what’s your poison…?”—her eccentric barmaid gestures swing and bounce along to the rhythm set by her words. These same gestures repeated with different dialogue become, not the habits of work, but a struggle; the ‘job’ becoming a problem under the weight of new discordant words. At another time, the precarious joke-telling skills of the inebriated give Houstoun a spoken rhythm of joke fragments that accompany her hysterical poses—“no…wait…wait… wait”, “this one’s going to kill you”, “what do you get…”, “this one will make you scream.” The failing, senseless joke ‘bits’ create a tragic pattern, an eternal parade of misplaced punchlines accompanied by desperate postures.
Like alcohol, Houstoun mutates from seductress to mate, from abuser to comforter, from sentimental to political. This happens as quickly as a drunk can ‘turn’, but it’s never as simple as this either. It’s always the transitory moment, the where-did-that-drink-go moment when logic dissolves and anything is possible. The improvisatory nature of the show heightens this giddy feeling. In Happy Hour, inebriation provides a model condition in which to move between these various states. Houstoun’s physical mastery recreates the malleable moment between confusion and realisation. A sentimental Houstoun builds up her friend—“you’re so lucky, you’ve got everything”—falling to pieces herself as she works through the list. A dance sequence with accompanying bites of conversation is repeated with reducing facility, Houstoun never losing control of her movement but the character losing a grip on her life.
In one of the final scenes, humanity’s ambiguous relationship to alcohol is given a striking image. Houstoun bounces herself out of the bar—“who do I think I am”, “if I knew what was good for me I’d head out that door right now”, “what do I think I’m looking at?”, “I’m not going to tell myself again.” At the Purcell Room, this scene was stretched to the limit, as was the joke scene, the discomforting pathos becoming painful in the way only a drunk can be.
The observational backbone and kind of realism that this brings to Happy Hour is shunted sideways by the sophisticated and intricate use of movement and text I’ve described. But, while the spoken word intrigues, it is Houstoun’s movement that seduces. The loose, malleable body of the drunk is combined with a skilful crafting of each ‘character’ that creates an uncanny effect—lost and found all at once. The peculiarities of Houston’s physicality carried across the work make this a journey and it’s our increasing familiarity with, and investment in, this particular way of moving that takes us with her. A delicate and minimal Hawaiian dance with a gentle rocking rhythm and repeated, intricate gestures that swing softly now, unlike her rather frantic barmaid dance, is dropped into this ‘bar scene’, as a quiet oasis. There is also a disturbingly lonely disco dance at the periphery of a spotlight.
When Houstoun announces that the bar’s closing and we have to leave, no-one wants to for fear of missing something. I’ve never felt an audience so caught in indecision. Should I stay or should I go? Maybe just one more for the road.
Maid To Drink presents Happy Hour, created and performed by Wendy Houstoun. Royal Festival Hall, London, September 28 – 29. Invitation-only performance, One Extra Dance Company, Ice Box, Sydney Jan 23.
The last decade has been marked by the convergence of many things, but one of the most interesting has been the convergence of art and digital technology. Artists working with new technologies have sought to familiarise themselves not just with the technical apparatus but with scientific theory as well. More generally, the explosion of interest in popularised science—including evolutionary theory, physics, neuroscience, chaos/complexity—has intensified awareness within the humanities of recent developments in science and technology. While academic post-structuralism now seems dated, lacking the persuasive power to reach a broader community, many non-science-based readers have at least a passing knowledge of debates within the scientific community on the nature of consciousness, or of time.
Various organisations have sought to facilitate the interaction of artists, theorists, scientists and technicians. Conference events such as the International Symposiums on Electronic Arts (ISEA) and Ars Electronica have drawn exponents together to show work and discuss ideas; in Australia, smaller-scale groups such as the Sydney-based New Media Forum have attempted a similar synthesis of art, theory and technology. In all these instances, ambition has been high, expectation even higher…and the realisation often not quite as elevated.
Perhaps the project has been simply too ambitious, or perhaps there exists a gulf between the artistic and scientific community that will never be breached (Einstein much preferred the music of Mozart to that of his Modernist peers Schoenberg and Stravinsky, while Cage, who dared to play dice with the musical universe, must have been a big no-no). Whatever the reason, none of the broad-based forums could be called an unqualified success, although they can produce stimulating, even exhilarating moments (ISEA’s best year was probably the Third International Symposium, TISEA, in 1992 in Sydney). Often the problem is that the open-minded approach of humanities exponents is not matched by the scientists, whose disciplines tend to be more narrowly defined.
A recent attempt at the art/technology synthesis was made by dLux media arts in the Immersive Conditions forum, held at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, in November. As part of dLux’s larger futureScreen program, which included exhibitions of new media works, this one-day forum concentrated on immersive technologies: virtual reality, artificial life, and various forms of interactive technology. The scope of the forum was admirably ambitious, bringing together artists, scientists, theorists and educationalists. Although virtual technologies no longer claim the media spotlight (now well and truly switched to the internet), there has been a long and fruitful intersection of artists and scientists in the field of computer-generated 3D technologies. Immersive Conditions was a successful attempt, for the most part, to illuminate the important aspects of this intersection.
A great strength of this forum was its structure. The proceedings took their cue from opening address by Dr Darren Tofts, Chair of Media and Communications at Swinburne University. Tofts’ presentation was that rare thing: a discussion of contemporary technologies within a historical and philosophical context. Moving from the familiar metaphor of Plato’s cave, Tofts traced an intellectual history of eidetic spaces, expressed in the mental constructions of the Roman ars memoria, and the inner spaces of memory related by St Augustine. This long theoretical tradition left Tofts impatient for a more fully realised immersive experience than the often clunky VR technology can generate; the goal is “the immediacy of the experience without the boredom of the conveyance” (Valery). Looking ahead, he advocated the pursuit of more elegant solutions to technological problems, with the fictional vaporware of “The Wire” in Kathryn Bigelow’s film Strange Days as a useful heuristic device; in theoretical terms he took a lead from the breakdown of the spectator/spectacle binary in quantum physics.
This presentation was an excellent opener for a forum of this kind, attentive to technology and aesthetics, machines and philosophy. Its hybrid approach embodied the potential of this convergent area. Almost as an aside, Tofts also questioned the helpfulness of the term “virtual reality”, suggesting as an alternative “apparent reality”: the substitute term embraces the sensation of presence, while acknowledging the awareness of “a here and there.”
Multimedia artist Justine Cooper followed with a discussion of her work within the theoretical context outlined by Tofts. Rapt comprises a virtual body generated by Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a technique which represents the body as axial slices (see RealTime 26, page 27). The various formats of Rapt (an installation version was exhibited at Artspace) allow the virtual body to be experienced both internally and externally. Cooper provided a useful interrogation of her work’s relation to contemporary medical science and technology, while positioning the objectification of the body within an historical framework (the mirror is a technology 5,000 years old).
The middle section of the forum was devoted to the benefits of research into computer-based technology. Dr Henry Gardner from the Computer Science department at ANU spoke wittily and enthusiastically about the “hot area” of immersive technologies, showcasing the WEDGE, Australia’s first walk-in VR theatre, installed for futureScreen in the Powerhouse. Sean Hart, on behalf of Professor Paula Swatman, represented RMIT’s I-cubed (the Interactive Information Institute), which pursues research projects in partnership with commercial ventures. While this presentation held limited interest for a general audience, it provided valuable information for artists working in multimedia and immersive technologies.
One such artist was Troy Innocent, who gave an enlightening account of his latest interactive work ICONICA. This work attracted much attention when exhibited at Artspace, although few users would have grasped its complexity. Innocent revealed some of that complexity, describing the work’s basis in artificial life research: the constructed world of ICONICA builds entities like DNA strings, comprising specific languages or codes. Intriguingly, users can ask these lifeforms what they are made of, and the creatures are only too happy to reply.
Not everything in Immersive Conditions gelled with the overall format. Dr Anna Cicognani from Sydney University missed an opportunity to develop the notion of cyberspace as a linguistic construct, which would have resonated with Troy Innocent’s work. However, dLux media arts director Alessio Cavallaro ended the forum on a high note, introducing fly-through video documentations of the Canadian artist Char Davies’ works Osmose and Éphémère. Davies’ sophisticated immersive virtual environments are probably the most celebrated achievements of this emerging art form; the insight into the recent Éphémère was particularly appreciated by the audience.
Immersive Conditions was a rewarding forum, certainly more successful than most attempts at the art/science synthesis. It also served to highlight the impressive level of achievement by Australian artists and scientists in this exciting field.
Immersive Conditions forum, presented in conjunction with the Powerhouse Museum, November 21; ICONICA, Troy Innocent, Artspace, Nov 12 – 28; part of futureScreen, organised by dLux media arts, Nov 12 – 28, 1998
A popular means of grasping life online has been via the lexicon of architecture. Given the overwhelming presence of architectural metaphors in describing cyberspace, it is inevitable that architectural critics should in turn reflect on the extent to which cyberspace is transforming architecture and its relationship to the human body. Digital Dreams by Neil Spiller (1998) is one of a growing number of architectural texts that maps this change.
Spiller is unequivocal in his assessment of this change. The architectural profession, he argues, is facing a future in which “advanced technologies, such as cyberspace, molecular and tissue engineering, genetics and the theories of complex systems, will drastically change our environment—and therefore our architecture.” However, unlike more skeptical architectural critics, such as M Christine Boyer, who regard this future as something of a crisis for architecture, Spiller embraces it as an “opening-up of a series of new spatial frontiers.” Moreover, in sketching these frontiers, Spiller foresees a range of metaphysical philosophies as the keys to building a future ‘online.’
Digital Dreams is Spiller’s ‘laboratory’, a textual space in which to examine this technologised future. Yet, like so many books purporting to chart a future in which “technological advances are currently contorting space beyond all recognisable limits”, Digital Dreams must first come to terms with the technologised space of the book.
Digital Dreams is structured in a ‘dialogic’ format with intersecting textual strands. The intention is a symbiotic relationship between the textual strands, with the meaning of one strand informed by a reading of the other. Unfortunately, though, for the most part the dialogic structure of the book does little in the way of “blurring the conceptual boundary between the two texts”, as is the stated intention. Even the overlaid titles sometimes read like naff Gen-X anti-advertising slogans—“Meaning in architecture is dead.”
The images that accompany the text are more successful. While primarily architectural in content, stylistically these images approximate digitally created Manga illustrations. This correlation is interesting in the light of Steven Johnson’s observation that computer games (and here one can add Anime) are where the future of virtual reality technologies are located. Whether or not this affiliation was a conscious design choice, the result is suggestive of Spiller’s greater comic book vision—the convergence of the technological and the biological in a future world, however absurd this vision might be (“nanotechnology will be able to produce Spidey and the Hulk for real”).
Like the formal aspects of the book, the content of Digital Dreams offers the reader a similarly mixed bag. As a commentary on future challenges to existing tenets of architectural theory and practice, Digital Dreams offers much that is thought provoking and fresh. For example, Spiller claims that the architect’s ability to “morph, mutate and hybridise” three-dimensional representational images in the ‘cyberspace’ of computer software renders obsolete the ‘form follows function’ dictum of architecture.
A second, equally charged suggestion is that emergent spatial environments (and architectures) will ultimately explode the classical notion of the Vitruvian ideal of the body. “Architecture as we know it is to a large extent influenced by the scale of our bodies,” he writes. “In the future this scale will not remain consistent.”
While the challenges faced by architecture in a technologised future are ostensibly the topic of the book (and one that, for the most part, is competently handled), the real theme is actually the technologised future itself. Digital Dreams is in equal parts a prediction of the manifold and untold ways in which ‘advanced technologies’ will transform the future, and a celebration of these changes. Unfortunately, however, it is as a soothsayer of a technologised, cyberspatial future that Spiller is at his least convincing. Spiller’s position on spirituality and cyberspace is a revealing example.
It is a curious irony of the computer age—an age closely aligned with postmodern philosophies that blithely proclaim the ‘death of (Enlightenment) God’—that so much attention should be paid to defining some sort of metaphysical, or spiritual dimension to cyberspace. Much recent work explicitly examines this, including critiques by Barry Sherman and Phil Judkins, Michael Heim, David Whittle, Douglas Rushkoff, and the more traditional Douglas Groothius. Add to these Spiller’s Digital Dreams.
The (non)place of traditional, Western religion in a post-human digital future forms a leitmotif in Digital Dreams. “As the body changes, so will religion”, Spiller claims. In rejecting traditional, organised Western religion, Spiller (after Rushkoff) suggests that the best (spiritual) guide to cyberspace is nevertheless one who is fully immersed in some sort of transcendental aesthetic. Unfortunately, however, all that Spiller can offer as a religious alternative amounts to little more than a cobbled-together amalgam of voodoo, shamanistic teaching, Aboriginal Dreamtime mythology, and alchemy. As a paradigm for a new metaphysics (read religion) of cyberspace, it is ill conceived and unconvincing—little more than a high-gloss, repackaged form of pop religious pluralism. For a new and uniquely ‘cyberspatial’ religion, we are still waiting.
Moreover, Spiller merely pays lip service to the aforementioned philosophies. The true religion of Digital Dreams is Spiller’s unabashed ‘techno-boosterism’ (to borrow Steven Johnson’s phrase). And, if techno-boosterism is the religion, then nanotechnology is the church, Eric Drexler the prophet, and Drexler’s Engines of Creation the bible through which Spiller divines the future. Spiller believes that when it comes to the future of architecture and humanity “Nano holds the key.”
Indeed, the second half of Digital Dreams reads like a veritable nano manifesto in which Spiller extols the virtues of nanotechnology for shaping the future. “We are on the cusp of the Nanolithic Age: at the beginning of Nanotime.” The transformative potential of this technology reaches its apotheosis in the end-time—what Spiller terms the Protoplasmic Age, a Promethean vision: “when virtual reality becomes real, the liberation of the bit is complete.”
Spiller’s ‘digital dreams’ openly embrace the possibility of a post-human, cyborgian future—even to the point of describing those who balk at some advances in surgery and robotics as ‘flesh chauvinists’ and ‘flesh Luddites.’ Needless to say, according to Spiller such a post-human future will only be possible if we are prepared to participate in “visceral escapology”—escape from the prison of the flesh.
Digital Dreams is not short on dogma or polemic. While certain minor qualifications are made, the fiercely techno-boosterist line that is pushed in Digital Dreams leaves little room for critical evaluation or circumspection; it is this lack of critical distance that is the book’s main weakness. As an architectural text, Digital Dreams offers much; as a blueprint for the future, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Neil Spiller, Digital Dreams: architecture and the new alchemic technologies, Ellipsis, London, 1998
No matter how hard one tries to ridicule multimedia, interactivity and online presence, there are trillions of real estate agents, CompSci students, Star Trek fans, cyberpunks, digital artists and WIRED subscribers to whom such sarcastic folly falls on deaf ears. To the list of Christians, parents and junkies, we now must add ‘digitalists’ as yet another sub-species of rabid, compulsive fundamentalists whose enlightened state is “I just don’t understand.” Like, if I don’t believe in God, how can I understand Christianity? If I haven’t had a kid, how can I really speak about social concern? If I haven’t taken smack, how can I say it’s bad?
Ian Haig’s Web Devolution—subtitled a “Digital Evangelist Web Cult Project”—firmly and deftly targets this incredulous mania of belief which has caused otherwise rational persons to make the most outrageous, extravagant and embarrassing claims for ‘new technologies.’ Presented as an installation, Web Devolution set itself up as a crackpot media station positioned in the centre of the gallery. Its ugly vertical assemblage resembled a mutation between a monstrously customised ghettoblaster, a Santiero altar, a Christian zealot’s placard and a homeless person’s commandeered shopping trolley. Cheap loudspeakers played a barrage of digitally processed noise (expertly crafted by electroacoustic composer Philip Samartzis) which served to intensify the effect of the station being a broadcast beacon desperately drawing all toward its higher cause of cyberbabble. Festooned with grafittied slogans and scraps of logo images, this was less an art object offered to further creativity in new technologies and more a piece of junk vomited forth from the overproduction of crappy new media art.
Ian Haig, Web Devolution, 1998
The actual online project lay buried in a maze of frantically flashing links displayed on a monitor nestled amongst this noisy pile of garbage. Once online, one truly gets lost in a world of sloganeering that evokes the balderdash of everyone from Negroponte to Stelarc to Leary to Lucas. The targets are obvious—Star Wars, Heaven’s Gate, Mastercard, Yahoo—but it truly is fun to know that when you click on a link labelled “Chewbacca” that right there is the punch line. You either get it or you don’t. Similar dumb jokes are embedded in the visual/iconic/linguistic hyper-narrative of the project: links go nowhere, images are grunge-res, mystical passwords are void, pull down menus give absurd options, animated GIFs flash their nothingness. All these non-sequitur pathways constitute a colon of digital Babel which is less concerned with contemplating the higher states of consciousness achieved by online/interactive exchange and more intent on reflecting the deluded aimlessness so typical of web navigation. Referencing Devo’s theory of devolution and its sardonic reflection of cultural exchange, Web Devolution celebrates the retrogressive puerility which lies at the heart of the nerdy ponderousness we call ‘being digital.’
But don’t miss the point here. Like anyone who has looked realistically at the digital and/or online technologies we have used for at least 8 years (and sound people have the jump on all you eyeballers), Haig is not a Neo-Luddite. Technology is all around us. Plumbing, road maintenance and air travel are complex marvels of human ingenuity and chaotic organisation—but I ain’t signing up for a 3-day conference on radical re-inventions of S-bends. Whereas so much New Media Art quite pathetically imports some ‘heavy concept’ via a few scanned images and hypertext links with hot buttons (take your pick of ‘hot topics’: surveillance, the body, medical science, glitches, crash, viruses, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, the city, consumerism, corporate control, ecology, etc), Web Devolution astutely probes the hysterical and frighteningly uncritical support of the most banal effects of new technologies.
Ian Haig, Web Devolution, game theory, Experimenta, Span Galleries, Melbourne, July 6 – 18, 1998
It was another strange Canberra summer’s evening. The sun was hanging low in the sky and there was a strong cooling wind as we drove along the lane to the Old Canberra Brickworks. We were given a map and a torch for our journey, and so set off to experience Spices—the latest project for Clare Dyson and Rachel Jennings. It began with sustained stillness. Five individuals sat, backs to us, on an old pergola-like structure; their visual backdrop the trees and their aural backdrop the rustling leaves and bird calls prompted by the setting sun. Beneath them: still water and a line of brick stepping stones through the pool. When movement began, it was slow and gentle—rolling, torsos hanging over the edge, a lifting of legs. Then one of the more resonant motifs of the work—the kicking and dropping of stones into the pool below. From here, the work heightened our awareness of the workings of our senses and the relationship between sense and memory. We later moved through a brick passageway and passed by a series of isolated vignettes: a representation of lust and desire, with a blindfolded woman caressed and whispered to by 2 others; a woman sucking from passionfruit, spitting the luscious flesh onto her thigh and then smearing it over her skin. It is the communication between artist and audience that is so well-developed in Spices. The use of water and fire, the fresh smells of passionfruit and lemons, and the placement of voice and song, light and darkness. Our journey is a completely sensory one. It is Dyson and Jenning’s keen awareness of the power of detail through these elements that connects with their audience. With its combination of superb design by Jennings—so well-placed in this setting—and Dyson’s interrogation of movement and gesture, Spices has a deeper, more personal connection. This is soul food.
Spices, created and directed by Clare Dyson and Rachel Jennings, a choreographic fellowship with the Choreographic Centre, old Canberra Brickworks, Yarralumla, Dec 9 – 13, 15 – 17
The biennial antistatic dance festival will be held March 24-April 11 at The Performance Space and is curated this year by Sue-ellen Kohler, Ros Crisp and Zane Trow.
antistatic 99 aims to foster critical debate and enquiry into contemporary dance practice in Australia. In particluar it looks at differences between practices and the values that underpin them. What kinds of work do dancers and choreographers want to make and why? And what is the cultural, historical and international context of their work?
Artists presenting work at the event include Trotman & Morish, Helen Herbertson, Jude Walton, Rose Warby, Alan Schacher, Rosalind Crisp, DeQuincy/Lynch, Jeff Stein, Tony Yap, Yumi Umiumare, Susie Fraser, Julie Humphreys and Helen Clarke-Lapin. International guest artists Jennifer Monson, Ishmael Houston-Jones and Lisa Nelson will all present workshops and performances. The Oaks Cafe/Cassandra’s Dance, a new work by Russell Dumas’ Dance Exchange kicks off the festival at The Studio, Sydney Opera House.
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Forum talks will be presented by artists, writers and academics including Sally Gardiner, Susan Leigh Foster, Julie-Anne Long and Virginia Baxter, Anne Thompson, Eleanor Brickhill. There are also installations and screenings from Margie Medlin, Adrienne Doig, Tracie Mitchell and others.
Aether is a full-length dance work which explores the integration of projection, sound and movement. Guerin generates intricate and chaotic dance that exists in a medium of signals, messages and data by award winning motion graphics designer Michaela French. It examines the overwhelming sophistication of contemporary communication and the problems that still remain with expressing ourselves in simple human interactions. [Text courtesy of Lucy Guerin Inc.]
Kirstie McCracken, Aether, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Rachel Roberts
Kirstie McCracken, Aether, Lucy Guerin Inc
credits: choreographer Lucy Guerin, motion graphic designer Michaela French, composer Gerald Mair, costume designer Paula Levis, lighting designer Keith Tucker, dancers from premiere production Antony Hamilton, Kyle Kremerskothen, Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry, Lee Serle
performances: premiere North Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, March 2005; Merlyn Theatre, November 2007; Pittsburgh, US, November 2007; Sydney Festival, January 2008
(l-r) Kyle Kremerskothen and Kirstie McCracken, Aether, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Rachel Roberts
(l-r) Kyle Kremerskothen and Kirstie McCracken, Aether, Lucy Guerin Inc
related articles in realtime
moving and shaking
sophie travers, realtime 82, december 2007-january 2008
Triple Alice was a gathering around the Central Desert of Australia—a gathering of a hard space and in virtual space. Triple Alice engages with the nature of artistic practice for the new millennium and takes the Central Desert as fundamental in its mapping of the future of artistic, cultural and media practice.
Held over three consecutive years, Triple Alice convened a forum and three live, site- and temporally-specific laboratories staged over three weeks each year. The forum and laboratories were accessible through a website which was integral to the event. Triple Alice is an open-ended project that took place at Hamilton Downs on the edge of the Tanami Track in the Northern Territory. Over the three years of the project, Indigenous and non-indigenous performers, visual artists, scientists, writers, web designers and theorists converged on Hamilton Downs for the Triple Alice Forum and Laboratory to hothouse a wide range of conceptual, cultural and critical issues. Out of these interdisciplinary, collaborative laboratories new works emerged, combining dance and movement, installation, text, photography, A/V and electronic media. These works were developed and presented both on location and also at arts institutions and cultural events around the country to generate further dialogue and exchange within Triple Alice.
Triple Alice 1 brought together more than 85 artists on site each day over the three weeks of the laboratory. There were three laboratories operating simultaneously—BodyWeather, an open ended physical research workshop; Writers—poetry, literature, text and theory; and local Territory Artists & Guest Speakers—from a range of different fields. Exchanges between the laboratories and each of the disciplines represented occurred via cross participation in each others labs and via collaborations between individual artists and groupings, while a range of poetry readings, discussions, slide-showings and performance events show-cased the work of those present and engendered dialogue, discussion and the initiation of processes that fed into and between each lab.
Triple Alice 2 was a small and intimate meeting. It comprised the Alice Springs Hothouse which included a performance in the Ilparpa claypans, followed by presentations, slide showings and discussions at the Watch This Space Gallery—as well as the on-site lab at Hamilton Downs. Triple Alice 3 was the third in a series of on-going forums and laboratories to be held in the Central Desert. The purpose of the laboratories is to draw on a fertile bed of cross-cultural, interdisciplinary practice from both Indigenous and non-indigenous traditions in relation to the Central heartland of Australia. It embodies a sustained commitment by a core group of artists to uncover a new cultural practice. It was held over a three-week period. Three simultaneously interlocking laboratories brought together different bodies of practice in relation to the place, focussing on visual, physical and textual disciplines whilst building on the experiences and information gathered during the first two years. (Text courtesy of De Quincey Co.)
credits: Triple Alice 1: The BodyWeather Laboratory facilitator Tess de Quincey, participants more than 50 from all over Australia as well as from Denmark, France, Holland, Germany and the UK. The Writers Laboratory participants Martin Harrison, Gay McCauley, Ian Maxwell, Peter Snow, Julia White, Angelika Fremd-Wiese, Gerd Christiansen. The Central Australian Laboratory facilitators Watch This Space, Desart, Christine Lennard and Gallery Gondwana, participants Cath Bowdler, Marg Bowman, Joy Hardman, Pam Lofts, Kim Mahood, Pip McManus, Ann Mosey, Rodd Moss, Dorothy Napangardi, Polly Napangardi Watson, Ann Oooms, Kirin Finane, Terry Whitebeach, Michael Watts, Nokturnl and Frank Yama, Denise Allen, Peter Latz, Dick Kimber, Arthur Ah Chee, Peter Toyne and Steve McCormack. Triple Alice 2 participants Francesca da Rimini, Sam de Silva, Sarah Waterson, Sophea Lerner, Michael Schiavello, Mari Velonaki, Peter Snow, Karen Vedel, Russell Emerson, Amanda MacDonald Crowley, Essar Gabriel, Kristina Harrison, Victoria Hunt, Marnie Orr, Lee Pemberton and Tess de Quincey.
performances: Triple Alice 1, September 20-October 10, 1999; Triple Alice 2, November 10-20, 2000; Triple Alice 3, September 17-October 7, 2001
reviews/articles – realtime
triple alice
realtime, realtime 30, april-may, 1999
About Performance devoted an entire issue to Tess de Quincey’s Triple Alice project, Each of the three laboratories was facilitated and documented by staff and students from the Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney. The issue contains essays and other artworks by participants and observers, casebooks and a photo-essay.
About Performance 5: Body Weather in Central Australia, editor Gay McAuley
introduction
gay mcauley
from observer to participant: reflections on the triple alice experience
kristina harrison
burning point: overview description of triple alice
tess de quincey
edge, desert, reticulation, information
martin harrison
triple alice 1: a participant’s perspective
sarah dunn
performance making in alice
peter snow
access all areas: reflections on triple alice 1
ian maxwell
how to say (roughly…very roughly) what sort of a thing a triple alice 3 is, having attended one
stuart grant
drawings and texts
julia white
sky hammer
martin harrison
body weather at hamilton downs: a photo essay
russell emerson, gay mcauley, garry seabrook
With absolute simplicity, two performers create a living portrait that illuminates the shape and rhythms of our inner life.
Drawing together work from three continents—Japan, India and Australia—dancer/choreographer Tess de Quincey and actor Peter Snow negotiate the eight states of human emotion, as outlined in The Natyasastra —the cornerstone of artistic practice in India.
For a captivating and intensely intimate hour, two performers are literally ‘framed’ as they create a fascinating living portrait, playing out various heightened states of emotion. The production is part of De Quincey Co’s ongoing ‘embrace’ exchange between international artists, exploring eastern and western performance vocabularies. Integral to the piece is Michael Toisuta’s evocative Homage to Ligeti which takes its inspiration from Gyorgi Ligeti’s Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes.” (Text courtesy of De Quincey Co.)
credits: created and performed by Tess de Quincey and Peter Snow, set design Russell Emerson, Steve Howarth, lighting design Travis Hodgson, sound design Michael Toisuta
performances: premiere Richard Wherrett Studio, Sydney Theatre, February-March 2008; La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, December, 2009
Stuart Shugg, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe and Talitha Maslin, Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Jeff Busby
Stuart Shugg, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe and Talitha Maslin, Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
Using image, sound, language and movement Human Interest Story explores the affects of the news cycle on our psyche and questions our ability to accept the reality of distant tragedy into the daily routine of our lives. Shifting between humour and anxiety it shows our varying responses to the stream of information that reaches into our domestic environments about newsworthy events in other places.
Is the news a consumer product that neutralises our ability to have a genuine reaction to the world’s suffering? Or does it permeate our lives in a deeply affecting way? Human Interest Story attempts to comprehend our responses to current events that range from switching off to heartbreak, and how this unending flow of words and images shapes us.
Presented initially as rote text where natural disasters, wars, riots and environmental collapse are interchangeable with celebrity updates, the language of news presentation devolves into a driving utterance which propels movement into a visceral reimagining of the impact of reports from around the globe. [Text courtesy of Lucy Guerin Inc.]
Jessica Wong, Alisdair Macindoe, Stephanie Lake, Talitha Maslin, Stuart Shugg and Harriet Ritchie, Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Jeff Busby
Jessica Wong, Alisdair Macindoe, Stephanie Lake, Talitha Maslin, Stuart Shugg and Harriet Ritchie, Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
credits: choreographer Lucy Guerin, performers Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Talitha Maslin, Harriet Ritchie, Stuart Shugg, Jessica Wong, set designer Gideon Obarzanek, realising designer Anna Cordingley, costume designer Paula Levis, lighting designer Paul Jackson, composer & sound designer Jethro Woodward, very special newscast by Anton Enus (World News Australia, SBS)
performances: premiere Malthouse Theatre Melbourne, July-August 2010; Perth International Arts Festival March 2011; Belvoir, September 2011
l-r Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Jessica Wong, Talitha Maslin, Alisdair Macindoe and Stuart Shugg, Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Jeff Busby
l-r Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Jessica Wong, Talitha Maslin, Alisdair Macindoe and Stuart Shugg, Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin Inc
Ros Warby and Stephanie Lake, Melt, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Virginia Cummins
Ros Warby and Stephanie Lake, Melt, Lucy Guerin Inc
Melt was part of Love Me, a program of three works—Reservoir of Giving I and II, On, and Melt—which explore relationships in projected environments. Melt describes a rise in temperature from freezing to boiling with each degree explored temperamentally and physically. It is a highly focused duet for two women whose detailed movements are intensified by the mercurial medium of motion graphics. [Text courtesy of Lucy Guerin Inc.]
credits: choreography Lucy Guerin, motion graphics Michaela French, music Franc Tetaz, cast Stephanie Lake, Kirstie McCracken
Kirstie McCracken, Stephanie Lake, Melt, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Jeff Busby
Kirstie McCracken, Stephanie Lake, Melt, Lucy Guerin Inc
performances: (with The Ends of Things) premiere On the Boards, Seattle, USA, March 2003; PICA, Oregon, March 2003; Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, March 2003; Diverseworks, Houston, USA, March 2003; Miami Light, Miami, USA, April 2003; National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Canada, April 2003; Dance Theatre Workshop, New York, April 2003; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, November 2003; Sydney Opera House, Sydney, November 2003; Zurich Festival, Switzerland, April 2003; Zurich Festival, Switzerland, August 2004;
(as part of Love Me) Contact Theatre, Manchester, UK, October 2005; Belfast Festival, Ireland, November 2005; Mobile States tour to Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart; Performance Space, Sydney; Visy Theatre, Brisbane; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, August-September 2007; Seoul Performing Arts Festival, October 2007; Southbank, London, UK, May 2009; Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, May 2009; Dance Week Festival, Zagreb, Croatia, June 2009
love me
stephanie glickman, herald sun, july 31, 2007
mesmerising
julie huffer, sun herald, august 12, 2007
exploration of relationships
shoba rao, daily telegraph, august 14, 2007
love me: lucy guerin in
oliivia stewart, the courier mail, august 24, 2007
the dancing body as a screen: synchronizing projected motion graphics onto the human form in contemporary dance
angela barnett, computers in entertainment, 7.1 (february 2009), pp. 5-5.32
Byron Perry and Kirstie McCracken, Structure and Sadness, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Jeff Busby
Byron Perry and Kirstie McCracken, Structure and Sadness, Lucy Guerin Inc
The collapse of the West Gate Bridge in 1970 is an event that remains imbedded in the public psyche of Melbourne. Thirty-five men lost their lives when a span came down during its construction. Structure and Sadness examines the bridge as a supporting and connecting structure. Its concrete and definable form contrasts with the unknowable grief and chaos brought about by its failure. On stage, the performers construct a precarious world teetering on the point of collapse. The work shifts between practical building of supportive structures and the impressionistic portrayal of disintegration and sorrow. Structure and Sadness is a complex dance work, which examines the impressionable human body contending with the unyielding inanimate world that surrounds it. It explores an event in recent history not as a factual narrative, but through physical, emotional and visual responses to a devastating accident. [Text courtesy of Lucy Guerin Inc.]
Antony Hamilton, Structure and Sadness, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Jeff Busby
Antony Hamilton, Structure and Sadness, Lucy Guerin Inc
credits: director Lucy Guerin, choreographer Lucy Guerin with dancers from the premiere production: Fiona Cameron, Antony Hamilton, Lina Limosani, Alisdair Macindoe, Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry, composer Gerald Mair, motion graphics Michaela French, set, lighting designers Bluebottle: Ben Cobham and Andrew Livingston, costume designer Paula Levis, dramaturg Maryanne Lynch, producer Michaela Coventry
performances: ppremiere Melbourne International Arts Festival, Malthouse Theatre, October 2006; Sydney Festival, January 2007; Perth International Arts Festival, February 2008; Dublin Dance Festival, Ireland, May 2009; Schloss Festspiele, Ludwigsberg, Germany, June 2009; Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany, June 2009; Dance Theatre Workshop, New York, September-October 2009; Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, November 2009; Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, US, August 2010
Sudden, unexpected events, accidents, the accumulation of fear brought on by irrational obsessions, the inability to let go of the moment when everything changed. In a place where grief becomes a way of life, life still has a way of going on.
Already Elsewhere is set on the roof of a submerged house surrounded by grass—a time capsule of buried histories. Did the roof land there? Was the house buried? What disastrous event brought this about? Seven people, seemingly unrelated, emerge on the scene each haunted by unexplainable events. A man obsessed by his role in a fatal accident…A woman bewildered by the sudden disappearance of her child…A young woman’s growing paranoia of everyday life…The guilty survivor…Why her and not her friends? The man who doesn’t trust anyone, anywhere…He doesn’t even trust the dead.
The cast of actors and dancers take command of the show’s material with equal physical and theatrical skill, negotiating the steep incline of the roof with fatalistic determination. The roof is multifaceted, at once benign and playful it also acts as a projection surface relaying images in real time that occur ‘out of sight’ to the naked eye. Finally it erupts tile by tile as an explosive metaphor to a life lived in fear.
Already Elsewhere’s aesthetics pays homage to the work of renowned American photographer Gregory Crewdson. Ingeniously designed (both lighting and set) by Geoff Cobham, this intensely atmospheric work mixes idyllic suburban states with the heightened world of unexpected disaster. With text by the acclaimed Sydney writer Brendan Cowell, sound and music composition by the versatile Paul Charlier and direction by resident artistic director/choreographer Kate Champion, Force Majeure has created a work of world class dance-theatre that doesn’t shy away from exploring the disturbing symptoms of our chronic post-September 11 state of fear. In 2005, Already Elsewhere received the Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Performance by a Company.” (Text courtesy of Force Majeure.)
credits: director Kate Champion, performers Fiona Cameron, Sarah Jayne Howard, Kirstie McCracken, Veronica Neave, Nathan Page, Byron Perry, Lee Wilson, Tom Hodgson, designer (set and lighting) Geoff Cobham, composer, sound designer Paul Charlier, writer Brendan Cowell, assistant director Lisa Ffrench, artistic associate Roz Hervey; tour to Lyon, performer Narelle Benjamin
performances: premiere Sydney Festival, January 2005; Biennale de la Danse, Lyon, September 2006
It’s not how old you are, but how you are old. Force Majeure’s The Age I’m In is a poignant, witty and revealing portrait of how we inhabit the age we’re in throughout our lives. Woven together and brought to life by Force Majeure’s distinctive dance theatre language, a diverse selection of Australians aged between 14 and 80 offer astonishingly personal responses to a range of emotive issues, creating an intimate and warm-hearted snapshot of the aging process. Directed by Kate Champion, this performance—which won Outstanding Performance by a Company at the 2009 Australian Dance Awards—skillfully combines audio visual technology, real-life interviews and a distinctive physical language to take a fresh and humorous look at generational clichés, family interactions and the complexity of human relationships. (Text courtesy of Force Majeure.)
Byron Perry, Kirstie McCracken, The Age I’m In, Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
Byron Perry, Kirstie McCracken, The Age I’m In, Force Majeure
credits: director Kate Champion, performers Marlo Benjamin, Samuel Brent, Annie Byron, Tilda Cobham Hervey, Alexandra Cook, Macushla Cross, Vincent Crowley, Daniel Daw, Penny Everingham, Brian Harrison, Roz Hervey, Kirstie McCracken, Josh Mu, Veronica Neave, Tim Ohl, Byron Perry, Ingrid Weisfelt, designer Geoff Cobham?, artistic associate Roz Hervey, composer Max Lyandvert, costume designer Bruce McKinven, sound editor Mark Blackwell, photographer William Yang, audio visual producer Tony Melov, audio visual designer Neil Jensen, producer Karen Rodgers
The Age I’m In, Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
The Age I’m In, Force Majeure
performances: premiere Sydney Festival, January 2008; Adelaide Festival, March 2008; CarriageWorks, Sydney, November-December 2008; International Tour to Dublin, Seoul and Montreal 2009; Australian Roadwork Tour (five states,16 venues), 2010
Same, same But Different takes its inspiration from our enduring ability to keep on struggling for love… whether from one relationship to another or in one, the same, relationship. The work creates lasting imagery of various states of co-dependence, frustration, tenderness and humour through a dexterous blend of film, dance and theatrical virtuosity. Within a moving set of frames, the action is exposed and edited before the audience’s eyes. Live action interacts with life-sized film imagery evoking the multiplicity of thought within each character…their fleeting desires… their unfulfilled expectations. Giant giraffes tangled in a mating ritual are background to a couple’s antagonistic, counterbalanced dance. A human race that runs in circles is a metaphor for our more desperate efforts to survive…and a marathon dance of repetition reveals nuances of intimacy that only exist through the stamina of emotional endurance. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources including the film They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, the Margaret Attwood short story “Happy Endings” and our own personal lives, the work uses movement/dance/physicality as its driving force. Same, same But Different defies categorisation with dancers who act, actors who move and film that lives and breathes through the flesh of the performers. In 2002 Same, same But Different received the Helpmann Award for Best Physical Theatre or Visual Performance and the Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Dancer (Roz Hervey). (Text courtesy of Force Majeure.)
Same, same but Different, Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
Same, same but Different, Force Majeure
credits: director Kate Champion, performers Arianthe Galani, Brian Harrison, Roz Hervey, Kirstie McCracken, Veronica Neave, Nathan Page, Shaun Parker, Byron Perry, Ben Winspear, designer (set and lighting) Geoff Cobham, composer, sound designer Max Lyandvert, filmmaker Brigid Kitchin, associate producer Karen Rodgers
performances: premiere Sydney Festival, January 2002; Brisbane Festival, September-October 2002; Melbourne Festival, October 2002; Sydney Opera House, November 2002
One-minute compilation of already elsewhere and same, same but different
Same, same but Different, Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
Same, same but Different, Force Majeure
reviews/articles – other
same, same but different
hilary crampton, the age, november 1, 2002
agenda: melbourne festival: same, same but different
neil jillet, sunday age, november 3, 2002
something in the way they move
jill sykes, sydney morning herald, january 17, 2002
Same, same but Different, Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
Same, same but Different, Force Majeure
cast changes in the power of walk off
alison cotes, courier mail, october 4, 2002
love’s beautiful dance survives many pitfalls
stephanie glickman, herald-sun, november 1, 2002
it’s the same difference, isn’t it?
deborah jones, the australian, january 18, 2002
‘the play’s the thing’ no longer: non-linear narrative in kate champion’s same, same but different
rosemary klich, australasian drama studies 46, april 2005, pp.58-69
Weaving between the work of three of Australia’s most acclaimed women artists and around writings by Julia Kristeva, dancer Tess de Quincey invites you into a feminine space, an environment where body and textuality coexist. This is a raw and edgy layering where resonances of women’s culture and female sensibility are assembled in a crosscultural, interdisciplinary synthesis.
This collaboration brings together breathtaking and provocative poet Amanda Stewart with the intense, monumentality of digital sequencer Debra Petrovitch and the subversive trajectories of new media artist Francesca da Rimini. Other contributors bring elements from Turkish, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, Arabic, French, Chilean and Balinese female forms. Visual and sonic poetry is interwoven with a choreography that is based in a synthesis of Eastern and Western dance traditions. (Text courtesy of De Quincey Co.)
Tess de Quincey, Nerve 9
photo Russell Emerson
Tess de Quincey, Nerve 9
credits: dance and direction Tess de Quincey, visual and sonic poetry Amanda Stewart, audio visual sequencing Debra Petrovitch, text Francesca da Rimini, design and image editing Russell Emerson, lighting and digital design Richard Manner
performances: premiere, Performance Space, Sydney, May 2001; Dancehouse, Melbourne, February 2002; Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, September-October 2005; Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, October 2005; Performance Space, Sydney, October 2005; North Melbourne Town Hall, November 2005; Brisbane Powerhouse, November 2005; Brown’s Mart, Darwin, November 2005
Triptych examines three elements—air, electricity and water.
Through dance, sonic and visual structures, framed by three large-scale video screens which envelop the audience, the piece explores the elements as fundamental modes of physicality and being in the world. This in turn reflects the contemporary and ancient spectrum of human experience spanning war and peace; the survival of species.
Linda Luke, Triptych, De Quincey Co
photo Mayu Kanamori
Linda Luke, Triptych, De Quincey Co
Triptych invites audiences into an immersive multi-dimensional, ‘holographic’ matrix of body and space. Breaking open the simple, it explores the nature of perception and relationship. It generates a tactile and richly sensorial world, an environment which touches the nonverbal, sensual knowing. (Text courtesy of De Quincey Co.)
credits: performers Peter Fraser, Victoria Hunt, Linda Luke, Lizzie Thomson, sound Chris Abraham, video and visuals Sam James, lighting Travis Hodgson, choreography, direction Tess de Quincey
performances: Performance Space, Sydney, November 2008
Peter Fraser, run—a performance engine, De Quincey Co
photo Mayu Kanamori
Peter Fraser, run—a performance engine, De Quincey Co
Run—a performance installation by De Quincey Co that explores extreme energy and motion. Run invites audiences into an unpredictable space, where objects and bodies become integrated elements of a massive, warping environment; where suspended objects oscillate between stability and chaos.
Building on De Quincey Co’s renowned site-specific performance The Stirring performed in November 2007, in Run elements from the CarriageWorks building are incorporated to create a mobile structure which is driven by, and affects, the movement of the performers. The mobile is a reflection of CarriageWorks’ history which invites a new set of relationships to the place, its origins and its future. As a study of locomotion, the performers generate movement on different planes, actually defying gravity. Media and video images create layers of meaning, while live video cameras capture, edit and project the subtle, elemental relationships of motion in space.
De Quincey Co’s ensemble of highly skilled physical performers are joined by some of Australia’s leading artists for this bold and awe-inspiring new work. (Text courtesy of De Quincey Co.)
Linda Luke, Peter Fraser, run—a performance engine, De Quincey Co
photo Mayu Kanamori
Linda Luke, Peter Fraser, run—a performance engine, De Quincey Co
credits: performers Tom Davies, Peter Fraser, Victoria Hunt, Linda Luke, musician Jim Denley, Dale Gorfinkel, media artist John Tonkin, video artist Emmanuela Prigioni, lighting designer Travis Hodgson, sculptural installation Garnet Brownbill, Bernie Regan
performances: premiere August 2009, Performance Space, Sydney
d a n s e is a project that Rosalind Crisp has been developing continuously since 2005 between Australia and France in collaboration with her company and other artists.
The d a n s e project deals with a volatile group of choreographic principles which guide the way movement is produced by the dancer. The practice is not about memorising movements, but rather, about practicing ways of sourcing movement from any part of the body, at any speed or level, with any force or direction, for any duration … at any time. It is about the body dancing.
Three fundamental scores or attention tasks are:
– As soon as one notices the beginnings of an habitual movement pathway, redirect the attention to another part of the body or employ a different speed, direction, size or effort in that movement.
– Practice constantly changing the speed, level, direction, effort or part of the body which is initiating the movement (an impossible task but one which constantly awakens one to the potential of each moment).
– Practice delaying the beginnings of movements or suspending momentarily during a movement. In this brief space one has time to notice, and potentially to make, a different movement choice than the one which was about to be fulfilled.
dance
photo Heidrun Löhr
dance
With her attention on how the movements are forming, the dancer is constantly in the present – that is, in the moment of making the movement. Through practice, as the dancer embodies these and many other choreographic scores, they become anchors for her attention, particularly when performing. The scores imprint multiple ways of exploring each moment of the dance. As the dancer’s body awareness becomes myelinated with ways of finding movement in any part of the body, at any speed, level, direction, effort,… at any time, this inevitably informs the way she perceives herself dancing and generates a fluid interactivity between the body and the imaginary, ultimately giving her a lot of freedom to play beyond the rules.
In the beginning I called it ‘not dancing’. Later I realized that this was simply a necessary process of positive discrimination towards movements of lesser ‘value’. Now any-thing is permitted, even ‘presentation’ if it comes along. Everything IS something
‘d a n s e is a modality of work that Rosalind Crisp has been developing since 2005. It is about a way of working with the body and an ensemble of unstable principles which guide the production of movement by the dancer. These principles are continually transforming, constituting a language that is both rigorously identifiable and constantly mutating.
d a n s e is not a piece but a world in constant evolution. This process of work is the basis from which pieces or performances crystallise, reflecting different moments or facets of the process, and which we term ’sites’. Each piece or performance is born of the confrontation between the practice of d a n s e , other artists, a particular space, or a specific question. Each of these meetings carves a new direction for the work, giving the particular form and substance to each site ….’ Isabelle Ginot, dance researcher
The history of the d a n s e project is inextricably linked with the first performances that emerged from this research. dance was developed in 2005 at Omeo Dance studio in Sydney and presented at Performance Space. It was the first public ‘site’ of this project.
Each dancer independently sustains a fifty minute journey through an open space. Stools are placed throughout the space for the audience. The four dancers work in silence for thirty-eight minutes. This is broken suddenly by loud rock and roll music, for 3 minutes. They keep working, the visceral impact of the music impacting on their dancing, they continue afterwards, again in silence.
‘The structure of this piece is the lightest I could find. It brings the four of us into close proximity at times, without ever addressing directly any harmonious composition of two or more bodies in the same location. The turning point for me in making this work was breaking away from frontal presentation, not a new concept at that time, but something that had not been relevant to my work since the view from here (installation piece for galleries, 2001)’. Rosalind Crisp
dance
photo Heidrun Löhr
dance
credits: choreographer Rosalind Crisp, dancer/collaborators Lizzie Thomson, Joanna Pollitt, Olivia Millard, Rosalind Crisp, video Eric Pellet, lights/production Simon Wise
performances: Performance Space Sydney November 2005, Dancehouse Melbourne (duet version Lizzie and Rosalind) November 2005
danse (1) is a fifty-minute solo journey through a large non-frontal space with five different “stations” or environments. Rosalind is concerned in this work with how the body in d a n s e is transformed over a duration of fifty minutes, in response to different textural environments and in close proximity to the public.
The piece commences with a projection on a giant screen (or wall) of the video d a n s e by Eric Pellet. Rosalind then proceeds to inhabit the space which is installed with a large open raised stage, a light box 2m x 2m lit from underneath, a place for Isabelle Ginot with her real-time writing responses to Rosalind’s dancing projected either side of her two laptops, a rock and roll scene, and the spaces in between…
These “stations” give the audience different frameworks through which to perceive the dancing. The public can move about or sit on benches placed in and around the various “stations”. Rosalind composes the dance in the presence of the spectators, working with different modes of relationship to them, …distant, direct, indirect, peripheral, in a constant state of listening.
A very personal voyage, this solo is saturated by its environment and influences it in turn. Isabelle Ginot dialogues “live” with the dance on her portable computers. Her texts – at times commentary, at times fictional responses to the dancing – are simultaneously projected on two screens (or walls) during one part of the journey. The public thus has access to multiple points of view, both in the space and by following the view of Isabelle.
In the final minutes of the piece, the space is invaded by powerful rock and roll music, which gives yet another perspective on the dance, underlining its visceral dimension. www.omeodance.com
credits: conception and choreography Rosalind Crisp, dance Rosalind Crisp, assistant Andrew Morrish, text and ‘inside’ eye Isabelle Ginot, music Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin, lights and technical direction Marco Wehrspann, video Eric Pellet, Le Fresnoy, stage design Rosalind Crisp, Marco Wehrspann, Andrew Morrish
performances: Mains d’œuvres Saint-Ouen, October 2006; Taichung Culture Centre Taiwan, November 2006; Greenwich Dance Agency London, February 2007; Biennale nationale de danse du Val-de-Marne, Centre des Bords de Marne Le Perreux, March 2007; Performance Space, Sydney, May-June 2007; Dancehouse, Melbourne (extracts), June 2007; Soirées MC2, Grenoble (extracts), June 2009; Platform, Zagreb, September 2009; Zodiak, Helsinki, Finland, February 2010
In danse (4), Rosalind Crisp expands her project by inviting three French dance artists, Céline Debyser, Max Fossati and Alban Richard, to appropriate her choreographic materials and processes of research. Her intention was to develop multiple registers of d a n s e , renderings of the work that are very different to her own and that can co-exist. For this she immerses the dancers in her choreographic world, at the same time constantly inviting them to effect it, to transform it in their own way, and even to reinvent it.
The structure of danse (4) builds on that of dance. The work is performed in an open space with benches for the audience to sit on and move between as they wish. The dancers inhabit the space one by one. Each of them composes according to their individual relationship to the practice and within the shared parameters of the “world” of d a n s e . It is a very personal journey experienced in the immediacy of the moment. The work is structured to bring the four dancers into common spaces at times, without ever imposing a dramaturgy. Swiss rock musician and composer Hansueli Tischhauser, plays live guitar at the 38 minute mark, and later, at the end, delicate ukulele as he wanders nonchalantly through the empty space.
With this work Rosalind Crisp also extends her investigation into perception, taking the public into an experience of dance that is sensitive, visceral, alive and in close contact with the dancers. The proximity to the dancers intensifies the proprioception of the spectators, eliciting in them an interior movement. Reciprocally, this effects the proprioception of the dancers, making them porous to the presence of the people around them. The spectators are free to move through space and take different points of view on each dancer, or on the group. The dancers develop a subtle listening in relation to one another, with the public and with the space.
(Text courtesy of Omeo Dance.)
credits: conception and choreography Rosalind Crisp, dancer/collaborators Rosalind Crisp, Céline Debyser, Max Fossati and Alban Richard, assistant Andrew Morrish, live music Hansueli Tischhauser, lights and technical direction Marco Wehrspann, costumes Maeva Cunci, stage design Rosalind Crisp, Marco Wehrspann and Andrew Morrish.
performances: premiered at the June Events 08 Festival, Théâtre du Soleil, Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson, June 2008; Les Plateaux de la Biennale nationale de danse du Val-de-Marne CDC, September 2008 (extracts); Condition Publique Roubaix, Decembre 2008; Festival Artdanthé Vanves, February 2009; festival Biennale nationale de danse du Val-de-Marne, Centre des Bords de Marne scène conventionnée du Perreux, April 2009
Dery’s approach to cultural criticism is remarkably inclusive. He scans popular culture as comfortably as high brow theory, from Disneyland to Deleuze. In this he shares a number of qualities with such writers as Mike Davis in City of Quartz, Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces, Erik Davis in Techngnosis and McKenzie Wark in Virtual Geography.
McKenzie Wark’s ongoing contribution to a contemporary understanding of Australia’s social and cultural condition cannot be underestimated. His third book, as its title indicates, paints a huge canvas and like most of his astute commentary in newspapers, academic journals and magazines, seeks to provoke reaction and stimulate further debate.
Here is a metanarrative-free text which is seriously intertextual, idiosyncratically fragmented and dangerously challenging notions of authorship. It wouldn’t be stretching the point to make claims for its flavours of bricolage, (re)appropriation and even the ludic. While (sadly) lacking in irony, parody or camp, it is possible to detect an ecstasy of excess, an inferno of intergenericity, a nose for nostalgia, a quire of “quotations”, a ream of repetitions, and a penchant for pastiche.
Cyberspace is the ostensible topic of this book. It is really a kind of Cook’s tour of space as it has been conceived and visualised through the ages, from the soul-space of Christian theology to the hyperspace of multi-dimensional physics. It is important to keep any discussion of cyberspace within a historical framework and Wertheim has done an admirable job in providing an extended cultural history into which cyberspace can be situated. Her argument is a fairly simple one and, as the title of her book suggests, it measures cyberspace against a quasi-Christian view of space as being transcendent, immaterial and other. “Cyberspace is not a religious construct per se”, Wertheim suggests, but “one way of understanding this new digital domain is as an attempt to realise a technological substitute for the Christian space of Heaven.” There is nothing particularly innovative about this suggestion, as cyberspace has been theorised elsewhere as a “spiritualist space” (Michael Benedikt’s “Heavenly City”, William Gibson’s Vodou pantheon in Count Zero). What perhaps is new is the sociological spin Wertheim puts on the emergence of cyberspace at the end of the 20th century: “Around the world, from Iran to Japan, religious fervour is on the rise.” But Heaven is something to be put off for later, so I will return to this issue directly.
A major aspect of technoculture comes from “mystical impulses behind our obsession with information technology.” That, in essence, is the central thesis of an ambitious tome entitled TechGnosis by San Francisco writer Erik Davis. Davis has written numerous snappy articles in this field for Wired, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, 21 C, Lingua Franca and The Nation. However in TechGnosis he attempts to touch upon the entire history that connects the spiritual imagination to technological development, from the printing press to the internet, from the telegraph to the world wide web.
