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Retina Dance Company

photo Marc Hoflack

Retina Dance Company

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) used to be one of the most progressive live art venues in Britain, featuring international artists and nurturing national talent on the peripheries of performance culture. Inexplicably the programming department recently closed and the live art offer of this excellently resourced centre has dwindled to the ad hoc hire of space to visiting groups such as the Lust contingent who presented the multimedia festival, Strange Fruits, Nature’s Mutations, March 25-28. Links nevertheless remain between previous performance programming, current activity in the gallery, the cinematheque and media arts centre and externally curated events, for Lustfest mixed its media so thoroughly that that old ICA feeling of disorientation and sensory overload remained.

Lust are a cliquey London-based collective of multi-disciplined European artists, “umbilically linked by a network of creative relationships.” Founded in 1992, Lust has annually presented a showcase of experimental performance art with a plethora of premieres and an edgy degree of “it’ll be alright on the night” improvisation.

This year’s festival took advantage of the ICA Bar (regular host to DJs and projectionists) by presenting a series of eclectic musical partnerships to loosen up the punters for the main events in the theatre. On the opening night, Fabienne Audeoud and L’Orange screeched and swooned respectively, offering the A to Z of female vocal tactics to bewildered boozers. ICA members, in for a quick pre-commute pint, were hurried homeward by Audeoud’s operatic improvisations.

In the theatre, Malcolm Boyle’s one man Mission for the Millennium introduced the fearsome faith and fantasy of evangelical revivalist Reverend Anal Hornchurch. Bose and Ficarra’s experimental film last june-4.30am provided respite in its fuzzy evocation of fleeting internal landscapes and the German quintet, Obst Obscure, entered still shadowier realms with their ghostly Kino Concert, incorporating filmic imagery into a Kafka inspired soundscape.

This same spaced out vibe coloured Thursday’s Trance Magic set by Polish vocalist/pianist/composer Jarmilia Xymena Gorna whose wild, echoey arpeggios bewitched the urbane drinkers. In the theatre Jane Chapman’s harpsichord found startling contemporary resonances, in dialogue with Daniel Biro’s Fender, Rhodes’ piano and Peter Lockett’s percussion. Two short films failed to impress amidst these sonic assaults and it was only the concluding performance of Tweeling by Retina Dance Company which reasserted the earlier intensity. Filip van Huffel and Sacha Lee’s demotic twins were all id as they forged the naked will to separate and dance their raw new selves into life. This act of creation, to Jules Maxwell’s evocative score, drew a cohesive conclusion to an epic evening.

Friday focused on a real-time ISDN linked jam with musicians in Nice, however a shamefaced Luc Martinez communicated the first anticlimax of the festival, announcing the failure of the video link. The audio connection to audiences and artists gathered at CIRM (Centre International pour Recherche de la Musique) left much to the imagination. As Martinez manipulated photo-sensitive instruments through a jazzy improvisation, it was unclear whether the intervening noises were his distant colleagues or simply another sample from his own computer. And yet the loss of raison d’etre did not entirely deflate this event as the bilingual apologies were followed by a ghostly, obscurely enchanting exchange with the ether. It is ironic that the much fanfared New Media Centre of the ICA cannot overcome an obstacle as concrete and foreseeable as the two incompatible national ISDN networks which undermined this event. Blame lies both with the venue’s lack of support for visiting artists and with the artists themselves, inadequately prepared, as ever, for the age-old technical hitch.

In more controlled circumstances, the festival drew to a close in the safe hands of saxophonist Evan Parker, in conversation with Lawrence Casserley’s diabolical deck of sound processors. Repeating her anomalous intervention with another disappointing dance/film, Jane Turner’s company presented Hybrid, a work as uninspiring as Friday’s solo, Compost, demonstrating that multiple media can confound artists and confuse audiences, with distracting results.

The enduring value of Lustfest, like most multimedia ventures, lies in its ambition. The disjunction between rhetoric and reality, ideals and outcomes, is typical of such progressive initiatives. Artists inspired by the multiple opportunities of cross-cultural, cross artform creativity, facilitated by new technologies will never be thorough or pragmatic. The outcome of all this abundance is almost by necessity erratic. Audiences, forearmed with tolerance, tempered expectations and a capacity to spot the golden needle in the haystack, will doubtless return to the ICA for Lustfest ’99, if either organisation remains.

Strange Fruits, Nature’s Mutations, Lust, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, March 25 – 28

RealTime issue #25 June-July 1998 pg. 14

Ros Warby

Sitting in the darkness, audience and performers alike wait for Ros Warby’s Enso to begin. We are forced to listen—to the rustles and coughs of others, whilst we open ourselves to the moment. Sometimes it is hard to identify an improvised work but listening is often one of its telltale signs. Enso moves between 3 performers, dancer (Ros Warby), cellist (Helen Mountfort) and singer (Jeannie Van de Velde). The flow of material throughout the piece is punctuated with spaces where each performer listens, waiting for each other to begin.

We are told that the structure of the work is set but that its content is open. There is a sense that the performers know who will begin a section. Eyes flicker towards Mountfort’s cello, ears strain towards Van de Velde’s voice, bodies lean to where Warby is waiting to move. But, and this is another of improvisation’s telltale signs, there is an episodic character to the flow of the piece. At one point, Warby’s movements are driven to the wall by Van de Valde’s vocal crescendo. Then a waiting for the next interaction to occur. A little later, Warby develops a most beautiful, intricate spinning motion across the room, then stops. More listening. A fan of Warby’s dancing, I want more from her. I don’t want her to wait for the others, to do nothing while allowing their contribution. But I have to accept the equity of the situation, its play between leading, listening, following, playing solo, making duets, forming trios.

There is scintillation to Warby’s movement, an exquisite attention to detail—the curlicue of her fingers, the twisted line of an arm—which speak of the moment. The attention permeating Warby’s body fills the most minute of spaces in a glorious detail; a dimly lit arm, curling and shaping itself, the length of a back spiralling into the turn of a head. One of Warby’s distinctive qualities is her ability to vary her speed with little apparent effort. Her work is textured by a subtle variety of velocities. A contemplation of fingers, wrist, and arm becomes a fast moving checkerboard of movement without notice.

Although set choreography can admit of any amount of depth and detail, there is a perceptual awareness which resonates in some improvisational work. One senses that the performer is utterly engaged in the moment, discovering and perceiving the work as it occurs. This distinguishes improvisation from set choreography, for the performer is making the work as it is being performed. Here, the performer, like audience, apprehends the unfolding of the work within the temporality of the performance itself. That makes for a certain degree of excitement.

Seasoned performers, Peter Trotman and Andrew Morrish, exploit that excitement for their own and other’s amusement. Their latest work, The Charlatan’s Web, is full of very funny moments where one performer invents a brazen complication which the other partner must incorporate. We the audience are invited to gloat over the sudden landscape which improvisation is able to thrust upon its subjects. The Charlatan’s Web was developed over 4 performances into an epic tale of character and intrigue. A man without qualities is banished from a religious cloister for the mortal sin of knowledge. He sails away to avoid execution, ultimately jumping ship in order to spin a web of chicanery and deceit. Andrew Morrish plays the hapless novice-cum-artful trickster, and Peter Trotman the feverish priest, who devours his books with a carnal lust.

The work begins with a duet, where Trotman and Morrish move simply from the back of the stage to the front. This enables them to establish a play of timing and rapport. Once established, the duo moves apart. A good deal of the tale is told by one performer moving and the other providing narrative, whether on stage or off. The work has a gem-like quality, of candle-lit cameos such as Trotman’s intense portrayal of the priest huddled over his books, sucking out their contents; the main character is himself a man of many faces; and the narrative just a series of fragments.

This is largely a play between word and movement. Neither performer exhibits a dancerly technique. Their panache comes from their energy and timing. They are utterly committed to their performance and to each other, such that the work as a whole and the contribution of each is seamless. I think the longevity of the Trotman-Morrish partnership—16 years—enables this duo to comfortably risk the narrative flow of their work for the greater good of the piece. Trotman and Morrish have just returned from the 1997 New York Improvisational Festival, where Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice described them as “two extremely wily, full throttle performers whose nutty dancing and subtle timing elevate verbal wit into inspired madness” (December 1997).

Enso and The Charlatan’s Web are ultimately distinguished by the technical skills that each performer brings to the improvisational moment. Despite the indeterminacy of improvisation, the history of people’s work inevitably speaks though their performance. Though the work itself may be fresh, the skills that make it possible are not gained so easily. It seems like a contradiction in terms to prepare for improvisation, but it takes some dexterity to produce work which surprises even the body making it.

–

Enso, A Choreography between Movement and Sound, Ros Warby, Helen Mountfort, and Jeannie Van de Velde, Danceworks, Melbourne, March 27 – April 5; The Charlatan’s Web, Peter Trotman and Andrew Morrish, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 29 – April 5

Philipa Rothfield is a Melbourne academic (Philosophy, La Trobe University) and sometime performer. Her next work, Logic, will be shown at Mixed Metaphor, Dancehouse, July 2 – 5

RealTime issue #25 June-July 1998 pg. 15

Dame Edith Cowan, Australia’s first female Parliamentarian, checks out Arts_Edge

Unusual to see an exhibition of web-based and CD-ROM work in a State collecting institution. Their particular digital obsession—not surprisingly—is digitisation of their various collections. So it was great to see Arts_Edge at the Art Gallery of WA in March, beautifully installed in the central atrium space of the gallery. It certainly found a very different kind of audience to that at your typical (sic) contemporary or screen-based art space/event: lots of school kids, families and senior citizens. The only problem I could discern, was to do with the number of stations and headsets available. It meant queues.

Arts_Edge was an integral component of Arts on the Edge, the conference on arts and education hosted by the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University. Co-ordinated by Derek Kreckler from the Academy of Performing Arts, this project was developed with a particular commitment to the necessity of creating an archive of these kinds of works before their particular techno-historical and creative 15 minutes has passed.

The exhibition came with a $5,000 cash prize and an Apple computer donated by Westech Computers. The cash was divided between Sally Pryor (AUS) for Postcard from Tunis and Perry Hoberman (USA) for The Sub-Division of Electric Light. Francesca da Rimini and Michael Grimm (AUS) are still working out how to carve up the dual processor Apple 7220 awarded for dollspace.

A much smaller exhibition than, say, Burning the Interface or techne, it was great to actually feel you could spend time with the individual works without needing an entire lifetime to do so. Aside from the excellent winning entries, I particularly enjoyed Melinda Rackham’s Line (web-based) and Dieter Kiessling’s cute CD-ROM Continue, which suggests a parodic link to Minimalism and the Fluxus wit of the 60s and 70s. Rather than attempting to fool us into accepting the ‘false infinities’ that the hype around CD-ROM would have us believe in, Continue takes us to the other end—or perhaps the beginning—to the binary code degree zero. Continue and The Sub Division of Electric Light are just 2 of the works exhibited in the witty ZKM Artintact series (See John Conomos’ report on ZKM on page 28).

Many will be familiar with Canadian Luc Courchesne’s Portrait One also screened in Burning the Interface. Portrait One is a witty virtual dialogue between the viewer and a ‘slyly amicable girl.’ Image association determines Slippery Traces: The Postcard Trail, a collaboration between George Legrady (CAN) and Rosemary Comella (USA). The viewer navigates a maze of about 200 interconnected postcards, snapping on hot spots which take you to other images through literal, semiotic, psychoanalytic, metaphoric or other links. Speaking of slippery, Brad Miller and McKenzie Wark’s Planet of Noise occupied a machine of its own and chasing the hot spots to move through the ROM provided hours of family fun. Great graphics and sound.

A coherent and enjoyable exhibition with an excellent catalogue essay by the McKenzie Wark, an important outcome from this event is the archiving—by the WA Academy of Performing Arts—of all the works exhibited: 4 web-based and 10 CD-ROM works. The archive is intended to be developed over a 10 year period.

Exhibiting Artists: web works: Line, Melinda Rackham (AUS); The Error by John Duncan (Italy); Maintenance Web by Kevin and Jennifer McCoy and Torsten Burns (AUS); dollspace by Francesca da Rimini and Michael Grimm (AUS). CD-ROMs: Shock in the Ear by Norie Neumark (AUS); Slippery traces: the postcard trail by George Legrady (USA); Portrait One by Luc Courchesne (Canada); Manuscript by Eric Lanz (GER); Troubles with Sex, Theory and History by Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid (Slovenia); Cyber Underground Poetry by Komninos Zervos, (AUS); Postcards from Tunis by Sally Pryor (AUS); The Subdivision of Electric Light by Perry Hoberman (USA); Continue by Dieter Kiessling (Germany) and Planet of Noise by Brad Miler and McKenzie Wark (AUS).

Arts_Edge, coordinated by Derek Kreckler, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and Imago Multimedia Centre at the Art Gallery of WA, March 27 – April 8.

RealTime issue #25 June-July 1998 pg. 11

It is an unfortunate sign of the ironic times we live in that 21.C magazine won’t be ringing in the new millennium. The magazine of the future is to be discontinued after 7 fruitful years of projection and speculation, in which the technoculture that now seems so familiar was carefully mapped out and articulated. Its last issue, “Revolting America”, edited by R.U. Sirius and prophetically subtitled “No Future”, is the magazine’s reluctant swansong, signalling, after Baudrillard, that in at least one incarnation the 3rd millennium has indeed already come and gone.

21.C had many qualities that made it distinctive. Its variety and unpredictability made it difficult to identify any singular contribution to the accelerated countdown to the future that has become so rampant in the last decade of the 20th century. However its determination to cross all checkpoints was in fact the quality that made it stand out from the crowd. 21.C was less pretentious and fashion conscious than Mondo 2000 and much broader in its scope than Wired. It recognized that the contemporary world was multi-faceted and fuzzy, a poetic body sans organs, as dependent as ever upon all areas of pre-digital cultural production. Unlike other publications attending to the trajectories of the present into the future, 21.C recognized the importance of cultural memory as well, and did its best to tease out its traces and demonstrate their propulsive force in the casting of these trajectories.

As any vigilant reader will know, 21.C fussed over its moniker as often as it changed editors: “Previews of a changing world”, “Scanning the future”, “The magazine of culture, technology and science”, “The world of ideas.” All of these missed the mark, for above all else the magazine was a preparatory guide, a concentration of reconnaissance dispatches from the future: 21.C: Mode d’emploi, a user’s manual for the world to come. On the occasion of 21.C’s passing, I spoke to publisher Ashley Crawford and editor Ray Edgar.

DT Tell me a bit about 21.C’s history.

AC & RE 21.C has had, to say the least, a tumultuous history. In a funny way 21.C has been a bit of a who’s who of Australian publishing. It was started in 1991 by the Commission for the Future, and it’s interesting to see how it captured so many imaginations. While it was Australian everyone wanted in: Barry Jones, David Dale, Robyn Williams, Paul Davies, Margaret Whitlam, Phillip Adams, the Quantum mob, lots of savvy media folk. After Gordon and Breach took it over and approached us in 1994 it went international and changed dramatically. Our mob was more R.U. Sirius, Kathy Acker, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker and John Shirley; still big names, just in different circles. A different beastie altogether.

DT 21.C has been a focal publication for discussion of contemporary culture and technology. Why is it being discontinued?

AC & RE In effect it is being discontinued as a magazine but will live on as a series of books by regular 21.C contributors. However as a magazine in its most recent incarnation 21.C suffered from several problems. The company publishing the magazine is a successful publisher of highly specialized medical and scientific journals. 21.C was far from specialized in that respect and accordingly the company had great difficulty working out how to market a title which had broader appeal. Without marketing it was difficult to establish the nature of the magazine in the public’s eye. There was also the problem of advertising. As an editorial policy we avoided sucking up to the Bill Gateses of the world. The material was not about promoting product and when products were discussed such as Microsoft, Disneyland, Nike, software etc, it was usually with a critical tone as opposed to fawning. Most magazines rely upon press releases to inform them, we relied upon our writers and our instincts—probably a mistake.

DT In his Introduction to Transit Lounge [a recently published 21.C anthology, see review on page 25] William Gibson described 21.C as “determinedly eclectic.” What kind of audience were you attempting to reach?

AC & RE Again a problem. Given that the magazine’s brief was the future, well the future effects “everyone” and that was reflected by readers’ surveys. We had subscribers ranging from unemployed 18 year old hackers through to US Vice President Al Gore, scientists, graphic designers, architects, you name it. Given that it wasn’t being actively marketed towards any specific segment, well, Gibson got it right when he described it as eclectic.

DT 21.C provided an important space for Australian digital artists to get their work out into the international community, and looking through the catalogue of back issues, the promotion of new media arts was one of its most consistent features. How important was this to your editorial policy?

AC & RE Very important. One of the most amazing things about our work with digital artists and illustrators is that we could confidently state that Australia produced the best work in the world in this field. 21.C’s main sales ended up being in North America and we regularly received parcels from San Francisco and New York illustrators trying to get a gig in 21.C. However there was no comparison to the work being done here by Troy Innocent, Elena Popa, Murray McKeich, Ian Haig, James Widdowson and others. It was a wonderful challenge to illustrate the magazine. Given the futuristic topics we couldn’t exactly send a photographer to 2020 to take a snap. The illustrations had to reflect the content, but could rarely be literal. They were impressionistic images of a world yet to come.

DT It could also be argued that 21.C really got into discussions of multimedia art before anyone else. What’s your sense of the magazine’s contribution to multimedia criticism?

AC & RE Well naturally we would hope that it has a lasting impact. I strongly believe that the writings of McKenzie Wark, Mark Dery, Bruce Sterling and in a more quirky sense R.U. Sirius, Rudy Rucker and Margaret Wertheim stand up very strongly indeed. Really, not many other publications have delved into multimedia criticism as heavily as 21.C with the exception of MediaMatic, which definitely leads the field in terms of words, but which unfortunately doesn’t have the budget to illustrate the discussions as lavishly as we did.

DT In the final analysis, you always had a problem with categorisation, didn’t you? Do you think in the public imagination 21.C was over-identified as an internet/cyberculture publication?

AC & RE Yeah, people described it all sorts of ways. A socially aware Wired, an intelligent Mondo 2000. But it was by no means a Wired, and it was not really what you’d call an internet magazine, although as a subject area that was a regular element. But it was more what was being done creatively on the New, eg Mark Amerika’s Grammatron or Richard Metzger’s Disinformation, than it was about commercial or technological developments. 21.C was, essentially, a cultural studies magazine produced in an age of cyberbabble, trying to make sense of the creative furore in an undefined cultural era.

Darren Tofts is the author (with artist Murray McKeich) of Memory Trade. A Prehistory of Cyberculture forthcoming 1998, Craftsman House. He is also working on a collection of essays on art, culture and technology.

Some aspects of 21.C can still be found here http://www.21cmagazine.com Eds. 2013

RealTime issue #25 June-July 1998 pg. 24

Part of the wonder of encounters with artworks is the juxtaposition between your own efforts to comprehend a piece, if that is what you do, and the intepretation presented in the ‘artist’s statement’. The disjuncture that can at times emerge prompts some questions. To what extent is an artwork independent of its accompanying text? (Can or should it even be thought in such terms?) Does the extra-discursive nature of experimental artwork sabotage the potential it may have to correlate with the logic of written statements of intent, flimsy as they often are? These are some of the reactions I had to two exhibitions that use decommodified and new technologies to explore both the place and use of technology in culture and society.

Electronic media are used by three of the seven artists in fresh, an annual exhibition at PICA where select emerging artists dialogue with a curator—PICA exhibitions officer Katie Major this year—as they develop their artworks for public display.

Tee Ken Ng’s installation Onto Itself makes use of reflective smoked glass to form a pane of illusion between two television monitors on which usually incommensurate subject matter converges: a running tap bubbles water over one TV surface; a suspended glass mug contains a straw of TV static; a digitally produced inanimate object contracts and expands its way into life as it passes, somewhat paradoxically, through TV static in an evolution of descent. While these arrangements do have a momentary fascination that comes with their peculiar form of presentation, they are less successful I think at communicating the counter-discourse on or critique of televisual discourses suggested in the artist’s statement.

Similarly, Neale Ricketts’ statement promises interesting things for Click, a large video projection of mostly indistinct images: “By comparing the nature of the format (film) with the essence of the subject (waste), I am hoping to encourage an exploration into notions of waste and its by-products, which thus recycled, are able to once again, be meaningfully consumed by our society.” Unfortunately, such ambition, important as it is, does not translate across to the work itself. Ricketts is also interested in issues of public surveillance by video cameras, and signifies this to a small extent by placing at the base of the video projection two video monitors with connected cameras, one of which transmits the image of the audience onto a monitor as they enter the installation space, while the other just points to the second monitor.

Part of the problem of employing new technologies in artwork as vehicles to communicate a critique of the technologies’ attendant culture, is that the capacity for dazzle tends to overwhelm the subject of critique. The artwork becomes a display of what technologies can do, rather than an articulation of, say, decommodification and cultural practices of consumption.

Across the car park divide from PICA, in the modest space of Artshouse Gallery, is an exhibition of sculptural works by visiting Melbourne artist Michael Bullock. Resting on cardboard supports poking out of one the gallery walls, are 10 cardboard scale models of obsolete technologies: TVs, a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, speakers, a tape player, an iron, a record player. Above each object is a typewritten text, usually a humorous anecdote of the artist’s habit of collecting and accumulating various mechanical and technological devices manufactured mostly in the 70s, only to then store them in a closet or back shed as a particular item fails to perform beyond its use by date.

Like Ng and Ricketts, Bullock too is interested in the kinds of peculiar things we do with technology in its stages of decommodification. Quite different though is his strategy of expression, avoiding the risk of the technology of production overwhelming its product, the artwork itself. His cardboard models, which could well have been pre-assembly line prototypes, stand somewhat pathetically as items once desired for their sheen and ‘new frontier’ domestic status. In some cases, objects like the record player or toasted sandwich maker have undergone a process of recommodification as the item attains a kitsch or cult value status. Bullock’s text and sculptures are mutually constitutive of each other, with the text situating the junk technologies in a contemporaneity that is both out of the closet and away from the ignored display shelves of manufacturer’s showrooms, if such things exist.

fresh, an exhibition of installation, time based and electronic media works, curator, Katie Major, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), March 26 – April 26. End of the Line, a project of sculptural works by Michael Bullock, Artshouse Gallery, Perth Cultural Centre, April 17 – 26

After receiving relatively small amounts of support (nominally ‘program grants’) from the Australia Council in 1996 and 1997, the Paige Gordon Company failed to receive subsequent funding towards a new work Raising the Standard. Arts ACT, the company’s main funder did support the creation of the work. However…

PG Although we didn’t receive Australia Council funding, we have been pretty well-funded by Arts ACT—the second best funded company here. However, dollars funding is one thing, support in terms of ongoing administration is another altogether. They fund you to a point and then expect you to survive. So no company in the ACT ever gets a chance to grow. In terms of a full-time dance company, $80,000 just doesn’t cut it. It’s crazy. And they have an expectation that you’ll do the work for free, and you’ll keep on doing it for free. And that’s ‘quote-unquote’ what they’ve said to me. There’s no valuing or comprehension of what a full time contemporary dance company means. It’s happened to a few companies, dance companies in particular—Meryl Tankard going, Vis a Vis going, and then Padma Menon going. So if my skills are going to be better rewarded somewhere else in the marketplace, then I’m going to seek out that opportunity. That’s exactly what I did.

PG I guess as soon as that was set up and well-funded, it was going to be knock out competition. The Centre gives little bits of support to lots of artists and so, in terms of grants, they’re actually pleasing a lot of people. And I’ve spoken to the artists who have been there and they say it’s a great opportunity. But in terms of development of their craft, I don’t know how much it contributes. And the Centre doesn’t have to build audiences—they’ve got a capacity of 60 in their theatre, and they’ll get that anyway because people are interested in dance. It is a good place to have a choreographic centre because Canberra is a transient place, everyone comes and goes. But in terms of follow-up for the artists, I’m not sure it meets a need.

Canberra’s a great place but people would love to have a dance company they could call their own. There are lots of people who don’t want The Choreographic Centre. And there are lots of people that, yes, they like seeing performances there but they don’t feel a sense of ownership. And whilst I think it is really true that The Choreographic Centre is fantastic nationally—where else could it really be other than the national capital—it’s a shame that things can’t be considered equally in funding terms. I think there is enough room for the centre and for a company and I think the funding bodies should recognise that.

JP How did you carve out your own niche in the context of bigger companies visiting more frequently and presenting work on a larger scale?

PG We’ve visited all the high schools in Canberra to help them with their rock eisteddfod performances; we do corporate gigs (like the opening of the Canberra museum and gallery); and we did the opening of Playhouse. I see dance as being a really vital part of living—not just on stage. And a place like Canberra is fantastic for that. It’s also great that Meryl Tankard and Chunky Move and the Australian Ballet and Bangarra come and do that big stuff, which then enables me to do work on the fringe and outside the mainstream.

PG Well my work is going to develop—while I’m on salary, which is wild! And the dancers will be on salary and the studio is going to be heated and we won’t have splinters in our feet and we’re going to have administrative support and a production person. And I’m going to have a chance to be in the studio every day. I’m walking in big shoes—Philippa Clarke has been there for 8 years so there is really quite a high standard. The company also does a lot of regional touring, and a lot of school work, which is important for developing the next generational audience. As well I want to bring to Buzz the national network of contacts that I have.

PG Well it’s always easier to assess your work in hindsight. I think that most of the pieces that I’ve done, I’ve been happy with. I like to put a work on and then 6 months later look at it again, that’s part of the choreographic learning process. It does take years and I’m quite happy to spend my life learning the craft. I want to be able to say when I’m 60, ‘Yeah, I think I got about five shows right.’ I really want to keep evolving.

PG The reason why I sought out the job in Perth was related to just knowing that after 7 years of going ‘please, please, please’ I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew that while we were going to be up for triennial funding next year from Arts ACT, we were also told that it was going to be the same amount of money. What did they want, my blood? So while I’m not leaving with any really negative feelings, I think Arts ACT do need to realise that if they want to nurture a professional dance company—or theatre company, or opera company—they actually need to look at how they’re structuring the grant applications for those organisations.

With the Australia Council, they funded us for 2 years running, and then they changed their policy so it was project-related funding. So, Made to Move for instance, who are quite interested in touring my work, are not going to take us on just the possibility that we may get funding for next year. So they take on the companies that have guaranteed funding for next year. So it’s a bit of a bad situation that dance has got itself into. I don’t know how, but it has.

The Paige Gordon Company production Party Party Party has received the support of Playing Australia and Health Pact and will tour in August.

If the addition of music to this the third Australia Council Performing Arts Market was welcome but predictable, the presence of new media arts came as a very pleasant surprise. Of course, an expanding number of performing artists work with the new media but expectations are usually of sound and screen works unmediated by any presence other than the viewer/interactor. As New Media Arts Fund Manager Lisa Colley reminds us later in this article, the fund is about this and much more.

Linda Wallace, director of the machine hunger company which won the tender to present new media arts at the Performing Arts Market, told me in a telephone interview she had proposed the “production of a set of useful information tools for the market.” She described the market as “an event which I viewed as an initial gateway to the Australia Council’s ongoing, long-term strategy for marketing new media arts.” She was also mindful that the market audience might not necessarily know much about the new media arts area, so the tools needed to be simple and accessible. machine hunger produced a publication, a video and organised the exhibition which also featured a range of CD-ROM works.

“The publication was cost-effective at A5 size, 24 pages, enabling space for 20 artists, companies or projects, one per page. I was project manager and editor, and Susan Charlton joined machine hunger as deputy editor of the publication, which we titled Embodying the Information Age.”

How did Linda go about selecting the artists? “From a list of New Media Arts fundees I curated the final group. I saw it as both a curatorial and a marketing project, primarily for new media arts, and secondly for the Fund and the Australia Council. So I didn’t curate on the basis of how much money different artists had received from the Fund, instead, the artists selected were diverse in their approach to new media arts, and also had a professionalism which could be relied upon to ‘deliver the goods.’ There are performance groups, digital/installation artists and crossmedia projects like Metabody. I put emphasis on the potential of the internet as both a medium for art and also as an information medium for festivals—it’s critical for festivals to understand how the internet can extend their reach, and the reach of featured art projects, to a global audience. Some of the festival directors at the market seemed to understand this.”

What was your prime aim? “To get the publication into delegates’ hands and later onto their bookshelves. It was something I felt that overseas and local delegates would want to take home with them, as it is a stylishly presented, useful object covering a number of areas and artists, and with email contacts. I was keen to avoid the paperfarm approach of stacks of ugly brochures and junk, and also the busy pop ‘multimedia’ aesthetic. In terms of design our exhibition, or stand, was minimal, with the eyecatching, jewel-like publication, a jumbo monitor showing either a CD-ROM work or the videotape which featured a larger range of new media artworks.”

I emailed Lisa Colley at the Australia Council for her account of the fund’s venture and asked, “Why New Media Arts at a performing arts market?” Lisa wrote back, “New media arts are broader than sound and screen cultures. We need to keep in mind the purpose of the fund which is based on interdisciplinary, collaborative work that crosses art form boundaries. Many of the artists supported by New Media Arts see themselves as performing artists, so we wanted to ensure a showcase for their work within the Performing Arts Market. A number of the shows, including Burn Sonata, Hungry and Masterkey in the Adelaide Festival and the market had their genesis with the current fund’s precursor, Hybrid Arts. As well, we wanted to ensure that works difficult to show as part of the Showcase [a set of half hour performances of excerpts from larger works—ed.] because of technical requirements were given an opportunity as well.

“Also, we knew that international visitors to the market were interested in looking at work that was outside of the international festival performance circuit. This could provide a broader range of opportunities for artists here in terms of residencies, exhibitions and so on. Many festivals have programs that cross over into exhibition and installation work. This proved to be true and we had substantial interest from overseas presenters who want to commission work, pick up existing work and, in longer term relationships, develop exchange opportunities.”

I asked Lisa about the value of the booklet, Embodying the Information Age. “We wanted to produce something that had a life beyond the market. It is critical that we can inform people about the work that is supported by the fund. Of course it only reveals a small number of the artists in this area, but they are representative of a much bigger movement. We have also put excerpts from the booklet up on the web pages that we developed to coincide with the recent launch of the New Media Arts Fund and we hope to add to this over time. As more work supported by the fund is created we hope we can inform people about the outcomes. This is something we are constantly being asked for, and is a way of value-adding to the grants process. The spread of information can be expanded by hyperlinking to artists’ sites as well as organisations like RealTime and exhibition sites currently being developed. As with the booklet, we’re not acting as agents for these artists—they have their own email and web sites and can be contacted directly about their work.”

What kind of response was there to the presence of New Media Arts at the market? “There was a very positive response from international delegates who thought it was a natural and timely addition to the market. I have now established contact with a small group of presenters and producers and we are in email contact and hopefully we should see some results. The artists so far have experienced a very positive response to the booklet with many of them having been contacted about work both nationally and internationally. It has proven a very useful tool for their own marketing and promotion. We have now circulated it to all our Australian diplomatic posts and have plans for further circulation nationally and internationally. It represents part of a broader advocacy and marketing strategy for the work of new media artists which we hope to develop further. The fund now having a more secure position within the Council will allow us to develop this approach more comprehensively and with a long term view.”

I asked Susan Charlton about responses to the New Media Arts fund initiative. She emailed back that, “The fact that we were tangential to the market was an advantage in that we could really fulfil an advocacy role without the same commercial pressures that a lot of other companies would have been under to make deals. In this way it was a well conceived first step—for the Fund and for delegates just beginning to think about the area. At the same time, contacts didn’t just dissolve into the ether. Lisa Colley from the Fund was also there to assist possible connections between delegates and the artists they expressed interest in.

“Also the fact that the market was associated with the Adelaide Festival, rather than being linked to the National Theatre Festival in Canberra as it was in previous years, was in our favour. The diversity and multidisciplinary nature of the festival program enhanced dialogue about the possibilities of artists of various sorts using new technologies in their work. Delegates were not just locked into a theatre mindset.

“Many were already familiar with new media arts, but there were several who weren’t. Those new to the area seemed to be propelled by forces greater than themselves. They recognised that there was a demand for new media arts from their audiences and they had to get up to speed to be able to create programs. The New Media Arts stall allowed them to take the first steps of inquiry without feeling foolish. Most attention came in the first days, but once the showcase program began everyone was very committed and focussed on that. However many purposely revisited us in the closing days to make sure they had everything they needed.”

Invariably the benefits of the Performing Arts Market are long term. It’ll be interesting to see how the new media arts figure in the next market in 2000 as more artists and performers generate more possibilities from their engagements with technology. In a forthcoming report we’ll look at the work of the various agencies involved in the promotion of new media arts.

New Media Arts at the 3rd Performing Arts Market was a project of the Audience Development and Advocacy Division of the Australia Council in association with the New Media Arts Fund, February 1998.

“The virtual attaches itself to the body to assuage its fears. The virtual is constantly reiterating: here is something, where actually there is nothing. The virtual is an appendage to life, the interface with life. The virtual belongs to the establishment of reality, not to what the virtual is accused of—unreality, immateriality.”
William Forsythe, Frankfurt Ballet

In this work dancers Hellen Sky and Louise Taube perform a series of playful meditations on the body mediated by technology. As in their earlier work The Pool is Damned, though highly sophisticated and proficient in its use of technology, there’s still some sense in the company’s work of the poignancy of early experiments.

“What does the weight of my flesh and bones have on this conversation?” the recorded voice in Mediated persistently asks.

The work is installed in Gallery 101 in Collins Street, Melbourne, an hermetic white studio with a set of experiments in progress. Aluminium frames form mirrors, frames, screens, trays. The audience moves to each of the installations as the dancers animate them. They lie in the tray of sand at the rear of the room, 2 dancers of almost identical stature, spooning, shifting as in sleep. As the bodies move, the sand makes a space for the lacy projections of bodies on the screen nearby. As often throughout the performance, the audience focus is largely on the dancers until they gradually notice the projected images. They tap one another on the shoulders and point to screens. Gradually they take in the 2 at once, the mode mostly required of them in Mediated which seems less interested with the possibilities of delays and disjunctions, occasional dominations, than the experience of simultaneity.

The dancers move to a standing frame and dance in tandem against their own captured images from the sand. The image of the bodies is amorphous, then all edge. Its shape confined to a smaller frame, the shape of the choreography blurs. We look at the real dancers, glean the shape of their dancing and compare it with its vapour trail in the virtual. There’s less sense of the technology intersecting the dance or attempts at creating a choreography of the screen.

A large central screen. On blue squares the dancers perform a mirror dance at its most interesting when their separation moves them out of synch. Their live images vie with projections of another body. A series of spots on the screen trigger lighting and Garth Paine’s interactive sound environment.

Then something quite distinctive happens. At the other end of the room suspended horizontally less than a metre above the floor is a large tray full of water, another aluminium frame but with a glass bottom. A camera underneath the tray looks up through the water at the ceiling. High above is a screen. As Hellen Sky moves over the water, Louise Taube pushes the tray from side to side. Sky’s projected image above is sharper than we’ve seen up to now, then screen and body turn to water. A filter emphasising facial planes, the live body is transformed, becomes radiant, golden. The ceiling of air conditioning ducts becomes painterly. The audience gaze goes from the real body, through the water to the ceiling. Our fears are temporarily dispelled. Suddenly the screen is a liquid space, the body breaks the membrane momentarily fulfilling our desires for something more than mediation. Soon one dancer operates the camera to look at the other and there’s a sense of the two creating something in real time, at play with the technology. The performers’ action agreeably shapes the audience’s attention.

The final sequence occurs in a corridor broken up by small red laser lights. At the end of the space a monitor relays recorded images of a dancer’s body—like architectural drawings of hips and thighs and feet. The dancers moving through the lights trigger this sensual cycle of body images on CD-ROM.

Later we go backstage to see John McCormick’s own ‘installation’. Along one wall, a set of vintage Amiga computers and the odd Apple, cords, plugs and keyboards balanced precariously. He tells us that some of the technology is so old now you can’t get it fixed. He’s had to take to it with a soldering iron.

The scale of Company in Space’s investigation is as impressive as we’ve seen in interactive dance in Australia. In concentrating on the interplay between the technology and the dancers, Company in Space are well on the way to creating a work of significance. At this moment, the projected bodies are so different from the live ones that an act of dissociation occurs, the audience giving each a different kind of focus. The technology searches for its aesthetic and we look for the live and screen bodies to begin a more equal conversation with the audience, but the sense of an emerging hybrid fascinates.

Mediated, Company in Space, Gallery 101, Collins Street, Melbourne for Next Wave Festival, May 2, 9, 16, 23

Dancehouse’s Mixed Metaphor season of multimedia movement works will launch the MAP (Movement and Performance) season of dance events across Melbourne throughout June and July. Presented annually by Dancehouse, Mixed Metaphor provides a crucial platform for experienced choreographers and artists creating works which aim to push conceptual and kinetic attitudes and blur the boundaries between dance, text, sound, image, design, physical theatre and technology. The first week of Mixed Metaphor 98 features: an internet link-up between San Francisco and Melbourne, where text and body converge through a digital dialogue in Heliograph, devised and performed by Sarah Neville with Matt Thomas, Becky Jenkin, Nic Mollison, Nik Gaffney; an exploration of suburban architecture and secrets, Blindness, choreographed and performed by Gretel Taylor with Telford Scully, Renee Whitehouse, James Welch; a surreal mapping of the myth of St Sebastian inspired by the writings of Yukio Mishima in Out of the Schoolroom Window by MIXED COMPANY directed by Tony Yap. In week two, Margaret Trail performs ‘Hi, it’s me’, an investigation of the body’s relationship with transmitted sound; Christos Linou performs his portrait of addiction and the AIDS virus, FIDDLE-DE-DIE; Philipa Rothfield, with Elizabeth Keen, creates a conversation between logic and the body in Logic, and Angie Potsch paints and dances with light in temporal. The Mixed Metaphor season also features a number of site-specific installations: a collection of red books, Red herring, by Charles Russell; photographs of urban architecture by James Welch; Kitesend, a ‘moving’ installation employing paper sculptures, by Hanna Hoyne and Lou Duckett. At an open forum entitled metaphorically speaking on Sunday July 5 at 2pm, issues and ideas arising from the works in the season will be discussed. RT

Mixed Metaphor, Dancehouse, June 25-27 at 8pm & June 28 at 5pm; July 2-4 at 8pm & July 5 at 5pm

Sound Mapping is a participatory work of sound art made specifically for the Sullivan’s Cove district of Hobart in collaboration with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Participants wheel four movement-sensitive, sound-producing suitcases around the district to realise a composition which spans space as well as time. The suitcases play “music” in response to the geographical location and movements of participants.

The prime mover behind the project is Hobart-based musician Ian Mott. Mott holds a BSc from the University of Queensland and a Graduate Diploma of Contemporary Music Technology from La Trobe University. His prime artistic activity is designing, developing, building and composing for public interactive sound sculptures—currently in collaboration with visual designer Marc Raszewski and engineer Jim Sosnin. Ian is also a specialist in real-time sound spatialisation and the real-time gestural control of music synthesis and interactive algorithmic environments.

“Sound Mapping”, as Mott explains, “creates an environment in which the public can make music as a collaborative exercise, with each other and with the artists. In a sense the music is only semi-composed; it requires that participants travel through urban space, moving creatively and cooperatively to produce a final musical exposition. Music produced through this interaction is designed to reflect the environment in which it is produced as well as the personal involvement of the participants”.

Sound Mapping uses a system of satellite and motion sensing equipment in combination with sound generating equipment and computer control. Its aim is to explore a sense of place, physicality and engagement to reaffirm the relationship between art and the everyday activities of life. For Mott, “Digital technology, for all its virtues as a precise tool for analysis, articulation of data, communication and control, is propelling society towards a detachment from physicality”.

For music, the introduction of the recording techniques and radio in the early 20th century broke the physical relationship between performer and listener entirely, so that musicians began to be denied direct interaction with their audience (and vice versa). Sound Mapping addresses this dilemma, for Mott believes that “while artists must engage with the contemporary state of society, they must also be aware of the aesthetic implications of pursuing digital technologies and should consider exploring avenues that connect individuals to the constructs and responsibilities of physical existence”.

The Sound Mapping communications system incorporates a single hub case and three standard cases. All the cases contain battery power, a public address system, an odometer and two piezoelectric gyroscopes. The standard cases contain a data radio transmitter for transmission to the hub and an audio radio device to receive a single distinct channel of music broadcast from the hub.

Prior to the project’s commencement, Mott anticipated that “the interaction between onlookers and participants will be intense due to the very public nature of the space. The interaction will be musical, visual, and verbal as well as social in confronting participants with taboos relating to exhibitionism. This situation is likely to deter many people from participating but nonetheless it is hoped the element of performance will contribute to the power of the experience for both participants and onlookers”. From my observation, these are precisely the reactions that the project did receive.

There is some precedent for Sound Mapping. Mott explains: “Participant exploratory works employing diffuse sound fields in architectural space have been explored by sound artists such as Michael Brewster (1994) and Christina Kubisch in her ‘sound architectures’ installations (1990). Recently composers such as Gerhard Eckel have embarked on projects employing virtual architecture as means to guide participants through compositions that are defined by the vocabulary of the virtual space (1996)”.

As a participant myself, I found three-quarters of an hour of wheeling a quite heavy suitcase rather draining. I think of myself as reasonably fit, but I reached the stage where just dragging the case was as much as I could do, despite Mott’s repeated urgings to swing and swerve the trolleys through space in more creative patterns, so as to generate more varied sounds. Not an activity for the frail.

I have to say, however, that I liked the concept of the work very much and was struck by the visual and aural impact of the piece on the several occasions when I encountered groups of engrossed participants making their way around the wharf area. Certainly, well executed public events such as this one enliven the sometimes staid atmosphere around Hobart. It is good to see art-making genuinely getting out into a wider and participating community. The lively nature of Hobart’s wharf area over summer—Tall Ships and all this year—made it a good venue for such a project.

Sound Mapping, A Sound Journey through Urban Space, by Ian Mott with Marc Raszewski and Jim Sosnin, in collaboration with The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, January-February 1998, Hobart

A sizeable fold gathered at the very smart (or ‘bourgy’, depending on your perspective) Ngapartji Multimedia Centre in East End Rundle Street for FOLDBACK, the day long forum exploring media, sound and screen cultures, organised for the festival by ANAT (the Australian Network for Art and Technology). Richard Grayson gave a user-friendly welcome invoking the the 10th anniversary of the other summer of love—“the famous event in south-east England, where techno ecstatics transformed the urban psyche of hyper-decay and escalating pan-capitalism into trance and psychedelic experiences” (ANAT newsletter)—stirring our barely repressed British memories of driving minis through Essex out of our gourds, on the lookout for parties we could never find. Paul Brown who says he actually found the party, stirred some of the same nostalgia in his account of the slow emergence of multiple media practice as 30 years on the fringe, citing rampant conservatism behind the form’s status in the artworld as part of a global salon des réfuse. There was some sense in this hankering that “legitimacy” meant legitimacy in the visual arts world which suggested perhaps a narrower engagement with the arts than expected. This was happily contradicted in subsequent sessions that demonstrated the vital relationships between new technologies and writing, sound and performance. A very writing-based day all round.

Cyberwriter Mark Amerika re-traced his steps from underground artworld, performing “acts of voluntary simplicity”, through his swerve into publication with the cult hit The Kafka Chronicles, which hurled him unwittingly into the public sphere and onto the digital overground. While he was busy collapsing the distance between author and reader, his online publication network, AltX (www.altx.com) was attracting the attention of international money marketeers. Like a lot of the international guests at the Adelaide Festival, Mark Amerika seems to be able to pat his head and rub his tummy at the same time. He may have achieved some fame and a little fortune as web publisher, but he’s still addressing the frictions between electronic art and writing. His writing-machine (Grammatron) still grapples with spirituality in the electronic age, asking questions like “Who are I this time?” (www.grammatron.com).

ANAT’s first executive officer, cyber-artist Francesca da Rimini, took some of her own advice (Quick! Question everything) rudely interrupting her own spoken text with others emanating from her cyber pseudonyms gash girl, doll yoko and gender-fuck-me-baby.

In *water always writes in *plural Linda Marie Walker and Teri Hoskin, from the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble, linked up live with Josephine Wilson (WA) and Linda Carroli (QLD) who have all been part of the first joint ANAT/EWRE virtual residency project, writing together online to create a work entitled A woman/stands on a street corner/waiting/for a stranger. Duplicating the act of writing for a live audience was an interesting if slow process, producing some nice accidents of speech: the odd poetry of phonetic translations, the Simple Text voices reproducing typos; suggestive intervals between writing and spoken text. You can read the piece on http://www.va.com.au/ensemble/water

Programming Linda Dement after lunch was a brave move. Still, it was soothing to hear a female voice in the dark still in love with the possibilities of technology for realising her expert if sometimes gruesome images. You would expect a sustained sequence of bloody bandages accompanying a diatribe on censorship to empty a room but here the pleasure of seeing the work of this former fine-art photographer projected on such a scale and in such vivid detail held too much fascination. Me, I spent a lot of time looking at the floor. Afterwards, diatribe met diatribe when a man in the crowd accused Linda Dement of male-bashing, citing “the situation in Bosnia” and then “all of history” as reason enough to censor, presumably, any statements along gender lines.

No wonder the cheery Komninos Zervos with his Underground Cyberpoetry received such a warm response after this error type-1. His CD-ROM was produced while Komninos was ANAT’s artist in residence at Artec (UK) last year. Using performance-poet delivery and adopting an assortment of streetwise London personae, Komninos playfully navigated his word animations. Screen became spin dryer, words tumbling as Komninos moved among us. The performance potential of multimedia works is really only beginning to be explored in Australia. Outside groups like skadada in Perth and Company in Space in Melbourne, we don’t see a lot of performance engagement with the new media. It’s an area that ANAT clearly see as important.

nervous_objects is an eclectic, accidental experiment in internet artistic collaboration. They met at ANAT’s 1997 Summer School in Hobart and have continued to collaborate online, in locations as remote as Perth, Woopen Creek and New York City exploring notions of realtime internet conferencing and manipulation of artistic pursuits in virtual and physical space. In their first project Lingua Elettrica (http://no.va.com.au) at Artpace and created for ISEA 97, they built an interactive website and publicly destroyed it. In a day otherwise free of technological accidents, nervous_objects encountered a few, making it sometimes difficult to decipher their precise intention. Their calm in the face of calamity produced a laid back form of subversion.

The stakes lifted when Stevie Wishart entered. Not an Adelaide Festival accordion in sight but improvising with medieval hurdy gurdy and live electronics she extracted an amazing array of sounds and tones. Real Audio was streamed from Sydney and mixed as it came through. As Stevie played, Jim Denley navigated the new CD-ROM track created with Kate Richards from Stevie’s new CD (Red Iris, Sinfonye, Glossa Nouvelle Vision GCD 920701).

In the energetic Q and A session, Mark Amerika brought up the need for new writing about multiple media, citing the likes of George Landau and Gregory Ulmer as critics who practice what they preach and engage with the work on its own terms. Chair of the New Media Arts Fund, John Rimmer, asked just how much technical difficulties (lags, delays, congestion) are intrinsic to the work and how they might develop given more bandwith. For nervous_objects, if it gets too fast, too polished it’s not interesting anyway. There was some discussion of Garry Bradbury’s score for Burn Sonata using pianola and digital technology. When someone in the audience thanked nervous_objects for sharing their process. Garry begged to differ, accusing them of utopian dreams of machines generating ideas. The nervous_objects said it was something that pushed them and they certainly didn’t expect the machines to generate ideas. Working with content issues was what they were doing. Afterwards all repaired to the Rhino Room for the launch of the excellent new CD by Zónar Recordings, Dis_locations, Incestuous Electronic Remixing, coordinated by Brendan Palmer. RT

FOLDBACK, ANAT, Adelaide Festival, Ngapartji Multimedia Centre, March 8.
An accompanying exhibition, possibly to tour, was exhibited at Ngapartji for the duration of the Adelaide Festival’s Artists Week. http://www.anat.org.au/foldback

Prelude: The industry

While watching Performing Arts Market performances I was struck by the presence of performance stalwart Katia Molino, seeing her one day performing with Stalker, on another with NYID, both shows requiring considerable physical fitness and dexterity. It was a reminder that there is a broad body of work loosely defined as physical theatre within which various subsidiary forms exist and across which a number of performers participate. Thor Blomfield, one time performer with and now Marketing and Project Coordinator for Legs on the Wall, commented that given “there’s an increasing crossover between companies, for example Legs people working with Stalker”, just how valuable last year’s Body Contact Conference, convened by Rock’n’Roll Circus in Brisbane, was for an area of performance he describes as “encompassing a range of contemporary circus, physical theatre and street theatre groups.”

Blomfield said of participants Circus Oz, Rock’n’Roll Circus, Bizirkus, Club Swing and The Party Line, artists from Darwin, Legs on the Wall, Desoxy, Stalker, some overseas artists and others that “it was an interesting combination that had never come together before. The sense of community in physical theatre has been growing but this conference was the first time we’ve come together formally. It’s timely now to discuss where we all want to go and what we need to do in regard to training, funding and touring. The base for our work was in circus, in the foundation of Circus Oz 25 years ago and that was uniquely Australian though with the influence of Chinese training. Now physical theatre has moved into taking on more European influences and other Asian physical performance traditions.”

Asked why is it important for these groups to talk about the future, Blomfield explains that there are industrial issues to discuss, training proposals (a national circus school), the exchange of information (being informed about overseas work, the rare opportunities to see each other’s work), understanding how companies operate artistically (Desoxy, Stalker, Mike Finch—ex-Circus Monoxide, now director of Circus Oz—spoke about this on a Body Contact panel) and issues like the role of the director, which can be critical for ongoing ensembles working with guest directors. He indicated that there was some preliminary debate about what the proposed training school should do, whether it should provide conventional circus skills or also include, for example, courses in Butoh and various training regimes.

A committee was formed at Body Contact to hold a conference in October 1998 so that these issues could be pursued in more depth, perhaps even to consider whether or not to form an association of companies to promote the standing of physical theatre, which Blomfield describes as being sometimes treated by the broader theatre profession as “the little kid they really don’t know about”. Belvoir Street’s inclusion of Legs on the Wall’s Under the Influence in their 1998 subscription season could be the start of something. Other areas Blomfield would like to see explored include marketing (making the most of marked US interest), physical theatre’s relationship with dance (choreographer Kate Champion has directed Leg’s Under the Influence; one of the Legs’ team was advising Meryl Tankard’s ADT on the use of hand loops for their Adelaide Festival production Possessed) and speech in performance. Physical theatre has proved itself an elastic form, one rich in hybridity and political range as well as being eminently marketable: doubtless for the artists and companies in this area to confer regularly, to see each other’s work, to debate training and artistic issues, to think collectively on industrial and marketing issues, can only enrich their work.

Physical theatre dances

I didn’t know what was cooking, the sausages sizzling at the entrance to the ‘performing area’ situated on the seventh floor of the carpark, or the audience beneath the tin roof in 40 degree heat plus lighting, say 45. Either way it wasn’t a good smell. And yet, Legs were cooking, giving a virtuosic physical performance despite being awash with sweat. They pretty much held their audience though it wasn’t clear how Legs were managing to hold each other. This is a company blessed with a kind of performance ease, physical feats are achieved without ‘drum rolls’ and the acting is laid back and lucid. To ease into this, a prelude of apparently casual exchanges and acrobatic events (and their ‘accidents’) unfolds as the audience enters asking has the show begun—well yes and no (except to say that this particular postmodern gag is a bit overripe and is somewhat scuttled when lights etc finally do mark a start. A pity.)

Physical theatre has always lent itself to the choreographic impulse (doubtless inherited from the lyricism of the circus trapeze artiste), and is certainly evident in Desoxy and The Party Line, but here, under the direction of choreographer Kate Champion, it goes further, not into dance per se, but into a dextrous patterning of moves and holds that provides a magical fluidity for the work, everything from small gestural motifs and work with domestic objects and clothing to large scale sweeps of movement and a coherent dance-theatre totality. It was fascinating to watch the thoroughness and the inventiveness of the movement and I found myself surprised at how much the performers must have had to absorb choreographically when already faced with considerable physical challenges. Legs are not to be underrated. As for the show as theatre, this early version was too discursive, key images (as the broad narrative works itself out) seemed to repeat themselves as long in duration as their original incarnations, one-off numbers looked more than suspiciously like unintegrated individual performer favorites, some scenes wandered too far from the dangerous intimacies central to the work, too many lines fell short of funny and into whimsy, personalities were just a little too abstracted, and the overall shape plateaued early, a not unfamiliar problem for physical theatre with its constant battle to escape the string of tricks. But for all of this it’s very good and by the time Under the Influence reaches its Sydney season hopefully everything that already works—the physical skills, the choreography, the ease of playing, the sensual energy and cheery fatalism—will be sustained by tighter scripting and shaping.

Dance does physical theatre

Possessed
Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre
Ridley Theatre, Adelaide Festival, March 14
Possessed is the next stage of Meryl Tankard’s adventure with dance that leaves the ground, seen first in Furioso but also evident in another way in her choreography for the Australian Opera’s Orfeo. I have a vivid memory clip of her dancers as Furies flinging themselves relentlessly at a giant revolving wall. It looked dangerous. There is some harness work (first explored in Furioso) in Possessed’s central scenes, but the impressive new material that frames the show in the first and last scenes suspends the dancer by wrist, or by both wrist and ankle, using loops. While doubtless placing enormous strain on joints and muscles, there are advantages for fluidity and freedom of movement for the dancer in the air. Of course, it’s not a trapeze and they’re starting from the floor, so there’s not a lot they can do by themselves without help from the ground, the push that leads to swing as their earthed partner determines the direction of the swing and acts as catcher and cradler (and assistant). That said, once airborne, the dancer can amplify their swing and create delicious physical shapes and defiant arcs out over the audience. It looks dangerous as the arcs extend and the dancers swing fast and low over the fence around the big stage. It’s exhilarating because it looks so free, so unencumbered. And these dancers look so at home taking the grace they defeat gravity with on the floor into the air. The opening scene featured male pairs, generating a surprising intimacy, the aerial device allowing them ease at lifting the fellow male body, leaps into space being taken off the body of the ground dancer, returns from space greeted with great care. That aside, the women dancers provided some of the most spectacular and unnerving flights. If Possessed has any meaning, it tells of an obsession with flight and the defeat of gravity. Psychoanalyst Michael Balint called these possessed “philobats”, lovers of flight, and suggested that we all have some of that obsession in us, though we’re mostly happy to let others do it for us, at the circus for example. Not surprisingly then, the audience for Possessed clapped and cheered at every stage of these flights.

Another possessed body appears in the second scene—an obsessive sporting body, its centre of gravity low to the earth, absorbing everything in its almost militaristic path (shades of NYIDs’ monopolistic one-dimensional fit body at the Performing Arts Market), first possessing individuals in separate gender groups and then obliterating even that difference, taking with it every expression of pain and anxiety and the strange shapes that pitifully express them—a clawing fall to the floor or a wipe to the eye. A later comic scene has a group of men parading like women in a beauty contest—high heels and parodic stances (but around me the audience broke into shrill cheers exclaiming, “the Chippendales, the Chippendales!”). A line of women in red dresses challenge the men to do it right and all but one fail and exit, the victor taking his place centre line, locked in the same smile he began with, totally absorbed.

Much else in the evening seemed incidental, making it a show of bits and ultimately a bit of a show, despite the consistently powerful contribution of the Balanescu Quartet. The first, second and the final scenes of Possessed could be assembled into a powerful work instead of the sprawling entertainment it unashamedly is. Some in physical theatre might see Tankard as appropriating their aerial space, and there are times when the showbiz of it all seems to say so, but physical theatre is not all circuses these days and Legs on the Wall have a choreographer-director who’s worked with DV 8. Stalker have come down off their stilts and are working the air in other ways. It’s an intriguing physical moment.

Embracing the unbearable

Gravity Feed, The Gravity of the Situation
Bond Store tunnel, The Rocks, Sydney
March 19 – 22
Gravity is upon us, from above and from beneath. It is weighty, it sucks, it pulls, it compels and commands from all sides. We act because we must, bound to this archaic form the cube which contains nothing yet everything. This is the tabernacle of damned creatures, and in its lightness is the source of their constant anxiety. Program note

Part of me wants to read this show literally. I resist. This is performance. We all inch our way in past signs that intimate danger. We are in a high ceilinged tunnel not in a theatre. Men in tired suits, some unshaven, hair straggling or shaved creep and dart about, oblivious to us, gathering lit candles in paper bags, placing them on a high ledge above a tall ladder, or in a cluster on the ground further down the tunnel. Me, I think I’m witness to some tramp ritual, a subterranean fire-worship culture, such is their care for their charge, fire that disintegrates that which is heavy into flame and ash as light as air. A soundtrack rumbles the resonant tunnel into a hymn of unremitting threat and mystery. It doesn’t let go of us. One of the men tugs at a huge metal cube walled with what looks like triple-ply cardboard (light but remarkably tough) and lets it roll down the slope of the tunnel, barely impeding its speed with all of his bodyweight. This is the first of the journeys of the cube, a miraculous device, Prometheus’ boulder to be rolled endlessly up the slope, a self-generating Platonic ideal that grows new walls as soon as old ones fall away (great design and construction), a perfect material to ignite (it takes and then refuses, glowing like a Red Milky Way), a tabernacle for unwilling worshippers whom it sucks to its centre from time to time and then once and for all. I can read The Gravity of the Situation literally, not as a tramp fire cult, of course (but what about those swinging buckets of flame?); it’s what it says it is, its heavy heart upon its sleeve. But lightness is as feared as much as gravity in this inverted Manicheanism. In a delicate and suspenseful moment the men hold the cardboard walls they’ve liberated from the cube vertically above their heads and criss-cross the space fearfully, juggling the surface area of the walls against the air in the tunnel.

The Gravity of the Situation is something more than the beginnings of the great work we’ve all been expecting from Gravity Feed after The House of Skin. What it needs now, now that the scenario is there, the shape is there, the marvellous cube is there, is for all the attention possible to be lavished on the choreography of bodies and space, a distillation of the opening, the establishment of a surer relationship between performers and Rik Rue’s awesome sound composition, and even perhaps opening space in the soundtrack so we, the congregation, can hear the performer bodies groan against the weight of the light and the heavy. In the past, Gravity Feed works have evaporated. Isn’t it time to embrace the unbearable lightness of being?

This is a strange experience; not weird, not wild, but odd. The odd opportunity to see one video several times and to read it differently (or not) each time because its soundtrack changes, each video voiced in a new way. I say voice, because voice, sung and spoken, is pivotal in this performance. Onstage three female singers, sometimes four, synch into spare soundtracks, adding to instrumental and/or vocal lines, or going it on their impressive own. As a music concert it’s mostly great, and gets better as it goes.

Often we don’t ‘hear’ soundtracks (even when moved by them), unless they’re as obtuse as the Titanic’s or packed with favorite tunes, unless we’re soundtrack addicts. In Voice Jam & Videotape image and music are almost in equal partnership. “Almost” because it’s the films in this performance which are repeated, not the musical compositions. Each video enjoys the benefit of two or three accompaniments. Although this is a Contemporary Music Events’ gig, it’s still a matter of music servicing the videos. (CME has produced a show where you sit in a cinema and listen to music without film.) Kosky tries to keep the balance by placing his singers next to the screen. By the last screening, I know what I’m inclined to look at.

Tyrone Landau, Rae Marcellino, Elena Kats-Chernin and Deborah Conway have created compositions that warrant multiple hearings. This could not be said of the viewing of most of the videos. Elena Kats-Chernin’s score for Judy Horacek’s animated The Thinkers, about The Stolen Children, was exemplary, matching this artist’s whimsical style with a musical cartoon language just serious enough to sustain the message. It markedly improved my still limited appreciation of the video, amplifying its moments of magic—especially the images of flight. David Bridie’s score for the same video, including the voice of Paul Keating, while politically pertinent, laboured the point, making the cartoon curiously twee, not up to the weight of the soundtrack. Deborah Conway’s composition for Lawrence Johnston’s Night, a Sydney Opera House reverie built from close ups of roof-shell details (tiles, edges etc.), added an aural density and a sense of the architectural space dealt with—many voices inside the Opera House, spare visual detail on the outside. Conway appeared (discreetly in the dark) adding her own voice to the multitude, the musical quality not dissimilar from that she helped create in the marvellous soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.

The one video that worked for me and that worked at me with the help of its composers, was Donna Swann’s dis-family-function. I’m usually not fond of narrative short films, but the almost silent movie, family-movie innocence of the work with its blunt edits and nervy close-ups (and none of these over-played), is engaging and I was more than happy to watch it twice. A gathering for a birthday party for an ageing mother starts from several points until the characters converge for a backyard party and the giving of gifts. Landau’s reading is relatively dark, male voice and piano, other male voices added, finally joined by the live voices of the onstage women singers. There’s something faintly disturbing about the score, a kind of restrained (almost Brittenish) poignancy, an inevitable unravelling of feeling and never a literal response. The onscreen image of the mother sinking into herself after the giving of gifts (dog bookends, dog statue, dog pictures, a real new dog—in the presence of her elderly-barely-willing-to-budge old dog) is sad. Rae Marcellino’s score is just as good, but much closer to what I imagine the videomaker might have had in mind. Its opening, rapid lines of “ma ma ma” immediately signals a lighter, everyday mood, and you don’t go looking for the video’s simple seriousness, that just hits you later. But in the choral work, as in the Landau, there’s something oddly holy generated as we watch these strangers—the mother, the dog, the son with his Indian girlfriend, the gay couple, and the young parents with baby, lolling in the sunlight, the near-but-never-to-be drama past.

Voice Jam & Videotape, curated by Barrie Kosky for Contemporary Music Events, Mercury Theatre, Adelaide, March 6 – 8; Salvation Army Temple, Melbourne, March 13 – 15

One moment you’re immersed in festival fever: running projects, racing to shows and exhibitions, talking about stuff in foyers and forums, grabbing inedible food at disgusting hours of the day and night and still getting to work on time in the mornings. Suddenly, the festival(s) recede, leaving you fishlike, stranded and gasping, over-tired and frumpy in a world full of incessant deadlines and all the things that have been left undone that should have been done last week.

I began the Festival of Perth with the light and fluffy Titanic and the now hotly debated (over two cities and two festivals) The Seven Streams of the River Ota by Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina. Seven Streams was an interesting work. The seven hours of viewing were not arduous. In fact the no doubt necessary pacing/tempo made it very easy to sit through. Without going into descriptive detail (of which much abounds), I found the first three sections visually exciting, witty and incisive. It seemed, nonetheless, a fragile work, easily thrown off its stride. I started to have misgivings in the fourth section or stream, which represented the legal suicide of one of the key characters who has contracted AIDS; misgivings that turned to irritation in the fifth section, dealing with the Holocaust—lots of tricks with mirrors and the familiar images of a displaced population struggling through a non-specific but clearly European winter landscape.

Given the number of works in both the Adelaide and Perth festivals, that have attempted to deal with humanly inspired catastrophe, including exhibitions such as Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord (Bosnia) and Adrian Jones’ Cadaver (the genocide committed against Aboriginal people) at PICA, as well as a range of talks addressing everything from terror and morals in Perth and the sacred and the profane in Adelaide, the questions I am left with have everything to do with the possibility of the appropriate ‘staging’ and/or ‘exhibition’ of grief or despair in the face of overwhelming brutality. Finally it is the considered and subtle collaboration between Adrian Jones (WA) and Marian Pastor Roces (Philippines) which has been the most compelling in terms of a thoughtful self reflexivity in relation to these complex terrains.

In Seven Streams, my initial discomfort turned to dislike in the final three sections. What had previously seemed to be the deft touch of the director carefully avoiding the pitfalls of easy resolution, became simply glib; the politics naive and the visuals clichéd. The relationships articulated across the 20th century between the survivors of the Holocaust and those of Hiroshima seemed contrived and twee and something more (or less) to do with innocent (albeit gauche) America and ravaged Japan—an all too familiar trope.

Being the Festival of the long night, I also spent five hours watching Cloudstreet, presented by Black Swan Theatre in association with Belvoir’s Company B at the Endeavour Boat Shed in Fremantle. A beautiful space with a fabulous cast assembled by Neil Armfield, this was the absolute crowd-stopper of the Festival. Whilst I think it could well do with some judicious editing, particularly in the first and third sections and the little girlie stuff is a bit ham for my taste, this was a work defined by outstanding performances. Having said that, Cloudstreet is a relatively easy show, dealing with the familiar and the happily parochial—designed for an enjoyable night in the theatre. My enjoyment was somewhat hampered by the fact that, seated as I was, towards the back of a very large and steep rake, it was very hard to hear this very verbal piece much of the time.

There’s not much to be said about Germany’s Theatre Titanick. A mildly entertaining bit of fluff which is perhaps more interesting to look at in relation to Stalker’s Blood Vessel in Adelaide. A more embryonic work, Blood Vessel has so much more going for it in terms of a beautiful rig (designed by Andrew Carter), the sound (Paul Charlier) and the substance (Rachael Swain and the company). Whilst Blood Vessel has a long way to go in terms of both its content and its choreography, and the relationship between its strong visuals (physical and filmic) and material base, previous experience suggests that it will be a much more exciting work than Titanic by the time it reaches Perth audiences in 1999.

My pleasure in Uttarpriyadarshi (The Final Beatitude) by the Chorus Repertory Theatre from Imphal (India) came from the fabulous cacophony of image, sound and story telling derived from a rich synthesis between traditional Indian styles in juxtaposition with contemporary techniques. An elephant, richly caparisoned for war, creates a dramatic and fabulous moment surrounded by the shadowy silhouettes suggestive of great armies. Women wail in varying extraordinarily pitched registers or cackle like banshees whilst the fires of Hell burn. Buddhist monks perform something akin to the antics of the Keystone Cops and unlike Lepage’s much cooler Seven Streams, there is no sense of embarrassment or measure.

I didn’t make it through the entire program of the Lyon Opera Ballet. The first offering, Central Figure by Susan Marshall, took a quite formal dance vocabulary and made it into something simultaneously dull and sentimental. The second, Contrastes by Maguy Marin, relied on parody and caricature and was positively offensive. I was grateful to catch up with Teshigawara’s I Was Real—Documents in Adelaide and in this much more considered and technically meticulous work, get the artificial taste of saccharine out of my mouth.

The absolute highlight of the Festival of Perth was the Belgian (Flemish really) company Les Ballets C. de la B. and Het Muziek Lod with La Tristeza Complice directed by Alain Platel. Interestingly enough, audiences in Adelaide responded with infinitely more enthusiasm than those in Perth. This is a work that took on all my pet theatrical phobias (performers doing ‘mad’ and/or ‘street people’ is a particular hate) and hung ’em out to dry. In this landscape, people unfolded and retreated, hung out and persevered, danced into stillness; inhabited the space against the extraordinary sound of ten piano accordionists performing the Baroque music of the English composer, Henry Purcell. This is a work for experiencing not describing but the relationship between the performers (whether professional or inexperienced) was exceptional and their ability to focus on the vulnerable, the imperfect and the ugly, made it a performance of extraordinary beauty and tension.

Cloudstreet, Black Swan Theatre/Company B Belvoir, The Endeavour Boatshed, director Neil Armfield; Uttarpriyadarshi, Chorus Repertory Theatre Imphal, written and directed by Ratan Thiyam, Winthrop Hall; The Seven Streams of the River Ota, Ex Machina Company, directed by Robert Lepage, Challenge Stadium; Titanic, Theater Titanick, The Esplanade; Central Figure, Lyon Opera Ballet, director Yorgos Loukos, choreographer, Susan Marshall, Contrastes, choreographer, Maguy Marin, His Majesty’s Theatre; La Tristeza Complice, Les Ballet C. de la B., director Alain Platel, music by Het Muziek Lod, Regal Theatre; Cadaver, Adrian Jones, PICA. All events part of the Festival of Perth, February 13 – March 8

not hyper real
not virtual real
this is just real
watch your back
wear sensible shoes
and be prepared
to play ball
from Ecstasy poster

When the publicity for The Ecstasy of Communication came out, I found it difficult to envisage just what Ecstasy was going to be. The title gives nothing away other than its implication, perhaps, of some engagement with illicit recreational substances. In fact, it’s taken from a work by Jean Baudrillard questioning the credibility of much of what is presented by the mainstream media.

A project of Salamanca Theatre Company, the piece is a joint effort involving Hobart and Sydney-based artists with no traditional use of script or story-line, but a multitude of images and environments. Salamanca caters primarily for school-aged audiences (without any patronising theatre-in-education-type agenda) and also presents some theatre for a wider audience.

Ecstasy is co-directed by Salamanca’s Artistic Director Deborah Pollard and Alicia Talbot from Sydney. The designer is Samuel James of Melbourne, who constructed the maze along with Don Hopkins. Sound design and video installation are by Nicholas Wishart. The performers are from Salamanca, 14 of them rotating the roles each night of the season.

This novel collaboration between emerging artists incorporates a variety of visual artforms, video, photography, computer-generated images and soundworks, along with integrated grabs of live performance, randomly encountered as one travels through the maze. Alicia Talbot described the event as “a bit like being the ball inside a pinball machine”. A local newspaper came up with another analogy: “a website made into a real space, a maze with corridors and illusions in which it is entirely possible to get lost”.

The idea is this: audience members arrive at the scheduled starting time, are organised into groups of about 10 and, at 10 minute intervals, are invited into the “reception area” of the maze, where a hyper-efficient, slightly hysterical “secretary” (very amusingly played on opening night by Sarah Chapman) “interviews” them, gives a few suggestions for negotiating the maze—and off they go, more or less separately from that point. (You find your own way, you don’t have to stay in your group and you go in whatever directions the fancy takes you.)

The first obstacle is the entrance proper, which starts as a passage but becomes a low tunnel through which one has to crawl. From then on there are choices of mysterious doors, concealed entrance ways, intersecting corridors and specially constructed rooms, nooks and alcoves. Everything is in semi-darkness. Each space has a raison d’être; there are artworks here and there (nothing conventional, of course), an interactive, a video to watch, or a peephole, a sound installation or walls of textures to explore, or… The attractions are ingeniously simple but very seductive: a phone and answering machine installation with messages “just for you”; a TV showing a video by, for example, Matt Warren from the Empire Collective (featured in RealTime 23), complete with a box of TV Snax; a tableau photograph by Craig Blowfield staged as a visual pun on Bernini’s Ecstasy of Theresa and itself constructed as a photo-collage—a postmodern in-joke for Art History groupies; a red room carpeted and lined with fake fur and padded satin, to caress and roll around in…or whatever you choose; a closed-circuit TV where you can be the star, a fairground-style mini-theatre where you direct the actor…

Negotiating the maze was a fascinating experience and particularly notable for the camaraderie the whole exercise engendered between participants; as you ran into people in the various nooks and crannies you engaged with them, enthused with them about the experience—whether you knew them or not. It was that kind of event—much more people-friendly than even the most wine-soaked exhibition opening!

Interestingly, for an interactive piece incorporating technology with live performers, there were none of the embarrassingly forced “audience participation/humiliation” components beloved of stand-up comics…the sort of thing that makes one uneasy about sitting in the front rows at some theatres.

The contribution of several teams of personnel deserves mention. There was a rotating team of Salamanca Theatre performers, many of whom also worked on the volunteer construction team. Besides those cited earlier, multimedia works for Ecstasy were provided by Robin Petterd, Sean Bacon, Mark Cornelius, Sally Harbison, Brian Martin, Sarah Greenwood, most of them former or current students at the local School of Art.

It’s difficult to make any unfavourable observations about The Ecstasy of Communication. It occurred to me, that the event may not be suitable for people with limited physical mobility. However, the availability of different entrance ways and access-points permitted some flexibility in this regard. The event generated a lot of interest amongst local schools and teachers. The prospect of accommodating largish groups of school-age visitors, let loose in a semi-darkened maze seems, to me, likewise a bit daunting—but again, not an insoluble challenge. I understand student visitors entered into the spirit with excitement and got the most out of it.

These are minor speculations, really, in the scheme of things. The sheer vision and inventiveness of Ecstasy, its ambition and scope, the skill and effort that went into bringing it to fruition—the pleasure and the surprise of the whole interactive experience—these are its achievements. The over-used and often incorrectly ascribed description ‘unique’ is, in this case, perfectly accurate.

The Ecstasy of Communication, Salamanca Theatre Company, The Long Gallery, Salamanca Place, Feb 2 – March 13

In London, I saw John Tavener at a performance of one of his cello works. Very tall and resplendent in dark suit, shock of white hair matched with equal shock of white leather slippers and a profile like Franz Liszt, his presence matched the soaring quality of the strings. There is yearning in the pull of his cello pieces, yearning and a human growl that has been subsumed in a battle of soul and animal with the ethereal realm. Appropriate, too, for Gary Rowe to have chosen Tavener’s Chant and Eternal Memory for solo cello/cello with strings for units of his Twelve Seas, interspersing long silences between the pull of strings. This is an elegant, meditative piece that seems awash with the blues of melancholy, waves, memory; of the loneliness of being marked by a ghost who is you/not you, a mirror not quite of the same substance. Four dancers slide and pivot across and into the space, meeting only in the general hum of time, but never in the specifics of a handshake, birthing, wartime. The movements are flags marking moments of longing; moments caught leaning against a ship’s rail. Even an eyeblink is long—what you see between the sheets of skin with which we view, sense, absorb the world.

The arc of an ocean marks the opening, a projection with voice-over. The projections are held to this vista: only the sun moving across to mark a progression in time. Fundamentally, we stay on a long sea journey throughout the piece. There is no landing (although there is, perhaps, the desire to land); Poseidon’s element, perhaps the song of corpses thrown in.

Ruth Gibson enters, sliding backwards, her arms stretch ahead, behind, a gesture from the heart into the world. She is vulnerable, with her backward slide, but also engaging, strong. This is the gift one makes in entering: an egg’s offering. This is the risk one takes: to extend and meet, perhaps, no more than a curved line.

Two men enter, backwards. Mirrored by the two women; fisher-people pulling nets along the square. So quiet, this crossing the grid of the world. The men flick their feet like a horse its tail. Heads lift, dreaming of balloons. I watch their limbs: Gibson’s arches as they slide, Fifield and Widdowson’s foot-edges flickering turns, Sky’s arms going for a dive.

I’m not impressed with publicity touting a “fusion of movement, design, music, and text”. A piece this sure doesn’t deserve to have its elements stated like starting blocks each at a different race. Image and music are subtle and discrete, text spare; success or failure rests on the quality of embodiment and the diffusion of physical force, in relation to an almost personified sense of time. There is a moment where Gibson’s elbows bend, then knees, arms reaching up (foot stretched ahead) as if lifting a block of turf into the sky. This is a lovely moment, where muscle meets cosmos, time enters the blood. Less successful is when Fifield and Sky, for instance, become too translucent, as if force, leaking at the elbows, no longer fuses out to the world.

Ships horns sound: departures, long journeys, salt air. Couples re-enter, carrying one another. Is memory carried, or the carrier? One spirit with four legs—two that walk, two that fail to touch the ground. Another with four arms: a pair that hold, a pair stretched like the mast of a ship, ready for sail. Motion propelled not by volition but another force. Each action has its shadows.

Hellen Sky as Gibson’s double shadows Gibson’s opening solo movements like the wind prodding and provoking her turns. The volition to move is the push of something else’s hand. This is the force of another, an outside, who yet fails to copy, to mirror exactly, because not quite of the same blood. This is appropriate and quietly taunting, leaving a great sadness when Gibson next enters the space alone. “I have chosen you before, in other lifetimes, other centuries”, says the voice-over. The Double is a lonely accompaniment. Two can be stranger than one.

There are other moments of syncopation between the men, I suspect unintended, because these fractured moments are not quite exact enough and the synchronicity for the most part is so good. And yet I like the idea of them, these fissures, breaks in coordination: they fit the bill, intellectually, psychologically. They seem caused, mostly, by a subtler elasticity in one body, a different catch of breath in the ribs. Widdowson in particular seems to me to dance with a rubato which could be quite exquisite if given rein.

In the end, “the sea takes its colour back”. What is given is returned, goes back home. I must admit I dreaded the idea of a piece about this subject, fearing it exhausted before the dance began by a decade of theory and projects and plays; but Rowe has created an elegant, subtle and quietly disquieted piece that hovers in the place that expands and cools like ocean water, rising, falling in a day. This, too, is the who, the we, the I, the self that dives and dissolves and reforms as it swims. The subtle interplay of grasping, mirroring, and release, the residue of salt lining our human rims.

Dialogue with Gary Rowe

GR I worked from the text The Coral Sea by Patti Smith to create the movement/choreography—the ‘poetic’ images from that writing became the source/resource which defined/redefined the process of improvisation/composition. I also listened to We shall see Him as He is by John Tavener which too became a score (albeit a loose one) during the composition of the material.

ZSM What do you look for when you work with your dancers? What is the dialogue?

GR I work with people that I know personally as friends and colleagues and I try to work also with the same set of people—that really allows a ‘shorthand’ approach to work when time is limited (we both know what we are getting!). All the performers are practising artists in their own right and work from widely differing backgrounds of study and training—they are all involved in their own artistic research and development. I implicitly place my trust in them, in their ability to create and perform. All material created comes from an improvisational process which then is directed by myself into some form. I ask of them to enter fully into a process of creative development that hopefully allows their own personalities to come through. The dialogue is one of creator/performer and director, which evolves through time. I think that we all know each other well enough, and the demands of the work, to be able to be ourselves in the roles that we lay out. I am totally reliant [on] these people as they ‘become’ the work. I ask them to enter my ‘image’ world and to inhabit it with their own connections and to be there developing a language in movement.

ZSM The students in your workshop made much of how you trained them in sensing relationship, enabling improvisations with four, six, eight or nine students together on stage. How is your training of this skill different from that of other dance teachers/choreographers?

GR The difference is difficult to highlight. My teaching method has evolved from being ‘taught’. I don’t think I have one way of training a skill in perception. I would not want to claim such a standpoint. What I do pursue, challenge and encourage students to do is to work from a place where visual/choreographic strategies are as one. Training in how one ‘sees’ the world (both an external and internal process—a moment, a fragment of time, the larger picture) is central to how one sees language. Movement is located for me in that matrix—what we choose to see or to be seen. The choices inherent in this process are central to my teaching methodology.

ZSM Another description was about how you encouraged them to “open the body”. What is it you think you “open” bodies to?

GR I hope that I ‘open’ bodies to the multiple complex of possibilities that arise from working and the taking of responsibility and action for one’s imagination/creation and to make that manifest in some way.

ZSM The text for Twelve Seas was sometimes exquisite. Still separable, though, into moving and spoken parts. Although I work differently myself, I didn’t mind it in this piece, due to its meditative nature. Sometimes the words functioned like music, like rhythms interspersed with the strains of Tavener’s piece. This is perhaps effective because the cello itself has such a human voice.

I’m wondering, though, whether you ever have speech more linked with movement? Do you ever get your dancers to speak as they dance?

GR I have as yet to make a piece where the dancers speak. This I feel requires a special skill and creates a different kind of work to what I am interested in. The text when used in the work is read by actors, sometimes live. The next work is being made in collaboration with [Melbourne dancer/academic] Philipa Rothfield and will be a series of five solos each with a philosophy paper attached. Themes of lying, death, love, place and acceptance/resistance will be explored. The text will be read by a female actor, delivered as a paper, whilst the dance proceeds.

Twelve Seas, Exploring themes of the double. Gary Rowe Company (UK). Conceived and directed by Gary Rowe. Created and performed by Andrew Fifield, Ruth Gibson, Alan Widdowson, Hellen Sky. Photography by Jim Roseveare. Sound: Michael Burdett. Dancehouse, Carlton, February 5.

Hollywood Road winds its way along one of ‘the Levels’ on Hong Kong island. Its naming precedes its more famous counterpart by a couple of hundred years, being one of the original streets laid down by the British colonial traders. Antique businesses have since colonised the area, providing windows onto the artefacts produced by Chinese artists from the past several millennia. It is as if each diorama, viewed through the barrier of glass, reveals the vast wealth of craft skill and applied imagination in order to mock the ephemerality of cinema and its attendant real estate culture that throngs throughout Hong Kong and the New Territories. Within this context of the popular and the traditional, contemporary artists in Hong Kong are making determined inroads both locally and internationally. But in order to comprehend this, we need to go back again.

In June 1997 the British Colonial Authority “handed over” the administration of the region to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was a highly promoted and publicised international event whereby one of the world’s biggest commercial centres, home to eight million people, changed owners.

The event was represented as the end of the colonial era and a return to the motherland. The people of Hong Kong are quite philosophical however, regarding it as saying goodbye to one coloniser and hello to another, for they are Cantonese and make up 90 per cent of the population, with the ex-pats (predominantly Europeans, mostly English of course, Americans and Australians), mainland and others making up the rest.

During the British colonial period, Hong Kong’s cultural activity was divided along ethnic lines with little integration and even less encouragement and support—until ten years before the British departure, when public money was invested into Museums, Galleries, Arts Centres, University art departments and cultural non-government organisations such as Videotage.

Videotage (www.enmpc.org.hk/videotage) was formed in 1985 as a video artists’ collective to organise screenings of work in Hong Kong and overseas. By 1996 it had established some non-linear post-production facilities, and gained the resources to maintain an office, library and archive, and administer events including the annual international Microwave Festival of media art. Its current director is Ellen Pau, a widely exhibited video artist who, like many Hong Kong artists, supports her practice outside the arts—she is a hospital radiographer.

In 1997 the Microwave Festival invited Kathy High (USA) to curate several programs of video, myself to curate a 10 day long exhibition of artists’ CD-ROMs (a long run by Hong Kong standards), and Steve Hawley (Britain) as artist in residence. The works selected gave a profile to the concerns and discourse prevalent amongst contemporary artists working within the ‘western’ aesthetic and language tradition. The audience were mostly under 30, had Cantonese as their first language and received the work within the multicultural context that is modern Hong Kong.

Computers are not expensive and CD-Video is a major consumer item. Software can be obtained cheaply if necessary—$AU7.00 will buy a CD-ROM with 30 top-line Mac applications, illegal copies like these being protected by the Pirates Union! Artists are just beginning to work with digital media as the opportunities become available through the universities and access centres like Videotage. Artists like Brian Wong, having pursued post-graduate study overseas, are not only beginning to produce challenging interactive multimedia but teach its basics in the universities.

The Microwave conference and seminar were well attended by artists, students, educators and members of the booming web industry. Many of the issues were, in parallel with realpolitik, about transition. From linear video art to options for interaction; and fears for the negation of one form by another; on an institutional level, in galleries and university departments, a tendency to hasten the eclipsing of one form by another, especially in those areas being driven by marketed technology. Repurposing the technology was felt to be a major component of any artistic enterprise and that this was not just restricted to technology but also to people and the wide range of skills and disciplines that, likewise, converge toward a multimedia outcome.

This expertise and experience has been around for 15-20 years. The performance group Zuni Icosahedron (www.zuni.org.hk) has at its core Danny Yung, a well known performance artist who spent some years in the USA, and is currently director of the Centre for the Arts at the University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Para/Site is an artists-run gallery (“the first of many” according to Danny Yung) which acts as a focus for people from a range of disciplines who publish artists’ books, including some digital output around the largely site-specific work, and also organise on-site forums. One writer explains that “it is necessary to think primarily in terms of ‘borders’—of borders as parasites that never take over a ‘field’ in its entirety but erode it slowly and tactically”. “The dominant group will have a well planned strategy to guard its field”, warns another.

Meanwhile the well established Hong Kong International Film Festival is now entering its 22nd year, showcasing the famous local industry and world cinema. The Independent Film and Videomakers Awards, a Cantonese-culture vectored event is run by Jimmy Choi at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, a multi-artform venue in the newest part of the CBD in downtown Hong Kong. Entries come from all over the world, representing an alternative viewpoint to that of the Film Festival and, intriguingly, reproduce the deliberations of the Awards Jury verbatim in the catalogue.

Funding for much of this activity (only a fraction is described here) originates with the government (the Provisional Urban Council), which devolves to the HK Arts Development Council (similar to the Australia Council and currently employing ex-pats Hiram To and Jonathon Thomson).

A double analogy could be made between the complexity of the many Chinese cultures and the many cultures on the internet, in comparison to Mandarin culture and the efforts of Microsoft Corp. According to Tung Kin Wah, the CEO of the Urban Council, “Hong Kong would be more stable if there are fewer dissenting voices…” Clearly there is official concern about accentuating differences between vibrant Hong Kong and cautious China. Since many Hong Kong artists, not only those working in the media arts field, speak about the issue of identity, the terms under which the 50-year window will be maintained will be central to their ability to contribute to the wider development of the regional as well as the national community.

Hong Kong Video/CD-ROM Festival, December 1997; Videotage, director Ellen Pau (www.enmpc.org.hk/videotage); The Microwave Festival, December 6 – 12, 1998; Hong Kong International Film Festival, April 3 – 18 1998; The Independent Film & Video Awards are in January 1999, director Jimmy Choi, Hong Kong Arts Centre

SIGGRAPH is the Special Interest Group in Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). I first got there in 1981 and followed the event fairly religiously throughout the 80s. If my memory is correct ’81 was the last year that you could turn up with a videotape in your bag and have it shown in the Electronic Theatre. It was also the first year the event included an art show. As an artist myself it was like going to wonderland. After years of being marginalised for my work in art and technology I found myself in a “birds of a feather” session with 50 or so others from around the world who all shared my vision and interests.

Throughout the 80s SIGGRAPH was an exciting melting pot of talent and ideas. Computer graphics (CG) were “a solution looking for a problem” and specialists from many diverse disciplines rubbed shoulders to share the latest techniques and gossip. In 1986 there was a panel on the film industry. Looker (Crighton, 1979), Tron (Lisberger, 1982) and The Last Starfighter (Castle, 1984) had all used computer effects (CFX) and, although all went on to become cult movies, none did well at the box office. At the panel a frustrated producer joked that it was easier to get a location helicopter than agreement to use CFX and studio execs reiterated the conservatism of Hollywood.

In television the situation was different. By 1986 the digital video post-production boxes had had a significant impact particularly on current affairs, news and the wealthy commercials sector. Digital systems were helping to push video as a master production medium with digital production gear like vtrs, switchers and cameras hitting the marketplace. The video post houses grew as the 16mm film facilities, which had relied on regular TV work, closed their doors.

SIGGRAPH 86 was a turning point. New York photographer Nancy Burson was there to promote her new book Composites which documented her digital imaging. In a press session she proclaimed that the era of “photographic truth” was over. At another “bird” session a group of creatives claimed CG as their own and predicted that, in ten years time, SIGGRAPH would be their event. Back then we were a distinct minority. SIGGRAPH belonged to engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists. Many laughed at our claim. They didn’t even like the increasing number of creative and media people getting elected to SIGGRAPH committees. At one point its parent society, ACM, expressed concern that its integrity as a professional society was being compromised by these outsiders.

Now, in the 1990s, computer imaging has found its own vertical markets and a whole host of new conferences, trade shows and symposia have sprung up to exploit demand. For many of us the expensive trip to SIGGRAPH has become less essential. So it was good for me to be invited to be a judge for the SIGGRAPH 97 Computer Animation Festival.

Los Angeles in August was in heat wave and the air-con for the 15 storey glass atriums at the LA Convention Centre was having trouble keeping up. Over 47,000 people milled around, mostly to see the trade show. In addition to the technical papers core (now a minority draw) were panels, screening rooms, the art show, the major trade show, the “start-up” park, the Electronic Garden, the education program, the outreach program and a host of lesser events. The Computer Animation Festival (CAF) offered four evening and three matinee performances in the Shrine Auditorium (home of the Academy Awards). Then there were the unofficial events, shows and parties all over town.

A chance meeting in the bar of the Hotel Figueroa best illustrates the changes in SIGGRAPH over the past decade. A schoolteacher from Malibu was down for the day to see the show, her first visit to SIGGRAPH. She explained that, if she hadn’t had been told in advance that it was a CG show, she would have assumed it was just another film industry extravaganza.

For me the domination of Hollywood is a problem. Glasnost and the drying up of Defence Department contracts have forced the military supply industry in the US to diversify. Many have moved into the entertainment sector. This union of Silicon Valley and Hollywood is being described as either the Hollyvalley or Sillywood depending on your point of view.

I hope I’m not just an aging internationalist academic who is concerned about the power, parochialism and lack of ethics of the military/entertainment complex. The interdisciplinary foundation of SIGGRAPH, arguably its most attractive feature, is under threat. I spent much of my week discussing this with SIGGRAPH officials. If they don’t succeed in reframing the show with a broad-base appeal it will become just another tool for the Hollywood propaganda machine. Links to the film industry are not helped by the decision to host SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles then Orlando on successive years.

Next year will be SIGGRAPH’s 25th anniversary and the committee are keen to explore historical links and re-establish the cross-disciplinary emphasis. They may not succeed.

The Shrine Auditorium, like so many places you’ve seen on TV, was seedy and disappointing. First impressions were the smell of dirty carpet and the need for a fresh coat of paint. As a jury member I was a privileged VIP and found my way to what had been described as the best seat in the house (centre, front row, balcony) ahead of the crowds jamming at the doors. This was my first mistake. Minders moved in around me and, just before the show started I was surrounded by suited studio execs. The Japanese to my left. Caucasians to my right. They ceremoniously crossed the aisle to shake hands, bow and exchange business cards. Trusted lieutenants whispered essential data to chiefs…“that’s xxx CEO of xxx, spouse’s name xxx you should go and say hello”…before the ritual. This is a world that I neither inhabit nor aspire to.

I regretted not taking a seat in the stalls, 20 rows from the front, sharing in the vicarious rage of the crowd and enduring the inevitable crick in the neck. Studio chiefs don’t rage, they clap politely, talk incessantly and clearly have trouble in comprehending why works by students, pieces of scientific visualisation and other unnecessary stuff is cluttering up the show.

But it’s precisely that egalitarianism that makes the SIGGRAPH CAF (and before it the legendary Electronic Theatre) such a valuable and exciting event.

My favourite was The DNA Story a fascinating piece of biological visualisation from Digital Studio SA that tells the story of the “transcription, replication and condensation of a mitotic chromosome”. Students’ work was well represented with three pieces from Ringling School of Art including Sharing a lyrical tale of ice cream on a hot summer’s day and 10,000 Feet the tragic story of a talking Teddy who mistakes his speech tag for a rip cord. Australia was represented with extracts from Jon McCormack’s Turbulence, and Changing Heart, a spectacular IMAX theme park opener from Animal Logic. The Hollywood studios were represented by Titanic, The Fifth Element and Lost World. CFX specialists Pacific Data Images fielded their usual high calibre down-time production in Gabola the Great.

People said it was a good show but, there again, I was wearing a badge that proclaimed my jury membership. Reliable feedback suggests that the show was good but, over the past three or so years, has levelled out. Not such a surprising outcome when you consider that major annual ‘quantum jumps’ that accompanied SIGGRAPH throughout the 80s and early 90s are no longer possible. The medium is maturing, the big picture has been painted and innovation now remains in filling in the details and, of course, telling good stories.

Back in the mainstream film industry I was surprised when jurying to discover that most of the puppies in 101 Dalmatians were computer generated (by ILM). On reflection it was obvious. The cost of maintaining a pack of trained, live and constantly growing puppies would have been prohibitive. CFX have arrived and their success is precisely that most audiences don’t know they are there. Dinosaurs, volcanoes and tornados are obvious but the major use of CFX in Hollywood today is more mundane and practical. Things like wire removal, retouching and compositing.

It’s here that digital post, which hit video in the mid 80s, has now hit the film industry. Every Disney animation feature since Rescuers Down Under has been mastered digitally. Most opticals are now “digitals” done on systems like Kodak’s “Cineon”, Quantel’s “Domino” or one of the new crop of “shrink wrapped” film-resolution app’s for general purpose workstations and personal computers. One industry specialist I spoke to claimed that there is only one optical house still trading on the West Coast “…and they’re only doing titles”.

Specialists also predict a major shake out in the CFX industry before long. The margins are too small for a competitive international industry. One example I was given was a quote from a UK company of $200,000 versus $1,200,000 from one of the big California CFX houses. The larger companies like ILM and Digital Domain are expected to go into full production and contract out SFX work to “one off” companies who set up to service one production with short-lease premises, rented computers and fixed term contacts from a growing talent pool of freelance CGI specialists.

In fact this is already happening and many regret the passing of the large specialist companies who can sustain the in-house research and development that has been an essential component of the medium’s development to date.

Launched at SIGGRAPH and essential reading is Clark Dodsworthy’s Digital Illusion—Entertaining the Future with High Technology, published by ACM SIGGRAPH and Addison Wesley.

Sydney Intermedia Network (SIN) will screen the Electronic Theatre program from SIGGRAPH 97 at the Chauvel Cinemas, Paddington, on Tuesday May 26 (information tel 02 9380 4255).

crosSeXXXamination is a collaborative website project by New York artist Beth Stryker and Australian artist Virginia Barratt (ex-VNS Matrix). The exhibition was the culmination of Stryker’s artist-in-residency at Artspace and was the first public viewing of the crosSeXXXamination website.

The site-specific installation housed two Powerbook computers in circular cubicles with plastic curtains creating a sense of privacy and intimacy while offering voyeuristic glimpses of the interior to those outside the cubicles. In the window frontages of Artspace, small video screens projected images of bodies and body parts supplied by guest artists. Opening night also featured a performance where audience members were invited to be examined by solicitous plastic-clad attendants, their tender ministrations given a sinister twist by the fact that the ‘consultations’ took place on top of a dissection table.

Timed to coincide with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the project has been influenced by Alan Turing, well known for his work on artificial intelligence. In his paper “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” Turing described a game where a man and a woman each sitting at remote computer terminals try to convince a third party who interrogates them that they are a woman. In the now famous Turing Test it is a software program that competes with a human, both trying to convince the interrogator that they are the human. The idea of the test (which has become a popular benchmark for testing computer ‘intelligence’) is for the computer to convincingly perform as human or ‘pass’ as human. These boundary crossings—male/female, human/computer, deviant/straight—echo throughout the crosSeXXXamination website. Turing himself was forced to undergo organotherapy, a hormonal sex change, as a supposed cure for his ‘deviant’ sexuality after he was arrested for consensual homosexual sex.

crosSeXXXamination parodies and subverts the way in which medical discourses seek to discipline and pathologise socially ‘deviant’ subjectivities and desires. On entry to the crosSeXXXamination site, the user/subject checks a number of randomly generated statements before being processed, eXXXamined and classified.

Your subject code classification is an indecipherable hieroglyphic (my most recent was ‘Bxxx.LB.brut’ which didn’t tell me much—kind of reminiscent of those arcane squiggles doctors make about you in their notes when they don’t want you to know what they’re doing!).

You can then click your way through to the next section where you ‘claim your body’. Having been interrogated, classified and assigned a body yourself, you can now interrogate and examine the revealed body parts (yours?), cut-up image fragments of head, torso and legs. Clicking on each segment reveals new images which disintegrate on further clicking to reveal new images. If you haven’t already guessed it, yes, you are still being interrogated; the images that you show a particular interest in determine where you will next end up…this can take some patience as you need to keep clicking on ever smaller segments.

Finally, you move into one of the various examination rooms designed by the artists Beth Stryker, Virginia Barrat and guest artists Sarah Waterson and Rea where you will be met by one of a variety of eXXXaminers. Unlike the situation in the Turing Test where it is a human examiner interrogating a software program, in crosSeXXXamination the tables are turned as the computers interrogate, provoke and question the human users/subjects.

After you have concluded your examination, you can choose another body by clicking in the graphics at the top of the screen. This will take you to a new section where you can scroll through and select various different bodies (text descriptions), for example, “inmate autopsy brutal softcore”, “butt lesboy autopsy invert”, “alien blueboy Other softcore”.

crosSeXXXamination is a technically ambitious, conceptually provocative and visually intriguing website. However, navigating the site can be a frustrating experience with lengthy waits while images load and an absence of instructions about how to progress at certain stages.

Users can quickly get confused and irritated if they are not given sufficient guidance or feedback that they are doing the right thing. It is difficult to know how much of a site you have seen. How do you know when you are finished? A number of users I spoke to got stuck in the Body Shop, confused about how to progress any further or whether that was all there was to see.

Some users will also have problems if their computers do not handle Java well (Java is programming language for the web). PCs generally perform better than Macintoshes in this area and there is still the odd bug that needs to be ironed out. This is a website that requires patience and perseverance (and a reasonably fast system!) but it’s worth the effort.

One of the particular strengths of on-line art projects such as crosSeXXXamination is their dynamic nature. As well as users being able to interact with the work in real time, aspects of the site are themselves randomised, so that users will have a different experience every time they visit the site. On-line work can also be adapted, modified and added to over time. The creators of crosSeXXXamination (along with guest collaborating artists) plan to continue the development of the website and tour the work in its exhibition incarnation both nationally and internationally.

crosSeXXXamination, http://203.35.148.178/xxx/ [expired] A collaborative website project by New York artist Beth Stryker and Australian artist Virginia Barratt, Artspace, Sydney, February 5-28.

Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
Steven Johnson
New York, Harper Collins, 1997

In the emerging discipline of “interface criticism” there is an unfortunate tendency to de-historicise the relationship between people and information spaces. The idea, a la Borges, of the digital world coming into being five minutes ago, with no memory of a past, is a nonsense. In Interface Culture Steven Johnson has impressively treated this cultural amnesia and set the record straight, hopefully once and for all, on the history of the interface. There have been other studies of interface development and design, however Interface Culture is written with such verve and modest authority that it resounds as the most persuasive and engaging work on the subject to have appeared so far.

Interface Culture is thoroughly researched and fluently written. It covers all the familiar bases and offers a succinct account of what could be called the standard genealogy of the interface. This incorporates its founding moments and decisive breakthroughs, the usual suspects, such as Douglas Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland and Vannevar Bush, and their signature technologies, the graphic user interface, Sketchpad and the Memex, respectively. It also outlines the predominant conceptual models of interface design that can be traced back to the late 1960s and the pioneering work done by Engelbart and researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre. Johnson maps out the dramatic, transitional stages and trends within interface design, such as the shift from command lines to windows, desktop metaphors and the principle of direct manipulation which liberated the user from the need to remember esoteric strings of code. In its place the graphic user interface (GUI) offered a more intuitive, visual representation of different modes of operation—it revolutionised the way people conceived of information space by creating an illusion of information as something representable in comprehensible terms, and by allowing users to control the illusion by moving information around (cutting and pasting etc). Johnson also teases out the social and cultural assumptions behind such trends within interface design, quite rightly demonstrating that there is a lot more to the stages of the interface than technological determinism. Drawing on the work of Sherry Turkle, Johnson suggests that the shift from the “fixed position of the command line” to the “anarchic possibilities” of the windows environment traces the route of the subject in Western philosophy, from the breakdown of the unified Enlightenment self to the proliferation of multiple viewpoints, contingency and relativism; the state of being otherwise known as the postmodern condition.

This is not to say that Johnson touts a doctrinaire, postmodernist line, replete with clichés of non-linearity, indeterminacy and fin-de -everything. On the contrary, He is astute and cautious in his development of a critique of interface culture. He clearly has no truck with the cool, aphoristic posturings of the post-literate set, arguing that if a new way of writing is upon us it is not the offspring of cyberpunks or hackers. More specifically, he redresses the default theorising which relegates old media to the dustbin of linearity, and supplants it with the multiplicity of new media, such as hypertext. In the admonitory spirit of Ted Nelson, Johnson refreshingly advances that much web-based writing is “unapologetically linear” and one-dimensional, and is a far cry from the free-form, revolutionary poetics customarily associated with the web. Johnson denounces the theme of “disassociation” as it pertains to hypertext, and elegantly articulates how the navigation of information space is a synthetic, rather than fragmentary act, “a way of drawing connections between things, a way of forging semantic relationships”. In this he has consolidated the emerging field of interface philology, which recognises that the digital age is not a break with the past, but a continuation of it, a transitional moment in the evolutionary drama of the grammar and technology of language.

This is nowhere better illustrated than in the inventive historical links Johnson articulates (he describes Interface Culture as a “book of links”), connections between desktop metaphors and Gothic cathedrals, hypertext and the metropolitan novels of the 19th century. He develops a series of fascinating and at times disarming conceits, in which a remark from the poet Coleridge (“The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable”) becomes an heuristic device for conceptualising the way the interface structures and represents abstract information; or the tumultuous reception of modernist art works, such as Ulysses and The Rite of Spring, and the early responses to the GUI; or more significantly, that the identification of information space is as profound as the discovery of perspective in the visual lexicon of the Renaissance. It is not only that such parallels have the ring of rightness about them, as they are deftly woven by Johnson’s measured prose, but that they fit into a much larger perception of the residual effects of cultural change. While we may no longer live in a world in which the novel, as an art form, fulfils the needs it satisfied in the 19th century (as people grappled with the technological effects of the industrial revolution), its underlying structure, or logic, prevails in the interface, which “performs a comparable service”, namely, of providing intelligible maps of the “virtual cities of the twenty-first century”. The significance of this Johnson makes compellingly clear, observing that the “way we choose to organise our space says an enormous amount about the society we live in—perhaps more than any other component of our cultural habits”. For too long the interface has been delimited as a pointy-clicky way of working with information, when it is more profoundly and more fundamentally a semantic gestalt that has taken many guises over the centuries. The GUI is its most recent manifestation.

Interface Culture is a timely work that makes a vital contribution to current debates about interface design, information space, and the status of literacy in the age of the digital network. But even more than this, it is a wonderful archaeology of remembrance, a testament to the cultural memory of this thing called the interface.

Pillow Songs is amongst the most powerful installations I have experienced. Entering the installation through a light trap I was immediately immersed in a darkened space, an aura of deep blue incandescence emanating from the single light bulbs hovering above three simple beds. As I lay down and my head came to rest on the pillow, an oceanic space rippled by sonic waves rolled out before my closed lids, and began to gently propel me across its textured surface.

I was hearing a subtle blend of the synthesised and the found. Extreme long fades in and out (mostly beyond immediate detection); modulations of pulses and beats, time-signals and thunder; the sounds of a radio tuned to the warbling between stations; a dog barking in the fog of winter dusk; sounds I had not encountered since I lay as a child with my first transistor radio hidden under my pillow long after my family had gone to sleep; drifting in and out of consciousness, hearing a voice, a passage of music, the rain on the roof and the hiss of off-station static.

Aware of the subjective nature of my response, I could also sense the broadly recognisable character of many of these sounds. My dreaming was but a single current stimulated by the stream of the artwork in which I was immersed.

Poonkhin Khut has been working with sound, installation and performance since 1987, and graduated from the University of Tasmania in 1993. Pillow Songs exemplifies his clean, minimal approach. Significantly, Khut makes conscious use of the space between sounds to define their quality, and to animate the role of silence as a sonic texture in its own right. His use of digital sampling and recording enables him to retain a “digital silence”, and this in turn facilitates his manipulation and layering of what he characterises as “wet” and “dry” sounds. Samples are bounced from DAT to computer and back until the right texture is attained, and these tracks are then edited onto CD.

The gallery installation realised an interesting alliance between low and hi-tech in that the computer mastered CDs were played through three conventional CD players programmed to deliver a selection of tracks that were re-mixed each day. These signals were then channelled to each of the three beds. Much of the success of Pillow Songs can be attributed to the consistent strength and individuality of these primary tracks, and the generous acoustic space which Khut allows to exist between the combined tertiary elements. The mix manages to maintain a tension between the mysterious and the recognisable whilst remaining open and suggestive.

Pillow Songs, an audio installation by Poonkhin Khut, Sidespace Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, January 16 – 30

My father played a button-accordion, for ‘old-time’ dances. And he was good. He was a sought-after musician, everyone could dance to his music. My mother was a good dancer. My parents took me to these dances, once a month, and taught me all of them. Occasionally at Christmas my father brings out his accordion. And we all sit around the lounge-room and eat and drink. I think my father should be in this festival. I grew up, in the country, with accordion music and dancing. I also grew up with dark nights outside the Mt McIntyre Hall where the cars were parked, where the fights started.

I always wondered what anguish or despair, caused the punches, the smashed bottles, and the violent speech. I wanted to be in the carpark and the hall at the same time. To see both, as if layered. I think I’ve seen this now. The carpark was dangerous, and the dance-hall wasn’t. A thin wooden wall separated them. In La Tristeza Complice (The Shared Sorrow) no wall separates living and dying, just invisible honour. And this dying is not literal, it’s living death. It’s sorrow. And the sharing of sorrow forms tenderness that is so terrible, so resisted and resented, that it barely exists as that. Still, it does. There’s no denying it, thank god. It’s energy that makes each of the ‘characters’ so full of life that they almost burst. It hurts to watch them play it out. Their bodies take a beating, or, they beat their bodies. It’s brutal, and sensual, to watch. There are awful, funny, scenes, yet one can’t laugh, one forbids oneself (somehow), and here lies the tenuous border.

The pacing of the work is careful. It swings from menacing calm to harsh chaos. Neither are deadly, yet each carries death like a precious weight which lifts now and then, leaving the person in a state of even greater loss, as if death holds cells together, is a friend. And this manifests when the winged break-dancer arrives with his small magic carpet, a silly Hermes with a silly message, a trickster whose one prop is a clue, too literal to be trusted—and someone covers it with broken glass for him to dance on. He’ll dance anywhere, be tortured anywhere. Calm and chaos append each other, one beckons the other. There is no rest, even in sleep. The finely tuned roller-skate segment declares the company’s tough poetics; a sustained poetics that keeps ‘faith’ to the bitter end; faith summoned up by one great indignant sentence: “So, who decided all of that”.

The whole work is composed of tiny, fragile, passing events that infect each other, changing the dynamic and dimension of ‘life’. You see a dozen young beings, together but totally alone, and sure of their aloneness. And this is perhaps Platel’s clearest intention: that despite the goings-on of others nearby, or in real contact, the self insists on its utter difference, its own expression; it cradles its own story like a gift. This is powerfully told when the black girl begins to sing her sorrowful song—“if love’s a sweet passion, why does it torment”—and the transvestite crawls all over her, pulls and bites her, drags her this way and that, covers her face, but cannot stop her song.

La Tristeza Complice, as political performance, respects the self whose screams are reduced to single syllables—no, damn, shit, how, bang—and to brief statements—“I’m Belgian, I’m from Belgium, I’m Belgian”. It’s that simple. The transformed Henry Purcell music (mostly from The Fairy Queen) is played by the ten accordionists from the Conservatoire in Antwerp, the soprano sings, the dancers dance. They all might die, they all might kill. It’s about (if ‘about’ is a fair word) circulating desire (for love and sex). Marguerite Duras wrote of this fierce, sly, worn currency. She also wrote of the gaps within desire and body: “Sometimes they look a hundred years old, as if they’d forgotten how to live, how to play, how to laugh…They weep quietly. They don’t say what it is they’re crying for. Not a word. They say it’s nothing, it’ll pass”. (Summer Rain)

I saw La Tristeza after the opening of the Adelaide Biennial, All this and Heaven too (at the Art Gallery of SA), and before watching the spectacle of Flamma Flamma (at Elder Park). That is, I saw the strong epic black and white texts of Robert MacPherson and the quiet domestic solitude of Anne Ooms’ chairs, lights, and books, and then listened to a Requiem (Nicholas Lens’ Flamma Flamma), and watched the hundreds of children carry their glowing lanterns, and embrace the river-lake, and inbetween witnessed people brutalise and comfort each other. It was like being burned by flames of every intensity, and squeezed to life.

La Tristeza Complice, Les Ballets C de la B and Het Musiek Lod, Playhouse, February 27, Adelaide Festival 1998

Faced, as Jan Lauwers put it in the Festival Forum on design, with the empty screen of the computer, dreaming a starting point, how to enter, how to begin testifying to the disturbance and disruption being caused within me and within the company I keep (strong disagreements abound), faced not simply by any one show but by the sheer monstrous Animal of the Festival itself. Knowing that the moment I enter that first word on the screen I will have made my entrance like a performer onto an empty stage. That breathtaking feeling of actually having to begin the irreversible momentum of the show. Wang Rong-yu, waiting for the rice to begin its unstoppable flow as the eternal wanderers emerge and the red drapes rise. Leda, with the uneasy music enveloping us in the dark, poised to fuck herself with her puppet Zeus, thus beginning the unending human saga of the interplay between eros and death. The American soldier, camera in hand, stepping on to the gravel path outside the Japanese house, about to face the horrors of Hiroshima and with one ejaculation to fertilise a 50 year comi-tragedy of East-West relations. Iyar Wolpe, on the brink of the white cloth stage (screen? page?) of the Bible, opening with those words which are at a soul-point of her race and which seem to speak for so many of the (Judeo-Christian) shows I have seen so far: “My heart is sore pained within me…” It’s there in the names: Burn Sonata, La Tristeza Complice, Snakesong, The Waste Land, Possessed. I appreciated the direct concern in Naomi’s question to Lauwers in the Forum: “Why is your show so painful?” And equally I understood his response (to paraphrase and shorten): “Because the world is a painful place”.

Never was this pain so vivid than when (by chance scheduling) I went, with the wanderers’ song still filling me, to hear the snake’s lament on the destructiveness of power mixed with erotic desire. The very belief system that Songs of the Wanderers, with its final unifying spiral, represented was rent asunder and its loss painfully evident in the disintegrated world of Snakesong. But the need for an aesthetics with which to express this rent and this loss gives rise in the work of both Belgian companies seen here this year to a charged and intense theatricality. It is one which, to use the words of Rudi Laermans in describing Meg Stuart, an artist we saw in the 96 Festival, “inhabits the realm of the uncanny” and is thereby sacred in its own perversely relevant way.

The harmonic completeness of the Taiwanese work, its organic rhythm, with scarcely a step or a move or a shift of tone out of place, the sheer lavish, joyous power of the rice-saturated spectacle, the layers of image and sound are all woven into an impressive, comforting, impermeable texture. It is not a cultural purity that creates the strength and impermeability. The touches of Western modernist expressive dance mixed in with the Eastern ritual journey and the sound track of Georgian folk songs are oddly disjunctive elements. But the artistic force, the accomplishment of the work seemed to me to be one of synthesis. Lin Hwai-min’s previous work Nine Songs is described in the Souvenir Guide as containing “disruptive moment(s)…when the audience is forced to experience a critical estrangement”. I felt no such estrangement in Songs of the Wanderers, from my position in the dress circle watching the map of the journey written into the rice. Here was an example of what Rudi Laermans, in talking from a different angle about the very different work of Meg Stuart, calls an “essential” (stage) image: “these images are so much ‘image’ that they never transform into words…(they) do not affect because of their ‘meaning’ or content, but by their ‘being-an-image’”. And later: “An image cannot be reduced to the metaphorical addition of a number of qualified poses, movements, or gestures. An image always keeps these elements together, and synthesises them into a particular…image”.

The power of a work like Songs of the Wanderers is at times overwhelming, undeniable. But it is for me at one with its limitations. I see it, I hear it, I feel it, I am in awe of it but it remains outside me, choreographed to the point of completion. How do I get in there? Despite Lin’s professed interculturality, this was also a question of cultural difference, of course. Wanderers is at the sacred end of the spectrum. It contains none of the profane late 20th century savvy I witnessed (and recognised) in the Taiwanese work on show at LIFT in London last year. The limitation is not in the work so much as in me—a profane Western voyeur both seduced by and resisting the seduction of Orientalism. I was enormously grateful for the final meditation upon the spiral as time to allow the spell of the work to move through my veins before I re-entered the Adelaide sun to let it sweat out.

Needcompany’s Snakesong/Le Pouvoir demolished all the tenets of artistic form and sensibility upon which Wanderers was based, putting a grenade under the belief in art as a force of synthesis. Snakesong had holes in it open enough to breathe through and deep enough to suicide in. In traditional terms it was undramatic, a-theatrical, inconsistently performed (the acting/performing dualism raised by Keith Gallasch in one of the Festival Forums was here the bloody knife edge upon which the very nature of identity rested), scenographically ‘ugly’, with scant respect for its audience, too loud, too laid back and unresolved thematically. And yet for all this it was liberating, witty, intriguing, confronting, irritating, satisfying, disturbing and with complete respect for its audience’s future.

The image seed from which it evidently grew was that fragment of the Lascaux cave paintings in which a man with a bird’s head and an erect penis lies prone next to the dead body of a bison. What a starting point! There at the birth of Western art is the eroticism of death, the fatality of sex, the paradoxes which have haunted it ever since. Following the opening darkness, the tortuous music and the twisted images of classical myth, the shocking interrogation scene drives hard into these paradoxes with unflaggingly overt histrionics. Did Leda die in sex (the little death) or was her death violent and meaningless. “Did you die (come) together?” The debate powers on and on through double translation. It really matters to them, these investigators, these actors, it is an issue to engage with fully, one important enough to keep chasing through the pain and the boredom, even though they know it is insoluble. It is rare these days to see such raw commitment to an argument on stage. The issue is still crucial enough to make demands on our passions. The myth is still with us, insoluble. We still suffer from it, as the gathering in the contemporary Antwerp scene makes all too clear. The competing egos, the lack of focus, the ache of betrayal, the lack of motive or certain cause, the inability of the characters to work from the heart when the actions needed are so simple and so necessary. The men and the young women are affectless, disengaged, able only to relate through violence and denial. The ‘room’, with its plinths and microphones and objects of a civilisation’s failed history is an empty mix of classical ruins and postmodern kitsch. This is a wasteland of the Millennium. It is little wonder that the extraordinary central woman, whose determination, courage, indomitability and dry dismissive wit is the only whiff of hope in the entire play, ‘dies’ out of it, orders the others off and leaves the mess for us to deal with. Her final wry smile at us is horrifying in its implication.

Needcompany—even the name is a cry for help. “Help me! I’m Belgian!” as the actress in La Tristeza yelled out. ‘Belgian’ in this late 20th century has, through the power of its theatre companies, come to mean ‘human’.

Festival Forum, Design; Songs of the Wanderers, Cloud Gate Dance Company; Le Pouvoir/Snakesong, Needcompany; Adelaide Festival 1998

For a long time I’ve wanted to compose musical scores from bits of text and coloured paper, and stack them on a shelf as a slowly amassing single work, or sentence (called ‘Litter’ perhaps), “as if the logic of fiction is one that pertains to the emotions” (Brenda Ludeman, Visual Arts Program); I’ve wondered what it would sound like, I always wonder what writing sounds like as music, or looks like as dance; and I’d been watching Junko Wada for a while before thinking there was something familiar about her movement, not something I’d seen before, or understood, but something I recognised faintly, or more likely imagined; then it came: she’s writing; it was like watching words come-about, pause, float briefly, and join-up like beads; I didn’t like this thought, I chastised myself for misreading the contorted hands and the calm feet, and the body separated into many parts, all at once; it seemed that each move interrupted itself (like a minor subversion) in its middle so that it was seen, insisted on being seen, and was isolated from what was otherwise fluid; still it persisted, this thought, the horrible ability (want) I have to align various forms to ‘writing’; her body a type of stylus, acute, accurate—each move equivalent to the next—inscribing her dance into me, lightly; the engraving did not occur by harsh cuts, rather by repetitious and concentrated (condensed) strokes; the performance wasn’t about grand vistas, it was some other spatial knowledge: a topology of small dove-tailing details: “(s)he is the worker of a single space, the space of measure and transport” (Claire Robinson, in Folding Architecture).

Junko Wada is not going anywhere (she’s staying put, digging in), there is no journey other than thought (where she was sending me), and this thought is restless and malleable; it is simultaneous thought of here and of that other place so far back there’s no known path; she writes: “back to when I was an amoeba-like single cell”; she’s showing a confined, restricting space, small white empty, to be intricate (to be an architecture folding and unfolding, to be flesh: “Her architecture would be…a local emergence within a saturated landscape” [Claire Robinson]) and endless; that is, the space is strange—in parched geometry there is the naked written and writing body—and this strangeness is left alone by the soundscape of Hans Peter Kuhn; so, therefore, there are two separate works which throughout the performance remain distant (he’s building, she’s building, apart), parallel, creating, for me, yet another space (a third) which belongs to neither, which belongs to the audience (a gift, if you want); the soundscape is as minimal as the dance; and I don’t remember its shapes, instead I remember single sounds, single events–—rain, and to my chagrin the almost too-human ones, his whistling, his voice singing a Marlene Dietrich song, the pouring of the white wine into two glasses, and his footsteps across the floor to where she stood, waiting, and the handing to her of a glass, to toast the idea of ‘ending’ (I liked the music because it did not mark the dance, it did not drive or state, it was comfortable being there, present, and available at will) and this brought me right back, with a thud, to the ‘real’ of human display—to humans performing for humans, in diverse and delicate ways—which chronicles and archives the immeasurable and the unchartable, fleeting fragments (have I told you of the three dresses, red, yellow, blue, of how they worked ‘against’ the body, making its utterance somehow more live, and awkward too?)—and then not so much as ‘noise’ but as ‘objects’ or ‘positions’ in the space where I was, where the watchers were, skirting the dancer’s square, leaving her ‘room’, her work, to her; the third space is a prolonged interval then—where thinking is invited, a thinking between, in this case, movement and sound, or dancing (as it comes from the inside out), and music (as it goes from the outside in); and this making, imagining, of the interval, or plane, by bringing into proximity, but not interweaving, two very considered forms—one that stretches, reaches to the limit, and another that rests, resides with slight tension—collects nowhere else but in oneself (who is saying nothing, while the gathered cells, a universe, are now at the bar taking their first post-show sip, putting themselves in, edging themselves toward, a state of speech [to borrow from Barthes]).

Who’s Afraid Of Anything?, Junko Wada/Hans Peter Kuhn; Space Theatre, March 5, Adelaide Festival 1998

One of the problems of writing about performances is the difficulty of notetaking in the dark. The disruptions it causes to other audience members, its potential to distract the performer, not to mention your own thoughts, are all reasons to avoid it. At the beginning of the festival I bought a pen with a light in it but it’s March 12 and I haven’t used it. Anyway, while you’re writing something down, you risk missing something else. The other difficulty is actually deciphering the notes you make afterwards. It’s like trying to remember dreams. The only words I wrote at the conclusion of Wendy Houstoun’s Haunted Daunted and Flaunted were her final ones. Who knows why I felt the need to write them down. I think endings in the theatre are given way too much importance, like nothing else has happened up to that point. I smiled when Hans Peter Kuhn said in the Forum on Tuesday March 10 that he and Junko Wada worked for a set time on Who’s Afraid of Anything? and when the time ran out, the work was complete. So much for endings.

Anyway the words I thought I scrawled on my program after Wendy Houstoun’s performance were “You can hear the human sound we are sitting here speaking” but looking at the scrawl I found “icnsethehunanoisewersittinghermak” or “I can see the human noise we are sitting here making”. A friend said she thought she heard something about “cities” which just goes to show how imprecise are the twists and turns of memory—more or less the territory that Wendy Houstoun is probing in this remarkable work.

After a festival full of words, my notebook holds a collection of such sentences—impressions, paragraphs scratched over drinks after performances, addresses, snatches of sudden poetry, eavesdroppings, meeting points, restaurants, snippets carried around in my head until I could find a place to write them down, headlines (like the one that appeared the day after the Barbara Hanrahan book was released—“Diary from the Grave” and Friday’s mysterious “Drug Dog in Limbo”. At this stage of the festival there’s an impulse to make connections so today Jenny Holzer and Wendy Houstoun meet on the page.

In note form, Jenny Holzer reads: “Repressed childhood/desire to paint 4th dimension. Art school—attempts reduce daunting reading list distilling books to sentences. Public posters/inflammatory essays/truisms”. (I almost broke my rule and stood up at question time to tell her about Ken Campbell who when he was in Sydney a few years ago performing his show The Furtive Nudist, spent days at the Museum of Contemporary Art writing a list of questions to which Jenny Holzer’s statements might be the answers). “Now installations. Latest work Lustmord—installations of words taking in whole body experience (where the eyes go). Words backwards/forwards/ reflected, juxtaposed with human bones to be picked up and read. ‘Resorted’ to writing, she said, because there are many places it can go but it doesn’t come easily.” Of the many sentences in her presentation I wrote down this one which came from a friend who was assaulted by a policeman: “When someone beats you with a flashlight, you make light shine in all directions”. “Nowadays—romantic inclination—writing text on water—as light—from multiple perspectives.” In Lustmord she writes as the perpetrator, the victim and the observer.

Wendy Houstoun too is all three. Before she enters, a voice from the speakers announces some random violence has been perpetrated on a woman. The voice appeals for witnesses, tells us that an actor will recreate the incident. The work is inspired by the BBC’s Crimewatch. True to life and art after this, my memory of the precise order of events is not sharp. Well, I have sharp memories of incidents. How sharp? Very. Particular movements? No. I’m not a dancer but I’d like to be. Details? I don’t…wait a minute, I remember a sequence where she took us through her dancing life by decades, going way back to the foetal position in 1969. I remember fragments of movements shaking her body. What kind of movements? Well like I said, I’m not a da…but they were unpredictable, unfamiliar, beautiful, no wait, wait, some were memories of other choreographies. I remember there was a Swedish bell dance she had learned which turned out to be incredibly useful, and I agreed with what she danced, sorry, what she said about jazz ballet and the Celtic dance revival. But that makes it sound satirical which is not what I meant to… What do I mean to say? Well the subtlety of… How? Well I remember she said she spent a year moving in two dimensions and how funny she was. But that makes it sound…There was much more. How much? Like I said, all I have is fragments, commentaries on her own body. She let us into her body and showed us her fear. That’s what I said, fear.

Wendy Houstoun is from Manchester, I think. Holzer’s crisp monotone is US mid-West. She is dryly witty, measured and fluid in the flesh. The words she exhibits electronically are short, sharp, sometimes savage. When someone asks her to explain what she means by “Protect Me From What I Want” she laughs and says “I don’t think I can”. Wendy Houstoun’s text is continuous, reminding us just what a physical act speech is. Unlike much dance using the spoken word, here it is not segregated in patches, or voiced-over, or used for interruption or pause. Words are inseparable from her body. She doesn’t enhance them with movement. They are partners. She does little more than speak them as she dances (no mean feat)—speaking of which, how Wendy Houstoun’s bare feet show the shape of a dancing life. And this work could not exist without the words. Without them the wonderful sequence of visual jokes (“Two small movements go into a bar”) would fall flat. The argument from people who don’t like the idea of dancers speaking is that dance has its own meaning and words get in the way. In Wendy Houstoun’s hands, feet and neck, the meanings of both words and movements begin to open up.

On an earlier page of my notebook is one of my first festival experiences, La Tristeza Complice, and as I flip the pages, Les Ballets C. de la B. become the bodies of Jenny Holzer’s “It takes a while before you can step over inert bodies and go ahead with what you were doing”. I wish she had seen those bodies dancing.

Haunted Daunted and Flaunted, Wendy Houstoun, The Price Theatre, March 10; Jenny Holzer; Artists Week Keynote Address, Adelaide Festival Centre, March 11, Adelaide Festival 2000

Why do people begin to cough during silences; do they wait for silence. Why do they want to be heard; are they really coughing. No wonder Saburo Teshigawara includes coughing in this work, I Was Real– Documents. It does define a space, small and sudden, where others can’t be. It marks terrain, which is communal, and yet exclusive, like the “sshh” does.

I was a little anxious about seeing this show. I’d seen it in London and loved it. Here it was even better. I was closer for one thing. But, there was something else, something extra that is difficult to describe: perhaps ‘tougher’ hints at it. Something that defied exhaustion, or passed borders, or dissolved desires.

The work is composed of several distinct parts or movements (like music), which flow into one another. These are bracketed by a beginning which is dark and slow, and an ending which is light, brief, and strangely, falsely, idyllic. Teshigawara uses air, air as material, to make space come about for the body, sculpting it with a relentless and often frantic style of dance that is so full of detail and nuance that it saturates the gaze. Looking changes as one understands that ‘air’ cannot be owned, that it, here translated into ‘moving’, is free. Space itself dances; breath is the material of the constant present and the tense and tension of this fact, as force, creates the next moment (or gives it reason to arrive, as ‘thing’, new and surprising). The bodies of the dancers are distinct and alone on the stage. There is only one time when they touch each other, and then it’s as if, in brief closeness, they establish separation by voice, by calling, screaming. In this particular movement or ‘document’, where the voice is amplified, and at once beautiful and painful, it’s clear that every cell of the body holds memory, and as the body pushes its limits, by repetition and commitment to detail—that in some sense is only the extraordinary possibility of every lived second—the idea of air and breath is put into doubt. I mean, the idea of what each is, as space and time, as language, is questioned. These ‘documents’, as they are shown, side by side, are themselves archives, and are, overall, from another larger archive. Each body, in its isolation, in its knowledge of being only itself, carves a world that is complex, abstract, and delicate.

Teshigawara himself, dressed in white and then black, is compelling; he draws one directly into the dance, to where he is, into his bare fluid aesthetic, into the body he makes for you. Emio Greco is stunning, I hope I don’t have to wait another 12 months to watch him dance again.

Perhaps seeing Documents in the Playhouse, where I was closer to the dancers, made them more ‘real’ and intense. And the experience was overwhelming. I’ve hardly touched the surface of the work, I’ve not mentioned the sound, which is a dimension in its own right, or the costumes, or the projections, or the…

These ‘documents’ pay respect to what it is to be human and to remember and to breathe; and this ‘is’ makes nonsense of wanting to re-define the word ‘sacred’, of wanting to loosen it a little here and tighten it a little there. It too ‘is’.

I Was Real–Documents, Saburo Teshigawara & KARAS; Playhouse, March 11, Adelaide Festival 2000

Wendy Houstoun, British performer and director of dance theatre, is on the move. She returned from teaching in Vienna to perform in a platform of British contemporary dance in Newcastle. She next travelled to the Adelaide Festival, to perform her solo trilogy, Haunted, Daunted and Flaunted. Before that she completed a site-specific commission for the Spitz cabaret club in London and conclude a mentoring project for emerging choreographers at The Place Theatre. Houstoun has been to Australia before, having toured with native Lloyd Newson’s company DV8. She has an affinity with Australians. “People often think I’m Australian”.

Houstoun’s trademark melange of monologue, movement and mood swings, hovers around the fringes of the contemporary dance scene; uncomfortably in the UK, where she is often criticised for subordinating movement to theatricality, more easily in Europe and beyond. In Newcastle she was programmed into the marginal mid-afternoon slot, but still stole the show with the international promoters. Her part time manager has been avalanched by offers for touring. “The Italians didn’t understand a word I was saying”, Houstoun shrugs, “but they still wanted to buy the work”.

Working on the Spitz commission when we met, Houstoun was remarkably chipper about her lack of progress: “That excruciating first step can take ages. One minute of dance can take five days to make”. On her own again, Houstoun is nevertheless clear that solo shows such as the trilogy are not the way forward. “Haunted was a way of breaking with Lloyd,” she admits, referring to the many roles she has created for DV8. “We were in a bit of a trap. We always started from devising and patterns would emerge and we’d repeat them and become sort of mutually dependent. It became hard to change or accentuate our ways of working. I would always end up cranking up the energy to get on the edge and become manic.” The links are not broken however, “Lloyd still comes to have a look at what I’m doing. He can see what is under the work”.

Houstoun is not in any hurry to get back onto the treadmill of international touring. “The trick is to keep free. There’s a degree of ordinariness in my work which I want to maintain. It’s to do with the claims you make for what you do. I want to avoid raising too many expectations. I can still change direction pretty easily.”

She’s at a turning point again: “I’m looking for a more internal way of performing now. I want to make smaller, quieter work. All this expressiveness is a bit juvenile”. The trilogy could already be seen as a first step towards this aim. There are traces of the confrontational characters Houstoun created for DV8, however this work allows a range of personae to take the mike. “I don’t see it continuing”, Houstoun says, “The whole idea of a trilogy was a bit of a joke. It just sort of carried on. The next thing should be quite different”.

Should be. Following Adelaide, Houstoun will work with theatre director Neil Bartlett on a series of performances in British cathedrals. “There will be a choir of 100 people, actors, dancers; anything could happen”. As we discuss the relationship between text and movement in her work, we stray into her experiences as movement director for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Houstoun continues to feed off theatre but reaffirms her commitment to dance as “the best way to get at human interaction. Acting is boring in the end. I get tired of the relationships the actors have with each other, with the director, with the text. They’re always talking everything through. Dancers take direction better, they take on shape without needing to know why”. Directors she admires (and she has workshopped with the best of them) are those who, like Deborah Warner, exhibit, “a light touch”. “Deborah has more of a manner than any specific technique. She leaves a lot of room around things. She’s not subscribing to any school of thought”.

There’s no doubt that the actorly dimension in Houstoun’s work will remain. Houstoun loves words and used them as the starting point for the trilogy. “Words often come way before the music. I often have to switch off, suspend thought to make the movement and to put the two together”. The words she wrote for Haunted were stored away long before the idea of the performance emerged. “I looked at the structure of a few plays. I pinched the odd quote. I’m interested in ways of talking to people, not so much what the words mean, but what they suggest. Speech as resonant of something else.”

In Touch, the short dance film Houstoun made with director David Hinton, there are no words. “A lot of the ambiguity goes out of words in film.” The medium still appeals however, “I enjoy the rigour of film, the way it eats ideas”. The pseudo-documentary she made in 1997, with Hinton again, taught her some lessons. “Maybe Diary of a Dancer didn’t work as a dance film. It was too long, gentle, lyrical. Not slick. It’s genuine. It has helped me to get away from some of the hardness too.”

And Houstoun is back to the impetus behind the steady progression of her career. “I need to negotiate ways to keep on making interesting work.” Whilst she cultivates a self-effacing modesty, it’s clear from the patterns of her career that she is always one step ahead of her current project, retaining the most interesting parts and moving on.

“How do you mature with your work?” she asks searchingly. “Credibility and respect are hard to negotiate.” Yet as the enthusiastic response to the trilogy and the offers of innovative collaborations with directors, musicians and choreographers keep on coming, Houstoun appears short of neither.

Haunted Daunted and Flaunted, Adelaide Festival, Price Theatre, March 10 – 14

Some dance writers make it a point of honour to avoid personal involvement or knowledge of the dancers or choreographic process prior to seeing a performance, hoping that the work might somehow be less tainted by their own biases, and they will be clear of ‘irrelevant’ distractions, more objective, a state counted as desirable and attainable. Indeed, it would be silly to pretend that having seen a dancer’s work over many years, liking their attitude, understanding the process with an intimate kinaesthetic awareness, a viewer wouldn’t enter a performance with certain expectations, a particular focus and set of assumptions, all of which carry a high intellectual charge.

With this in mind, my understanding of Ros’ work is a long one, having, in this particular project—part of her MA honours thesis at UWS—been invited to document over five weeks the three dancers’ internal thought processes, even to intervene by suggesting what they seemed to me to be doing, and requiring them therefore to respond by explaining in words that very intuitional improvisational modus operandi.

So, with the feeling that any ‘performance’ is just a momentary crystallisation in an ongoing process, I watched this particular manifestation. And in fact, the lights, designed with Iain Court’s delicate touch, and the palpable expectations of the audience induced a feeling of closure, pinning down some of the ideas, and making invisible some of the more vagrant possibilities in the work, threads of ideas I had seen before, too errant to become part of this ‘performance’ pattern.

What I have often seen which distinguishes Ros’s work is that its subject matter tends to be open and layered, inviting contemplation. Each performer can be seen not as a technician parading various accomplishments, but as an individual with a uniquely developed personal language and physical demeanour. The motives for movement are different for each of the performers. Even though my ‘outside eye’ might have relied on its ‘dancerly’ experience, in the absence of a studied choreography, I was drawn more often to what seemed like ordinary, if heightened, behaviour, thoughts and feelings and their physical expression, the ‘non-dancing’ character of each, the parts that can get submerged beneath specific styles.

Julie Humphreys, in her dance Telling Stories to the Sky, has a most distinctive improvisational persona. Perhaps it is not her intention, but her dancing seems to draw from a slightly eccentric emotionality, a whimsical, funny, secret shyness, a state of mind that anyone might remember having been in: not feeling sure, being vulnerable, self-conscious, and aware of your own foolishness, in a place where there is no hiding, and no alternative except to be yourself. It is not about epically beautiful feelings or lines, or ‘aesthetics’, and indeed she is not hidden behind any ‘dancerly’ performer’s shell. What you see is Julie Humphreys being really funny, breathing and laughing, sitting with awkwardly folded legs, running, gesturing, looking sideways, communing with something as if she’s watched, being herself, and reminding us about the soft, secret, silly side of being human, in this particular rather difficult and distracting environment, this public exposure called performance.

Gabby Adamik’s solo, Tidal, seems more straightforward in its dynamics. She works not so much with a muscular strength as with a central physical core to her body, undergoing seizures by waves and currents, pulling her to extremes, and back to calm, being thrown around, but clothed in a more indeterminate flesh which plays little part in these internal ebbing tides. Gabby’s is a short, contained and well-formed idea, a strong and supple solo, with a rich, clear texture, a rising-ebbing symmetry.

Ros Crisp’s duet with Gabby, Audible Air, has a similarly uncluttered structure: the dancers commence, widely spaced and obliquely angled, on either side of the stage, moving around and past each other, to change places. There are meetings in this dance, responses, awareness of each other’s presence, self-containment, listening. It has a cooler, less intensely personal quality. You might see only one dancer at a time, widely separated as they are, depending on which side of the space you sit. I was aware of their changing spatial relationships, creating a deep and acutely angled field. The image of a blurred distant figure behind one which was very near and crisply focused, made a strange photographic image, emotionally more removed than the other pieces.

Ros’s solo rendition of Audible Air, opening the program, also works with a quiet physical listening, not so much concerned with perceiving external sound, but with a slow internal cyclic resonance, waiting for the seep and swell of sensation and attendant imagination through the body cavities, through the breath, along axons, charging synapses, waiting, filling and emptying again from her body’s contours.

On one level there is a clear dancerly beauty in her energy and gesture. Her expression has a practised and refined emotional sensibility about it—unlike Julie’s more unravelled quality—which rests easily on a long and established physical practice. If speed, control, flow and precision are not primarily what she is concerned with, those qualities come to work inevitably and extraordinarily, providing a compelling focus for those who might find unsettling any departures from orthodoxy.

In the program notes, she has quoted Claudel:
Violaine (who is blind): I hear…
Mara: What do you hear?
Violaine: Things existing in me.

Omeo Dance Project, Four improvisations directed by Rosalind Crisp: Audible Air, Solo—Rosalind Crisp; Duet—Rosalind Crisp and Gabrielle Adamik; Telling stories to the sky, Julie Humphreys; Tidal, Gabrielle Adamik. Omeo Studios, Newtown, February

In addition to her many solo dance performances in non-theatre venues, Shelley Lasica has developed an extensive repertoire of collaborative works with dancers as well as artists from other fields. In Character X at the 1996 Next Wave Festival she collaborated with architect Roger Wood, composer Paul Schutze and visual artist Kathy Temin. Following her series entitled Behaviour spanning four years and six performance works, a video and a publication, Lasica embarked on a new series of theatre pieces. The first, Live Drama Situation, was shown at the Cleveland Project Space in London last year. The second in the series, Situation Live: The Subject, is a performance about theatrical interaction, loss of memory, coincidence and the subject of space. This time, Shelley Lasica collaborates with dancers Deanne Butterworth and Jo Lloyd, writer Robyn McKenzie (editor of LIKE magazine and visual arts critic for the Herald Sun in Melbourne) and composer Franc Tetaz who works as a composer and sound engineer with artists as diverse as Regurgitator and Michael Keiran Harvey. Situation Live is about what happens in the interaction between spoken, written and movement language.

In Dress, Shelley’s collaborator is fashion designer Martin Grant who created the 10 striking dresses with Julia Morison for the exhibition Material Evidence:100-headless woman at the Adelaide Festival. In Dress we see the way a body behaves and is arranged by the physical habits of clothing. Rather than making a costume for a performance, Martin Grant has designed an outfit that both defines and resists the performance of it. Dress was recently presented at Anna Schwartz Gallery as part of the Melbourne Fashion Festival. RT

Situation Live:The Subject and Dress: a costumed performance will be presented for three nights only at The Performance Space, Sydney, April 15-17 at 8 pm

Melbourne’s very own contemporary dance company Chunky Move will headbutt its new audience at a preview screening on Saturday May 16 at the CUB Malthouse with their new hour-long dance film Wet commissioned by ABCTV, choreographed and scripted by Mr. Chunky himself, Gideon Obarzanek, and directed by Steven Burstow. A cluey collaboration—Burstow is one of a very few Australian directors interested in exploring the interface between arts live and on TV.

In a city full of fancy footwork, Chunky Move aims to do its bit to shift the boundaries of conventional performance in dance. The company’s move from project-base to three-year funding status will allow it to realise works on a larger scale and to reach a wider audience. Let’s hope that it also buys the company some of the time it needs to seriously develop new work. At the Adelaide Festival, companies like Belgium’s Les Ballet C. de la B. made local mouths water with the relative luxury of their work processes—18 months non-stop for La Tristeza Complice. Nurtured over time, the works are developed further over a number of productions. Robert Lepage (The Seven Streams of the River Ota) says he doesn’t write anything down until the 200th performance!

At this stage, the program is looking decidedly chunky. First up will be a remount of their recent work, Bonehead for performances in Melbourne in May following a tour of the work to South America in April. Gideon Obarzanek sees Bonehead as a work about the body as utilitarian being or object. “At one time,” he says, “the body is able to be an hilarious caricature of a vulnerable victim, while at another, it is seen number-crunching frenetically through virtuosic movement combinations, reducing it to a mechanism of bone, sinew and muscle.”Bonehead features some of Australia’s most skilful dancers: Narelle Benjamin, Brett Daffy, Kathryn Dunn, Byron Perry and Luke Smiles and newcomer, VCA graduate, Fiona Cameron. A tour to Germany in June will be followed by a collaboration with Paul Selwyn Norton (UK/Holland) after which the company goes into intensive development for Hydra, a large scale work combining performance and sculptural installation which moves dance out of the theatre and into the pool. Hydra has been commissioned by the Sydney Festival and will tour Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and internationally throughout 1999. In June next year, a new triple bill will premiere in Melbourne including a commission for Lucy Guerin.

Pseudoscience is a kind of halfway house between old religion and new science, mistrusted by both.

—Carl Sagan’s words and The Red Shift’s story. With this latest work-in-progress, Garry Stewart takes the shared spaces between science fiction and science fact and blows them in different directions with an appropriately cosmic movement vocabulary.

The Red Shift in workshop is a series of seven short scenes, some of them using a complex choreographic tool that has led to the creation of original, innovative chunks of movement. Stewart and dancers Bernadette Walong, Richard Seidel, Kate Levy and Elizabeth Thompson worked with Gideon Obarzanek for three workshop sessions, exploring movement possibilities through the strategy known as 9 point improvisation. Stewart explained the methodology to us before the showing. Each dancer—working in their own imagined box with nine points in different spatial planes—moves between the points, in different orders and using different kinds of movement.

The result is sometimes awkward-looking, sometimes fluid, and always interesting; the force of the movement heightened by an often frenetic pace. Stewart seems to have an ability to meld movement forms with a kind of organised anarchy—in The Red Shift he has Seidel spinning on the floor in a new type of breakdancing across the space. A radical pas de deux emerges from the breakdancing solo. Sequences spin in and out of each other to maintain the pace, while slides of ‘alien spacecraft’ and crop circles impose their visual stories on the performance. The dancers are more or less dispassionate—except for the moment straight from Close Encounters when lights beam down upon them and there are a few moments of performance anxiety.

After the showing, Stewart expanded on the choreographic process and some of the problems he and dramaturg David Bonney have encountered. One that is particularly puzzling for him—although a common dilemma for many artists looking to create new and challenging work—is the accessibility of the performance. Stewart was concerned that the story of the piece and the related notion of fictional and factual science barriers blurring was not being communicated to the audience. One audience member thought the slides too directive, instead of allowing the audience to determine the story for themselves. It will be interesting to see how ‘well-supervised’ the piece becomes through reworkings.

The beauty of The Choreographic Centre is its focus on exploration and process above and beyond product. A relief really, especially at a time when federal government arts policy fails to embrace the richness of investigating the medium of performance, or to acknowledge artistic practice as a means of research.

Garry Stewart made reference to this in his program notes, saying “The Choreographic Centre offered the time and space to test out new methods of working, and…ideas which had been satelliting around in my head for some time could finally be put to the test”. It makes sense—give someone the resources of time, space and money to look into even the vaguest conceptual problem, and they’ll work to solve it. The research problems of artistic practice can give rise to innovations which extend that practice, and The Red Shift does offer some interesting, creative ‘solutions’ to continual ‘problems’ like narrative and structure.

Garry Stewart, choreographer, The Red Shift, The Choreographic Centre, Canberra

Code Red was the third in a series of Australian Network for Art and Technology initiated events over the past few years bringing international new media artists and theorists to Australia to engage with Australian practitioners and theorists. The previous initiatives, Virogenesis 1 & 2, curated by Francesca da Rimini, played on the metaphor of viral infection and replication, with international guests, Graham Harwood, Matt Fuller and E. “Gomma” Guaneri, spreading their own strain of subversive politicised commentary on new media culture and production and finding willing hosts and co-conspirators in the Australian new media community.

Building on the successes of these earlier events, Code Red, curated by Julianne Pierce, brought together an impressive lineup of international and Australian-based theorists and artists to interrogate and critique contemporary information culture. Following the theme suggested by its title, Code Red acted as a timely alert or call to arms for the Australian new media arts community drawing attention to the growing commercialisation and state/corporate control of contemporary media and information culture as well as suggesting strategies for intervention and resistance. It is only possible to give a small taste of these presentations here but if your tastebuds are stimulated keep an eye on the ANAT website http://www.anat.org.au/projects where the papers will be going up soon and you can find links to related websites.

In his keynote address, “Strategies for Media Activism”, Geert Lovink (Netherlands) outlined his personal commitment to “cyber pragmatism and media activism” in the face of an international climate of increasing media monopolies, surveillance and censorship. “New media is a dirty business, full of traps and seductive offers to work ‘for the other side’”, he cautioned, suggesting that artists and activists need to develop and defend spaces on the internet which are independent of both state and commercial interests. By way of example he discussed the practice of a number of autonomous organisations in Europe which are working to promote access to and critique of new media.

Jeffrey Cook (Australia) also spoke of the need for techno-activism and the importance of a critical art practice in maintaining “a radical position in the homogenous soup of mainstream media and information”. The imminent prospect of webTV threatens to undermine the most positive and productive feature of the internet, its facilitation of many-to-many communication with active participation by users to a dumbed down space for endless re-runs of sitcoms, commercials and infotainment. Free speech and expression of ideas on the internet are also under threat in Australia from a proposed web rating system that would require ISPs to ensure that all the websites they host carry a rating which will distinguish ‘safe’ from ‘unsafe’ websites. This would allow browsers to lock out ‘undesirable’ sites leading to further marginalisation of much of the more challenging and creative content.

In her presentation, “Luminous”, Linda Wallace (Australia) took a pragmatic approach to the vexed questions of corporate/state funding for artists, challenging notions that corporate money is “dirty” and state money “pure”. She emphasised the fundamental importance for artists of the work itself and “having the space and time and funds to create it”. She drew on her own experience of seizing opportunities in either the state or corporate sector and performing the difficult juggling act of “taking the funds but still having the space to speak freely”.

The final two presentations were by artists. Australian new media artist Brad Miller’s “Art in the Age of Collaboration” discussed and advocated the collaborative art practice that is a feature of much new media work such as Miller’s own collaboration with theorist McKenzie Wark in the production of the CD-ROM Planet of Noise. In “The Production of Visibility”, Cornelia Sollfrank (Germany) described strategies for parodying and subverting the power structures and advertising images of the media, business and public authorities. Using a technique of “over-coding”, she takes already existing media images from advertising and promotional material (a technique she calls “ready-aesthetics”) and subjects them to a process of “concept-hacking” to make visible their latent power-strategies. Cornelia is also a founding member of the German new media performance group Innen who use similar techniques and have successfully infiltrated European computer fairs posing as trade fair assistants handing out mousemats with subversive messages to unsuspecting delegates.

In addition to the main conference, Code Red included a number of artist projects and presentations in The Performance Space gallery. Visiting from Slovenia, Marko Peljhan’s exhibition and performance piece 178 EAST—ANOTHER OCEAN REGION was the culmination of a two week residency at The Performance Space researching Australian telecommunication laws and using satellite technology to intercept transmissions in the radio space above Australia. Part of this research resulted in a guest appearance by Adam Cobb (Visiting Research Fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU, Canberra) and the grafting of a satellite dish onto the roof of The Performance Space. Marko’s performance elicited audience complicity as participants were required to sign a confidentiality agreement stating they would not seek to record or disclose any of the intercepted material they were eavesdropping on.

Also dealing with themes of surveillance and privacy was Australia-based Zina Kaye’s (Humble Under Minded) Psychic Rumble Part 2 which recorded and broadcast over the internet ambient sounds and mutated snatches of conversation from The Performance Space gallery. Another event taking place in the gallery on the day of the conference was an on-line performance The Word: The Wall directed by Ann Morrison exploring the anarchic lives and environments of three virtual characters.

One of the most productive and useful features of Code Red was its facilitation of on-going debate and discussion between conference delegates and participants. Issues raised in the conference itself were followed up on subsequent days with two roundtables. The first (led by Geert Lovink and Australian media theorist McKenzie Wark) focussed on new media theory and strategies for communication and critique, the second (led by Cornelia Sollfrank and Julianne Pierce) discussed cyberfeminist practice and the creation of a ‘global’ cyberfeminist movement, issues that were the focus of the First Cyberfeminist International held during last year’s Documenta X in Kassel.

A Code Red outcome of particular interest to the Australian new media community is the creation of a new Australian/Asia Pacific email mailing list. The list :::recode::: will be hosted by autonomous.org (System X) with support from ANAT and will be a site for critical commentary and debate by practitioners and critics on contemporary new media, online and digital culture as well as providing an outlet for publishing material online. Those interested in subscribing to the list or who want more information should contact the list moderator: owner-recode@autonomous.org [expired]

Code Red was a project of the Australian Network for Art and Technology and The Performance Space curated by Julianne Pierce with support from the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council, the Goethe Institut, ABC Radio and the Arts Law Centre of Australia.

Auditory display? Puzzled faces and a momentary whirring of cogs are not uncommon responses to hearing this phrase for the first time. What it quite broadly refers to is the use of audio in computer systems. But perhaps the spontaneous sense of contradiction thus conjured goes to the heart of what is most interesting in this area: How do you bring together computers, scientists and sound? And why?

As an event the International Conference on Auditory Display, ICAD ‘97, was highly interdisciplinary, bringing together participants from academia, industry and the arts, sporting a plethora of technical knowledges and creative applications—people with backgrounds in everything from computer music to rocket science, all of whom use sound in some way to communicate information at the interface.

This conjunction of audio and computing is interesting because it requires a bringing together of the discrete symbolic operations of computers with the indiscrete resonant operations of sound. Sounds mix in space and overlap in time. The current interest in audio amongst computing professionals and scientists is connected to major changes in how we conceptualise computer capabilities…No longer the box on the desk! Computing is breaking out as an emerging rash of ubiquitous and diverse and much more specialised gadgets and applications. As computing takes place less and less in the other worlds that we picture through our monitor screens, and more and more in our physical environments, sound has an important role in integrating computer functions into physical space.

The relationship between computing and the visual interface however has a particular history which complicates the adoption of audio as an interface paradigm. The development of the visual display to replace punched cards and text printers as the dominant interface for input to and output from computers came from a scientific culture which sought to represent and manipulate discrete symbolic operations of computers directly through the screen which acted as a window on a world which was quantifiably known. The computer screen carries the baggage of ways of looking and thinking and knowing that are as old as writing.

ICAD as a whole attempted to reconcile the contradictions inherent in the relationships between computing science and sound design by creating a framework for addressing the cultural problems of bringing together such a range of disciplines. So too the work demonstrated and discussed on the whole attempted to bring these paradigmatically divergent modes together.

Sessions included a huge range of approaches. Some used the properties of sounds and their capacity for providing background awareness or spatial information as enhancements to existing data zones, such as a presentation by Beth Mynatt and Maribeth Back on work they are doing on Audio Aura: a lightweight audio augmented reality which used thoughtfully designed sounds to enhance awareness of workplace activity and interaction. At the other end of the scale were presenters bent on attributing absolute empirically proven meanings to certain kinds of sound events; these tended to make very blunt assumptions about the representational meanings of sounds such as failures to distinguish in a meaningful way between, for example, the sound of a real musical instrument and a badly synthesised midi equivalent. In reproducing sounds, the apparatus of recording reproduction and the space in which the sound occurred, as well as the space in which the sound is replayed, all affect the quality and meaning of the sound.

To balance the sometimes simplistic approaches to the material meanings of sounds, a number of special sessions were organised to introduce a diversity of sound art and design issues to the predominantly technical scientific community. An after-dinner panel comprising Paul deMarinis, Ed Osborn, Tim Perkis and Bill Viola presented a range of perspectives on sounds, silence and listening. Paul deMarinis discussed a history of the sounds which have signified silence from the soft introductory passages of eighteenth century orchestral music to the line noise of telephone systems, sounds which indicate an immanent listening space. Tim Perkis gave an interesting talk on different levels of listening attention, proposing a particular mode of not listening, or not listening with conscious attention as an important and valuable listening mode for sound workers to consider. Osborn and Viola discussed their work. On the last night, delegates were treated to Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening experience in which the audience performed for the first 40 minutes—a strategy which created conditions for a particular kind of open listening for Oliveros’ following accordion performance. By contrast, in the closing session of the conference, sound designer Mark Mancini demonstrated sound design techniques from Speilberg blockbusters and Ben Burtt’s classic work on Star Wars.

It seems inevitable that the convergence of sound and computing will change cultural perceptions of both computing and sound. Perhaps the increased use of audio in computing and the dispersal of computing from the box on the desk will bring different ways of listening and knowing into play in the day to day use of computers.

The sheer diversity of ICAD and the seriousness with which it addresses the complexities of such an interdisciplinary event make it an important contribution to these shifts in the culture of computing.

ICAD ’97, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto November 2-5 1997. ICAD ’98 November 2-4, hosted by the University of Glasgow’s Department of Computing Science; queries icad98_info@santafe.edu. ICAD website http://www.santafe.edu/~icad

The idea of comparing Twyla Tharp and her new company Tharp! with Russell Dumas’ new work, Cargo Cult, makes sense, firstly in terms of their shared influences—both have continuing and evolving relationships with ballet and the American avant-garde—and then the way those influences have been quite differently deployed.

Dumas’ artistic directorship of Dance Exchange began not so long after leaving Twyla Tharp’s first company and the rich American environment of the 70s. Since then, he has developed Dance Exchange as an ongoing and expanding network (both national and international) of dancers and other artists. Tharp’s focus seems somewhat narrower than it used to be, now firmly in the territory of mainstream American ballet, with her current company of all-new “non-professional” dancers.

It’s been said about both of them that, while it’s taken people many years to appreciate the kind of work they offered, when it finally happened, it wasn’t the work that had changed, but the audience. It was Tharp’s early work of the 60s and 70s that made her reputation: the detailed and complex choreographic exploration bringing a provocative sense of combat into a warm-fuzzy new dance environment. But the programs brought to The Sydney Festival, while resting on that reputation, seemed largely to be made of different stuff, and one might wonder whether the audience’s youth and tumultuous applause was for the work or the reputation, given that it is unlikely they had seen work made 30 years ago.

Dumas’ Cargo Cult, on the other hand, was built entirely from the original—being an accumulation and development of material which has been worked on over the years by several generations of dancers since his directorship began.

Something else which is often said of seminal artists (including Twyla Tharp and Martha Graham) is that the dances they choreograph are designed to make better dancers. In other words, their dancers do not train first in order for the choreographer to come along and use that training to make their dances. Instead, the dancers train by developing and embodying ways of being and thinking about the world directly from the choreographer, and this feeling about movement is the actual ‘technique’. That’s the theory, anyway.

The title of Dance Exchange’s new work, Cargo Cult, is not mere fancy. It says something about culture and its structure, and particularly our cultural history, and how we have often transplanted ideas from the place where they originated into our ‘foreign’ context. Our theatres are built to house international artists, whose ‘product’ we ‘acquire’ without understanding the reason it has developed the way it has. We mimic the aesthetics without understanding the cultural infrastructures which create them, and in our lack of understanding the ideas become cultish and degraded, being cut off at the roots. Most of Dumas’ dancers have been required to study overseas, not just the ‘steps’ or ‘styles’ of particular artists, but the cultural contexts in which those artists create their work, to find out how and why the ideas which we might have cherished for generations, have evolved.

The eight dancers in Cargo Cult bring not just their phrases and steps to the work, but individual processes. While material is drawn from a shared choreographic history of Dumas’ previous works, and a common physical understanding, the dancers’ ages and professional backgrounds vary greatly. Material is worked in such different ways in the three almost simultaneous duets and two solos, that each seems like a separate line of thought expressing distinct individuality, while retaining a deep aesthetic unity.

Cultural embodiment is, in part, what Cargo Cult endeavours to explore. At one point, we see Cath Stewart’s soft, pouted lips and up-tilted, relaxed jaw whispering, and although we can’t hear the words, we know it is French because the feel of the language is clearly visible. In fact, Stewart’s entire 50 minute solo, including this snatch of speech, was created in France amidst a polyglot group of people in which features of cultural difference and similarity were of great import. Perhaps it’s drawing a long bow to say that just as a specific cultural context provides a matrix by which language and feeling is understood, so does the context in which dance is made. But the point is that it is the embodiment of context in which feeling and gesture develop together which goes towards creating more interesting dancing than simply learning imported steps, or laying them on culturally untuned bodies.

The imported artistry of Tharp! could be a case in point. Critical comment was mostly luke-warm: too clean, too balletic, too naive, too commercial, all of that. Not what we have come to expect from Tharp. Unfortunately I was unable to see the second program which featured probably the two more interesting pieces, the oldest work, Fugue, and the newest, Roy’s Joys, in which her old style was reputedly more in evidence, although ‘compromised’ somewhat by the dancers’ youth.

People said it wasn’t the dancers’ fault that the works lacked substance—especially the three pieces in the first program, Heroes, Sweet Fields and 66. Must it have been the choreography then? The publicity for Tharp! reminds us constantly that these dancers have ‘raw’ talent, chosen from schools rather than professional circles, which presumably means they have an as yet unadulterated ballet school training, and are young enough not to have developed injuries, affectations or idiosyncrasies which need to be worked around. They also probably do not have the depth of experience to understand how to play with rhythm or movement so that it comes alive, or to be able to interpret action in any way other than through a foursquare ballet school demeanour, which flattens choreographic nuance, should it exist, into the prescribed patterns for which ballet schools are famous. And if the dances have been designed to make them more interesting dancers, it will take a few more years yet.

Certainly it seemed Heroes was made like a well-crafted demonstration work for graduating dancers, with high legs and multiple tours abounding, of which the drive and execution were impeccable. It may be mere hearsay that Tharp once said you know that you’ve grown up when you have no more heroes. In this case, the heroes she gave us were a team of three spotless, epically unmoved young men against whose torsos young girls hurled themselves mercilessly. Perhaps it was simply a comment about youth.

Sweet Fields and 66 both made what I interpreted as unmistakable references to some particularly American cultural icons. Shaker hymns, and simple vocal chants in open fourths and fifths accompany the short dances in Sweet Fields. To say this work is simple is not just a polite way to say nothing is going on. A pale circular spotlight underpins the symmetry of pairs in processional patterns and the simple walking steps of a folk tradition. Running, rolling, leaping and rhythmic variations in lines, squares and circles provide the bare structure which seeps through at the bottom of a transparent filmy balletic style and a brief touch of Graham; an aged brown filigree pinned to the preserved bones of tradition.

66 on the other hand, went for the bluster and chintz of popular Americana: Route 66, Buster Keaton, Sunset Strip, Hollywood musicals, Disneyland, the ‘coolth’ of vibraphone, denim and basketball, too absurd for words.

But then, one might say to oneself, this is our Twyla! She, a choreographer capable of being in full control of what she wants us to see, must be creating something this facile for a reason. But what, if not to point out that these are American traditions born of a very particular cultural climate? This is not Europe, and not Australia, even though we once adopted much of the imagery as our own. Now it all seems faded and tacky, and the dancers’ youthful slickness is unpersuasive. Perhaps it’s just that Tharp is sick of being a hero, and has opted for the more substantial comforts of fame.

Cargo Cult, Dance Exchange, The Performance Space, December 1997; Tharp!, the Capitol Theatre, Sydney Festival, January 20-25, 1998

• The once and future Premier launches extensions to the Dancehouse (Carlton) space. There is indeed some truth in the glorious statement with which he concludes his proceedings: “I am the Lord of the Dance” (sic). If Chunky Move thinks it’s autonomous, take note.

• The launch is followed by a showing, seating guests with pillows on the floor. The once and future Premier gets a sore arse, complains bitterly in the stalls.

• Between the rhetoric and the dream, is a
place of hard work, lonely hauls, less funds. Sometimes, not even a pillow. Funding in Victoria has been so draconian that over the last six or so years, middle-range companies and spaces have folded, practitioners sat and wept as some of Babylon’s multifarious voices died. In 1996, needing a new director and perhaps new criteria in order to survive, Danceworks called for expressions of interest to see in which direction they might move. At that time, the Board invited a limitless submission of ideas on how the company might metamorphose (into a production facility; towards performance…). It seems they couldn’t then decide, asking Helen Herbertson to hang on as caretaker for another two years. With the appointment last month of Sandra Parker as AD, the company now seems intent on consolidating its identity as a group focused on the production and development of dance. Hopefully, she’ll please the still-incumbent Lord.

Parker, whose work as dancer and choreographer has been seen at Green Mill, PICA, WAAPA, VCA, Tasdance, Vis-a-Vis and Next Wave, and includes collaborative work in Australia with filmmaker Margie Medlin [in absentia, March 96] and in New York with Shelley Lasica, is planning a year focussing on dance craft, with less emphasis on multimedia development than in her previous work. Her links in choreographic thinking with makers such as Lasica is apparent in Two Stories, an architectural piece shown at the red-brick shell Economiser Building in November. The four dancers—all quite recent graduates of VCA—are technically proficient in a space that lends itself to abstract contemplations across spatial planes. Two neon-edged, black with red-bordered squares mark the two “stories”, which are zones of physical exploration of relationship to time, pattern, and space rather than narratives of plot or character-line.

Whilst this has the feeling of a major work, I found the piece cold, despite the very fine lighting by Ben Cobham and competently-structured electronic score by Amelia Barden. These features did not distract from an essentially neutralised dancer presence only occasionally, and troublingly, disrupted by deep-breathed bodily feeling. Particularly problematic was the inconsistency of embodiment between the male and female dancers’ bodies. Suddenly, in the last quarter of the piece, David Tyndall’s dance is infused with muscular bite and personality. The work speaks through a potentised being. Thereafter, there are glimpses of this in one or two of the women dancers. The inconsistency gives the clue to perhaps an unresolved relationship between personal and abstract, or, alternatively, the potential in future works for explosive choreography.

I find similarities between this work and Lasica’s Situation Live for two dancers. A similar exercise in dance architecture (though in a space one-fifteenth of the size), this piece also explores human interrelationship, in an odd combination of extension and stasis in the dancers’ bodies. Amongst intriguing squarish shapes, edgings, lifts and slides, steppings and rollings patterned into well-structured configurations, the dancers exhibit a consistent and strange angularity. Their rod-like shoulders and contained upper ribs somewhere need release. Abstraction is not cold per se, but becomes such in the context of tight (or uninhabited) bodies.

In one of the segments, the two dancers armwrestle as if on both ends of a Chinese torture-stick—an interesting moment which hints less translucently at the work’s stated source in a scripted scenario by Robyn McKenzie about relationships. For the most part, however, the idea of a text “behind” the work is both misleading, and a paper tiger: as in Two Stories, the narratives are based in physical and textual interrelationship, here pocked with rigidities which detract from the success of the abstractions.

The fabrics of the dancers’ costumes provide nice antitheses: sleeved tops and fitted skirts in contrasting full-blown floral and 60s abstract lines and stripes. This image is a successful working on the difference and tension between passion and abstraction, which the choreography might have reflected elsewhere. Francois Tetaz’ Balinese-influenced electronic score likewise develops its own counterpoints between the developing forces of texture versus melodic contour.

Helen Herbertson’s Danceworks swansong was to curate the December season at Athenaeum II, recalling three current or previously New York-based Australian dancers to present new works. Each shows a distinctly dry New York flavour, with the occasional spice of blarney. The programme is satisfying overall, but intriguingly poses questions to do with immediacy and residue: what impacts, and what holds over after viewing.

I am struck by how much each dance suits one or other of the dancer’s (never the choreographer’s) bodies better. In each piece, this is a surprise, denoting the importance of collaboration, of seeing and exploring, sculpting and training in long term partnerships between performers. This is surely one of the principles of ensemble and sustained work in theatre and dance, which in Australia is becoming so difficult to maintain.

Rebecca Hilton’s House, invigorating and quirky, shows a hip sensibility and independent mind with nonetheless a concern parallel to Phillip Adams and Lucy Guerin with dance bodies, dolly bodies, music-box girls and molls. Hilton’s choreography perhaps mocks the confines of house, family and home by playing rebelliously with catwalks and waltzes, shivas and leather-rebels, with leaps and jumps that square the stage. Bodies trick each other, as limbs refuse to catch but make a space to loop another through. Adams’ Grey Area is also athletic—Hilton especially revelling in the work’s muscularity—but distracts me with its carrying of chairs and sorting of objects, reliant on furniture to turn its humour. I feel there’s an urban joke here failing me (or the fabrics fail my fancy). Despite the sludge of white noise between scenes, the chair-edges hold me too surely in a dance piece whose title and envoy means to focus on the speechless in-betweens.

Geurin’s Robbery Waitress on Bail (with a new sound score replacing the one used last year in Sydney) works more with characterisation than the other two. Initially, this quality makes me like this piece the least, although such a linear narrative tends to make it, initially, the easiest to recall. Ros Warby in particular infuses her characterisation of the waitress caught in the act of faking her own kidnap with her boyfriend with a sullen immaturity, rocking and hugging her hips as if in moral exclusion of a rich and judging world. Her and Guerin’s uniforms are tight and short; they blow bubble-gum in the face of the waitress’ role of availability. It is these held images which intensify in memory: rocking against the huge Athenaeum walls, two small figures in huge blank spaces. Extracts from the source news story projected onto small suspended screens, whilst not a particularly likeable device, nonetheless amplify the contrast between such concentrated news abbreviation and the vacuum in which daily transgressions are dared.

The ghosts of ballet are teased and prodded within these three works, alternately stroking and grating against the way movement in our culture is codified. Such spirits are as potent in their own way as the ghosts in Asian dance traditions which Arthur and Corrine Cantrill evoke in their short film of a Balinese dance. Their Moving Statics programme—one day in a well-curated and important film component to Dancehouse’s bodyworks festival—seems concerned with capturing either the body-intelligence with which a performer ripples into shape from one moment to the next (close-up footage of mime artist Will Spoor); or, ancestral spirits infusing ritual music and movement (single-frame time-exposure footage of a Ramayana ritual dance); or, the way the retina itself imprints a sequence of images and constructs meaning from a composite of expectations. Any looking is ghosted by memory and such composing of meaning; Dancehouse’ dance lumiere component lets film technique further expose dance to this process.

Although one can see the Cantrills’ curatorial logic, the other pieces in this afternoon do not match the quality of their own work. Christos Linou’s self-portrait shadow piece shows little structural invention; his Animated Doll film fetishises movement and confounds “wonderment” into eminently forgettable, breakable parts. John Harrison’s film forgets that Kali is goddess of creativity as well as of destruction, obsessing with dark swirlings and black eyes. His acid bathing of film-stock creates interesting ghost-effects, but is relentlessly one-sided; and no-one can convince me that blasting human eardrums with intentionally bad-quality sound can ever effect anything of symbolic value.

In a workshop context, it was nice to see where Rosalind Crisp’s work has developed from her solos into a two-hander at the Double Dialogues conference, Theatreworks. Partnering another dancer seems to have released a different spirit in her work. Crisp cites a workshop with American Lisa Nelson (at Sidetrack’s CPW8 last year) which challenged and freed her previous focus on personal emotion, with the result that Julie Humphreys seemed to take over Crisp’s usual persona, leaving Rosalind free to stride the stage like a watching angel, animating the strings of space with a kind of fully-embodied detachment that seemed to carry even more power. At times, I thought I was watching Rodin’s l’homme arme crossing the stage.

The conference itself was full of the awkwardnesses, disjunctions and non sequiturs that happen when practitioners start to theorise and theorists at times introduce practitioners without a clue as to how they engender work. That said, some fine working and speaking was heard and shown in the corridors between conclusions, and edges (thank god) remained frayed. Mark Minchinton, in his keynote address, debunked the keynoting put upon him, and insisted that the point of any analysis, or indeed, of any interdisciplinary activity, is to poke, prod and stir and that under no circumstances should performing arts research forget about fun. Minchinton spoke, teasingly, about the necessary teasing between the two fields of play and analysis (twin propellants of creative making), and positioned himself like a fierce but amiable and protective lion on the portal to this Dialogue.

The conference event reminded me that the moat is often more powerful than the castle. Let’s cushion no blows: both launches and talk-fests can lose the point. Though dance tugs at the lords, no-one can really lord the dance. Pillows or not.

Two Stories, choreographer Sandra Parker, The Economiser Bldg, November 25; Situation Live: The Subject, Director/choreographer Shelley Lasica, La Mama, Nov 12; Return Ticket, works by Rebecca Hilton, Phillip Adams, Lucy Guerin. Danceworks season curated by Helen Herbertson, Athenaeum II, December 14; Moving Statics, curated by Arthur and Corrine Cantrill, Dance Lumiere, Bodyworks 97, Dancehouse, December 7; Double Dialogues: Lines of Flight, Deakin University School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts/School of Literary and Communication Studies/Theatreworks conference, Theatreworks, St Kilda, December 5.

A boy stares out to sea from a high sand dune, thinking, waiting, ready for action in his commando-style jumpsuit. This is serious play. He signals with obscure gestures to a figure on the beach (he plays all the roles), arms and limbs flying in an ‘action man’ display of skill. The figure on the beach bolts, twisting and spinning as he runs. The camera work in Boy (UK) choreographer Rosemary Lee, director Peter Anderson, takes us into an imaginary life, small hands fluttering out codes, epic slides down the side of a dune. Between close-up and long shot we can piece together gesture, intention, space and terrain in this beautiful depiction of the intensity of child’s play—the choreography remains true to the unthought, incipient actions of childhood, and the direction privileges each moment with grand, almost monumental shots.

This short film was one of the international dance video/films that made up Videosteps, curated by Michelle Mahrer and part of Leisa Shelton’s Intersteps programme at The Performance Space. This event also included the launch of the Microdance films. What people at the screenings saw was a kind of map of the interface between dance and film, two points which, speaking cinematically, could become ‘documentation’ and ‘cinema’. This neat binary of mine grew out of a belief that the utilitarian use of film/video for the creation and recording of dance, was a type of primitive practice in relation to recent examples which engage in the technical and historical aspects of film, along with the dance as subject.

An example of this ‘primitive’ practice within Videosteps would be Douglas Wright’s Ore (New Zealand), directed by himself and Chris Graves, a film that for me, marked a point around which the other films could be placed. Ore is a film of Wright’s solo from Buried Venus (1996) and if you’re talking documentation, this is a fine example. The virtuosity of this curiously Nijinksyish dancer is highlighted by some great editing; the intention of the film is clear as you find yourself marvelling, striving to comprehend. (Where’s that pause button?) Ex-Wright dancer Brian Carbee comments that the film cannot compare to the live performance, cannot be more than a mediation which is devoid of the magic of a physical presence. I suggest that this style of dance film must always fall short as a ‘replacement’ in comparison to those films which actively negotiate the filmic form. Then Carbee brings me face to face with my own bias, asking—but how can film be truer to dance than to represent a dance performance to the best of its ability? For a dancer, this may well be the fundamental aim. It is dance, he points out, which is expected to bend towards this monolith of the 20th century arts; it is dance which is adapting to film. Meanwhile, I feel myself slipping between two worlds, but decide to stick to my guns and argue that “it’s a two way street”. There is a definite satisfaction in those films which embrace the whole—the dance, the filmic expectations and possibilities, the movement both on the screen and of the frames.

A certain tendency in dance film to patch together dramatic sections and discrete dance sequences performed to the camera became clear after seeing the films Effort Public (Germany), Vertigo Bird (Slovenia) and The Father is Sleeping (Microdance) in this programme. Effort Public expresses the class struggle with the effort of dance becoming the main physical metaphor. Men throw and catch each other like sides of meat in an industrial, dark space where the dance can never stop, always in frame, moving off, or in the background. Filmic ‘tricks’ such as a play on reflections in a pool of water and the tracing of a chain reaction across objects, sit outside the drama which is located in the movement. The film really only frames and selects the dance, the factory space acting as a ‘set’. Vertigo Bird, choreographer Iztok Kovac, is alarmingly similar, set as it is, in “the labyrinth of mining pits” in the town of Trbovlje (program note). The drama is established through the shots of workers moving around with the dance sequences remaining separate, except for a scene where the workers act as an audience, the aim of the work to seek “a connection between two worlds” becoming clear. Here we slip into a documentation of ‘audience’ response. In The Father Is Sleeping, choreographer Matthew Bergen; director Robert Herbert, everyday gestures between father and son develop into a new and touching movement language, but a separate dance sequence by new performers at the height of the action fails to make contact with the central drama.

Then there were cases where The Dance was the sole subject driving the work and we perhaps came close to that balance between the two elements, the film ‘showing’ the dance as only it can—doing the dance created specifically for it. The most remarkable in this regard was Nine Cauldrons (Microdance), director-choreographer Trevor Patrick; co-director Paul Hampton, which can be summed up in the word performer Trevor Patrick chose to describe his cinematic encounter—“seductive”. The camera is in the thrall of the moving body—every detail from fabric moving across skin to the twist of an ankle is rendered with an obsessive gaze, the ‘eye’ now dangerously close, now taking in the body, costume, movement and all. The alchemy of the filmic process transforms and reinvents.

In opposition to this harnessing of technology in the service of the choreography is an indulgence in filmic techniques at the expense of choreographic invention. Lodela (Canada), is an uncanny visual fantasy of epic proportions, memorable for the shimmering void of white back to back with a similar void of black. Two figures mirror each others’ movements in these opposing ‘worlds’ but the movements add little to the black/white, life/death oppositions established visually.

Like Boy, Reines D’un Jour (Switzerland) takes us into a singular world and acquaints us with it through movement that seems organic to its context. If film has an historical association with narrative fiction, both Boy and Reines D’un Jour negotiate this history while also accessing the avant-garde possibilities of a non-text based short. The Swiss film is located in the Alps and draws on romantic cinematic imagery, from lush green landscapes to bodies tumbling down a hill to rustic cottages and village feasts. The joi de vivre of such scenarios is given free rein in the ecstatic bodies of the dancers who move through the landscape, not as locals, but as visitors responding to the environment. Social dancing is intertwined with other dance; men challenge each other, women lean and support one another, couples tease each other. And all without a trace of irony—completely disarming.

It perhaps confirms Eleanor Brickhill’s concern that “the good will” is gone from audiences (RealTime #24)—in this case Sydney dance audiences—that people didn’t seize an opportunity to see some great international and local dance film/video. An interest in the dance film genre is not imperative. For dance, the most elusive of the performing arts, the opportunity to transport performances from around the world to our own theatres is like a small miracle.

Videosteps, curated by Michelle Mahrer in Leisa Shelton’s Intersteps, The Performance Space, Sydney, November 1, 8 & 15, 1997

There is, it might be argued, a kind of ‘techno-orientalism’ surrounding new technologies when thinking the machine, soft-space and the digital-image in the western psyche: a pairing of high end technology with Asia in the western imaginary, if you will, however empirically inaccurate.

It gives rise to a ponderous situation where westerners operate with a technology and therefore a thinking which they do not ‘own’. When using new imaging technologies in the visual arts—if the modernist Greenbergian axiom around form and content and a Benjaminian assertion regarding the complex form of training imposed by modern technology can be indulged—what results is a kind of ‘blank canvas’ at the heart of thinking the digital image.

It was in this light that encountering the First National Electronic Art Exhibition at the Malaysian National Gallery in Kuala Lumpur raised particular considerations. If granted the license to think speculatively for a moment, one might wonder if the aniconic formulation of the image particularly in traditional Muslim art as it influences contemporary artists working with multi-media technology in Malaysia, does not somehow afford a greater propriety towards the digital image (if this is not to engage in a kind of [techno-]orientalism itself of another order).

The confounding of historical concepts of representation and analogy in western philosophies of the image are well documented in relation to the digital image (Binkley, T “The Digital Dilemma”, Leonardo, Supplemental Issue, Pergamon Press, Japan, 1997). What marks eastern philosophies of the image, particularly within the Islamic tradition, is the aniconic as opposed to iconic relation to the image that exists in the west. The aniconic are those images and symbols relating to deities that are non-figurative or non-representational.

Within Islam, Allah is inexpressible therefore non-representational. “No vision can grasp Him…” (Qur’an [Koran], 6:103). The spiritual order determines the aesthetic-formal order. Stylisation techniques exercised in calligraphy, illumination, geometric pattern and arabesque form the foundations for a tradition where the artwork in fact functions as a ‘cosmogram’. Not only does the aniconic concept of art in Islam make for an art practice arguably predisposed to a knowledge and use of the digital image—“knowledge and use” here in the Deleuzian sense of ‘savior’ which is an ability to make active, “a knowledge by description”, “a competence to produce” rather than reproduce (Deleuze, G. Negotiations, Columbia University Press, USA, 1995). But the ‘cosmogrammatic’ nature of the artwork when applied to the digital image overrides criticism often raised in relation to the electronic image in the west: that it is slick, glossy, dazzling, decorative, all surface and therefore superficial.

Surface ornamentation is the core of spiritualising enhancement, not a superficial addition in the Islamic concept of the artwork. This is not to add foreign elements to the shape of the object but to bring forth its potential, ennobling the object. “Through ornamentation the veil that hides its spiritual and divine qualities is lifted.” (Esa, S. Art and Spirituality, National Art Gallery, Malaysia, 1995) In Islam, beauty is a divine quality, God is beautiful and loves beauty. Beauty in art is that which generates the sense of God. Since beauty is a divine quality its expression has to be made without showing subjective individualistic inspiration. There is therefore no distinction between the material and spiritual planes. In creating beauty the artist is engaged in a form of spiritual alchemy and in doing so the soul of the artist undergoes a process of spiritual cleansing. This raises some very different notions around the artwork than those generated in the west around questions of abstraction, the sublime and the beautiful.

This is also not to say that the works exhibited during the First Electronic Art Exhibition in Kuala Lumpur were traditional in terms of technique or concepts. Far from it. The works that drew upon traditional methods or concepts did so with a rigorous critical distance and engagement. Nor were the traditional methods and form that were used and conceptual frameworks employed exclusively Muslim. Hindu, Taoist, animist and Christian traditions and metaphysics also come into play in Malaysian culture. But most contemporary artists in Malaysia have trained under a western art history syllabus with the majority, it seems, completing graduate degrees in the west. So there is certainly an engagement with western art history and art markets but often put to work in relation to eastern systems of ideas.

Mohd Nasir Bin Baharuddin’s four monitor video floor piece, for instance, works precisely in this manner. It encourages a deceptively pious response, although for a westerner one is even less sure why. The viewer is ceremoniously positioned by the work—submitting to its lure, sitting submissively at its feet, as it were, encircled by silent monitors across the soft opaque screen of which, runs a fluid arabic calligraphic script. The effect is mesmeric and contemplative. However as the artist, who is also the curator at Gallery Shah Alam, points out to a Muslim observer there would be questions as to why the monitors containing sacred script have been placed on the floor, indicating a lack of reverence. The script, however, is not from the Qur’an but Jawi, an arabic script spoken in Bahasa Malaysian (which is also written in a roman script) and which in fact many Malaysian Muslims do not even read themselves. And the text, far from being the word of god is everyday diary extracts. Baharuddin’s trick is a gentle one and works along side the temporal enquiries of the work, which are figured so that the piece never ‘begins’ as such. An allusion perhaps to the ‘awan larat’ (arabesque), a pattern so interconnected that it is impossible to trace the beginning of each motif. Within the installation the viewer is placed in one physical position but one which triggers many different and simultaneous readings of the position. The space in the midst of the monitors is also the space of the traditional cross-legged village story-teller, but the ‘audience’ of monitors tell story fragments that becomes the viewer’s, the ‘centre-piece’s’ own, confusing the places of teller, told and tale.

Hasnul Jaimal Saidon’s CD-ROM work, Ong (slang for “hot streak”), from his solo show Hyperview, was shown along with his I’m trying to Locate, a video-projected, corner piece that creates the optical illusion of a three dimensional space out of a flat wall. The black and white piece uses Chinese pictograms, English and Bahasa scripts over a textured electronic weave evoking traditional Songket. Textiles, historically have a sacred and ceremonial function as does calligraphic script which is said to be “the divinely written pre-eternal word which brings the faithful into immediate contact with the Divine Eternal Writer of fate and from there even profane writing has inherited a certain sanctity.” (Islamic Calligraphy, Leiden, 1970) This work and the others exhibited, while either overtly concerned, less so or not at all, with contemporary interpretations of traditional Malaysian cultural forms, never dip into parochialism. The works could function in the context of any international gallery in addressing the medium to be read along side works by Gary Hill, Mary-Jo La Fontaine or Eder Santos.

Hasnul, who also heads the Fine Arts Programme at the University of Malaysia, Sarawak, curated the exhibition with Niranjan Rajah whose on-line work The Failure of Marcel Duchamp/Japanese Fetish Even! is available on http://wwwhgb-leipzig.de/waterfall/ [link expired]. The piece is a parody of Duchamp’s Etant Donnes which, in Rajah’s words, interrogates the ontology of imaging while marking the problem of cultural constituencies on the internet.

The historical component of the exhibition saw the mounting of a posthumous retrospective of the work of Ismail Zain, a veteran in the field of computer art. Ironically computer art was being produced by Zain and others in Malaysia before video art, which did not come until after computer art had been explored and developed. In producing collages reminiscent of early political photo collage, Zain said of his work “in digital collage there are no harsh outlines. The new medium is much more malleable, like clay”. (Noordin Hassan interviews Ismail Zain, Ismail Zain retrospective exhibition catalogue, National Art Gallery of Malaysia. 1995)

Ponirin Amin, one of the country’s leading printmakers exhibited a number of woodcut/computer prints, as did Dr Kamarudzaman Md. Isa. The strong traditions of printing, textiles and woodcutting saw these forms being integrated with computer generated elements to produce object based works, which ironically overcome the complaint among artists operating in the west have about the lack of collectability and therefore saleability of work in new media.

Other works included those by Wong Hoy Cheong, the Matahati Coterie, British, Kuala Lumpur-based artists David Lister and Carl Jaycock, a 3D animation using wayang puppets, screen and live performance as well as pieces from YCA (Malaysia’s Primavera) and winners from the Swatch Metal Art Award, Bayu, Kungyu and Noor.

“Attention can ground an economy because it is a fundamental human desire and is intrinsically, unavoidably scarce.”
Michael H. Goldhaber,
“Attention Shoppers!” Wired, Dec 1997

When Wired first came out a few years ago, I read it from cover to cover. Nowadays I still buy the magazine each month but no longer feel compelled to read every word: my attention has shifted elsewhere. Still, every now and again, concealed amongst the lifestyle advertising and self-referential American bullshit, there’s an occasional gem. The December 1997 issue contained such a piece, by Michael H. Goldhaber, about the attention economy.

Goldhaber’s central thesis is that in a world of material abundance (defined as “the US, Western Europe, Japan, and a growing list of other places”), attention is the only truly scarce commodity. For all our vaunted ability to multi-task (for example simultaneously eat dinner, watch TV, and talk on the phone with a friend), it is close to impossible to devote what we might call “quality attention” to more than a single activity at once. It’s this kind of attention that Goldhaber sees (correctly) as becoming increasingly valuable.

In Goldhaber’s, as in any economic model, there are haves and have-nots: stars who attract attention and fans who pay attention. But, it’s a little more complex than that. Because cyberspace is so huge, anyone with the requisite drive and tenacity can now compete for a global audience. On the other hand, this vast pool will throw up increasing numbers of players, ensuring that the competition becomes even more ruthless.

In the world of old media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines), this relentless drive for attention is played out every minute of the day. A celebrity profile in a weekly magazine: “When she’s not fighting off an alien with its tail between her legs, Sigourney Weaver is at home fighting dust. She talks to Marianne MacDonald about housework, her husband and her height”. New Idea, you might think, or Who Weekly. But no, it’s the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine of January 3.

You don’t have to read past the first couple of paragraphs to figure out that the “profile” is just an extended advertisement for Ms Weaver’s new movie, Alien Resurrection. Actually she has two new movies (The Ice Storm is the other). “But”, writes the journalist, “we are here to talk about Alien”. Just so. And, once you’ve read this puff piece, and been subjected to the relentless barrage of newspaper and television commercials, there’ll be a TV special (The Making of Alien Resurrection), appearances on the Today and Midday shows, newspaper reviews, radio interviews, and probably a segment on The Movie Show, all telling stories about Sigourney Weaver and Alien Resurrection.

The line between news, opinion, and advertising is now so blurred that almost no media coverage is untainted by marketing imperatives. Marketing is concerned solely with creating and keeping customers. In other words, getting and holding our attention (or loyalty, which is essentially the same thing). If we accept Goldhaber’s proposition that attention is scarce and therefore valuable, then attracting attention is difficult and frequently expensive. So it’s hardly accidental that the marketing budget for a movie like Alien Resurrection usually equals and occasionally exceeds the production budget, the money it took to actually make the film.

The fourth in the Alien series, Alien Resurrection —despite its higher production and marketing costs—will inevitably return a far greater profit than Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. Why? Primarily because of branding. Both movies offer the Sigourney Weaver brand but, despite the success of Sense and Sensibility, the Ang Lee brand can’t compete against the combined weight of the Alien, Winona Ryder, and Ripley brands. In fact, I suspect that the Ripley character (a tough, tenacious, resourceful, courageous woman) has probably done more for feminism than Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem together (and they comprise three formidable feminist brands).

Nothing attracts and holds attention like a successful brand. Coke, Pepsi, Madonna, Nike, Picasso, Adidas, Mercedes, Miles Davis, BMW, McDonalds, Louise Bourgeois, KFC, Microsoft, Salman Rushdie, Intel, Sony, Peter Greenaway, Arnotts, Claudia Schiffer, Vegemite, Grange, Cathy Freeman, IKEA, Jane Campion, Peter Carey, Russell Crowe, Kylie Minogue, Susan Norrie, Mike Parr, Bettina Arndt, McKenzie Wark…Faced with too much information competing for our scarce attention, we rely on the safety of a known and trusted brand.

There’s an old line that the reason academic politics is so bitterly contested is because the stakes are so small. I used to think that was true and that the art world was similar too. But the internecine warfare between artists or academics (or movie stars) is simply the Cola war writ large. The stakes are huge.

Long term success in any endeavour means getting and holding an audience’s attention. The key to success for individuals—as for cola manufacturers and movie producers—will increasingly depend on building a successful brand. Whether corporate or personal, successful brand building depends on telling the right story, for, as marketing analyst Michael Moon says: “Every brand tells a story, but not every story creates a brand”. But let’s leave storytelling for next time…

Thinking I’d arrived late to the opening address by Zoë Sofoulis for the conference of the multi-component event Women on the Verge of New Technology (hereafter WoVNT), I took a back seat at Kulcha, scanned the room, as one does, and quickly came to the realisation that it was not women but men who were ‘on the verge’ of this cultural-technological situation. I was one of perhaps five men in a venue otherwise filled with women, maybe 60. An audience this size, regardless of sex, translates as a successful event for a critical arts happening in Perth.

In the terms suggested by Sofoulis in her paper which drew on “actor-network theory” (ANT) by Bruno Latour and Daniel Stern’s psychoanalytic notions of ‘inter-subjectivity’, male or female positionality shouldn’t make a difference based on binary distinctions. With ANT, the space of culture and society and everything else in the world is no longer defined through core-periphery, interior-exterior models; humans are no longer defined as subjects negotiating a field of objects, or by their gender identity or biological sex, but rather as elements of varying intensity performing strategic connections within networks that might include artworks, institutions and new technologies. (See Zoë Sofoulis, “Interactivity, Intersubjectivity and the Artwork/Network”, Mesh 10, Spring, 1996. See also Bruno Latour, On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications, http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/stt/stt/ant/latour.htm [expired]) However, the problematic of consciousness, and hence human agency, still lingers with Latour’s notion of strategic connections: without consciousness, how can either a human or non-human actant have a strategic capacity? We start heading down the path of proto-subjectivity here…and I don’t wish to go there, just yet.

The relationship between women and technology can be thought of in terms of the extent to which artworks produced by women, among others, are commodified, and the effect this has in terms of institutional-market cooptation. This prompts the question, what becomes marginalised as some artworks, artists, curators, administrators and academics ascend the ladder in the emergent culture industry of all things digital? Despite the deification of the internet and, by association, computer generated art, for its capacity to abolish the banality of geographic distance and almost overcome the download weariness of time-lag, the traditional Melbourne-Sydney cultural-economic nexus maintains its monopoly on who and what gets a guernsey. That is to say, cultural forms and practices still take place, constituting a verge beyond which a different culture happens as a provincial one. Herein lies the apparent incommensurability of the time of new communication technologies with the dreck of everydayness.

On paper, WoVNT appeared as a diverse, comprehensive and ambitious event. Along with its central act—a two day conference with speakers from academic, administrative, performance, and ‘Digitart’ practitioner backgrounds—WoVNT included a web design workshop; demonstrations on the use of digital technologies in Yamaji and Nyoongar historiography, biomedical research, and stock marketeer entertainment; and Leah Irving’s video installation whose representation of Millias’ ‘Ophelia’ engaged wistfully with but didn’t exactly challenge the ‘gaze’ of this viewer as he circumambulated her outer electro-sensory reaches. Unfortunately the ‘virtual component’, TechnoLust: Desire and Technology, never virtualised. Computers were stolen from Antwerp’s MCA a few days prior to transmission, preventing big-name lectures by the likes of Constance Penley, Rosi Braidotti, Linda Dement, Vivian Sobchack, and Claudia Springer, and video and CD-ROM programs from coming on-line.

Domestic Disturbances did its Perth leg of a national tour, with a selection of digital art and films, some of which had made an appearance at PICA last year in the techné exhibition, and a number of which have been commented on in previous issues of RealTime (see also Mesh #10, 1996). A ‘video lounge’ featuring work by Perth-based artists was supposed to be there for the sitting, but on the two occasions I made the trip to Kulcha and the Film and Television Institute (FTI) this wasn’t to be. At Kulcha, Fremantle’s mayor had booked the venue for a ‘VIP only’ elevated viewing position of the Fremantle Festival parade. I was able to get in the front door as some pretty inebriated and sunburnt VIP folk staggered out, only to discover that removalists had beat me to whatever was the video lounge. And, for whatever reason, Domestic Disturbances and the video lounge were not to be found at the FTI.

What is a reviewer to do? Obtain a partial show-reel copy, of course. Brigitte Priestley’s CARNA l/ge ISM is a sound-image loop that is kind of like Yoko Ono’s orgasm piece overlaid on images of metal more twisted than Cronenberg’s meditation on Ballard’s Crash. Vikki Wilson and Rick Mason of Retarded Eye contributed The Only Machine, a complex foray into the cul-de-sac of aesthetics. While Kim McGlynn’s Lip exemplifies a central theme taken up in the conference: ‘women’ have a stronger investment in the experiences to be had in the processes of production, rather than in the end product itself. McGlynn takes the trope of liquid identity and puts it to work, scanning her ‘menstrual cunt’ into the computer, then composing a flower shape which is swallowed up by a mouth with a digi-prosthetic tongue.

Rather than being preoccupied with issues of positionality, Isabelle Delmotte concurred with a kind of liquid-machinic-becoming in her conference paper: “To me women are more likely to allow time to grow and pulse without having an urge to expel the fruits of their patience for no other reason than the ephemeral approval of others”. Nonetheless, the dominant criterion of most funding bodies is the delivery of end products. Performer and composer Cathy Travers hinted at the special position performance art may have in its synthesis of processes of production with the product itself. As Travers spoke about and performed extracts from her composition work for the performance group skadada, the following refrain persisted in no other place than my head: does the movement of the performer determine the placement of sound, or does the movement of sound determine the place of the performer? No doubt those working in sound composition and performance art have a ready and possibly dismissive answer to this, but it seemed to me to be a wonderful example of locating a dialogical communication whose expression occurs in the dissolve of boundaries.

Women on the Verge of New Technology; Event Director, Colleen Cruise with Cinematrix, Kulcha and FTI, November 20-December 14, 1997. http://www.imago.com.au/WOV [expired]

As we are told loudly and repeatedly, by innumerable voices in innumerable places, this is ‘The Age Of Information’. Indeed the cacophony of voices telling us so seems in some sense to provide the proof of its own claims; the ever accelerating multiplication of sources, modes of access, of speed and reach of information that we are experiencing do indeed appear to be articulating a qualitative change in the cultural dynamics of our society and of the world at large. It seems significant, then, that one of the major claims made for the new information technologies, and for the internet and the world wide web in particular, is that by providing a non-hierarchical structure for the exchange of information amongst a (potentially) global audience, they democratise the access and control of information. The more traditional forms of media (television, radio, print etc.) operate as centralised sites of information distribution and control, working on a ‘broadcast’ model of one-to-many, thereby concentrating power at the top of a fixed information hierarchy where information flows in one direction only, from the top down. The new media, on the other hand offer us a ‘netcast’ of many-to-many, distributing the flows of information and their control horizontally as an infomatic field which organises and reorganises itself transversally from moment to moment (Deleuze and Guattari would call this form of organisation “rhizomatic”, and that of the traditional media “arboreal”; see “Introduction: Rhizome”, in Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix,A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [trans. Brian Massumi], Minneapolis & London, University of Minnesota Press, 1987). By facilitating mass participation in both the production and consumption of information, the ever accelerating spread of these new media technologies democratises information and the distribution of it, and thus society at large. Or so the story goes.

What this story leaves out, however, is that the ‘democratisation’ of information effected by the new media of the internet and the world wide web has as its corollary a parallel divorcing of that information from any identifiable legitimising or authorial source. Anyone with access to a computer is able to put information out there on the net, produce their own web page, contribute to discussion lists or internet relay chats and so on; this is precisely the ‘democratisation’ such media make possible. However, the value of that information remains at best ambivalent for those net surfers who ride its flows. With traditional, more centralised forms of media, it is the institution distributing the information, the corporation, the government, the university, as much as the individual signing her name to it that gives it its legitimacy, on the basis of that institution’s history and reputation as a trustworthy (or otherwise) source; it is precisely its undemocratic institutional centralisation which allows it to be recognised and authorised as a ‘reliable’ source of information.

The democratic masses of information flowing on the net have no such institutional legitimacy; they are effectively anonymous, in practical if not literal terms (obviously there are many identifiable information sources/sites on the net, with clearly defined institutional allegiances that allow you to judge their value as an information source one way or the other. My claims apply more properly to those sources/sites on the net that more clearly fulfil the ‘democratising’ promise held out by the net—those that give a voice to non-institutional sources of information). In the absence of any mechanism of verification, claims made by such sources can at best raise questions or doubts, without being able to lay claim to the status of fact or truth. Moreover, given the democratic multiplicity of sources that flood the net, every topic has such a plethora of contradictory or conflicting claims made around it that for every piece of information from a legitimised source on the net (a government or corporate web site for instance) there will be 10 unlegitimisable ones contradicting it, undermining the legitimised source without being able to take its place. In effect, the multiplication of sources and sites of information made possible by the internet and world wide web produces not so much an increase in knowledge as an increase in doubt.

There is an important distinction to be made here between information and knowledge; knowledge is in essence a structuring of information via the binary opposition of truth and falsity, as determined by mechanisms of legitimation (ideology if you like). Information however, in its cybernetic sense, knows no negation, no oppositional structuring, no ‘organisation’ as such at all. The state of maximum information is the state of maximum indecipherability—what’s called ‘white noise’ or static (white noise is basically the sound of every frequency heard simultaneously. In contrast, a pure tone consists of a single, distinct frequency). Any structuring or codification of this static into a communicable message involves a redundancy of information (since any system of communication/representation is implicitly a system of repetition) which necessarily decreases the amount of information present in any given signal, at the same time as it makes it possible for that signal to actually tell you something. The new media of the internet and world wide web present us with an ever increasing load of information of indeterminate value, while simultaneously undermining the traditional sources of legitimisation and authorisation; at the same time that the flow of information is increasing, our capacity to determine that information as true or false, to structure that flow, is undermined. The explosion of the infomatic field that characterise the ‘Age of Information’ brings with it a concomitant decrease in our capacity to order that information into a systematic pattern of truth and falsity, of determined knowledge. The age of information could just as accurately be called the age of noise, the age of static.

For a practical example of this on-line tension between authorised and legitimated knowledge and the unlegitimised flows of information made possible by the new media, you only have to look as far as the supremely paranoid TV creations of Chris Carter, The X-Files and Millennium. The shows themselves exist of course as part of the traditional media, their source clearly identified with Carter and the Fox network. They have, however, spawned a substantial on-line community; according to Steve Silberman, in an article in the on-line magazine Hotwired (http://www.hotwired.com/special/millennium – [expired]) there are over 900 unofficial sites devoted to The X-Files alone. These sites aren’t just devoted to providing information about the shows themselves; many take the material provided by the show as a basis for their own wildly divergent fantasies, creating their own thoroughly unauthorised plotlines that remould the content of the show to match their own desires. There is, as Silberman notes, an entire “subgenre of these home generated parallel plot universes devoted to gay and lesbian plot developments, and gleefully X-rated contributions from the ‘Gillian Anderson Testosterone Brigade’” (Anderson is the show’s female lead; there’s also a “David Duchovny Oestrogen Brigade” devoted to its male lead). A similar situation developed around Carter’s other show, Millennium, when it was premiered in the US. This would seem, on the surface at least, to be a perfect example of the net’s democratising potential; the mutation and multiplication of an originary legitimised source by an on-line community into a mass of chaotic and incompatible ‘responses’ which turn the original material to their own ‘illegitimate’ ends.

Perhaps it was this sense of their (copyrighted) material escaping from their control that prompted Fox to attempt to sweep the net clean of unofficial sites based on their shows, by threatening web-servers supporting these sites with legal action if they didn’t boot the offending sites off-line. This attempt to maintain control of legitimation and authorisation of their product received a swift response from the on-line community, with the formation of numerous protests sites (featuring the slogan “Free Speech is Out There”, itself a mutation of a well known X-Files motto), the posting of Fox’s legal letters on-line, and the alleged crashing of Fox’s mail server by the masses of e-mails from outraged fans (see http://www.yahoo.com/_News_and_Media/Television/ Shows/Science_Fiction_Fantasy_and_horror/X_files__The/X_Philes_Millennium_Protest/[expired] for a selection of links to sites dealing with this topic. For the official Fox response, see http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6975/fox_statement.htm [expired]). Much of the media coverage and on-line outrage in this exchange focused on Gil Trevizo, a student at the University of El Paso, Texas, who had set up an unofficial Millennium site even before the show had premiered in the US, and who then had his on-line access blocked by the University in response to demands by Fox. Recently however, his status as an on-line martyr to censorship has come into question on the same protest sites that his alleged plight generated; there are now claims that he has been manipulating the cyber-community to his own ends and is not to be trusted. (The site on which I saw this claim made seems to have disappeared in the space between my initial research and the final writing of this article. It’s enough to make you paranoid…)

All the themes are here; the multiplication and appropriation of information on-line via the unlegitimisable masses, attempts by the site of institutional authorisation (in this case Fox) to control these ever multiplying flows of information and contain them within the traditional hierarchies of control, ‘democratic’ on-line protest over these attempts to limit and control the free flow of information, and finally the paranoid questioning of the truth status of the whole exchange by the very on-line community that generated it in the first place. Faced with this mass of conflicting claims, all focused in different ways precisely on the issue of the control of information and its legitimisation on the net, the only position one is left to take up is to doubt everything and everyone. As they say on The X-Files, “Trust no-one”.

As such, I would suggest that superfluity of information offered by these new information technologies, divorced as they are from traditional modes of legitimation, does not of necessity lead us towards an increasingly transparent and/or democratic society. Despite the expanded range of access it offers for ‘the masses’ to a variety of information from a multiplicity of sources (which one might expect to free that information up from the kind of political cum ideological manipulation exemplified by the actions of the US military during the Gulf War), in the absence of a means of ‘filtering’ this body of conflicting claims to the truth through some authorising or legitimising mechanism, it pushes the ‘masses’ that it mediates towards what could be described as a state of paranoia. Unable to determine or choose any one given perspective as ‘true’, all come under suspicion. This is not to say that there is ‘no longer’ any truth; rather that our relationship to it has changed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, The X-Files offers us an exemplary formulation of these new conditions of knowledge in an infomatic world as its motto: “The Truth is Out There”. Perhaps there is a truth to the matter, perhaps there is genuine knowledge, but it is never here where I am, it is only ever out there, somewhere else, inaccessible and perpetually absent; here where I am there is only the static hiss of information flowing.

Empire state was an enterprising multimedia event staged in December across Tasmania (Launceston, Burnie and Queenstown), by Empire Studios, a production group dedicated to making electronic media more widely accessible. The Hobart-based artists in this collective are mostly recent graduates of the School of Art in Hobart and have experience across media such as video, film, photography and computer-generated image-making.

Matt Warren is a member of one of Hobart’s more successful alternative bands. Mixed-media artist Sally Rees is probably best known for her anthropomorphic sculptures. Sean Bacon is a photographer and video artist. The work of Tim Stone and Stephanie Carnevale includes painting, video and computer-generated image-making.

With its intriguing ‘space-race’ retro logo and promotional material, and its combination of video, light-works, internet, soundscape and large-scale light projections, Empire state is an ambitious collaboration. At each of its sites, large-scale projections from sources including the work of local artists and schoolchildren, were screened onto the exteriors of local landmark buildings. The installation incorporated a light show and was given an aural dimension by the inclusion of contemporary recorded music. In Queenstown, musicians Annette Van Bethlehem and Karen Burgess sang on a phone link-up amplified to the audience.

The project was not presented in Hobart, but its closing in Queenstown (a mining town on the remote west coast) was relayed to Hobart via a live internet broadcast set up at CAST, coinciding with the opening of CAST’s inaugural Member’s Exhibition and so ensuring a ready-made audience.

The whole performance took two hours and created a festive atmosphere amongst onlookers, many of whom had never previously experienced any experimental or performance art. It was admirable that Empire State was presented in regions which have too few opportunities to host major arts events and exhibitions, even those of the more conventional variety.

Empire Studios, Empire state, Launceston, Burnie, Queenstown; December 4-12, 1997

As one of few events in this year’s Telstra Adelaide Festival tackling the nexus between technology and art, the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s FOLDBACK project is bound to cause quite a commotion. Intended as both a celebration of ANAT’s tenth anniversary and as an opportunity to interrogate some of the central issues in new media art, FOLDBACK is a transmedia event focussing on media, techno-sound and screen culture. Featuring real-time performances by flesh and data bodies, the event will utilise virtual media to bring together a range of participants from some of ANAT’s most successful projects who continue to pioneer developments in cross-disciplinary art.

As coordinator of FOLDBACK, Director of ANAT, Amanda McDonald Crowley explains, “One of the things that strikes me is that media art is often referred to within a visual arts context only. It is important to remember that most artists working in this area really do work in very cross-disciplinary ways. The artists included in this event are all exploring and critiquing new modes of communication. They are pulling apart and reinventing the ways we are being told we can use communications technologies and exploring collaborative modes of art production in exciting new ways”.

Taking place on March 8, FOLDBACK will form a bridge between the themes explored at Writers’ Week and Artists’ Week. Drawing connections between the often divergent cultures of art and writing, FOLDBACK will include renowned cyberwriter, the USA’s eponymous Mark Amerika, elaborating on the frictions between hard and soft publishing, the mechanics of hypertext and the correlations between electronic art and writing.

VS You are the primary catalyst behind one of the first online publishing projects, AltX (http://www.altx.com), a venture which uses hypertext as a mode of constructing literary narrative. Tell us a little bit about what hypertext publishing is and how AltX uses this tool.

MA The first thing I would say about hypertext publishing is that it moves away from the Gutenberg-inspired print-publishing paradigm and enters more computer-mediated network environments. Ted Nelson, in the mid 60s, came up with the term “hypertext” to help describe a new kind of electronic text that practices multi-linear sequencing, that branches out and makes references by way of hotlinks. These links usually give the reader the option to choose what route they would like to follow. The thing about hypertext published on the world wide web that makes it somewhat gestalt-shifting is that once it attaches itself to a globally interconnected protocol like the internet, the boundaries between composition, publication and distribution start melting into each other. Writers become network-publishers, hypermedia curators, net art distributors etc.

When AltX started in late 1993, we were just learning about the potential of hypertext and we began making links to long documents that most people could just print up and read. But we soon came to realise that ‘true’ hypertext is something that cannot be printed—rather, it can develop into something more collaborative and multimedia. So with AltX, the model we developed for our ‘project’ or ‘work-in-progress’ is the network. We see the network-publishing space as transforming the computer from a word-processing machine (an electronic typewriter) that spits out paper and/or floppy disks, into something more immediate ie a hypermedia composition tool that is simultaneously a publishing and distribution tool.

VS You’ve indicated in the past that hypertextual publishing “suggests an alternative to the more rigid, authoritarian linearity of conventional book-contained text”. At the same time you are the author of several books yourself. What do you perceive are the tensions between the two modes of publishing?

MA Good question. The first, most obvious tension, is the struggle that takes place in what Walter Benjamin might have called “the literary production of our time”. My experience is that there is a kind of ‘false consciousness’ being promoted today via outmoded literary forms like, for example, the novel. Having written and published two fairly popular yet very avant-novels, The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood, I know the contemporary book world pretty well and still read a lot of books and respect a lot of the writing coming out of the alternative press scene. But the mainstreaming of so-called ‘literary’ books as mass-media by-products, especially these ‘suspension-of-disbelief’ linear narratives, disgusts me.

The most interesting literature, to me, is that literature which breaks out of the mould of conventional realism and its need to predictably tell a story with ‘real’ characters, plots, settings, etc. Sorry, but my life doesn’t read like this. It’s much more multi-digressionary and has moments of linkage or connectivity that come to light due to associative thinking, parallel processing, collaborative networking, intuitive writing etc. And so what better way for younger, more adventurous writers who know this to be true—but have been quite literally bound by the mainstream book publishing industry—to break out of this rigid structure than to start experimenting with both their writing practice and their political or cultural work vis-a-vis the web?

VS Tell us about GRAMMATRON and Hypertextual Consciousness, two of your most prominent works? Will we be seeing them in FOLDBACK?

MA Yes, I hope to be able to, in the context of my remarks, showcase parts of GRAMMATRON (http://www.GRAMMATRON.com) and perhaps HTC and AltX too. GRAMMATRON started as my third novel. I had written about 30 or 40 pages of narrative that took place in a near-future cyberworld where writers and artists were becoming hypermedia avatars teleporting their multimedia work to immediate global reception. This was in the very early part of 1993, way before Netscape, MSExplorer, Real-Audio, Java, etc. The more I looked at the story, the more I realised that this world was going to soon become our collective reality and I immediately decided that, instead of writing another cyberpunk novel, I would reboot the project and build it more as a “public domain narrative environment”.

The day that I released the current 1.0 version of the project on the net, it was written up in the New York Times and soon thereafter many other international media sources covered it too, thus bringing in a huge audience, more than my books by far. But what’s been most interesting about the project’s reception is that it’s had much more effect, much more attention, in the art world, especially the electronic arts, than in the literary world, which sometimes looks like it is a flailing cockroach that’s just been sprayed with chemicals.

As for HTC, it’s the companion theory guide, a kind of critifictional manifesto for a new way of writing critical theory. I think it’s time to start playing around with theory more, not shy away from it, especially since most artists and/or intellectuals are, in the end, slightly turned on by it. That’s why I decided to use both abstract language and the language of desire and sexuality throughout its screen action.

VS You’ll be embarking on a national tour following FOLDBACK. Are you aware of collaborative writing projects which are using online media in Australia?

MA Yes, I’m aware of some of them. I’ve published many voices from Oz on AltX, starting with Ken Wark and Rosie Cross (geekgirl) in early 1994 and Francesca di Rimini (aka gashgirl) and members of the Electronic Writing Ensemble like Linda Marie Walker, Teri Hoskin and Jyanni Stefensen, as well as young radical writers like the group Mindflux and many others. I’m also looking forward to finding out about many of the other high-energy writing projects that are developing around the country and will be seeking ways to increase the amount of collaboration and exchange that is already taking place between AltX and emerging new media artists in Australia.

ANAT and Ngapartji, FOLDBACK, Ngapartji Multimedia Centre, 211 Rundle Street, Adelaide, 1998 Adelaide Festival, March 8 12 noon http://www.anat.org.au/FOLDBACK

(Crack the) Binary Code

Multimedia’s status as art, and its relationship with extant art forms, were the main items on the agenda at (Crack the) Binary Code. Its principle focus was to bring these two spheres together, and redress the biases which still see reviews of CD-ROM relegated to the computer pages (as if to foreground this prejudice, Deborah Bogle’s profile of the event was demoted from the weekend Australian’s glossy magazine to Syte the week before). The circulation of this issue throughout Binary Code was problematic in that it reinforced the very factions the symposium was attempting to merge. In this it had the unfortunate effect of reanimating, rather than exorcising, the shade of C.P. Snow and his “two cultures”.

The opening session, in particular, smacked of a literate/post-literate détente, in which two incongruous world orientations debated the role of multimedia as an “add-on” to established art forms. Peter Craven declared that he was an “improbable person to be addressing a conference of this kind”, and that multimedia was “largely lost” on him. Multimedia criticism does not count as one of Craven’s contributions to Australian letters. He did, though, make one decisive contribution to this symposium, for in repeatedly referring to James Joyce, he introduced a more palatable talisman than Snow, which shifted the subtleties of the convergence debate into a more constructive orbit. This was consolidated by Philippa Hawker’s engaging discussion of Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet. Hawker explored the convergent relationships forming between literary, filmic and multimedia practices, noting, with exemplary admonition, that there are many similarities and differences between the experience of literature, film and multimedia. It was just this ambivalence that was needed to crack the binary code.

The dynamic of ambivalence was picked up by Bill Mitchell in a fascinating account of his Palladio Virtual Museum project. Mitchell spoke of complementarity, and the creative unease involved in exploring the interface between the physical and the virtual (he also invoked Joyce as a tutelary presence, comparing his own work in progress to the textual editing of Ulysses). This was an inventive concept that found resonance in Michael Hill’s witty and satirical incursion into the great divide between contemplation and distraction in multimedia art. Hill recalled an online performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in the “waiting room” of The Palace, which is as good an example of the tension between stasis and movement as you will find. The challenge of staging a play, in which “to be there” is everything, in the “no there, there” zone of cyberspace, beautifully demonstrated what Mitchell called “magical moments”, epiphanies born of unease, where innovative possibilities are glimpsed.

Ambivalence also exerted a force in the discussion of multimedia criticism. In drawing attention to the hybridity of the medium, artist Peter Hennessey articulated the need for a syncretic critical language, one which drew on established discourses and blurred their conceptual and lexical boundaries. This was admirably demonstrated in Justine Humphry’s inventive reading of the CD-ROM game Myst in the context of the Mars Pathfinder mission. Humphry drew on cultural theory in apposite ways, to project Myst as a narrative of loss and yearning for new spaces of discovery. Hennessey’s invocation of a hybrid form of criticism attests to the need to get beyond the divisive switching between new media and established art, as if they were the only terms of debate in the discourse surrounding emergent art forms. McKenzie Wark, a writer not present at this symposium, has effectively discussed multimedia art in terms of a “new abstraction”; a resonant idea that has significantly broadened the debate in ways canvassed by Hennessey. As Stephanie Britton also observed, there is in fact a distinctive form of multimedia criticism, that draws, in part, on the critical languages of the visual arts, film theory, and, I would quickly add, literary theory (it’s no accident that Joyce and Beckett kept elbowing their way into the discussion).

Under the panoptical gaze of his camera, ABC TV’s Stephen Feneley admirably played the role of luddite uninspired by new media art. While diverting at the end of a long day, all the head-high tackling about ART distracted attention from the more substantive issues of dissemination and distribution, and the appropriate place for experiencing multimedia art. Access, Britton reminded us, is the most crucial issue of all. The idea of a public sphere, what Geert Lovink usefully described as a “third space”, is the promise of the internet, and it is perhaps this space that holds the greatest potential for achieving the kind of dissemination necessary to reach a mass audience, and thereby form a culture of multimedia art and criticism. A related issue was identified by Mike Leggett, who drew attention to the curatorial process, drawing on his experience of putting together Burning the Interface, the first international exhibition of CD-ROM art. The key for Leggett, as with Britton and Lovink, was the dissemination of multimedia art into public spaces. Leggett, too, discussed an idea that should have been the subject of more substantial attention, that of the social responsibility of nurturing a culture of multimedia art.

Is multimedia art part of the historical tradition of poesis, or aesthetic-making, or is it an aberrant technological cool, undeserving of artistic value? experimenta’s Shiralee Saul had the final word on this imbroglio, turning the tables on the art debate in a fit of pique (“Let’s face it, contemporary art is dead, or is at least looking a bit peaky”), then asking what could only be described as a rhetorical question: “Does art deserve to be revitalized by multimedia?”

For a different type of audience Binary Code would have been a solid and informative introduction to the key issues in the multimedia debate. I’m not sure how many of the Interact-going general-public were in attendance, but most of the people there seemed to be from the media arts community, for whom much of the discussion was already very familiar. That said, symposium co-ordinator Kevin Murray and the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) have maintained an important public dialogue concerning multimedia art. In this they achieved one of their key themes, namely, the consolidation of a dedicated practice of multimedia criticism.

Altered States; Psychotropic Visions and the digitally-corrupted gaze.

A word from the wise to the unwary: don’t ever go to trade fairs without a floor plan. The Interact Multimedia jamboree was predictably overwhelming, and orienteering without a map was not the way to go. When I finally located experimenta’s Altered States exhibition it was like happening upon a refreshing oasis of culture in that arid plain of corporate logos and disposable marketing kipple. I felt secure in that fortress of solitude where no-one was trying to sell you anything to polish your benchmark or economise your scales. It’s too easy to succumb to this kind of cynicism, and to do so actually detracts from the significance of experimenta’s achievement with Altered States . Multimedia art is still finding its public, and Altered States has successfully furthered this process with a succession of important exhibitions conducted and hosted over the last year (Burning the Interface, Cyberzone, Cyber Cultures). The issue of where to locate multimedia art is a contentious and ongoing one, and would-be critics of Altered States’ presence at Interact should exercise caution. It seems to me that no context should be left unexplored in the project of raising public awareness of, and familiarity with, multimedia art. experimenta’s decision to stage Altered States as part of Interact is to be applauded for this very reason. Altered States declared, by the very force of its presence, that multimedia art should be taken just as seriously as any other use of multimedia technology, and, moreover, indignantly declared that there is a thriving culture of multimedia art that people need to get up to speed with. This was cleverly suggested by Peter Hennessey’s design for the Altered States stand, which ingeniously mimicked the general exhibition principle of an attractive display. The assemblage of video and computer-based work as a contemplative circumference around the larger, unseen installations (concealed by heavy black curtains) surreptitiously guided you into a journey of discovery, transforming informania into curiosity.

Tactical appropriation did not stop there. Most of the software being touted by the corporate spin-doctors as pixelation for profit margins had been used for quite different purposes by the artists exhibiting in Altered States . Recognizing the cross-over between corporate and artistic contexts of use confronts us with the issue of the perverse. Any poetics of multimedia art has to incorporate an understanding of its perversity, its realignment of multimedia as an instrumental technology, a shift away from utility to a poetic process of organized violence. At one point I found myself trapped in a parallactic freeze-frame, seeing QuickTime VR promoted as a useful navigational device, and at the same time a portal to other worlds in Lindsay Colborne’s ludic The Pursuit of Happiness. I wondered if the purveyors of QTVR also noticed this. Given the unfortunate ambience of two different cultures within the temporary autonomous zone of Interact, I suspected that they probably had not. The good people of experimenta clearly had. Altered States’ subtitle (“Psychotropic Visions and the digitally-corrupted gaze”) promised a different way of seeing, its product of the month being perverse corrective lenses. In the context of Interact, then, Altered States was a tableau of disruptive interventions into the normative language of multimedia.

The lexicon of multimedia art as it currently stands was well represented in Altered States, and visitors to the exhibition were treated to one of the classics of the form—Jon McCormack’s Turbulence—as well as new works by established and emerging artists. Computer-generated animation was admirably represented in Peter Hennessey’s haunting surveillance installation pH7.2-Watchtower, Tina Gonsalves’ Alchemical Process of Becoming, Dorian Dowse’s awesome OmTipi, and PsyVision, the dynamic PsyHarmonics/Troy Innocent collaboration, probably the first example of digital fusion. Interactives, synonymous with multimedia art for many, revealed an interesting cross-section of degrees and kinds of user involvement. Rebecca Young’s Prozac-inspired allegory of sedation and aggression Are You Happy Yet? required minimal interactivity, yet had a few surprises up its sleeve. Naomi Herzog’s brooding anatomy of mind and memory, Mined Feelds, invited the user to work through a range of dungeon-like spaces, prompted by a macabre interface of severed heads. Lindsay Colborne’s road trip to Nirvana, The Pursuit of Happiness, Norie Neumark’s Shock in the Ear, and Mindflux’s reflexive laboratory of artificial life, Mutagen, were more beguiling works that required a higher degree of conceptual interactivity and the patient development of navigational strategies. Tim Gruchy’s cyberspace jam, Synthing, was the most fully developed example of an immersive environment. Synthing ingeniously converges the architecture of the intelligent, sensory space and the aleatory sound event. Get two or more people happening in there and you have an ensemble postmoderne. I never get tired of engaging with Jon McCormack’s monumental Turbulence, which seems more and more like an immersive experience with every welcome return. Memespace, Troy Innocent’s latest zone of otherness, is also a transitional work, which re-defines the interface in its use of a topographical bas-relief map, rather than the screen, as the nodal connection to his world.

While there was a strategic importance in exhibiting Altered States as part of Interact, there were also considerable drawbacks. The degree of ambient noise made it very difficult to really get involved with many of the works, particularly the terminal based interactives, and especially the ones that were new to me. Works like Turbulence were not given their best showing, as there was far too much light and unwanted noise. The absence of explanatory signage (which was used effectively in Burning the Interface) unfortunately compounded the confusion of newcomers to many of these works, who felt unclear about what (or why, in at least one instance) they should be doing.

These drawbacks aside, Altered States was an important initiative that will have at the very least succeeded in exposing several thousand people to the exceptional work being done by Australian artists in this form.

(Crack the) Binary Code, co-ordinated by Kevin Murray, Centre for Contemporary Photography

Altered States; Psychotropic Visions and the digitally-corrupted gaze, presented by experimenta media arts

Interact Asia Pacific Multimedia Festival, Melbourne Exhibition Centre Auditorium, October 30-November 2 1997

Artsinfo is a substantial new information service developed by the Department of Communications and the Arts for the cultural sector. In Canberra it is also regarded as the policy initiative which has given substance to the rhetoric of bringing together the communications and arts portfolios.

Among other things, Artsinfo provides computer-based access to information on the many thousands of grants, services, and business development programs offered across all levels of government, as well as through corporations, foundations and other non-government bodies.

Artsinfo came out of the Coalition’s election platform, “For Arts Sake”. This policy emphasised access, equity and market development. It was supported by a $60 million funding package over three years. This included an amount of $4.5 million to the Department of Communications and the Arts to streamline institutional arrangements across the cultural sector, and to develop a one stop arts information shop. A team in the department co-ordinated work on Artsinfo which was outsourced to a host of specialist consultants. A year in development, Artsinfo was launched by the Minister, Richard Alston, in August 1997. The project is well-funded to 1999, after which time it will be reviewed.

The amalgamation of the communications and arts portfolios in 1994 came as part of the Keating Government’s Creative Nation initiative. The synergy of these two policy areas for cultural development had previously been argued for many years. It was most cogently described by Stuart Cunningham in his book Framing Culture as a key means by which the cultural mandate of the Commonwealth—to foster the formation of an Australian nation—could be most effectively exercised.

Artsinfo does indeed appear to give substance to this rhetoric. It uses communications infrastructures to create and extend cultural and other transactional spaces of “the nation” across the natural geography of the continent. In this respect the Artsinfo story is similar to other stories of communications development in Australia.

However, there are also important differences. The “nation” is not produced here from investment in physical labour or infrastructure. Rather, Artsinfo seeks to add value to existing public stocks of cultural and communications capital. Paradoxically, under the Coalition government, many parts of the underlying communications infrastructure are in the process of being alienated from the ‘public good’ objectives of nation-building. For this reason Artsinfo tells of the ‘weak’ nation-building strategy of the Coalition government.

It also speaks of the general trajectory of economic development which is being pursued by many governments around the world. This particular vision of development can be summed up as the ‘information economy’. In this scenario national economic growth is achieved through open, international markets and greater economic reliance upon communications. Indeed, the Howard government recently established the National Office of the Information Economy as a separate entity within Richard Alston’s portfolio.

So, like Creative Nation before it, Artsinfo has a strong business and export orientation. It aims to “inspire action”, and open doors to “national and international opportunities for a diverse range of cultural activities”.

Artsinfo was launched at the computer game theme centre Sega World, in Sydney’s Darling Harbour. A real time video signal was digitised for internet distribution so that Artsinfo could be simultaneously launched in a number of regional centres, including the Lismore campus of Southern Cross University, where I was involved in hosting the launch.

Preparations for the regional launch began about a fortnight beforehand. Invitations went out to local arts and media organisations. A suitable computer lab was found and the necessary software needed to view the launch was downloaded from the internet. The network was configured and the connection with the Artsinfo server tested. In effect, we were getting ready for the arrival of real time digital video in Lismore.

Coming live over the internet, the videostream had amazing textual qualities. The moving images seemed quite unreal, due in part to the compression techniques required to cram so much data into efficient (and in this case, available) channels. They unfolded in unpredictable ways upon the screen as patchwork puzzles of time. This strangeness was frustrating, but also exciting to experience.

Our view into the launch was provided by a single, fixed camera. Against a plain, black backdrop we could make out the torso and head of a woman. The presentation was simple, but suited to the bandwidth limits of the internet. However, details were washed out with eerie results: could that faceless bureaucrat really be Cathy Santamaria, the country’s most senior arts administrator? At least we could hear her clearly. Not so the Minister, Richard Alston, who was off-mike for much of his speech. We respectfully strained to hear what he said, for most of it. I was reminded of a time when people would gather outside electrical stores to watch television, with interest, awe and fascination.

But our gathering was not entirely made up of inquisitive passers-by. The Artsinfo launch, like the service, aimed to include this assembled group in the national arts and cultural industries “loop” of people-in-the-know. The launch also situated us in relation to other local and global possibilities of community.

A small wave of excitement ran through us when our role as witnesses to the Artsinfo launch was acknowledged by the Minister. I felt momentarily included in the elusive global village of the information economy. I was simultaneously a participant in this particular formation of national and local arts communities. However, these impressions of the global, national and local, mediated by the narrow bandwidths of the internet, were fragile and fleeting.

The importance of ongoing national government support to the development of national culture is clear. Perhaps not so well understood is the importance of communications infrastructure.

It remains to be seen how developments like an open market in telecommunications, the partial privatisation of Telstra, and the sale of the National Transmission Agency (which owns most ABC and SBS transmitter sites), will actually affect the quality, diversity and accessibility of cultural and communications services, especially in regional and remote areas. The Networking the Nation initiative, to be funded from the Telstra float, addresses these problems by directing resources for infrastructure development to those regions and populations in greatest need. It has the potential to facilitate some interesting, important and long overdue projects, especially from Indigenous communities.

No doubt, important and complex consequences for national culture will arise from the alterations to Australian communications described here. An important threshold question to emerge from this term of the Howard government is the extent to which national public culture can be sustained and developed on the basis of privatised communications infrastructures.

The experience of the Artsinfo launch highlights a further paradox here: the first “public” experience of live digital video reached Lismore on the goat tracks of the virtual community, the internet, and not by means of the much-touted (mythical) information superhighway. In this respect Artsinfo is an interesting model of development to emerge from cultural policy. Other initiatives, for example the Australian Cultural Network which aims to provide internet access to public cultural collections, are also being produced from this mould.

Artsinfo marks the shift in the roles of government in both policy fields of communications and culture. But it also serves to highlight the continuing and important role of the Commonwealth in making the nation. It is a risky venture largely because the direct returns on this investment will not generally be measurable in dollar terms. It is also a valuable and timely “public good” service which only a central government can provide.

Artsinfo can be accessed through the world wide web and is available at: http://www.artsinfo.net.au [expired]. A free telephone service, staffed by operators trained to interrogate the database on behalf of callers, has also been established (tel 1800 241 247).

“Metalux” is a term which loosely translates as “above light”. It also has an alchemical ring to it. So too do many of the striking films and videos which comprise the program of this name recently screened by SIN (Sydney Intermedia Network). This memorable new media program co-ordinated by artists Jo Law and Redmond Bridgeman brought together 11 raconteurs of transformation and enlightenment, produced by Western Australian experimental film and video artists.

Like their precursors, the UBU group and film-makers like Paul Winkler, these would-be cinemalchemists loosen celluloid from the primacy of its linear and narrative projections. These are films rich with metaphor that seek out the transmutative aspects of film and video structure. They enliven the project of structural film and in so doing evince the spirit of countercultural film-making which informed their predecessors.

These are new media works from the aftermath of structuralism. Each film in the program comprises the mutable imaging from the dusk of celluloid and the dawn of digital. The program, it seems, has been undertaken to continue the project of structural film-making in an era of technological ambivalence. In examining technologies, old and new, it retrieves radical and anarchic film-making tendencies from our collective amnesia and applies them to new media.

To be digital or not to be digital is the question for many low-end new media makers, many of whom have been seduced by Super 8, 16mm and video and who have abandoned what might be termed a “filmic spirit” (and, many would argue, the formal principles, techniques and craft of film) in the race to multimedia and FX.

Each artist has interrogated the structural rupture inherent in the current milieu. Intentionally or not, these artists have also taken to task the very nature of this ambivalence, the similarities and differences of filmic and electronic media. These are often mesmerising and entrancing architectures. The filmmakers imbue these spaces, often handmade, with incantation-like texts, sounds and markings treating the base elements of film and video, its celluloid and electronic fields, more as a collision course for the prismatic and mutable qualities of film’s building blocks.

The program is a triumvirate of structural approaches. First up, works which interrogate celluloid as a constructive premise. Second, those that deploy a diverse range of media from Super 8 to 16mm to video and are completed as a video product. The third intriguing but obscure component is film which explores the relationship between visual perception and visual representation.

Like their precursors, there is a common subtext of sheer exuberance for the wonderment of technological progress. Here the film-makers have combined new and old technologies more for a scratchy obfuscation than elucidation or narrative intent. Each of them, however, has kept their sites (sic) firmly on restoring the glint in the eye of experimental film.

The first section begins with a film as disturbing as it is entrancing. It is the Zen-like simplicity of At No Time, a 16mm film by Martin Heine which sets the tone for the program; its rudimentary and rustic quality highlights film’s meditative, contemplative and introspective possibilities. The prescient catalogue essay by Redmond Bridgeman (from a beautifully designed catalogue) describes it thus, “the simple stripping back of the emulsion brings each frame into consciousness and focuses attention on the temporal structure of film”.

The second section includes Snow Film by Arlene de Souza, Old Earth and the sexy nonsense of Given Leave to Enter by Jo Law. Each uses home movie style Super 8 film to suggest private memory, sentimentality and a retrieval of the brass tacks of film.

The final section includes the more technically sophisticated films like the Wagnerian and highly patterned tour de force Hydra by Sam Lendels using techniques from pre-cinema: the zoetrope and kinetoscope. A remarkable film which, in the current race to high end, high tech multimedia, resonates with a fin de siecle intensity. The trance-like Rinse and Repeat by Bec Dean foregrounds the paradox of machinic autonomy in a humanist world. Each of these films have arousal in mind, arousal of memory, arousal of basics. Each film heightens these rudiments of film structure and history to achieve an aura-like and symbolic nature in this time where new and old technologies collide.

The vortex-like 3D animation Landscape 1 by Soha Ariel Hayes which concludes the program is like the first film, At No Time, strangely primordial. The former from the pre-light of digital and the latter from the beginnings of pre-cinema. Landscape 1 is an amazing film which seems at once visually incongruous and disturbingly vital alongside these overtly low-tech looking films. It consists of images lifted from a book on human skin diseases. The animation has the appearance of a carnal, architectural and technological Mixmaster. It serves as something of a leitmotif for these alchemical days when morphing, transforming and transmuting are de rigeur.

Landscape 1 is a spiralling animation which concludes the films of the more high end ilk. It is also the antithesis of those which precede it. While this created a rich irony for the program and a spectacular finish, it also suggested a convincing narrative within this climate of ambivalence—that the pyrotechnics of high-tech animations will prevail.

This program deserves legs, it deserves box office gold, it deserves to be seen by many more than those who attended the Art Gallery of New South Wales screenings. Metalux is emblematic of the new wave of cinematic changelings who have not forgotten the past, who have not forgotten the future and whose project is to continue restoring the glint in the eye of cinema.

Metalux was presented by Sydney Intermedia Network (SIN) at The Domain Theatre, The Art Gallery of NSW, November 1 and 8.

In the four years I studied chemistry at Sydney University in the late sixties, nothing affected me as profoundly as working in a shipyard during two summer vacations. Employed as a boilermaker’s assistant, I carried the tradesman’s tools, set up the cutting and welding equipment, and did my best to keep out of his way and not make a fool of myself. Five or six days a week for one of those summers, Robert and I joined a team who took a ferry from Balmain to Garden Island and spent the day on the aircraft carrier Melbourne, in dry dock for repair after slicing the Voyager in half.

Overnight I forgot about quantum mechanics and organic reagents, worrying instead about measuring the length of a weld accurately and setting the correct mix of oxygen and acetylene. I’d had to join a union (the Federated Ironworkers of Australia) and was immediately inducted into the mysteries of demarcation disputes, getting into serious trouble for moving a ladder (“Painters and Dockers’ work, son,” explained Robert after defending me from the foreman’s wrath).

“Uni Jon” they called me, with a mixture of affection and derision, their respect for my intellectual achievements tempered with amazement at my ignorance of life’s realities. Robert and I spent one memorable morning chatting while we waited for a painter and docker to deliver a fresh acetylene cylinder. He told me about the great love of his life: a woman a few years older with whom he had been desperately in love. He’d wanted to marry her but she kept putting him off, breaking up with him then returning to resume the relationship, before leaving once more.

Eventually he cut his losses, transferring his attention to another woman, someone he’d known socially for some time. They married and, at the time Robert was telling me this story, had three children. “But what happened to the other woman,” I asked, “the one you really loved?”

“I realised I couldn’t rely on her,” he replied. “She was beautiful, smart, witty, great in bed. I’ve never met anyone like her. But she was always making promises she couldn’t keep. She drove me crazy. I simply wanted to love her and she broke my heart. So I married someone else.”

At 19 I believed absolutely in the grand passion, although I’d never experienced one. I thought that Robert—by following his head rather than his heart—had been unfair: to his capricious lover, to his wife, and to himself. I resolved that I would behave differently if faced with a similar choice.

Needless to say, I was wrong. The choice, as is turned out, was not between two women but it involved a grand passion nonetheless—my more than 10 year love affair with the Macintosh. The relationship began to sour two years ago, when my employer at that time supplied me with a PowerBook 5300. I’d been using my own PowerBooks happily for years but this turned out to be the computer from hell. Over a six month period, the keyboard, LCD screen, modem port, and finally the motherboard were all replaced. My experience was not unique, the 5300 series was the subject of a humiliating recall that cost Apple over 60 million dollars.

About the time I left the company to freelance, I received some money from the AFC to create a web-based hypertext narrative. Included in the budget was an amount for a notebook computer (to be sold at the end of the project with the proceeds returned to the AFC). Instead of a PowerBook, I bought a Toshiba notebook running Windows 95. This meant I could create the text and graphics for the web pages on my Macintosh 8500 desktop machine while checking how the site looked under Windows. I could use the Macintosh as a content creation platform and the Windows machine to check how the project would look to 90 percent of personal computer users. My compact with the devil had begun.

From there it was a gradual slide into hell. I transferred my calendar and contacts database to the PC so that it would always be available. Since I work as a freelance writer and charge for my time, I needed an accounting program that tracked and invoiced by time. QuickBooks Pro was perfect but Intuit, the developers, had just announced that they’d no longer be developing a Macintosh version.

Michael Hill and I had developed a concept for an online chat game and were seeking out potential partners. All the 3D chat spaces had Windows-only client software. My friends, who’d been using Macs for years too, began to switch to Windows. Every application I used on the Macintosh was available for Windows too: Photoshop, Director, Inspiration, Storyspace, DeBabelizer, FileMaker Pro. In every case the Windows version turned out to be as good as or better than the Macintosh original. Worse still, many fine software applications were only available for Windows.

I’d been using Nisus Writer as my word processor for nearly ten years. Nisus Software bet the farm on a new Apple technology called OpenDoc by releasing an OpenDoc compliant version of Nisus Writer. It was disastrously buggy. Not long afterwards, Apple abandoned OpenDoc (and the developers who’d spent millions of dollars building OpenDoc software). I needed a replacement word processor. Microsoft Word on the Macintosh was awful but the PC version turned out to be surprisingly good.

That left the internet, which I was still accessing from the Macintosh. A few months ago I bought the Windows version of Eudora, switched my e-mail to the PC, and the migration was complete.

Over the past couple of weeks, as I’ve been thinking about writing this piece, an e-mail list (Windows-Newbies) and a web site (MacWindows) have sprung up: the former for Macintosh users making the switch to Windows, the latter for Mac users who want to (or must) use PCs too. Windows-Newbies is fascinating: the people on the list are technically sophisticated Macintosh users struggling to come to terms with how Windows is better, or worse, or simply different. Their humility and openness to new experience is refreshingly different to the Macintosh or Windows fanatics who scream abuse at each other across a gulf of ignorance, incomprehension, and intolerance.

What’s Windows like? It’s OK. Usable. Once you’re inside Photoshop or Director, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Windows is ugly to look at (but you get used to it), its memory management is appalling (I regularly run out of memory although I have 48Mb of physical RAM), it lacks the seamless elegance of the Macintosh OS. I like Windows well enough, it does the job. But I don’t love using it as I loved the Mac.

In years to come, the Macintosh saga will be studied—as one of the great marketing failures of the 20th century—in business schools all over the world. Anyone who has used both knows that a Macintosh is superior to a Windows PC but Apple has never been able to persuasively communicate that difference. As Macintosh hardware sales began to decline, software developers scaled down or abandoned their commitment to the platform, sending hardware sales into an even deeper downward spiral.

I still use my Macintosh 8500, for video capture and to work in Japanese (Apple’s Asian language support remains unsurpassed). I’m sentimental about the Mac: every morning when I log on to the net via the PC, I read my e-mail then immediately check out the Macintouch and MacWEEK web sites to see what’s happening in the Macintosh world. I’m hoping against hope that Steve Jobs will turn Apple around, that Rhapsody will ship, and that—like the prodigal son—I can return to the Macintosh fold. But I’m not holding my breath.

So, you might ask, if the Mac is so much better and I loved it so much, why did I switch to Windows? Well, Robert was right, all those years ago. “Sometimes,” he told me, as we stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the brilliant summer sun, “you have to settle for second best”.

Our search for a history often begins with the residue of memory, with the traces of the past that remain with us in the present. These remnants become starting points for a journey into our history—for the maps we make of the past. And yet, memories are invariably partial and incomplete. The maps we create lead us back to very precise places—to very personal and limited locations—and they give us a very particular view of our history and our heritage.

This tracing of a memory to create a history is a very pleasurable act. I was reminded of this at the 1997 Green Mill Dance Project held in Melbourne during early July. As I watched a parade of dancers take the microphone to offer witness to the legacy of Gertrude Bodenwieser and Laurel Martin, I was fascinated by the seductive nature of living history (especially when it is celebrated among people starved of a past). Person after person rose to pay tribute to these women—bodies in the present becoming testimony to the significance of these bodies of the past.

But what does it take to be remembered in dance? Which bodies resonate in the present, leaving maps for us to follow to the past? According to Karen Van Ulzen, editor of Dance Australia, they are the heretics who leave a heritage. They are “seldom lone individuals but part of a continuum of change sweeping Western art”. These artists defy tradition while acknowledging their heritage as a “point of departure”. This genesis model of history (Martha begat Merce begat etc etc) validates the present by reference to the existence of a past. It offers dance a kind of historical legitimacy which champions linear, progressive development but, in the process, glosses over a memory of rupture and historical specificity.

Let’s take one dancer’s career as a case in point. Sonia Revid was trained by Mary Wigman in Germany. Originally from Latvia, she arrived in Australia in 1932. Four years earlier Revid had left Wigman’s Dresden studio to pursue a solo career throughout Europe, gaining particular success in Berlin. She remained in Melbourne for 13 years, dying suddenly in 1945. Like other independent dancers working in Australia during the late 1920s and the 1930s, Sonia’s work provoked interest, received praise, and stimulated criticism from reviewers, audience members and other dancers. Basil Burdett was one critic who took a particular dislike to Revid’s style. Burdett was horrified by what he saw as Sonia’s abandonment of established technique (ballet) and scoffed at her reliance on internal stimulation for external action. He told his readers in the Melbourne Herald in 1934 that during her recital, the “general conception and technical invention were hardly adequate” and “the emotional side tends to be too dominant”.

However, Basil Burdett condemned Sonia Revid’s performances by judging them against completely inappropriate standards, assumptions and principles. For him, her abandonment of an identifiable technique made her dance highly subjective and, therefore, of suspect quality. However, the whole point of Sonia Revid’s work was her rejection of formalised techniques, her application of theory which had been developed in other art forms, and…her independence.

Consequently, as her work was so personal she did not acquire the trappings necessary for the development of a stake in the future, in the history of this country’s dance practice. She left no legacy, no disciples, no means through which her name, her life, and her work could transcend her own time. The focus of this woman’s life, and her dance, was its particularity, it was situated and historically specific. Such behaviour dictated that she be forgotten in a world so reliant on a history in which the significance of a past activity is measured by its residue and relevance in the present.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that, 60 years after Basil Burdett’s complaints, the idea of an art which transcends the specificities of time and place should prevail. As Karen Van Ulzen stated in 1988:

It is surely obvious that most of the good art of the past transcends the flux of specific ideologies to touch something else that remains constant throughout human experience…
Dance Australia, October/November 1988

Such a statement was prompted by Van Ulzen’s evaluation of the work of American independents such as Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, and Trisha Brown and the theories they followed. Theories which, to Van Ulzen’s dismay, had infected the projects of Australian dancers and choreographers. These dancers applied inappropriate theories to an art form which had always been, for Van Ulzen, necessarily associated with ideological individualism, the attainment of skill, the rewarding of talent, and a “discriminating, evaluative…authoritative, hierarchical approach” to criticism.

Well, Van Ulzen is nothing if not consistent. Ten years later, in her review of this year’s Green Mill for The Australian, she bemoaned the lack of external stimulus and reference to tradition displayed in the work of contemporary independents. Their dance was “utterly unremarkable”—but, as she later suggested:

We really shouldn’t be surprised—most independents choreograph on themselves. They are therefore, first, limited by their own technical facility and, second, by a lack of outside perspective of guidance.
The Australian, July 4 1997

However, this was only part of the problem. The other was the continued use of supposedly inappropriate theories in the creation of dance; or the use of “post-frog guff” as Van Ulzen calls it. This phrase refers to post-structuralist theories and post-modernism and was proudly borrowed by Van Ulzen from the Robert Hughes—a critic who freely admits to his own generationally induced myopia.

As we have seen, this association between independent practice, the active use of theory, and the critical devaluation of such art, has a long history in Australian dance. So, when I attended this September’s Dancers Are Space Eaters forum, organised by the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) and subtitled Directions in independent dance, I arrived with the history of independent practice, the reviews of this year’s Green Mill, and the indignation of many dancers, ringing in my ears. There, some interesting questions were asked. “What is independence anyway?” Sally Gardner grappled with this topic offering a reference point for further discussion. “What do those artists who consider themselves independents represent in their work?” The variety of relationships between the individual, the world and movement saw a mesmeric exploration of the relationship between light/video and movement by Sue Peacock, f22: the last stop; the revisiting of a highly personal but revealing history by Kate Champion, Of Sound Body and Mind; a dance of playful simplicity and explosive space-carving from Jennifer Monson, Lure; a frenetic race for escape at the crescendo of Rosalind Crisp’s memorable roar; and Tamara Kerr’s Ricochet whose relentless energy became seductively hypnotic.

What I saw at PICA was a group of artists exploring the relationship between life and their moving bodies. Sure, not all of it was great, but even the pieces mentioned above, which have all stayed with me in the months that followed their viewing, were very specific to their time and place. For me, this is where their validity lies, but for others this condemns the work. It also threatens to banish the creators to historical obscurity as the canonical myths of the future devour the multiplicity of our dancing present, just as has happened with our dancing past. For independence, whether it means working alone, inventing against the grain, or merely managing to create work outside dominant funding structures, rarely lends itself to the establishment of a ‘heritage’. Or does it?

To my amazement even I finally contributed to the maintenance of this idea of heritage with my address to the audience of Space Eaters. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. For in my attempt to diffuse the centrality of certain memories and explode the mythology of ‘heritage’ through the illumination of the lives of former ‘independent’ dancers in Australia, I also gave some of those who identified as independent artists in the audience a linkage to a past of their own. Hungry for affirmation of their contemporary location, these histories gave these young dancers—their process, their passions, and their position in the contemporary social structure of Australian dance—some sort of validity. It offered them a memory from which to create a map to their own heritage.

Sections of this article originally appeared as part of the keynote address for the 1997 Dancers are Space Eaters forum at PICA entitled Maps, Notion and Memory: a tale of independents in the history of Australian dance.

Escape velocity is the speed at which one body overcomes the gravitational pull of another body. This metaphor of the gathering of momentum and release from constraints seems an appropriate way to describe the creative processes which this year led to two new performance projects by Company in Space. Escape Velocity, a dance installation for Melbourne’s Green Mill 97 festival in June and Digital Dancing, a residency at The Choreographic Centre in Canberra, were linked by an imaginative energy far stronger than the gravitational pull of practicalities. The successful risk-taking of the first project provided the impetus which enabled the following residency to fulfil its promise of innovation.

Escape Velocity was an example of faith over adversity. Determined to take part in Green Mill, yet too late to apply for funding for the exploration of ideas which had only emerged during the previous production, The Pool is Damned, which took place in March, the company was starting from scratch. When the Victorian College of the Arts agreed to donate their Hybrid Room to the company for the duration of the dance festival, they provided the space in which the ideas of company co-artistic directors, Hellen Sky and John McCormick, could form. The Hybrid Room, a small empty space without any history as a performance venue, offered the bare walls against which the artists could bounce their laser beams and bodies. The reality of a physical context for their ideas released the energy required to spark the creative process into life. Energy which was gradually dissipated by a fruitless search for sponsorship in kind for the expensive technologies on the shopping list, but energy enough to carry through the conversion of the room to a black box, the construction and installation of the technologies, some speedy made-on-the-body-whilst-avoiding-cabling choreography and some hurried match-making between the two elements. With time and resources at a premium however, the dress rehearsal came only on the opening night, the installation never fully received the focus it required, and the experimentation with the interactive potential of the work occurred during each performance.

Inspired by Mark Dery’s book of the same name, Escape Velocity sought to examine the role of the body in the virtual world. As technology revolutionises our public, private and interstitial spaces (such as the internet), shrinking the globe, compressing time and expanding horizons, the reach of an arm, the length of a stride is distorted and confused. There’s no need for a nod and a wink by e-mail, we can’t embrace by video conference and our eyes won’t ever meet across a crowded chat room. So where does flesh and fragile bone fit into the new geographies of the late 20th century? Has technology accelerated us free of each other’s orbits, into a solitary virtual world where our bodies are an irrelevance, a hindrance?

Escape Velocity posed these questions in an other-worldly space without temporal, geographic or political context. Was this the mythical cyberspace? Probably not, there were too many bodies around. The intention, stated clearly in the program (a new step in the direction of accessibility for this company), was to construct a layered, responsive environment where the bodies of the audience would enter into relationships with the space, each other, a dancer and a series of aural and visual effects. By creating an immersive interactive environment, Sky and McCormick were seeking a physical and emotional, as well as a cerebral, response to their ideas. Introducing effects singly and cumulatively would allow the audience to absorb the many technologies in operation (something which The Pool is Damned, with its inscrutable complexity failed to do). Certainly the laser beams which criss-crossed the space and were broken by the bodies of the entering audience did evidently trigger a variety of sound effects. Questioning voices ricocheted around the bodies, quoting from texts such as Dery’s, in a Babel of languages suggestive of entire continents and cultures. Over the sounds came images, similarly triggered; projections of moving bodies, filtered through animation and special effects packages to create visions of other-worldly hybrid beings. Suspended overhead, the body of Sky was filmed and projected around the space as she danced her aspiration to flight, her will to escape. As she fell to earth and carved a powerful path through the crowd to perform her final shamanistic dance, she incrementally reasserted her physicality, gathering weight and volume with every step, every fling of her arm through a wall of light. Moving below the ‘vortex’ of laser lights and overhead cameras which responded to her spinning limbs with sound and images, Sky took control of her environment and lead the technology into a beautiful synthesis with her movement. As the lights came up and she stood, small and sweaty in a sea of cold cabling, her kinetic transformation of the space remained on the retina for an instant, an after-image, testimony to the power of the body in these new relationships.

The end of Escape Velocity was the starting point for Digital Dancing, the residency at Canberra’s Choreographic Centre. Australia Council funding earmarked specifically for initiatives involving dance and new technologies provided a well-resourced space, three dancers and the ability to involve a previous collaborator, the composer Garth Paine, in five weeks of creative discovery. Sky was able to step back from performing and choreograph with dancers Louise Taube, and Joey and Cazerine Barry. Clare Dyson joined the project’s technical team. Taking many of the themes and technological devices of the previous work at a more measured pace facilitated a thorough, measured approach. The ‘vortex’ for example, which Sky so gamely manipulated in her improvised ritualistic dancing, was adapted through repeated rehearsals with the dancers to achieve its broadest choreographic range. Experimentation and analysis found a complex, balanced relationship between cause and effect, forming an environment which both drove and was driven by the dancer. The audience could see that physical activity triggered responses in the visual and aural environment, yet the evolution of the movement was complex and resistant to the reductive equations which typify much interactive work (such as the point and click world of the CD-ROM). The final performance which emerged through the weeks of testing was more a series of vignettes, demonstrations of prototypes, rather than a single cohesive show. The company was able to take several of their ideas to a logical conclusion, using trained bodies, before a live audience given the rare opportunity of experiencing the results of informed experimentation with dance and technology.

While The Choreographic Centre plans to continue its support of such new media work, the company returns to the struggle for resources sufficient to match their ideas. An interactive television project taking place in Victorian schools and on the internet in late 1997, and the possible tour of a reworked version of The Pool is Damned in early 1998, should provide the fuel to maintain the velocity achieved during these two successful projects. A new large scale work involving a range of artists is planned for next year, potentially accelerating the company, free once again of the pull of compromise and limited ambition.

However, without a permanent physical space in which to make and test its performance ideas, Company in Space will forever remain ironically virtual—Company without Space, Company in between Spaces. Whilst the commitment to new technologies often leads Sky and McCormick into the cyber-world of the ether, their passion is fed by the body, and without somewhere to put those limbs, lungs and larynxes, they will always be hamstrung by the physical imperative. Since the company’s inception in 1992, the work has steadily increased in scale and ambition, with each successive project forging a new understanding of the performance potential of the interactive technologies emerging through progressive commercial and industrial initiatives. And yet, as with every new discovery, adaptations and modifications are required before a perfect model is formed. It is this space for experimentation which escapes the company and many like them. The wonder of technology is its ability to transform the known world, its capacity to transcend the imagination and redefine perception. Only through immediate experience does one fully grasp the power of technology, only through protracted exposure does one start to push the technology forward and through the processes for which it was commercially designed. The creative mind can see potential far beyond the intent of the manufacturer or industrial user, can question, re-formulate and re-apply technologies with implications which consequently feed back into the industry. But nobody wants to pay for these rather unquantifiable processes and so artists like Sky and McCormick will still be making lasers in their lounge room, buying PCs from The Trading Post and wiring up the standard lamp for the foreseeable future. Escape velocity, not easily achieved, is all too quickly lost again. Sad, but virtually true.

On October 29, the Australia Council announced three New Media Arts Fellowships, worth $40,000 a year over two years.

New Media Fellow Linda Dement, whose CD-ROM work Cyberfleshgirl monster was featured in last year’s Burning the Interface exhibition at the MCA, will develop a literary-digital multimedia work in collaboration with avant-garde New York author Kathy Acker. Acker will provide the text, and Dement the images. The collaboration will take form online and on CD-ROM, and the work will be submitted to galleries and electronic arts events.

Fellowship recipient Stephen Jones is a video artist of 20 years standing, and member of groundbreaking techno-arts and music group Severed Heads. Jones will develope an interdisciplinary opera The Brain Project, originally inspired by Michael Nyman’s operatic interpretation of neurologist Oliver Sachs’ The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. The work will involve on-stage computers driven by performance and used to present illustrative material, dance and vocal work.

Video artist John Gillies will devote the fellowship to complete a large body of solo and collaborative performance work, with a focus on a fusion of sound and image, as in the work Tempest, a video installation of an electronically generated thunderstorm. The work will represent the culmination of 10 years of research, and will be presented in gallery, performance and screening situations. RT

A plainchant violin. Between the national and the bristol opens like an arrangement of Giacometti figures in a square: eight faces, eight physiques turned in different directions, at different levels. Some are seated, some stand. This is an architectural arrangement of bodies in a wavering line—a queue, a thread, a taciturn question (how much can we know each other?). The inherent drama of bodies thinking, thinking to pass each other, is accentuated with a momentary blackout. Lights up again, as if, in remembering (the same positions, same roles), we can now look differently. This is not a piece about disability, nor even one that so much as points to some of its dancers as disabled. It is about planes of habitation, interaction, of where and how one can know another, manifest through sweep and contact.

Technically, what is notable is that the viewer’s attention is equally dispersed between dancers. Siobhan Davies has choreographed for texture, line and placement, leverage, echo and counterbalance. This for me highlights one of the problems in Christy don’t leave me so soon which first labelled the three dancers as (wheelchair) bound or unbound, before they could explore how it was possible to move. As an audience for this program there is a fine line between wondering at limitation, and wandering within the art: Christy… defines its characters as (unfortunately, female and) crippled, desiring, versus erect (and male) before it explores manoeuvres off-the-wheelchair in quite nice ways. Perhaps its first part was pointed, provocative, for some, but I found its politics loaded and unthinking. The problematic of Davies’ piece, however, is quite different: how do you stop one dancer showing up the others?

David Toole uses his elbows like knees, his arms like levering cranes, his tumbles and turns somehow turning the earth like an earth-moving machine. None of his manoeuvres skim the surface—of soil, or emotions. Most of the fully-able-bodied dancers feel static beside him. There was some nice partnering with Helen Baggett, she breathing through her bones to accompany him; but largely, this legless dancer’s skill should have been caught up in the rest of the troupe, but wasn’t. Wheel-chair bound, Jon French’s angularity was given wonderful space by Davies, but could have been better threaded and echoed as a texture by other dancers throughout the piece. Working against isolation and exclusion is obviously a huge factor in the work of CandoCo; in its choreography this program did not always achieve a similar vision.

CandoCo is a group of able and dis-able-bodied dancers founded in 1991 in London. Their Australian tour, part of the British Council’s newIMAGES program, encompassed performances and workshops in Lismore, Newcastle, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane September 18-October 29. between the national and the bristol, choreography Siobhan Davies, music by Gavin Bryars; Christy don’t leave so soon, choreography Benjamin/Dandeker/Parkinson. The Gasworks, Melbourne Fringe, October 7.

The city of Kassel in the north west of Germany is an unlikely town for Documenta, the world’s leading art event. It has the feeling of a large village—perhaps once a grand city, but totally devastated then rebuilt after World War II. But somehow this village feeling works for an exhibition like Documenta, allowing the audience to walk the city between four exhibition spaces and view several site-specific projects along the way. Throughout all sites, a strong thematic cohesion is maintained along with a sense of relation between the many installation, photographic, screen-based and sculptural works on display.

The 10th Documenta (aka dX) was held from June to September this year assembled by French curator Catherine David with the title “politics/poetics”. Without including many big names, dX featured over 100 artists and groups, indicating a preference towards a thematic rather than a ‘blockbuster’ approach.

dX engaged in very direct ways, enticing the viewer to spend time with works, to read, to sit, to watch and at times touch. This engagement was particularly pronounced with the screen-based works, a predominant feature of dX. What was most obvious about these works was the presentation in relation to the viewer—with great consideration of how an audience relates to screen-based work within the context of an art exhibition. The viewer could be both receptive and active in the concept and delivery of the ideas.

The most pronounced example of this was a series of four videos by Jean Luc Godard screened in a ‘viewing structure’ designed by Dan Graham. The Godard works were from his personal history of cinema and other movies, excerpts from his own and others’ films, interspersed with interviews and dialogues on many topics from French philosophy to cinema theory. Each monitor sat on the floor and was displayed in one compartment of a four cell glass ‘booth’, the audience sitting on cushions in each booth with headphones. The design of the booth however created an uneasy sense of voyeurism as viewers could see each other through the glass, as well as reflections of the other videos, and in turn, their own image as part of the reflected Godard image. The whole structure created tension, mirroring Godard’s own techniques of fracturing and layering.

French artist Liisa Roberts presented a 16mm installation entitled Trap Door. Situated in a large space, three loops of repetitive human motion were projected on the walls as well as screens arranged in a triangular pattern. Her work “…reflects the relationship between viewer and work in time and space…in a space that is both closed and open at the same time. The viewer can walk around it, enter it, or observe it, for it adheres to sculptural principles as well as visual principles. It is both exhibition space and object.” (dX, Short Guide) The grainy black and white film, with only the sound of the projectors created an eerie and mesmeric effect. Like the Godard work, the viewer becomes both spectator and participant, but using a more poetic approach, Roberts created an immersive and contemplative screen environment.

On a more ‘gritty realist’ note Johan Grimonprez presented a documentary video Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1995-97), an historical chronology of airplane highjackings. The work was totally engaging, and in the context of dX was an important detailing of the history of extreme political actions. The work did not glorify the terrorist acts, but rather seemed nostalgic for the ‘classical’ terrorist method.

These three works are only a short selection from a comprehensive list of screen-based works. The inclusion of these works alongside many other artforms created a strong sense of content and theme rather than medium. Most of the screen-based works were actually about projecting beyond the screen, engaging the audience in an environment, creating the image as a confrontational spectre. Artists such as Graham/Godard, Roberts, Grimonprez as well as, for example, Jordan Crandall, Steve McQueen and the collaborative team of Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler are working at the intersection of politics and poetics, exploring ways in which the screen is simultaneously site of production, display medium and expanded sculptural/architectural mechanism.

Informal, sardine-packed and a little like the Mother of All Uncle Arthur’s Slide Nights, Digita’s takeover of the Binary Bar for two nights was worth its wait in set-up time.

Lisa Gye and Steven Ball, in an inspired piece of adhoc-ery, used a calico sheet over the main window of the bar rather than a clinical projection screen, so pedestrians and that peculiar brand of Melbournian flaneur could—with neat literalism—turn the plane to interface. Apt, really, for a double bill of interactive multimedia entertainment that aimed to put the performance and audience-focus back into an often-predictable point-click Timezoney version of art shrink-wrapped to fit kiosk one-to-one.

As with any decent theatre restaurant, we got some terrific warm-up acts, in this case an experimental video compilation featuring work by RMIT animation students, from scalpel-surreal metallic 3D-morphed flowers to deconstructed faux-naif retro-Astroboy, starring (as enjoyably always) Troy Innocent and Third Eye.

At one end of the theatricalisation continuum were CD-ROM extravaganzas that nonetheless simply multiplied the over-shoulder-starer experience of impatiently waiting for a Riven addict to finish up. Zoe Beloff’s Beyond is an extraordinary cinematic VR narrative, set in an abandoned asylum occupied by about 20 panoramas and 20 QuickTime movies. Hauntingly gothic and dreamily associative, it explores artificial resurrection and dramatises the paradoxes and cross-translations between media technologies over time, mode, fiction, analysis and use, and frankensteining discarded 1920s home movies. But—in addition to the distancing of CD-autocontrol—the poor circus-bear computer got d-drive stutters, dissipating the soundscape, swallowing the scripted-word recordings, distorting the picture.

Then there’s the hybrid inbetweeneries of performed interactivity and projected performances. Regurgitations, a la Dirk de Bruyn, did fractal variations on the diaristic theme in full handheld vertigo mode with palimpsestic layers of text, old family-photo riffs, chanting, live guitar, comic-book iconography and hallucinogenic movement disconcertingly reminiscent of bad improvisational contact dancing. Synthesiser, by Steven Ball and Nicole Skeltys, bounced fractured randomly-generated text off a distressed, Gaussian road movie (broken white line zipping itself up into infinity), colliding with pixillated palettes, tartan swatches, screensize Dulux samplers and other found-objects from the technical apparatus of image manipulation.

But at the other performance extreme, and probably the most entertainingly effective, were those incorporating and engaging the space and audience. Tony Wood’s Interactive boasted live percussion and electric guitar backing CD-ROM projections of abstracted video and photographic kinetic water studies, match-cut and jump-cut with a duelling slide projector. The two competing (and mobile: tilting, scrolling, crawling up the wall, chasing each other across the screen) image-sets framed, overlapped, slid in and out of focus and position, collide-o-scoping sunflowers, circuitboards, snakeskin, peacock-tail oil-patinas, diodes, stained glass, and hieroglyphs. Mesmerising fun syncopated to the live music.

And Paul Rodgers produced two terrific pieces, The Waxing Book and Paul’s Experiments, the latter being the Digita highlight (in all senses), installing a video hook-up projecting the audience-as-film, three light globes that he slowly, surgically punctured with a blowtorch while a fan dissected light, mirrors refracted it, sunspots imploded it, video-inserts and shadow produced a quadrupled puppet-play commentary. Medium as newly-visibilised message and toy: an acute fable for Digita.

There’s something spooky about attending a performance in an empty shop, particularly when it’s one of those characterless boxes that are part of a much bigger complex. It’s as if absent, glassy-eyed shoppers haunt the space, searching for merchandise, offended by the frivolous goings on. On this Saturday night, drunken passers-by perform for us in the window before moving on. As if pre-empting this atmosphere, a surreal, intensely performative aesthetic informs the items presented in the space, six in all by choreographers: Cadi McCarthy, Janet Charlton, Barbara Mullin, Vivienne Rogis, Lisa Ffrench and James Berlyn.

Part of the Festival of Contemporary Arts in Canberra, this collection titled To The Wall, was curated by choreographer Paige Gordon and her influence could certainly be seen in unifying elements across the programme; comedy, character-based drama and the use of song and dialogue. As she states in the program, her primary concern is “an interest in making dance accessible by making it entertaining”. While conforming to the aesthetic of the host company/choreographer raises obvious questions, it was actually great to see a dance collection that managed some kind of cohesion. The one factor that did divide the program—straight down the middle in fact—was the relative choreographic experience of Charlton, Ffrench and Berlyn, in comparison with McCarthy, Mullin and Rogis. Having said that, McCarthy’s piece Waiting showed promise in developing a single idea well.

Interestingly, the three more successful pieces shared a particular tendency within dance practice to choose between pure, choreographed movement sequences and a mixture of performance techniques including, but not privileging, movement. These choreographers chose the latter. The site specific Retail Therapy by Charlton is a case in point. In what amounted to an exercise in hyperbole, Ffrench, Berlyn, comedienne Darren Gisherman and Charlton herself began outside the window as drooling shoppers, drawn inside by an overwhelming, obsessive force and finally overcome in a frenzy of wanton consumerism that culminated in a song delivered cabaret style—“five dollars…only five dollars…”. Comedic skills are often demanded of dancers not up to the challenge, but in this case Charlton was lucky—or wise—in having genuinely funny people at her disposal.

In H.T.D.A.P.H. (How To Draw A Perfect Heart), Lisa Ffrench continued her often autobiographical project on obsessive human behaviour. Beginning with a Psycho-style shower scene, Ffrench confounds expectations when the bloody smears on the fake glass shower curtain take on the form of a heart. Emerging clad in a Glad-Wrap beehive and black slip, Ffrench’s monologue/dance develops around the image of the two-sided heart. The difficulty, when drawing hearts, to match the second half to the first becomes the obsession, the central idea which propagates to encompass many facets of love—disparity, co-dependence, two as one, obsession, repetition…this idea can go places not yet dreamt of by Ffrench which is proof of a good idea.

The final work for the evening was Berlyn’s Attraction Suite and sweet it was. Arrivals and departures, awkward casualness and polystyrene cups set up a party scene where a suite of couplings unfold. Fascination, excitement, boredom, duplicity…all the elements of attraction are depicted, with differing levels of comic sensibility from performers Charlton, McCarthy, Rogis and Simon Clarke. McCarthy’s performance as a panting, love sick party-goer, all trembling and swooning, was spot on. Berlyn’s own comic talent, given a regular airing by his alter-ego, the drag character Buffy, stood him in good stead.

Down a block, around the corner and up the hill a very different performance unfolded in a ‘proper’ theatre, also a part of the festival. What do Padma Menon, Diana Reyes, Nigel Kellaway and Gary Lester have in common? A production called Laya: Women Who Dare, presented by Padma Menon Dance Theatre. This is indeed a daring enterprise for Menon who lists herself as choreographer/artistic director, Reyes as flamenco tutor, Kellaway as dramaturgy assistant and Lester as contemporary tutor. (The dancers are credited as co-creators.) To have these four, individually distinctive, often formally unambiguous artists involved in the one project, suggests a significant central concept; one which could inspire, and furthermore, make imperative such collaborations. Cultural hybridisation is also implied in this list of contributing artists; a fusion of performance styles driven together by an artistic impulse clearly understood and committed to by all members involved. Needless to say, a lot to ask. Menon has aimed high in Laya… and by the end of the show, the perils of such an ambitious project are painfully evident. What is also clear is a recklessly daring spirit, a commendable choice of cast and an often sensitive treatment of a difficult theme.

Laya is about women—their sexuality, strength, victimisation and relationships with each other. Indian, Spanish and contemporary dance vocabularies are particularly rich for women, with female dancers being historically significant in terms of their creation and development. This goes some way towards explaining Menon’s choice of collaborators.

Diana Reyes’ virtuosic style of flamenco is exceptionally aggressive and strong, her compact figure demanding your attention and holding it. Indian dance can match Spanish in strength, and has a softer register that expresses a particularly feminine type of passion. Stylistically, both forms focus on the arms, hands, face and feet and in the first half these practical points of contact were worked through. The dancers, asked to be proficient in so many, incredibly complex forms, often appeared to be progressing step by step, the themes being left to some Kellawayesque illuminations, where screaming, retching and twitching said emphatically what the dance sequences alluded to. Somewhere amongst all this, contemporary dance served as a strange kind of link, filling in the gaps but never appearing point blank.

The second half was a completely different show; minimal, sensual and completely seductive. Bare backed, voluptuous women (Peta Bull and Jane McKernan were strongest in this half), caressed themselves and each other in simple movement sequences, alluding to auto-eroticism, lesbianism and the intimate, often silent communication between women. This idea developed alone could have said more than the formal crisis that the first half amounted to.

Laya, Padma Menon Dance Theatre; To The Wall, Paige Gordon and Performance Group, Festival of the Contemporary Arts, Canberra, October 18

One of the many things that keeps me coming back for more in dance is the unique ways it evokes a sense of place: how movement stories create connections with viewers in distinct moments in time and space; how I recall a piece in my mind and reconnect with that moment. It’s something I’ve felt more conspicuously since I moved to Canberra from Brisbane. The history of place has shifted. No doubt the experience will help to expand my connection with dance and place, but for now I can enjoy the newness; the sharpening of perception it provokes.

Canberra’s Festival of Contemporary Arts has just had its third incarnation. Between October 9 and 19 there was a lot going on at the Gorman House Arts Centre and other arts venues around town. In trying to piece together my thoughts on the works I saw during this time, I found myself focusing on how the different artists dealt with the idea of the contemporary, as well as how past and place impacted upon the idea.

Spontaneous Combustion. As the title of a collection of works, the association is to explosive, impulsive and improvised material. Maybe this wasn’t realised, but Spontaneous Combustion proved to be a fun introduction to the work of Canberra’s independent artists. Vivienne Rogis’ Ya Ya was threaded throughout the program, developing in three mad episodes over the course of the evening: Ya Ya, Ya Ya The 1st Corner, and Ya Ya The Last Lap. Six ‘drivers’ struggle for position in a race; hands clenched on imaginary steering wheels, eyes focused, chewing gum, feet shuffling in a frenzy that mimicked the accompanying music by Cake. The climax is perfect chaos.

Like Ya Ya, A Perfect Day used music as an important part of the story. Choreographer Janine Ayres examines what makes a perfect day and what follows a perfect day, using Lou Reed’s song to set the scene. It’s a playful, investigative work, with more than a touch of melodrama. A video showing the performers strolling the streets of Canberra in their pyjamas, doing weird and wonderful things, like goofily sliding down escalators, gives the piece another layer of performance—although the connection between the video and the real bodies in the space could possibly have been explored more fully.

Also ‘spontaneously combusting’ was Tiger by Beren Molony. With the music of April Stevens’ fabulously wicked Teach me Tiger filling the theatre, two performers have a ludicrous seduction battle over an imaginary love interest. The war is fought using props like a loaf of bread, egg beater and broom in mysteriously sexy ways. The leopard skin outfit and fantastic wigs make this a fun work that says a lot more than my short and sweet response may suggest.

Canberra Dance Theatre presented Visions 7…1997, a collection of works by choreographers Sandra Inman and Stephanie Burridge. Abstract movement images, bold spectacle, virtuosic dance and comic moments were strong features of this mixed program. Burridge in particular seems to have a canny ability to incorporate absurdities into her choreography, turning the focus of the dance on its head in curious ways. This was most evident in joop/.sb. and still life, the latter with Patrick Harding Irmer and Anca Frankenhaeuser taking on some freakily funny roles. Burridge’s dysfunction, performed by Amalia Hordern, explodes at a frantic pace to the music of Bang on a Can, with lots of agitated movement: arms flailing, darting about the space, stumbling. Set against slow, restless movement, the pace is constantly unresolved. It’s a short piece that punches. Inman’s weavers reworks more traditional and familiar modern dance with a distinctly dynamic quality: jerky jumps, leg swings, precise footwork and signature steps of contemporary dance technique.

In Speaking of Winged Feet by Canberra Choreographic Centre residency recipient Niki Shepherd, Kuchipudi Indian Dance Theatre is interwoven with percussive rhythms and intimate song. This is a collection of works by Shepherd, with each verse in her poetic movement story revealing new explorations. Shepherd spoke after the performance about her attraction to the Greek god Hermes, “messenger of the gods, guardian of music and bringer of dreams”. This influence was palpable, with Shepherd’s winged feet taking us to Hermes. Her connection with the Greek god is contagious for a few moments there. She stomps around the space, and yet there’s a sense of weightlessness to her movement, with a strong use of the lower body balanced by a subtle fluttering of fingertips. The dance has many forms—at times joyful and others more introspective. But throughout, her connection with the audience is held and fostered, drawing me in with each new development.

Tuula Roppola’s movement story Aino is a mesmerising interpretation of The Drowned Maid, canto 4 of the epic poem The Kalevala. What strikes me most about Aino is the way Roppola moves through poses and expressions so fluidly, making me cringe with discomfort in reaction to some of the awkward physical tensions she creates. The detail in Aino pinches the nerves: a wrist bent back, head twisted away from the rest of the body, eyes either downcast or wide open and to the side, mouth open but saying nothing. Combined, these subtle, uncomfortable touches give rise to something more momentous. Like the clues in a well-constructed crime novel, in reading these details we see so much more and begin to bristle with the slow and steady unravelling of the melancholy tale.

And finally then, I feel I can begin to establish my own sense of place through these performances, varied as they are. Strangely enough it is these last two solo performance works, which each sought to recast and explore the movement potential of ancient myth in entirely different ways, that proved to be the more contemporary on the program. It’s something I’ve been mulling over for awhile now; maybe it’s my constant need to experience innovations, new histories, and the fact that ‘contemporary’ is such a fundamentally shifty term.

Let’s talk ‘big art’ for a moment. If you subscribe to the marginal idea that good dance, like good movies, or philosophy, or science, can actually reveal something about being human that wasn’t visible before, and may consist of more than advertising industry fodder, then let’s muse on this idea of ‘big dance’, and the relationship between its corporate, team-based, single-focus kind of legacy, and some recent Sydney dance events.

If dancers call themselves ‘independent’ as many of the Bodies and Intersteps artists do, then (as Sally Gardner has recently noted) it begs the question: independent of what? Independence implies relationship, a process of having grown away from something—a certain way of doing things, a context—and a process of negotiating that separation. For instance, dancers who’ve inherited the Sydney Dance Company seal of approval—like many of the artists from the Bodies programs and Stephen Page, Brett Daffy, Garry Stewart, to mention several—might find this process of separation problematic, because of the kind of effort needed both in its recognition and explication.

And credits for the first Bodies program at Newtown Theatre suggest this venture is a safe haven for ex-Sydney Dance Company and Ballet School trained artists. This tradition might provide a sense of security for dancers working on their own, but their ‘independence’ is rarely expressed in the work they make, despite the label. Maybe it’s the ‘black box’ variety where the workings of that relational process are never acknowledged as relevant or important, and never available for investigation.

Nevertheless, the idea of ‘inheritance’ has been central to much recent work, in the seeing, the doing and the making of dances; the continuous negotiation between personal understanding, the kind of physical belief systems that make personal sense, and the attractive respectability of well-trodden cultural heritage. Everything you’ve learned about people and places, different ways of being and thinking, all the small details which accumulate like threads in a carpet, become superimposed, grow together, fuse. Yet one view of something may not obliterate others. They remain together, side by side, all viable, negotiating for recognition within one body. You can, if you want to, commit yourself to one or the other exclusively, or you might choose to investigate their relationship. At present, it’s this investigation which seems crucial. The history of our dancing bodies is becoming hot.

So it might seem a good time for Indigenous artists whose work overtly straddles cultures. Stephen Page’s Fish (Bangarra) has certainly achieved popular acclaim. But if traditions waltz with each other in the bodies of the dancers, it must be off-stage, and not when they have their public dancing faces on. On-stage the negotiations seem formal, distant.

But the traditional material, both dance and music, is totally compelling and the effect is quite unlike watching the predictable paces of the western trained dancers in the group. Fish features Djakapurra Munyarryun, a performer whose physical language gives purpose and weight to the work. His gestures are mercurial and his meanings seem rich and clear, sharpened perhaps by unfamiliarity, hiding no cliches. And David Page’s traditional sounds seeped into my bones, leaving traces of melody and mood long after the theatre closed.

Meanwhile, is there something in the air at the moment, absent a few years back, which sees audiences unwilling to make any effort towards participating in an idea? Or is it that the complex Steps #3 Intersteps, Video Steps and Studio Steps programs at the Performance Space, curated by Leisa Shelton, came at the back end of a long spate of dance programs, and it was just too big an ask that audiences show much enthusiasm for turning up several nights a week, sitting on tiny stools and being constantly shunted around the theatre in the dark with all your belongings falling off your lap. Okay, if it’s distracting now, why wasn’t it three years ago? Is the good will really gone?

How is it possible, for instance, that Sydney audiences didn’t flock to Trevor Patrick’s concise and moving Continental Drift (see RealTime 20) with the same enthusiasm as Melbourne audiences? And Clare Hague’s dead trees arteries lent itself to many viewings, as her finely wrought images of insinuating root, capillary, and great gnarled branches began to speak through her frame, wired as it was with such torsion that every pulse beat seemed charged and visible.

While Leisa Shelton’s ideas about using all the space, requiring the audience to move from one vantage point to another might have provided nightmarish technical problems, it also allowed for an extremely varied program. But the text-based works all suffered similarly from muffled acoustics, making it difficult to follow Beth Kayes, for instance, in her bits of ‘Her’, or Brian Carbee’s caught between Heaven and Earth, a kind of burlesque dance-play, or Trevor Patrick’s Continental Drift.

Memory and history operated strongly in Sue-ellen Kohler’s Premonition. (TPS, October). Mahalya Middlemist’s Falling film which opens the work has a grainy familiar texture, suggesting some past era of dance-making. But as she enters, Kohler’s live body seems personable, vulnerable, with a poignant, childlike stance, hands open and toes turned-in, in a costume suggesting a playsuit, pantaloons, whale bone corsetry, a calf-length tulle tutu. Later balletic images appear, but oddly cut up, considered and intense. In her single drawn-out phrase reiterated live and over three screens, there are grand gestures and smaller inflection, but almost scrubbed of meaning.

But the phrases soften, some alchemical process working within the layers, and gradually it’s revealed. Within her own body’s assimilation of experience, her movements change, begin to flow together, closer to her centre, smaller, more from the present. There’s a sense that she’s creating her own self as we watch, without pretence or foreknowledge.

Comments regarding Sue-ellen Kohler’s ‘failed dancer’ status in some reviews of the work, are pure grist to the critical mill, because the idea of critical judgment is integral to the work. Opinions reflect certain choices about what a dancer can or should do next, why one step follows another in just the way it does. If you think of different kinds of physical training as kinds of belief systems, what kind of physical beliefs count as important, what are the conditions that are brought to bear on our choices about what is appropriate, or possible?

While the spirit of the dance speaks of unlimited possibility and its multiple containments, the multi-screened films seem also to reflect a different story, one about the body’s naturally conservative nature. Choices are enmeshed in that cultural matrix that’s called life as we know it. You don’t just leave that behind, or else you flounder, fail, get lost in a very real sense, without language. But Premonition is not just about success or social survival, but that process of understanding how one’s own personal history becomes currency for the present, what happens from moment to moment within you, over time, between flesh and social imperative.

Similarly balletic shadows fell over the works in One Extra’s joint program, Two, featuring Lucy Guerin’s Remote and Garry Stewart’s Fugly. Balletic lines, stylised, extreme, disjointed and on the edge, featured strongly, but the choreographers’ two directions were very different.

In Remote as if in the white on-and-off half light of a video screen, the dancers, sometimes with a hunched-up awkwardness, carved out their ungainly but definite ways with sharp-lined precision. The lighting, the stop-start, forward and back quality suggest they were in search mode. Becky Hilton, in her literally off-the-wall solo, clung closely to the wings, leaned out, curved her body like a bow, taut and twangy, and several arms-length duets lent a strange, coy, mechanical distance to these peculiar partnerships. At one point, in a laneway down centre stage, the dancers lay spayed out, with light falling on them like truck lights on a road accident. In a tight staccato cannon they knelt, stood, and lay down again, as if in a frame-by-frame, video replay.

Garry Stewart’s Fugly opens on four dancers in a diagonal line, doll-like, frontal, slightly grim and paranoid looking, and wearing what have become infamous red tracksuits. It’s claimed that we saw this initial image first in the work of another group, Frumpus. But in Fugly, the dancers’ doll-like stance has an air of highly cultivated fashion pitch. With their big eyes and pig-tails, the dancers assume sultry suspicion, an I-don’t-know-where-I-am-or-what-I’m-doing look, tough, naive and defensive, which pervades the work. Frumpus’ doll-like images have a very different import—their pig-tails and lipstick are not at all cute or sexy, and their approach quite purposefully drags its teeth through excesses of that kind of still-rampant sexual commodification which underpins Fugly’s presentation. If the external trappings of that first image were lifted from Frumpus’s work, its crucial commentary was unfortunately forgotten.

But Narelle Benjamin’s solos dances in Fugly are extraordinary: extreme, interior, exhausting, possessed. Her last solo is tired, struggling and pushed to such limits that it seems to transcend the idea of escape from those internal demons. The intensity and doomedness of her efforts reaches the height of pathos, and the struggle is transmogrified into art.

Festival of the Dreaming: Fish, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Drama Theatre, September 17

Steps Three—Intersteps. The Performance Space 28 October 1997. Curated by Leisa Shelton. Brett Daffy, Claire Hague, Beth Kayes, Meredith Kitchen, Brian Carbee, Trevor Patrick, Tuula Roppola. You can read more on the Steps 3 video program in RT#23

One Extra, Two: Double Edged Dance: Remote, (watch closely for the re-runs) by Lucy Guerin, and Fugly (There’s a shonky low-tech accident about to happen) by Garry Stewart. Seymour Centre, October 31

Premonition: A Strange Feeling For What is to Come, Sue-ellen Kohler, The Performance Space, October 9

Bodies, Artistic directors: Normal Hall, Susan Barling, Patrick Harding-Irma. First program choreographers: Susan Barling, Kathy Driscoll, James Taylor, Francoise Philipbert, Rosetta Cook, Deborah Mills, Kenny Feather, Newtown Theatre, October 22

In my interview with Meryl Tankard in RealTime #21 (“Free from Steps”) I hoped to tease out the meanings of terms she uses to talk about her work and dance in general—terms borrowed from a Modernist discourse. This proved difficult as the meaning of these terms was clearly implicit for Meryl and important to her. For this issue, I interviewed Sally Chance, artistic director of Restless Dance Company in Adelaide. Sally is clearly conscious of the necessity of speaking across existing discourses of aesthetics and identity. She also acknowledges the effect of doing so and thus how using a certain discourse can be a strategy for social change.

AT Why was Restless Dance formed? What is its charter? What drives you to run such a company?

SC The simple answer is that the time was right. My involvement began when I toured to Australia with Ludus Dance Company from the UK as one of their community dance workers at the 1989 Come Out Festival. Part of my role on tour was to run workshops. While we were in Adelaide I ran dance workshops with groups of differently-abled people including those with Down syndrome and cerebral palsy. This was a new area for dance in Australia. A couple of years later I decided to leave Ludus. I was interested in working in Australia but needed to establish myself as a specialist in an area of work to obtain permission to live and work here. So I thought I would seek work as a dance animateur with differently-abled people. Carclew Youth Arts Centre provided me with that opportunity. The company thus began as a youth arts project initiated by project officers Judy Potter and Virginia Hyme.

Since its inception in 1991 Restless Dance has held hundreds of workshops for fun and recreation, for skill and personal development, for industry professionals and for school and community groups. We’ve also performed in festivals, at conferences, at launches, at benefits, toured interstate and performed in Adelaide’s premier theatres.

The company’s aims are: to create and present excellent and challenging dance theatre nationally and internationally; to provide high quality dance workshops for people with and without a disability; to increase the profile of dance and disability in the community; to provide enjoyable recreational experiences.

SC When the company was associated with Carclew, project officers considered it important that workshops had a public outcome. So there has always been a split focus for me. I have always had community goals and artistic goals. The company is currently in transition. We have been incorporated for nearly a year. We would like triennial funding but the Australia Council’s Dance Fund doesn’t fund youth companies. We are also at a stage where some of the dancers, who have been with the company since its inception, deserve to be paid to co-direct and lead workshops as well as to perform. These dancers have become skilled and should be eligible for professional status. I’d like to establish a small professional company with a core group of performers as well as continue the work of the youth company. Each would contribute something different.

SC The policy of the company is “reverse integration” in which the expressive skills of the participants with disabilities define the company’s unique style. This policy developed in response to three perceptions: Firstly, integration was the policy of the disability support services when the company began. This policy was connected to two other notions—normalisation and social role valorisation. In practical terms this policy involved placing individuals with disabilities in tedious jobs at low pay.

These individuals were not encouraged to have aspirations beyond being employed. They were not encouraged to be ambitious within the workplace, or to desire other life experiences such as personal health and fitness, sexual relationships, home ownership, children or travel. I, alongside some workers in the disability sector, began to feel quite cynical about the so-called ‘opportunities’ being offered to the disabled. I became interested in helping to redefine identity for this group in a broader way. I felt people gained identity options through leisure activities as well as through paid work. I thought that being a dancer could be one of these options.

Secondly, I also questioned the definition of ‘normal’ being used as the yardstick in determining lifestyle for the disabled. In my experience ‘normal’ people don’t dance so I am not ‘normal’ in the way the word was being used. I also observed that in my dance classes the carers who accompanied the ‘dis-abled’ were often less skilled as dancers and as workshop participants than their so-called clients. What then was ‘normal’ behaviour in a situation such as a creative dance class?

Thirdly, I also felt that it was unfair that the person with the disability had to make all the effort in relation to integration. However, we have lost some workshop participants because of our policy. Some parents prefer their child to be a member of a group of predominantly able-bodied people or with able-bodied norms of behaviour.

AT Do you perceive dance training to be a tool of socialisation, a means by which unruly bodies can be disciplined?

SC Dance means as many different things to this population as it does across the general category of “people who dance”. For some it’s a means of getting fit, for others it’s a social activity and for others it serves an expressive purpose. Some company members like their jobs and dance for fun. Others are bored at work and the experience of being in the company has enabled them to become more ambitious. One company member wants to become a full-time dancer. In workshops, I explore a range of goals such as the development of social skills and physical skills, personal expression, self-discipline and I challenge behaviour patterns.

SC I always focus on the group rather than on individuals and encourage participants to work as a group. I ask members to watch and copy each other. Thus, in performance everyone tends to do everything. Improvisation is the primary approach taken in workshops and a crucial aspect of the performances which can differ depending on how a participant is feeling. Because of this variable, I set up a “time-out” space for the performers during the show.

I select material on the basis of whether the dancers look comfortable doing it. I always work from a movement focus and then suggest links with emotion rather than the other way around. I find that these dancers have a powerful understanding of gesture as a dance language and of touch. Contact work, unison work and gesture have thus become the identifiable components of the company’s style.

SC It explored a particular category of personal identity. The company divided into male and female groups to explore the idea of gender roles and behaviours and to devise and create dance. The project began with some sex education workshops run by the Family Planning Association. This aspect of identity seemed important to address as sexism, and the subsequent limiting of gender roles, can occur within the company.

My interest is in providing someone with a disability with as many terms with which to define themselves as are available to someone without a disability. Calling yourself a dancer is one of these options. Considering yourself male or female and sexual are others.

Stephen Jones takes a brief look at several issues that might have arisen (had there been time allocated for debate) at the Consciousness Reframed Conference in Wales

Consciousness Reframed at the CAiiA institute of the University of Wales was convened in July of this year to open up research and discussion of issues in interactive arts and “to examine what might be described as the technoetic principle in art.” (All quotes are from the Abstracts of the conference.) That is, how the technological is changing our consciousness of the world; our perceptions and our productions, our knowledge and modeling of the world.

Setting up the framework, Carol Gigliotti (Ohio State University) suggested that consciousness of cyberspace is a function of our understanding of how navigating through our own domestic worlds informs “our involvements with contemporary interactive technologies.” She asked, “Why construct virtual environments? Why do we feel the need to create something when we have so little understanding of why the natural world exists?” This question is often asked in relation to technological activity, usually in the following way. Look, all this technology is doing terrible things to our environment, so isn't it time we stopped and let the 'natural' world have ascendency again?

I'm never sure what I think about this, being so heavily involved in technology myself. The activity of cultural production is an ancient and deeply human function in which we engage with the world in order to understand it. Even some animals make and use tools, and language and counting are technologies. We need to pay deeper attention to the impacts of our activities on other systems, and it is here that we can work multimedia towards more acceptable ends. We can use the theory behind multimedia, the notions of interactivity and feedback, complex systems and self-organisation to recast our frameworks to look carefully at and acknowledge the consequences of what we do.

Another way to change thinking is in the re-mythologisation of the technological. For many people involved with VR (Virtual Reality) it seems to have acquired characteristics of dreaming, because one is removed from the world in wearing the helmet and harness of the VR installation. Canadian VR producer Char Davies notes that one experiences her work Osmose as though removed from the everyday world and 'immersed' in some environment that doesn't behave according to known rules. One navigates Osmose by breathing; breathing in one rises through the virtual worlds and breathing out one sinks slowly into deeper realms, descending to the core machine-code world. The immersant dives into the transparency of the virtual world, breaking habitualised perception, leading to altered states of consciousness.

Davies spoke of Osmose as being a kind of poiesis, un-concealing our being in the world. Immersion brings with it a realm of the emotional. She comments that “…by re-conceiving humans as beings 'within' the world, as participants among the world's temporal becomings” we may be able to subvert the rationalist view, revealing new perceptions of our relations to the world, re-invoking the sacred. Thus response to the experience of Osmose is often one of its ineffability, its indescribable nature, “an unfathomably poetic flux of comings-into-being, lingerings and passings-away within which our own mortality is encompassed.”

Davies' discussion also opens up issues of what Cyberspace actually is. Is it a dream world or a trance space? Margaret Dolinsky (University of Illinois, Chicago) spoke of VR as being active or “lucid” dreaming. In her work Dream Grrls designed for the Cave (an immersive, stereo-graphic virtual display theatre), she provides active dreaming spaces where we can explore dream versions of our self. The cyber realm becomes differently valued, a source of experiencing substantial otherness from our regular in-the-world being.

Is the producer of cyberspaces a shaman? Kathleen Rogers has been exploring Mayan shamanism in the mythology of the snake, using multimedia to emulate and bring on these trance states. The snake represents spiritual energy in many cultures and Rogers' intention “is to re-activate this complex model of Mayan consciousness” as a kind of cognitive archeology. The snake represents spiritual energy as well as the cyclical notion of time held by the Maya. She aims get to some sort of essence of this mythology using immersion as a tool for inducing spiritual states in the VR adventurer.

The Brazilian artist Diana Domingues also spoke of the potential for shamanistic states in VR and likened the screen of VR to the desert as a device for the projection of desires and dreams. She suggested that creative production is a way of losing ourselves, offering “interactive installations for people to experience conscious propagation in an organic/inorganic life. Electronic interfaces and neural networks provide intelligent behaviours, managing signals of the human body in sensorized environments,” providing electronic ritual and trance interfaced with electronic memory as “virtual hallucination” producing a shamanic experience.

Mark Pesce (the inventor of VRML) also takes the line that cyberspace is ineffable, mythological space, “dream-time” or “faerie”, a space of magical reality. “The forms of magical reality, ancient to humanity's beginnings, shape our vision in the unbounded void of electronic potential”. It is as though cyberspace provides an hallucinatory configuration of our perception, becoming a screen for the projection of our spiritual desires and interests.

More generally, the question becomes just what is “immersion”? How do we define it and how can we distinguish it from other mental states such as being absorbed in a book or the cinema? What degree of suspension of disbelief is needed, what agreements with the artist do we make in entering “cyberspace” so that the artist can bring a version of their conceived experience to us?

Osmose in many ways provides the paradigm example of the truly immersive space; one dons the helmet and harness and enters a world where everything is translucent, floating, jungle-like—an enveloping world of the artist's imagination. For Joe Nechvatal (an American artist living in France) immersion is containment, a 360-degree surround, physical rather than cognitive, different from the absorption we have in a book or the cinema. For Nechvatal immersion in a VR work implies a unified total space, an homogeneous world without external distraction, striving to be a consummate, harmonious whole. He identifies “two grades of immersion…(1) cocooning and (2) expanding within, which, when these two directions of psychic space cooperate…we feel…our bodies becoming subliminal, immersed in an extensive topophilia…an inner immensity where we realise our limitations along with our desires for expansion”.

In the immersive world of VR we are placed at the centre of a polar dimensional realm: wherever we turn our perspective follows, the sounds of the cyber jungle exist within plain hearing, the view is only revealed as we penetrate deeper into re-calculated space.

In the jungle, hearing becomes primary, vision is downgraded. In the VR world hearing and vision are continually re-calculated placing us at the centre of polar coordinates. As art historian Suzanne Ackers suggested, renaissance perspective is displaced and we learn new ways of seeing, navigating in new kinds of conceptual space. Point of view no longer operates in its traditional manner, it now alters over time and our perception of time and space becomes a virtual knowledge, no longer fixed to the Cartesian frame, mutable, always recalculated, determined by our progress through the environment.

The suggestion is that the experience of VR is one of non-knowing, omni-perception transcending formerly known territories, launching us into dreamspace and the worlds of the shaman. As Davies amply demonstrates in Osmose the world visually perceived becomes one of multiple layers as well as one of fluid viewpoint, worlds layered as sheets of knowing through which we navigate, each sheet providing its own enveloping omni-projective space as though we had torn away at the veils of perception rumoured at in so much early western mystical literature.

But to what extent can this really be happening given that most VR work is simply re-calculated perspectives of thoroughly well defined visual productions? Shamanism and dreaming both suppose a disruption of the consciousness of the viewer wherein recombination of thoughts and images can freely occur. I don't feel that any of the work reviewed here manages this but I suspect that there is other work, for example Bill Seaman's, where the seeds of such a process are being laid.

If popular culture has an afterlife, I imagine it would look something like Trick or Treat. Trick or Treat is a kind of spectral limbo for pop ephemera. You know, like those “where are they now” shows. Mummified daleks, kewpie dolls, backyard swimming pool accessories all suggest themselves in what at first glance appears to be a perverse discotheque of the anthropomorphously challenged. The organic, lava-lamp shapes on the walls receive the projected images of ghoulish forms, in the process becoming smears of ectoplasmic residue. The spare use of the gallery space creates the impression of a 70s minimalist sculpture, though Carl Andre never dreamed of anything like this.

At an even deeper level (the spectral world is an n-dimensional space), Trick or Treat shores up the detritus of even older, dead media. 19th century slide and magic lantern shows, automata, phantasmagoria, the gothic novel. In this Trick or Treat is a timely reminder of the historical association of projection technologies and the spectral. It subtly demonstrates the intimate links between the supernatural, the paranormal and animation technologies, such as film, which are, in every sense of the word, mediums, bridges, or conduits between the living and the dead (the ectoplasmic splatter suggests a recent paranormal irruption).

One of the main themes of this installation is animation, the breathing of life into the inanimate. The space is alive with movement and sound, yet there are no people (apart from you, the spectator), only three aloof sentinels and what appears to be their brood, all indifferent to your presence. Philip Samartzis' spooky, “granular soundscape” sustains an ongoing ambience of mechanism and process, of invisible yet immutable goings-on behind the scenes. The impression of things seen but not heard, of the order of things hidden from view, brings to mind the concept of “occultation”, which is particularly appropriate in this environment of shades and sprites.

More specifically, Trick or Treat it is a canny exploration of the ways in which new technologies are conceived and interpreted in human terms. Anthropomorphisation, animation, personification, these are the categories that have come to dominate our engagement with projection technologies from the 19th century onwards, and more recently with cybernetic and information technologies. Artificial Reality is just the latest manifestation of an urge to recognize human qualities in the technological, and a desire to witness signs of autonomy and life in the machinic. However, it would be folly to get too serious about any perceived meta-qualities in Trick or Treat, to see it as an installation-essay theorizing the techno-animus. This strange, mystifying space undoubtedly comments on dead media and on the anthropomorphic terms of reference through which we speak of them. However everything about Trick or Treat is suffused with irony. Martine Corompt's chunky, beautifully sculptural neophytes stand in virtually mute dependence, linked to the life-giving matrix by a preposterous, alarmingly high-bandwidth hose, pumping who knows what into their diminutive, pupal forms. Far from being life-like, these forms have an oppressive tactility about them; you feel their bulbous inflation visually. You need to get down close to them to hear their chirps and strains, though you can't be sure if they are noises of satisfaction or protest. Ian Haig's screaming, Munch-like effigies fly around the walls and over the bodies of spectators, looking all the time 'like' mutant, Halloweenish ghouls.

Irony morphs into satire in Philip Brophy's catalogue essay, the exhibition's screaming skull, with what's left of its tongue in its cheek. Far from being a commentary on the exhibition, just another medium, Brophy's essay is in fact an extension of the exhibition, since it interpolates a context against which Trick or Treat exerts an abrasive force. The essay's title, “Digital ArtóFour Manias,” is suggestive of its import, though any visitor to the gallery could be well forgiven for wondering what, if anything, Trick or Treat has to do with digital art. But herein lies the art of Trick or Treat. It is a space in which you have to do, literally, nothing. Except, that is, walk around, look, listen, consider, reflect etc. In other words, not a mouse in sight. This is an active, rather than interactive space, which is entirely out of the sphere of our influence. Everything happens despite you, and you'd better get used to it. Better leave your twitchy fingers at the desk.

Visually, the architecture of the work is suggestive of a matrix, a network of communications between nodes. This conceit subtly invokes the abstract nature of the digital realm, its otherworldliness (“there's no there, there”). Electrical switches, Brophy reminds us, “are so inhuman and un-interactive.” Trick or Treat plays with the idea that sound and projection technologies, like 19th century phantasmagoria, present immersive experiences which demand that the spectator gives up presumptions of interaction and succumbs to the transfixed experience of the haunting, the manifestation.

This is not to say that Trick or Treat is a reactionary work. Far from it. Trick or Treat is a humorous intervention into the ongoing artistic and critical exploration of the relationship between art and its audience in the age of digital reproduction. Digital imaging undoubtedly has its place, as does the principle of interactivity. But there are clearly types of aesthetic experience that are best encountered actively, rather than interactively. Who on earth would want to interact with a ghost train, or a splatter movie? Here comes the blood, quick, click to the next screen! Thanks, but no thanks.

Trick or Treat, fibreglass forms by Martine Corompt; digital images and rotating slide projectors by Ian Haig, Granular soundscape by Philip Samartzis, 200 Gertrude St, Melbourne August 8 -30

If “the purpose of good criticism is to kill bad art,” as one of the screens in Planet of Noise asserts, then the good critic faces a Herculean task—particularly now, when so much art springs from theoretical imperatives rather than love or passion, or both.

Still, I doubt that bad art needs to be killed, since most of it will die of natural causes. McKenzie Wark’s hanging judge, his killer of bad art, runs the risk of matching my favourite definition of a critic: someone who strolls around the battlefield when the war is over, slaughtering the wounded. As Anne Lamott points out in her book on writing, Bird by Bird, “you don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.”

In any case, the best art renders criticism superfluous since it performs a dual function: engaging and delighting our senses, intellect, and emotions while simultaneously laying down a rigorous critique of the medium and its possibilities. Jean-Luc Godard started out writing film criticism and in 1962, having made four films in two years (including the sublime Vivre sa Vie), he wrote: “Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form, or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them”.

Interactive media desperately needs work like this, work that blends art with critical discourse, particularly now, when CD-ROM has failed commercially and the hype machine has turned its attention to DVD-RAM (“ten times more storage must be the answer because more is necessarily better”) and Internet push channels (“we failed to make books or movies interactive but we’ll succeed in making the Net like television”). But we don’t need six or eight or ten gigabytes of storage or 50 or 500 hundred push channels. What we need right now is work that explores the nature of interactivity itself.

In Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray identifies four principal properties “which separately and collectively make (the computer) a powerful vehicle for literary creation. Digital environments are procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. The first two properties make up most of what we mean by the vaguely used word interactive; the remaining two properties help to make digital creations seem as explorable and extensive as the actual world, making up much of what we mean when we say that cyberspace is immersive.”

Using as its foundation the work of the performance artist Stelarc, Metabody explores digital self-representation and the human-machine interface by examining golems, robots, automata and cyborgs—past, present, and future. Using as its foundation the ironic moralism of the aphorism (with a particular debt to Adorno), Planet of Noise explores a world “where all things lie, in exile from their future; where stories burn, and spaceships, on re-entry jettison all desires”. That Metabody satisfies all of Murray’s criteria while Planet of Noise meets few of them goes a long way towards explaining why I prefer the former to the latter.

“The computer is not fundamentally a wire or a pathway,” says Murray, “but an engine. It was designed not to carry static information but to embody complex, contingent behaviours.” Metabody is procedural because it is, above all, besotted with the rules through which one might create a digital being.

“Procedural environments are appealing to us not just because they exhibit rule-generated behaviour,” writes Murray, “but because we can induce the behaviour. They are responsive to our input.” In other words, they invite participation. On every level Metabody invites us to participate in the ongoing creation of meaning: constructing our own 3D golems; uploading them to a web site where they are grafted onto an evolving assemblage; exploring the relationship between the sovereign individual and the collective democracy of the Internet.

“The new digital environments are characterized by their power to represent navigable space.” Metabody uses VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) to represent not just the 3D avatars or golems but the spatial relationships between avatars and the world they inhabit.

Digital environments are encyclopedic: simultaneously offering and inducing the expectation of infinite resources. Metabody is dense and coherent: its images, texts, audio, and digital video working in concert to invite us to explore the present, reflect upon the past, and attempt to imagine the future.

In all these ways, Metabody is exemplary in mapping out the territory that, inevitably, we must explore over the next few years: 3D space, the human-computer interface, digital representation via avatars, and the integration of CD-ROM with the Internet.

Planet of Noise, on the other hand, is not procedural, since it appears to embody no rules other than the one that clicking on a 3-dimensional sphere causes the next aphorism to appear. Nor is it participatory since eschews any kind of real interactivity. It is indifferent to spatial exploration, constraining the viewer to the flat plane of the computer screen. But it is however—in the range, depth, and quality both of the ideas and their (written) expression—encyclopedic. As well as maddening. And fascinating.

The graphics and audio are superb, as is the writing. And the underlying idea—to use digital media to reinvigorate the aphorism—is startling and original. But it seems, to me, that the Planet of Noise team members laboured in isolation, combining their efforts at the last moment, since the images and sounds appear to bear, at best, only a tangential relationship to the texts.

Parading these (perceived) flaws with almost reckless indifference, Planet of Noise is still—because of the quality of its ideas and its ambition—preferable to most CD-ROM titles: whether the usual commercial dreck or the earnest, well-meaning outpourings of the “Australia on CD” program.

It might be best to finish by giving McKenzie Wark the last word. In an aphorism titled Review he writes: “At least he did me the honour of taking the trouble to misunderstand me.”

Metabody: CD-ROM by Gary Zebington, Jeffrey Cook and Sam de Silva, Merlin; Planet of Noise: CD-ROM by Brad Miller and McKenzie Wark

“I thank the organisers of the Fulbright Symposium for the invitation to speak and I pay my respects to the Larrakia people on whose Land we meet,” stated the first speaker. This was an acknowledgment picked up and repeated by each speaker who followed, by Indigenous and non-indigenous representatives alike, from all the five continents. It characterised and set the tone for four days of entwining dialogue, exposition and revelation that celebrated the Indigenous cultures of Australia in an interconnected world. It was about Respect—respect amongst a world community of cultures who have survived the onslaughts of colonisation.

Sitting in the tranquil gardens of the Art Gallery and Museum of the Northern Territory in Darwin, breathing the pungent tropical air cooled by winter breezes, with the Arafura Sea as a backdrop to the proceedings and cultural expression happening all around as the talking continued, the sense of an eventual positive outcome for Aboriginal communities was irresistible. The political realities for Indigenous Australians however, are another matter, and were reflected within the Symposium itself—conflicts over Aboriginal representation and the professional ambitions of academics and anthropologists; conflicts over the objectivity of a session on Mining sponsored by Rio Tinto; and doubts even about the productive outcomes from such an event.

As a briefing for the non-indigenous the outcome was palpable. The complexity of describing Land and Country and its centrality to the culture—without the Land there is no culture—came from many viewpoints, and most convincingly from Indigenous speakers. Kinship and community, Law and Knowledge unify the custodians within egalitarian principles long regarded as sacred. These are principles that challenge the basis of non-indigenous society, politicians, miners, pastoralists, artists and cultural workers alike.

The flourishing of visual arts throughout the communities who have secured the stewardship of their traditional lands demonstrates these principles. The richness and variety of work not only in the Museum’s collection but also in the tourist shops in town testify to this.

The interconnectedness of the communities and the continuing embrace of technological means to develop that sense of community/communicability was the broad emphasis given to the symposium. The implications of cyberspace and digital media were only occasionally, but tantalisingly, amplified, and these I outline in this short report.

David Nathan from the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies (AIATSIS) gave a succinct but dense account of the issues and outcomes of the adoption of the Internet by many communities, in particular the innovations that have occurred. There are approximately 60 websites now related to Indigenous matters, 40% of which are run by indigenous organisations—these are all linked at www.ciolek.com/WWWVL-Aboriginal.html [expired].

Prime among these is the site run by the community at Maningrida in Arnhem Land for more than two years now, (www.peg.apc.org/~bawinanga/welcome.html – expired). The site is designed to make visible to the rest of the world the full range of public cultural tradition found in the clan estates that comprise this Country through a catalogue of visual works and essays.

Whilst this has been useful for the direct marketing to a worldwide audience of cultural artefacts, Peter Danaja and Murray Garde from the community described some of the drawbacks of being so available—even at the end of a 400-kilometre line from Darwin. For instance, electronic colonisation-by-response from New Agers seeking instruction for the purposes of establishing their individual spiritual needs through the borrowing of Indigenous cultural knowledge and skills (particularly in the playing of the didjeridu, “the mother of all flutes” amongst cult Northern Hemisphere groupings), has created demands quite impossible to meet. However, as access to the internet spreads across Arnhem Land and beyond, it is regarded in a more positive way as being like a linked kinship system, with allied projects such as the building of an oral history database being part of a long-term project for later use by families. As Kathryn Wells observed in an early session: “Indigenous art and Culture is re-shaping and re-claiming a subjective identity for Indigenous people in a global context and is thus re-defining non-indigenous cultural definitions of 'authenticity' in terms of Indigenous definitions of authorship.”

Chris ‘Bandirra’ Lee has been establishing cultural recognition, knowledge and respect for the communities of Queensland through the Indiginet project attached to QANTM Co-operative Multimedia Centre based in Brisbane (also with an office in Darwin). Digital networks are being integrated with the more traditional networks with an emphasis on access and training for these communities and with a wider access to be given to the global community when the time is right.

The network metaphor also extends to off-line formats. Moorditj, one of the DoCA funded Cultural Expressions on CD-ROM Projects is due for completion in 1998. Under the direction of Leslie Bangama Fogarty and Richard Walley (“We’re fed up with teaching without having control…”), the CD-ROM examines the work of 200 Indigenous artists through interactive linking in relation to four themes: firstly land, law and language; secondly cultural maintenance and ceremony; thirdly, the influence of other cultures; and finally, social justice and survival.

The Jurassic technologies of phone, radio, television, satellites and, more recently, the Telstra planned ISDN links were referred to by many speakers, all extolling the benefits enjoyed through the adoption of these technologies (in particular Kevin Rangi from Aotearoa National Maori Radio). Some pointed to the dangers to communities of half-resourced or incomplete projects—“Well, the cable wouldn’t quite reach…” While the symposium progressed, papers and interviews were broadcast across remote communities in Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific and Asia by third year Broadcast to Remote Area Community Services (BRACS) students of NT’s Batchelor College.

Many speakers referred to copyright reform and intellectual property rights in the digital age. Terri Janke launched Our Culture, Our Future, the principles and guidelines currently being submitted for adoption by the UN Human Rights Sub-Commission. Michael Mansell questioned the collection of genetic property from the world’s Indigenous peoples, and objected to non-indigenous notions of ownership over culture. In a later session we were reminded of the trust that had been extended to scholars when collecting artefacts 30, 50 to 100 years earlier, and making sound and image documentation of Aboriginal culture. Many compromises had since occurred to this trust and with this material, including its exploitation on websites in a form unauthorised by its traditional owners.

The symposium had much vibrant activity at the edges including a French anthropologist demonstrating a digital archive of stories and paintings based on the dreaming tracks and song cycles of a desert community. Two Indigenous artists resident in Tasmania, Harri Higgs from Nira Nina Bush Place and Julie Gough of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, resolved Palawa Aboriginal law issues in Darwin around forms of representation that had been used in works exhibited in Hobart.

The symposium emphasised the many facets that construct Respect. The final speaker Galarawuy Yunupingu spoke of the imperative in respecting the land as a living entity from which we are all born and to which Indigenous knowledge and the cultural basis of Native Title is intrinsically linked. The symposium showed that the resourcing and recognition of Indigenous skills, knowledge, place and their cultural practice within a global continuum is necessary if we are to survive in any meaningful way.

Within weeks, the Howard government's introduction of legislation based on the ‘Ten Point Plan', (rebuffing the High Court Wik decision recognising historically proven joint custodianship of pastoral leases) represents a rebuttal of shared stewardship of the land and country with Australia’s Indigenous people.

Respect for land, law and country is a lesson still to be taught to the non-indigenous policy-makers as we embrace an inter-connected world.

Microdance is an initiative of the Australia Council and the Australian Film Commission. Funded by these two agencies, 13 projects from a field of 62 submissions where shortlisted for further development. In August 1996, the ABC selected four projects for production. They will be screened as part of Steps#3—Intersteps at The Performance Space on November 8, followed by discussion with the artists.

Film has been fascinated with the moving body since the first “moving pictures” harnessed light through technology to give motion to images. Filmic studies of human movement such as the work of Eadweard Muybridge late last century are seminal examples of this obsession. Trevor Patrick would appear to revisit these origins of the cinema in his short film, Nine Cauldrons. Nine pools of light illuminate nine encounters between camera and body, the body becoming site and geography of the filmic journey. The notion of ‘journey’ and its narrative implications, whether explicit or implicit, is at the heart of the series of four short films that constitute Microdance.

Another significant issue became apparent in discussions with three of the choreographers, Matthew Bergan, Kate Champion and Sue Healey, along with a faxed response from Trevor Patrick—the role of the choreographer within the cinematic process. Trevor Patrick describes the historic role of the choreographer as being “functionary—someone who came in, put the steps or movement sequences together, then left the director and the producer alone to get on with realising their artistic vision.” We must go back beyond the musical genre to understand current dance/film practice or alternatively to the avant-garde film movements of the 50s and 60s when experimental film techniques escaped the trajectory of the classic fiction film genre.

Recently, dance-maker Lucy Guerin spoke of the effect that the human figure has upon performance, describing it as being “one of the most loaded sites for a narrative source.” This function of the human figure, the narrative history of the cinematic practice and the often-problematic relationship between dance and narrative, emerged as a framework for creative considerations. Matthew Bergan posed the question that we had been circling: “How do you bring movement to film and film narrative—whether it be just movement for movement’s sake, the lusciousness of it, or whether you try and present a narrative within that?” Bergan also spoke of “the linguistic matter of using dancers and bodies as opposed to the textual matter of story and narrative”. The choreographers found themselves negotiating a medium, which had its own indelible history of storytelling, a point compounded by the application process which demanded written synopses and storyboards or shot-lists. Bergan felt compelled to “make it read on paper” and Healey found she “rewrote it as if it would be a straight literary narrative”.

The challenge that Bergan articulated was met by each team in varying ways that constitute a kind of map of the interface between film and dance. Trevor Patrick chose a metaphoric journey made up of iconic moments inspired by a series of drawings by American artist Robert Longo entitled “Men in the Cities”, and Taoist mythology concerning alchemy. His simple approach to the film as “a trio for camera, sound and dancer” is reminiscent of Muybridge; in this case the science is absorbed into the expression, the relationship between body and camera becomes a storytelling mechanism, and the alchemy resonates in the mixture of body, light and film.

Sue Healey, like Trevor Patrick, indulged in the writing stage of her project Slipped and, like Patrick, moved far away from literal interpretations towards what she referred to as “a very clear physical narrative”. With the basic metaphor of a staircase and the journey of the climb being representative of “memory, ancestral past and looking back at the past”, ultimately for her “the movement is the drama”. The use of a strong and simple metaphorical image that acts as a “spine image” allows the dance to occur along and around the stairs, fulfilling a narrative-like function in elaborating upon the basic premise.

Matthew Bergan approached his film, The Father is Sleeping, from the linguistic problematics of a film/dance collaboration, stating in his proposal that his agenda for the film was to look at “narrative and developing an area that combines movement and drama”. Bergan developed a process in which “a scene happens quite naturally and out of that comes a physical gesture…a casual approach to movement.” His theme of “the symbolic father” was approached as a “realistic portrayal” complicated by the effects of memory.

The concept of memory is common to three of the four projects and offers a device for the type of magical transformation of events with which both film and dance have long been enamoured. Kate Champion’s The Changing Room is explicit in taking memory as its subject, the idea that “you can’t go forward if you are attached to your memories…until you’ve completely confronted them.” Again there is a strong visual metaphor—a room that tilts and diminishes in size, eventually filling with water and forcing Champion’s character out. As with Healey, the movement is dictated by the central physical image with the drama growing out of Champion’s desire to explore the kind of “visual effects” that only film can offer.

In Healey’s description of her project, theatre and dance are opposing forces and the struggle to insist upon the work as “a dance project” where “the actual guts of the work had to exist in movement,” required that her director Louise Curham “give over” the work. The creation of a binary opposition where theatre, drama and film came down on one side with movement/dance on the other, persisted throughout the discussions. The assumptions this promotes are odd; that dance and theatre are discrete disciplines is a point contradicted in the stage work of all four choreographers.

This opposition seems more attributable to a power struggle that developed out of disciplinary traditions. Patrick describes “the independent dance-maker who writes, performs, directs and occasionally produces his own work.” This central authority figure is in direct contrast to the teamwork that creates films, a methodology Patrick refers to as being from “another culture.” This new territory was alternatively daunting and comforting for the choreographers. There was a sense of relief when the delegatory system of film production seemed to support an artistic vision, and frustration when this same process left the choreographers feeling “out of control.” As all of the choreographers came up with the original concepts, many felt like Champion when she said that the collaborative process is “like making a cake and someone puts orange rind in, and you didn’t want to put orange rind in.”

Perhaps we must look at the notion of the film auteur, the central artistic force that first appeared in theory surrounding the avant-garde film movements. If new dance film/video practice relates more to this type of aesthetic, as opposed to the aesthetic of the classic narrative fiction film, then the auteur is an obvious role model. Problems arise then when this figure comes in two parts with two different crafts—two different cakes from two different recipes.

The technology and language of filmmakers can be alienating and the industry structure of film is ever-present in the shape of producers and financial pressure. The choreographers’ concerns seem understandable when you place the power of the film industry beside the relatively marginalised dance community. Matthew Bergan’s studies in the area of film gave him the confidence to state that he felt “100 per cent confident to direct and choreograph” next time and, with Champion in agreement, there are precedents set where a cinematographer has been a sufficient co-worker on such projects. I would like to see the choreographers in the editing suite succumbing to the “seduction” Patrick described, indulging in choreography of the image that this technology makes possible.

Matthew Bergan, The Father is Sleeping, director Robert Herbert; Trevor Patrick, Nine Cauldrons, director Paul Hampton; Sue Healey, Slipped, director Louise Curham; Kate Champion, The Changing Room, director Alyson Bell

The writer discusses a new dance and film project entitled Premonition, with choreographer-performer Sue-Ellen Kohler, writer-dramaturg William McClure and filmmaker Mahalya Middlemist.

A woman falls… slowly…her weight shifts…her naked body begins…to slip…frame by frame…she…falls…out of sight.

I thought I saw someone shake my body from a sleep of death, but I could not swear to it.

SK Premonition is about dance history. William talks about it in terms of creating a space between two moves: One move, and then the decision—what comes next? And in the gap between the moves is the premonition. Waiting for the next move. You don’t know the next move until…

SK Certainly the idea for this project has come out of the past work Mahalya and I have done together, even if it hasn’t happened in a logical way with Premonition as the next step. For instance, Mahalya couldn’t have made the film Vivarium in 1994 without the particular way that I moved my particular body. And neither would I ever have imagined Vivarium the way Mahalya did, but somehow the two visions went together well. When you put movement on film, something happens which you can’t necessarily predict. The results come through an intensely creative process, and that for me is the best thing about it.

MM We’ve been talking about the multi-screen set-up for a long time, three full-sized screens, side by side, showing simultaneous but variant images of Sue-ellen’s dancing body. The camera is straight on and fixed, so the perspective is the same as you would have of the performing body.

In the end, due to budgetary constraints, we had to shoot one screen on film, and the other two on video. So we’ll have those three different textures: two video bodies, a film body and a real body. And we’ve also got the Falling film from Hybrid, very large in space, and we’ll bring that in at the beginning.

In the daytime, I can see things very clearly. I know just the right moves for the right moment. It is as if all my training directs me down a path that I have walked before. This is a path that I know very well. So I lie down and go to sleep.

SK I’ve encountered so many different kinds of movement in my training and performing. Premonition is about past and future understandings of my body; my past body informs my future body; and those understandings can get mixed up, squashed together. Premonition is about a feeling of how things are, and on that feeling rest the possibilities for how things might be.

SK We both originally wanted the work to be all on 16mm film rather than video because of the better quality of resolution. And certainly for both of us, film in performance is actually about light. Using videos can bring in a whole lot of other things.

MM Film technology is not so laden with ideas, and it’s so accepted that you hardly think about it. And it’s more elusive, ephemeral, because it’s made out of light beams. There’s a sense of the photographic image being projected on screens but travelling further than the screen. And an important part is the way Sue-ellen is lit, floating in space, not bound to the ground, with the screens like doorway-shaped pools of light.

We worried that video might force people into reading the work in unintended ways, imagining that Sue-ellen is talking about some kind of body mediated by technology, when she’s not at all. We’re really just interested in Sue-ellen’s body and images of it, not in highlighting the technology that creates those images.

Now, in my dreams, I still keep on moving and in the same way that I have always done. I meet my balletic body and we dance together. I meet all my modern and postmodern bodies and we all dance together three times, or is it five, around in circles. I can’t be sure right now, but neither does it seem to matter.

SK I’m not a dancer who’s been totally codified and rigidly formed by some particular style. There’s a lot of slip, and within that slip I often feel quite at sea. Being at sea is not always very comfortable. It’s hard to feel authorised, confident as a creator of new dance; I often feel like I can’t do anything original. And it’s also about not being able to succeed in any kind of dance structure, because all set-ups are about not succeeding.

There is an inherent failure in being placed in Australia as a dancer. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re never the original article and your referents are always somewhere else. Your judges can never be pleased with what you do, because Australian identity is bound up in mimicry of the rest of the world. And the perceived failure lies in failure to be the real thing.

None of this seems strange, rather it all seems perfectly natural, and so I continue on in the same way as I have always done.

WM Often people look at dance in terms of where it has come from, but that way of seeing is questioned here. Premonition is engaging with the fact that its sources may lie somewhere else, but what we end up with in the here and now is what is important.

Then—but it wasn’t really a ‘then’—as if from nowhere, a flash, a disgusting premonition of my present state was given to me. And in this state, all the while, I kept on moving in precisely the same way as I have always done. But only now, my body smelt of putrid flesh and the movement itself seemed to rise up before me as tombstones.

WM Premonition is about exploding the reality of the moment, the reality in what you can pin down in an accepted format. So it tries to hollow that out, and to give access to something built of the limitless possibilities of choice. It’s a piece about many voices.

MM Yes, the vertical screens suit that constrained, frontal, upright, balletic kind of presentation that we are very much talking about.

EB The Falling film is something I remember vividly from Hybrid. How does that relate to what you’re doing in Premonition?

MM I’ve always liked the idea of starting this work with Falling. It was a good ending for Hybrid, that falling away right out of frame at the bottom of the stage so that there’s nothing there. Now we want to start again with that. It has a link with that verticality which is so balletic. The structure seems to make a lot of sense.

SK But there’s no sense of a resurrection of the fallen body. I don’t especially want to make that kind of statement, even though I know that some people will want to see that. Falling was originally set on top of the proscenium arch—the epitome of female presentation and ballet presentation. That little balletic dance that I did in Hybrid across the stage underneath Falling, I never knew what it was then. But now I can bring it back into this work, showing how so much of my training is implicated in the way I am, and how it can’t be extricated from anything that I or anyone might want to say about dance. I’m trying now to speak about that in a more conscious way.

WM There’s an uncivilised part of a person that cannot accept the seductive power of tradition and the kinds of decisions made from that stance, without testing them. So, it’s in the testing, the evolving relationship you have to those decisions and those traditions. That’s important, not the traditions themselves.

Premonition is about playfulness in and around the choices from one moment to the next. It’s an attempt to reach a non-apologetic place in the world.

There is now a convulsion and a deep agitation going on in my limbs. They are stretching—as if they want to speak in phrases not seen before. I am out of myself and running away and a body is now moving in a very dark place.

Premonition, choreographed and performed by Sue-ellen Kohler; assistant choreographer Sandra Perrin; filmmaker Mahalya Middlemist; writer-dramaturg William McClure; composer Ion Pearce. The Performance Space, Sydney, October 8-19

I once heard a colleague (Dave Sag from Virtual Artists, in fact) invent a scenario for the 2000 Olympics: thousands of people at the opening ceremony capturing the event with digital cameras hooked into their mobiles, feeding the images onto the web; people around the world, in front of their computers with access to images from anywhere within the stadium. Virtual Artists have been instrumental in creating web ‘events,’ getting Womad on-line, creating the Cyberfringe during Adelaide’s Festival of Arts. I like the context behind this story as well. We were in a meeting that included local representatives of television, an industry that has invested millions in the Games. It is economic, not technical, limitations that ensure Dave’s Olympic vision will fail to materialise by 2000 because it poses the question of just how to generate capital out of the new technology and equally importantly, who would control that capital. But 10,000 cameras? How would you find the best vantage point? What if you found it just at the point when the child with the camera grew tired and handed it back to her inept father? In other words, how do you read a medium like that?

But of course, I’m thinking of television. I love watching [Olympic] diving, as well as television’s solutions to the search for that ‘best’ camera angle, catching scant seconds of free fall; the introduction of overhead cameras; the underwater camera that stretches the brief moment of spectacle just that little bit longer; Atlanta’s addition of a tracking camera to follow the diver’s fall; the director who, by selecting angles, weaves each dive into its semi-narrative context. In other words, these are solutions to problems (what is the best angle?) posed by the medium itself. So what happens with an interactive medium where the reader, not the producer, gets to write the script; when an interactive media allows the viewer to become the director?

Perhaps this article should be titled “Towards a Critical Theory of New Media,” or something of the sort. For several reasons: we are still in an era where our ability to formulate a critical response is as much in its infancy as interactive technology itself, heavily dependent on concepts formulated for 20th century media and culture, and because our attempts in dealing with interactivity at a critical level are, to date, marked by a certain utopianism, as befits any ‘infant.’

Of course, utopias are unrealisable fantasies (and reason to distrust any essay with ‘towards’ in its title.) It is, as also befits any infant, coloured by a now traditional fear of technology, expressed through anxiety about the presence of pornography or build-your-own-bomb instructions on the web. (These anxieties are also linked to real infants, children’s access, which I’ll touch upon later).

Still, this is a hot topic. For example, research in education is onto it. The Adelaide group Rosebud and Ngapartji Multimedia Centre commissioned a brief paper on work being undertaken on audience engagement with interactive multimedia. Researcher Sal Humphries concluded the over-riding issue was still one of ‘literacy,’ with researchers monitoring user engagement (the interface between the technology and the user), in order to understand how cues are presented and how the reader’s response determines outcome. This isn’t far removed from most digital art that I’ve seen, where artists still determine the parameters of how the text is to be experienced, how its interactive content is to be ‘read,’ inviting a kind of reception theory. Regardless of the aesthetics of the new medium, we are still in the domain of ‘author’ and ‘reader.’

But other aspects are emerging, particularly on the web, and certainly on those sites which are, more rather than less, ‘written’ by their ‘readers’: chat rooms, palaces, muds and moos—all multi-user virtual environments. Perhaps these activities are better thought of as performances rather than
texts, in which case we can include Cyberfringe and Womad experiments. It may also be that the prototypes for such sites predate the web as we now know it, once accessible only to programmers or specialists exchanging information. What happens, however, when multi-user sites become accessible to a ‘popular culture?’

Some observations: As an ordinary web surfer I am struck by the way the potential for my own interactive ‘writing’ is marginalised: guest books, graffiti walls and the like. I’m invited to write, yes, but as an adjunct to the main event of the web page itself. This reflects what appears to be happening on the web generally; for example, there are ‘official’ sites and ‘unofficial’ ones (no more so than where entertainment franchises such as Star Trek are concerned). This tension serves a purpose in that it distinguishes between a product (official, copyrighted) and a fan. It can invite a kind of Derridean reading, the margins against the centre, where we write in the margins in order to circumscribe an official content, one defining the other in a symbiosis that actually structures meaning on the web despite the fact that anybody with access to the technology can participate in it.

If this is the determining structure, it is a self-determined and regulating one, not generated by conscious intent. This seems to worry conventional mass media as well as our political representatives, hence their continual carping about porn and terrorism on the web. But this stems from the fact that because the web is unfettered and its participants are happily scrawling away in the margins and back alleys, pushing gender boundaries and expounding their most loved fetishes to the world, it is in accord with Bakhtin’s concept of the Carnivalesque, that night-time revelry that suspends the daylight of social law. On several conditions: notably that the temporary suspension of these laws is a condition of their stability.

Online porn may drive the web’s technological development in interface design and financial viability. Right-wing racism may find the web a means of dissemination (never forget the Carnivalesque has a grotesque downside). But the web is actually a pretty safe place, including for children as most liberal parents have found. Its final collective face is not so much transgression but a consensus, in that what is played out, virtual utopic sex and all, manifests an underlying phantasmic structure. In other words, those 10,000 cameras could well reach a consensus on what to film, rendering the need to choose between them unnecessary because, as ‘virtual subjects,’ we will have already determined our own position within the vast exchange of digital information. I’m borrowing here from Slavoj Zizek’s conclusion to The Metastases of Enjoyment where he discusses the West’s response to Sarajevo, phantasmically bound in the figure of the victim. Victimisation is universalised, he writes, “from sexual abuse and harassment to the victims of AIDS…from the starving children of Somalia to the victims of bombardment in Sarajevo…” What has this to do with the web as a multi-user, writerly environment home of the virtual subject? Go to a search engine and type in “Diana.”

A particularly virulent strain of the New Age virus can be found spreading rapidly throughout digital media culture—from VRML 3D worlds of transcendental self-discovery to the computer animation of the digital shaman, to interactive digital mandalas. While the current fixation with the new age is rife in rave culture, digital media’s particular fascination is with mysticism. The new environments of online worlds and interactivity often go hand in hand with a new age, touchy-feely cyber-induced hype.

Devoted followers of the cyber gospel, strung out on the flakey new technological Haight Ashbury, look to the likes of Timothy Leary, Mark Pesce, Howard Rheingold and Jaron Lanier, to inform their own utopian-new age cyber sensibilities. The popular rhetoric of interactive media makes things worse, as it is viewed as opening the doors to a new paradigm, the ultimate democratic medium that truly delivers on that collective 60s dream of individual empowerment.

The Heaven's Gate cult fanatically build their web pages, seeing the internet as the delivery system to a new plane of consciousness, a new level of language with Virtual Reality, Artificial Life and 3D space as the extensions of a new realm of human experience; while magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000 tune in and drop out to a cyber-consciousness of alternate realities, avatars and 3D texture mapping of the mindscape…

Digital Art in particular picks up on the more obvious ‘transcendental’ elements of 60s mysticism in regard to notions of ‘immersive worlds’ and interactivity, but with none of its psychedelic freakishness and weirdo graphic sensibilities. Instead what we’re left with is the rehashed, predictable and clichéd new age icons of crystals, magick, the Buddha, mandalas, digital dreamscapes and never-ending Mandelbrot sets. Such graphic icons are so culturally loaded with fuzzy 60s alternative consciousness, that redefining them as models for the digital age is nothing short of depressing. The strong smell of incense hangs over new age cyberculture like a critical cloud. Just plug into the headspace and trip out.

Historically, computer graphics have always had a thing going on with the daggy elements of early 70s graphic sensibilities, from Roger Dean and Hypnosis album covers to Pink Floyd. Just look at any Siggraph animation collection from the late 80s with their computer generated images of pyramids, unicorns and strange uninhabited lands—all testament to a culture out of step with the graphic pulsations of the time. By far the worst example of new ageism in cyberculture would have to be the annual San Francisco Digital Be-in; depending on where you stand you either go with the flow and paint your face and celebrate the dawn of the new age or run screaming for the nearest exit.

This is the first of two articles on dance companies based in Adelaide as indicative of a range of dance discourses in Australia. In this issue, Anne Thompson interviews Meryl Tankard who, subsequent to this interview, won the Mobil Pegasus Award for her choreography of Inuk for the Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre at the 14th International Summer Theatre Festival in Hamburg. In RealTime #22, Anne Thompson talks to Sally Chance, artistic director of the Restless Dance Company who will be shortly working in Melbourne with Candoco, a British company which also features dancers with disabilities. Candoco are guests of the Newimages Exchange program between Australia and Great Britain.

I am interested in articulating the discourses now available to dancers and choreographers. This interest is linked to my belief that the way we live and give meaning to our work and lives as artists depends on the range and social power of the discourses to which we have access.

I want to challenge the idea that there exists a universally understood truth about the nature of dance and dancing. I believe Australian dance culture to be a plurality of competing subcultures. I want to acknowledge the range of discourses now being used by Australian dancers and choreographers. I want to encourage the view that the use of a discourse can be a strategy.

This interview with Meryl Tankard raised many questions for me: What happens to the notions of “expression” and “originality” if an individual’s dancing is understood to be marked by aesthetic and cultural codes? What use is the concept of national identity for dancers? In what ways could this be defined as linking to birthplace, as aboriginality, as a conscious representation of cultural plurality? Is the dance we recognise as a representation of a culture or inner feeling, what we classify as authentic? How can we acknowledge our fascination with “other” cultures? How is the task of promoting dance on the national and international dance market shaping the way Australian dance artists think about dance?

AT How do you understand the mix of classicism/classical ballet and expressionism/modern dance in your work? Are these two dance traditions connected for you?

MT My training as a dancer has been in both classical and modern dance as I danced in the Australian Ballet and with Pina Bausch (Tanztheater Wuppertal). In some ways they feel like the opposite extreme of each other. I always felt as a ballet dancer that there was something missing, that there was something I couldn’t get out because I was too worried about getting the technique right.

But then on the other hand there is an amazing similarity of rigour and devotion required by the ballet and Pina’s dance theatre. The ballet was a sheltered world and we never saw or thought of anything else. When I entered Pina’s company I thought, “Great! Freedom at last!” And it was freeing to do her work. Yet there was, as with classical dance, an almost religious devotion to the art of dance. There couldn’t be anything else in your life. You could never say Pina was hard. She never yelled at anybody, but we were like monks. Giving up everything for dance was expected and we lived up to that expectation.

MT Work that doesn’t have a depth that comes from within. There is something that comes from inside and goes out through the body when we dance. So much dance works the other way. Dancing can be about vanity. “I’m so cute. My body is gorgeous. Look at me.” It can become vulgar. Movement, for me, has to be honest, truthful. If people have never experienced that way of dancing, they are free to work in other ways. Sometimes I find it aggravating that I can’t just indulge in movement. It might bring something else out in me. But I can’t just go into the studio and work on movement alone.

AT How would you explain what drives the creative process when you are making a work?

MT I feel fortunate to have worked with Pina, although at times it was hard. I will never find anyone like her again. I learned from her to ask questions of the dancers, to get them to use their own creativity. They are, after all, human beings, not objects. I learnt not to get dancers to just copy a step I can do or to move the way my body does. I think those days are gone. Dancers are creative. When the dancers use that creativity there is a commitment in the performing that is different from when dancers just do steps.

AT How do you select an answer? Is it to do with a dancer connecting to the question in some way?

MT I think so. When you see honesty it touches you. Sometimes I can’t even work out why I am touched. When a response is truthful, that dancer has a special energy that communicates. This dancing has nothing to do with the toe being pointed or the leg turned out. It’s so much more interesting. The voice is also interesting. You can’t lie with the voice. I don’t really think you can lie with movement either. You are totally exposed and vulnerable.

MT It is always scary and I go in there totally empty. It’s only when I’m watching that I can say “That goes with that!” You have a feeling for form but it is something subtle. I can’t express it in words.

But I do love the space. I’ve always loved space. Loved using every bit of it. In Pina’s work I would always run around the space. In Furioso (1993) the ropes allowed me to use space in a new way. That was exciting for me.

MT Discipline and a strong foundation in a dance style are important. It doesn’t have to be classical ballet. It may be something you reject but it will still be important.

MT Just before a show opens I always think, “I am not a choreographer.” I associate choreography with steps. I think that in Australia you are called a choreographer if you keep the dancers bounding around to the music, jumping up and down, turning and twisting. If you sit in a dark corner, people ask, “What’s that?” I’m not talking about audiences. I’m talking about critics. I’m not going to move just for movement’s sake.

AT How do you understand the relationship between the choreographer and the dancer?

MT I feel like I’ve gone through what they are going through. I’ve been guided and now I can guide them, unlock their creative powers, push. Some people resist this. Once you uncover their artistry a door is opened and they go through it. You can see them become so much more confident.

MT Pina Bausch took three months to make a piece. Ideally it would be good to work, to have time to think and then complete the work.

MT I don’t mind the technique. But I see no point in doing 19th century ballets. The ballets change when the choreographers are no longer around. They just get watered down. They’ve lost the choreographer’s inner connection with the movement. Ballets should also express what is happening now. When I created Aurora (1994), I came to love and respect the story. The critics went berserk because I tap-danced to Tchaikovsky. I wasn’t sending it up. I was really trying to work out how to tell that fairy tale.

I’m in a position now where a number of dancers I have worked with for four or five years want to leave and go to Europe. We constantly lose dancers from Australia to overseas. This means we don’t have a pool of dancers to choose from. I really think that Australia should allow foreign dancers to work here. There are many dancers in Europe who want to work with me and I think it would enrich the culture here if they could. It would give Australian dancers so much to work alongside them.

MT Oh, life, love! Pina always said that all her pieces were about love. Though in the last piece I made, Inuk (1997), I felt a need to talk about the environment and Australia. Most of the critics didn’t see this and so didn’t know what the piece was about. I thought I was making a pretty obvious statement.

MT When I came back from Europe, Australia seemed…vast. I was aware of the lack of support for the arts here. I felt alone. Pauline Hanson was on the scene! There are quite a few sections in the piece that comment on this situation. I had two Aboriginal dancers and a Maori boy in the piece. The last scene shows a Maori boy wanting to know about his background and his father laughing at him. It is quite hard.

A white girl plays the Maori boy. It ends with Sean, a white Australian, and Rachel, a beautiful, tall, Aboriginal girl, singing an Italian aria, “Give Us Peace!” For me, this said everything I wanted to say.

AT What have the company’s travels taught it about dance and its identity as an Australian dance company?

MT The promoter from Brooklyn Academy of Music said, “This work is not Australian. I refuse to promote it as such. It’s universal.” But when we took Furioso to Europe it was perceived as Australian. And it is. We are all Australians who create the work. It is hard to define what that is. Our last European tour was sold out and we’ve been invited back to Hamburg. So we must offer something different from what they are used to in Europe. That’s why they are excited by it. In Australia they say the work is very European. I think that’s why I did this last piece. I had to ask, “Where is home?” “Where is my home?”

MT When I first arrived back from Europe I felt a need to understand this culture. Now I look to other cultures. They seem to have a reason for dancing. We’ve lost that.

AT You perceive there to be a connection between dance and social life in other cultures.

MT I think dance is a very natural activity and we should all be involved in it. Greek and Italian migrants brought a different relation to dance to Australia.

AT Did you feel there existed a relationship between dance and social ritual in Europe?

MT I felt it when I left Europe. These rituals don’t necessarily occur there any more. A beautiful Bulgarian artist said of Songs For Mara, “It has taken an Australian to remind us where we have come from.”

MT I think it’s a pity that more people don’t write about dance. In Europe dance has more of a connection with other art forms. Australia is young and people are starting to write. I just wish more people would write. It is only then that a history will exist. I was cleaning out my bookshelves the other day and found seven books on Pina Bausch, written from very different perspectives.

The conference component of CODE RED will take place at The Performance Space, Sydney on November 25. It is being curated by Julianne Pierce (new media artist and Project Co-ordinator at the Performance Space) and organized by the Adelaide-based Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT). CODE RED will include highly regarded specialist Australian and international speakers who will debate and discuss media power, communication and information technology. CODE RED will investigate how artists are shaping communication and the vital role that artists can play in developing the future of the new media.

Geert Lovink is an editor of nettime, which declares itself “a semi-public, collaborative text filter for net criticism, cultural politics of the net and international co-ordination of meetings, conferences and publishing projects; it started in June 1995 after a meeting at the Venice Biennale and functions as an exchange between media activists, artists, theorists, philosophers, journalists, technicians and researchers from all over the world with many European and East European subscribers.
Nettime http://mediafilter.org/nettime/ [expired]

On ‘netlish’
McKenzie Wark

You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.
Caliban, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

On the net, one is forever coming across versions of English written as a second language that are at once charming and strange. It’s a temptation, as a native speaker, to think these usages are 'wrong'. But I think there's a better way of seeing it. What the net makes possible is the circulation of the very wide range of forms of English as a second language that have existed for some time, and which are, via the net, coming more and more in contact with each other.

When non-English language speakers start writing in English, elements of their native grammar and style come into it. This can enrich English immeasurably, so long as the way in which English is being used in a given non-native context is reasonably coherent.

Take the notorious 'Japlish'. At first sight, it’s extremely strange. But after a while, it makes sense. And you can start to see it as a distinctive kind of writing. A fantastic hybrid of ways of making sense and making a self in language. A wacky footnote to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

This was the idea that each language makes possible certain conceptual structures, and makes others most unlikely. For example, ancient Greek was a language extremely rich in articles, so it lent itself to the formation of the discourse of philosophy. What is being? It’s a thought that Greek—and English—can express easily, but that can't occur in certain other languages. Those other languages, needless to say, are no doubt rich in other kinds of thought.

What happens when non-native writers use English is that the reader sees the shadow of another way of thinking, as it meets the ways of thinking that English shapes. One sees the English shape, and beyond it, the shadow of another shape. Even better, one sees a third shape, not belonging to either language, emerging at the point of contact of the two.

All of this is more obvious in netwriting than in printed matter. On the net, nobody pays too much attention to grammar and style. On the net, one sees the shape of language through the little mistakes and fissures that in printed texts editors remove. What emerges is a whole range of ways of writing 'Netlish', where non-native forms of English writing come in contact with each other, and with native forms, without being passed through a single editorial standard.

Which leads me to the question of how Netlish should be edited, when net texts are published in printed form. Perhaps editing has to be looked at from two sides. On the one hand, it helps to think about it from the point of view of kinds of native English use (of which there are several). It matters that English has conventions, so that it is clear to readers what a writer intends.

But that doesn't mean there has to be one convention of usage—be it Oxford or Webster. As a speaker and writer of a minority English, I'm all in favour of recognising distinct forms of the language. Australian-English is different. We have our own dictionary, our own style guides. So too does Indian English—and there may be more people speaking English as a first language in India than in the whole of the British Isles. I think this principle can be extended to the various emerging kinds of Netlish.

Print is the place to codify things like language usage, so print can become a device for propagating, not just writing's content, but also its forms. Including forms of Netlish once they become relatively stable and recognisable. This is not as easy as it looks. I've struck a similar problem with Aboriginal English in Australia. You can translate it into standard Australian usage, but then you lose sight of the otherness of the shape of thought behind it.

English was always a bastard language. It’s a bastard to learn—for every rule there seems to be a swarm of exceptions. But there's a reason why it is so: it’s the mix in it of everything, from Pict to Pakistani. Its prehistory in the British Isles is a small-scale model of what's happening to it now on a global scale. The Romans, the Saxons, the Normans and the Norse—everybody came and brought something to the mix. “We will fight them on the beaches”—pure Saxon. “We will never surrender”—the abstract noun is Norman. Different shapes of thought, superimposed on top of each other, making something else. As Saxon becomes Norman, Norman becomes something else—English.

Language is a machine that produces, as one of these effects, subjectivity. As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze said, “What is the self but this habit of saying 'I'?” The net makes English habits of writing one's self come in contact with other habits of self, making them become something else. And making English as it proliferates across the net—Netlish. Adding richness to the language of potentially Shakespearian proportions. That is more a blessing than a curse.

The netletters were originally written 'live' for the listserve group Nettime: http://www.Desk.nl/~nettime/ [expired]. This is the edited version.

Language? No problem
Geert Lovink: edited by McKenzie Wark

Have you tried to discuss recipes with friends, feeling socially disabled because you never learned the English names for all those kitchen garnishes, deluxe herbs and flamboyant birds? For gourmets, language can be a true obstacle in the enjoyment of the self-made haute cuisine. The careful pronunciation of the names is a crucial part of the dining pleasure. Naming is the social counterpart of tasting and a failed attempt to find the precise name of the ambitious appetiser can easily temper the mood.

McKenzie Wark has introduced the term 'Euro-English', being one of the many 'Englishes' currently spoken and written. It's a funny term, only an outsider (from Australia, in this case) could come up with it. Of course, it does not exist and Wark should have used the term in the plural, 'Euro-Englishes'. The term is also highly political. If you put it in the perspective of current Euro-politics in Great Britain. Is the UK part of Europe and if so, is their rich collection of 'Englishes' (Irish, Scottish etc.) then part of the bigger family of Euro-English 'dialects'? That would be a truly radical, utopian European perspective. Or is 'Euro-English' perhaps the 20th century Latin spoken on 'the continent'?

Continentals can only hear accents, like the extraordinary French-English, the deep, slow Russian-English or the smooth, almost British accent of the Scandinavians. It seems hard to hear and admit one's own version. One friend of mine speaks English with a heavy Cockney accent (not the Dutch one) and I never dared ask him why this was the case. Should he be disciplined and pretend to speak like they do on BBC World Service? I don't think so. What is right and wrong in those cases? Should he speak Dutch-English, like most of us? Switching to other English’s is a strange thing to do, but sometimes necessary. If you want to communicate successfully in Japan you have to adjust your English, speak slowly and constantly check if your message gets through. Mimicking Japlish is a stupid thing to do, but you have to come near to that if you want to achieve anything.

BBC World Service is my point of reference, I must admit. The BBC seems to be the only stable factor in my life. It's always there, even moreso than the Internet. In bed, I am listening carefully to the way they are building sentences, and guessing the meaning of the countless words with which I am not familiar. A couple of years ago they started to broadcast 'Europe Today' where you can hear all the variations of 'Euro-English', even from the moderator. Sometimes it's amusing, but most of the time it is just informative, like any other good radio program. Would that be the 'Euro-English' McKenzie speaks about, beyond all accents and apparent mistakes, a still not yet conscious 'Gesamtsprachwerk'?

According to McKenzie, within this 'bastard language' one can 'sometimes see the shadows of another way of thinking.' This might be true. We all agree that we should not be annoyed by mistakes, but instead look for the new forms of English that the Net is now generating. But for me, most of these shadows are like the shadows in Plato's Cave story. They are weak, distorted references to a point somebody is desperately trying to make. We will never know whether the 'charming' and 'strange' outcomes are intentional, or not. Non-native English writers (not sanctioned by editors) might have more freedom to play with the language.

Finding the right expression even makes more fun, at least for me. At this moment, I am writing three times as slow as I would do in Dutch or German. Not having dictionaries here, nor the sophisticated software to do spell checking, one feels that the libidinous streams are getting interrupted here and there. On-line text is full of those holes. At sudden moments, I feel the language barrier rising up and I am not anymore able to express myself. This is a violent, bodily experience, a very frustrating one that Wark is perhaps not aware of. He could trace those holes and ruptures later, in the text. But then again we move on and the desire to communicate removes the temporary obstacles.

How should the Euro-English e-texts be edited? At least they should go through a spell-checker. Obvious grammar mistakes should be taken out, and they should not be rewritten be a naive English or American editor. If we are in favour of 'language diversification,' this should also be implemented on the level of the printed word. 'Euro-English’s' or 'Net-English’s' are very much alive, but do they need to be formalised or even codified? I don't care, to be honest. At the moment, I am more afraid of an anthropological approach, an exotic view on Net-English that would like to document this odd language before it disappears again. But our way of expression is not cute (or rare). It is born out of a specific historical and technological circumstance: the Pax Americana, pop culture, global capitalism, Europe after 89 and the rise of the Internet.

Globalisation will further unify the English languages and will treat local variations as minor, subcultural deviations. As long as they are alive, I don't see any problem, but should we transform these e-texts onto paper, only to show the outsiders that the Net is so different, so exciting? I would propose that the Book as a medium should not be used to make propaganda for the idea of 'hyper-text' or 'multi-media'. A discussion in a news group, on a list or just through personal e-mail exchange is nothing more than building a 'discourse' and not by definition a case for sophisticated graphic design to show all the (un)necessary cross references.

McKenzie Wark didn't want to speak about the right to express yourself in your own language. He agrees with this and I guess we all do. His native language is English, the lucky boy. But we do have to speak about it. Especially US-Americans do not want to be bothered about this topic. I haven't heard one cyber-visionary ever mentioning the fact that the Net has to become multi-lingual if we ever want to reach Negroponte's famous 'one billion users by the year 2000.' It is not in their interest to develop multi-lingual networks. OK, the marketing departments of the software houses do bring out versions in other languages. But this is only done for commercial reasons. And the Internet is not going to change so quickly. Still 90% of its users are living in the USA. Rebuilding Babylon within the Net will be primarily the task of the non-natives.

Of course, many of us have found our way in dealing with the dominance of the English language and think that newbies should do likewise. But this attitude seems shortsighted, even a bit cynical. If we want the Net to grow, to be open and democratic, to have its free, public access and content zones, then sooner or later we have to face the language problem. Until now, this has been merely one's own, private problem. It depends on your cultural background, education and commitment whether you are able and willing to communicate freely in English. This 'individual' quality goes together with the emphasis on the user-as-an-individual in the slogan of cyber-visionaries about the so-called 'many to many' communication. But the language from 'all 2 all' remains unmentioned.. 'Translation bots will solve that problem,' the eternal optimist will tell you. Everything has been taken care of in the Fantasy World called Internet. But so far nothing has happened. At the moment, the number of languages used in the Net is increasing rapidly. But they exist mainly separately. It can happen that a user in Japan or Spain will never (have to) leave his or her language sphere, or is not able to…

Languages are neither global nor local. Unlike the proclaimed qualities of the Net, they are bound to the nation state and its borders, or perhaps shared by several nations or spoken in a certain region, depending on the course history took in the 19th and 20th century. Countless small languages have disappeared in this process of nation building, migration and genocide. But in Europe we still have at least 20 or 30 of them and they are not likely to disappear. So communicating effectively within Europe through the Net will need a serious effort to build a 'many to many' languages translation interface. A first step will be the implementation of unicode. Automatic translation programs will only then become more reliable. At this moment, French and Hungarian users, for example, seriously feel their language mutilated if they have to express themselves in ASCII.

But let's not complain too much. Once I saw a small paper in a shop window in Amsterdam, saying “English? No problem.” Rebuilding the Babel Tower together should be big fun and I am ready to spend a lot of time in the construction of a true multi-lingual Net.

Anyone using this awful phrase 'global communications' without mentioning the multi-lingual aspect of it, seems implausible for me. Let's change this and put the translation on the agenda. Separated, bi-lingual systems, though, remind me of 'apartheid'. The linguistic Islands on the Net should not become closed and isolated universes. Our own cute bastardised Englishes has no future either. There will never be one planet, with one people, speaking one language. 'Das Ganze ist immer das Unwahre' and this specially counts for all dreams about English becoming the one and only world language for the New Dark Age. Still many netizens unconsciously do make suggestions in the direction of 'One language or no language.' (In parallel with the eco-blackmail speech 'One planet or no planet'). The pretension to go global can be a cheap escape not to be confronted anymore with the stagnation and boredom of the local (and specially national) levels. Working together on language solutions can be one way to avoid this trap.

Editor’s note
McKenzie Wark

I was tempted to change 'flamboyant birds' in the first paragraph, by substituting in its place either 'exotic birds' or 'exotic fowl'. Flamboyant connotes showy and ornate—it’s something one would say of a Las Vegas stage show. Exotic connotes rarity of occurrence, as well as a less specific quality of unusual appearance. The justification for making the change would be that, as the editor, I am getting closer to the 'author's intention.'

It’s worth noting that 'bird' is also unusual in this context. It’s used colloquially in Australia for a fowl meant for the table—but I don't know if the expression is so used anywhere else. The OED is not enlightening on this subject. 'Fowl' is more correct, as the term fowl includes chicken, duck, geese, turkey and pheasant—but not quail. But 'fowl' sounds no more natural. So while 'exotic fowl' seems to me to be both a correct expression and closest to the author's intention, it isn't something that looks quite natural—hence I see no net gain in such a change.

I've left 'flamboyant birds' because, quite simply, there's nothing grammatically wrong with it. It’s just an unusual usage. But this often happens in Euro-English’s: neglected areas of connotation for particular words get reactivated, or extensions of connotation that don't yet quite exist in English-English come into being. I think that is, historically, how English develops and changes—just look at the remarkable richness that’s crept into standard English-English through Irish English. The example here may seem trivial—all editing decisions are in the end trivial—but I've expounded on it in order to show the kind of things that happen.

The editorial solutions can head in one of two directions—the instrumental or the formal. Geert's preference is instrumental—the text is a means to an end. I'm inclined to a slightly more formal approach—the surface of the text, as a distinct artefact in its own right, ought to be respected.

I've made minor changes elsewhere in Geert's text. With one exception, sentences ending in prepositions have been recast. Possessive apostrophes have been added. Spelling is now more or less OED, except of course the 'net-neologisms' that don't yet exist in any recognised dictionary. For example 'newbie.' Here one follows standard net-usage. If I was editing for printed publication, I'd be inclined to eliminate unnecessary net-speak—but that's another issue.

The netletters were originally written ‘live’ for the listserve group nettime.
These are edited versions.

Geert Lovink received two responses from Japan on his article, Language? No Problem. One comes from a Japanese book editor, the other from an American translator involved in video activism and documentary film. The first commented: “Japanese are always frustrated by English in Net (reading, writing, sending mail) and this situation divides people. When I sent mail to my Japanese friend in London, I used English-Japanese like ‘konnitiwa, Yano desu’; because his internet server didn’t accept 2-byte characters.” He added, “But Japanese never questions this problem There is the situation which push us not to think about that.” This was a theme explored by the second writer:

“I got your piece on the English language problem, and enjoyed reading it. We have faced with some of the same issues at Yamagata since we established our WWW site. As a rule, we put everything in English and Japanese, but we seriously realize that to fulfill our role as a promoter of Asian documentary, we have to also start putting out some of the information in Korean and Chinese (at least). For that, however, we have no money.

It was hard enough just producing everything in Japanese and English. The people who ran the site insisted we could just have Japanese volunteers translate material into English because in their own “cyber-visionary” fashion they insisted that Internet will give birth to a diversified English no longer controlled by white Anglo-Saxons. I sympathize with their goal, but at the same time, their statements can be easily co-opted within various ideologies about the Japanese language. The feeling that Japanese do not need to learn to be fluent in English, to produce it on their own in a communicative situation, but only be able to read it, has been central to state education policy and reinforces the construction of the Japanese nation through the language. Japanese have been crucially defined through their language, to the degree that Japanese children raised abroad who speak fluent Japanese and English are somehow considered “non-Japanese.” The inability or lack of necessity to produce good English then provides the insulation through which the discursive “community” of Japanese can articulate an homogeneous national identity. I sometimes then wonder what would happen if more Japanese could speak and write ‘good’ English.”

Reproduced with the permission of the authors and nettime from http://mediafilter.org/nettime/[expired]

As part of the Denmark Meets Australia program brought to us by the Royal Danish Ministry of Culture, New Danish Dance Theatre is presenting their work Tanne: Episodes from the Life of Karen Blixen choreographed by NDDT’s artistic director Warren Spears and performed by six dancers from the company with music by Jens Wilhelm Pedersen at the Newtown Theatre 16-18 October. The NDDT season dovetails into the 1997 Bodies season at the same venue from October 22 to November 9. Producer Mark Cleary’s Bodies count this year numbers around 20 dancers including Elizabeth Dalman, Susan Barling, Virginia Ferris, Rosetta Cook, Norman Hall, Paulina Quinteros, Bernadette Walong and Patrick Harding-Irmer. There’s also a special Youthworks program produced by Julianne Sanders on November 1 and 8.

The Denmark Meets Australia program also includes the stunning production of Orfeo by Hotel Pro Forma, a visit by the 20-piece Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra with jazz bassists Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson, a program of contemporary Danish cinema and a tour by Danish writers (Ib Michael, Carsten Jensen, Vagn Lundbye and Solvej Balle) with actors from the Danish People’s Theatre. Parts of the program are touring Sydney, Canberra and Barossa Valley, South Australia.

The annual independent dance showcase, Steps is an eagerly anticipated forum for new work and debate around issues of physical performance. The third Steps program (Inter-Steps) will run throughout November at The Performance Space in Sydney. There’s always a sense of performance as event in the Steps program along with serious explorations of space. As well as providing a platform for independent artists, Steps offers dancers and physical performers an opportunity to reflect a personal style as distinct from their performances within companies.

This year’s featured artists are Brett Daffy, Meredith Kitchen, Claire Hague, Trevor Patrick, Brian Carbee, Beth Kayes and Tuula Roppola. As well as the main program, Studio Steps features one-off performances by Martin del Amo, Jeff Stein, James McAllister, Lisa Ffrench, Lisa Freshwater and Brett Heath. Premiering at Steps is a new 13-minute dance on film, Touched, choreographed by Wendy Houstoun of DV8 fame. There’ll also be an intimate exhibition of images by photographer Heidrun Löhr.

A special focus of Inter-steps will be dance on video. Michelle Mahrer has curated a program of recent award winning films from Europe and North America including Vertigo Bird (33 mins) featuring Slovenia’s En-Knap Company choreographed by Iztok Kovac and from the UK, Boy (5 mins) choreographed by Rosemary Lee and directed by Peter Anderson. On November 8 following the screenings of the Microdance films, there’ll be a discussion on the vexed process of creating dance on film with film-makers Robert Herbert, Paul Hampton, Louise Curham and Alyson Bell and choreographers Matthew Bergan, Sue Healey, Kate Champion and Trevor Patrick.

How does one interpret or use a classical dance form to tell a new story, one that is relevant to the Indian Diaspora, rather than a traditional religious tale which may also be of value, but a soft option in the sense that it may not challenge the community dogma and, worse, may fuel prejudice? This is a question asked by many new Indian dancers who are classically trained. Breaks with traditional story-telling techniques have been made by contemporary British-Asian choreographers such as Shobana Jeyasingh using Bharatnatyam and, to a lesser extent, Nahid Siddiqi using Kathak. In eliminating the orthodox costume and make up of Kathakali, but also in her choice of subject matter, Maya Krishna Rao makes a welcome addition to this modernising principle.

In his classic short story, Khol Do, Saadat Hasan Manto deals with the communalism of the partition of India in 1947. Trains travelling between Amritsar and Lahore would depart packed with people hanging onto the sides and sitting on the roofs, but would arrive at their destination with their entire passenger load slaughtered.

As we have witnessed recently in Eastern Europe, history repeats its unimaginable horrors, re-named as ethnic cleansing, as if somehow the mere act of re-naming sanitises the atrocities human beings are capable of. In the re-telling of Khol Do, Rao’s solo performance in a British context is a sublime experience.

An aspect of classical Indian arts is that an artist may present nine rasas (moods or flavours) during the exposition of an improvisation or rehearsed set piece. This range of feeling usually allows an audience to empathise with a work on different levels. Maya Krishna Rao’s opening minimal gestures are executed with the technical precision of a classically trained dancer and, enhanced by Gavin O’Shea’s sound design, evoke the atmosphere of an Indian train journey. Overall though, I felt the emotions expressed in the work were limited. Viewing Khol Do, I felt the pathos of the father separated from his daughter and the desperation of his search, but not his love. The motif running through the performance is the daughter’s expression of fear, Rao’s gestures of fright being expressed to effect in Kathakali abiniyah (visual expression) of mudras (hand gestures) and facial movements, in particular, the eyes. The nritya (pure dance) element here was minimal and I thought could be developed further to convey a feeling of space. Instead of restricting the performance to the confines of the strong red central dais, it would have been liberating to see some of the explosive Kathakali movements outside this sacred space, in perhaps the profane space of the margins around the dais. Rao’s Kathakali nritya, both in footwork and poses, transmits a high level of energy and consequently, is more convincing in delivery and reception than the earlier slower movements.

Maya Krishna Rao is courageous in dealing with the subject of ethnic violence during the formation of Indian and Pakistani national identities. The bloody wound that opened up during Partition never healed and is now being salted by fundamentalist Hindu, Muslim and Sikh factions in the Indian sub-continent and supported by the Indian Diaspora. The religious premise for this sectarianism is again raising its ugly Janus head. In order to hold on to their imaginary homeland in their respective mother countries, Asian communities in Britain are unfortunately now more sharply divided than ever. In this respect, one welcomes any artist who transgresses absolutist ideologies. The general disclaimer that Asian communities in the West make of this type of work, especially if it has been created by migrant Asian artists, is that they are not speaking with an authority which is authentic—“the Asian community is not like this”. They refer to the artists’ “non-Indianness” for hybridising European and Eastern artistic aesthetics. The artist is thought to be tainted by the vagaries of Western political, social and artistic preoccupations. British-Asian artists are described in the Asian community press as having lost their roots in adopting modes of telling their stories or using new forms to re-tell old stories.

It’s the first time that I’ve seen any public event involving Argentinians since that drowning war when my sister and her children went in fear. Someone had daubed “Argies live here” in guttural, ugly paint on the side wall of their council flat. It felt good that De La Guarda and I waited until that government was out.

They hung like corpses, drenched and dredged up to the ceiling, or stood on temporary, rigged platforms under pouring water calling, calling, calling. I wept for them.

I saw women and men in civilian clothes (knickers, skirts, ties—subterfuge in mufti, you could shoot them as spies). And a world in whose mores I would like to live—them kissing and hugging strangers in the moment’s trance of eye contact and desire. (The next moment we may have to kill.)

My friend had just made a film on concentration camp survivor, Simon Wiesenthal, when the doors closed on the claustrophobic crush and gas started coming from above. I turned to apologise and couldn’t see her. They didn’t make it easy on us. I wanted to call out, “I don’t want to live here”.

Then the room opened, and there was air, and we were loving the peace with the drowned waking above us and running through showers among us with (it’s in the detail) their socks fallen around their ankles.

The audience is crammed into a small space whilst the humming through the speakers grows to a drone and then a tune. We are illuminated by the reassuring exit signs; above us a paper ceiling defines the space as cramped, low, capped. Upward gaze; these words look very optimistic here. The vertical is the space for performance. The performance begins with the angelic/devilish sight of backlit sprites casting shadows on the ceiling. Balloons, toys, fluorescent splatter spots fill the paper with joyful play. They are above us, beyond the ceiling, in another world, but we have access to this world. The ceiling is removed. Removed is too passive a word; ripped, dragged, sliced by human missiles, making the world above our heads available to us. Tickertape pours down from the heavens.

After the storm cloud of paper has passed, the performers are precision drivers doing daring manoeuvres except with no cars, no roads and no helmets. WARNING: Do not attempt this at home. Six hundred people, all of us thinking we are as close as we can get, find the space quickly when water gushes from the ceiling. A childlike sense of watching a thunderstorm roll in over the ocean and breaking on the Land; the fear of destructive power, counter-balanced by excitement and relief. The dance and music engulf me. The performers now unleashed from their harnesses hold the audience, hugging, kissing, encouraging us to dance. The energy I want to unleash is being played out in the space above my head. Women running up the wall, this is my Batman fantasy. Drenched and dripping, they pound the rhythms. This is nightclub, rave, concert, theatre, spectacle. I have no head space for theory here. This performance would not be possible where I come from. In Queensland, at our request to burn a few leaves for The 7 Stages of Grieving, the authorities went ape-shit, at one moment threatening to close the show. The laws (internal and external) that govern us would require so much compromise, but here I revel in this moment. There is no danger here, no personal danger that threatens my body. The danger lies in what I will expect from the theatre of tamed lounge chairs and fake velvet curtains. Euphoria.

What can a national ballet company be? It hardly seems fruitful to argue whether one should exist, one does and is not likely to be disbanded barring a violent revolution in culture and government. So, given that a lion’s share of resources for dance is poured into a national ballet company, it is very good news that ours is being directed by Ross Stretton.

In fact, after our conversation in July, I am convinced that the Australian Ballet could be on the verge of becoming something great. Ross Stretton strikes me as a sort of a Clark Kent of kinetic intelligence. It remains to be seen whether he will evolve into a dance super hero, but his mild manners are working just fine at the moment for gently introducing some pretty radical ideas, methods and works.

Stretton is serious and thoughtful on the subjects of great choreographers, great dancers and great dance. And he has specific plans for creating them, as well as for opening up the AB’s resources to dance as a whole and cutting down on the cross-aesthetic bashing which seems to be the basic mode of discourse in dance in Australia.

With the aim of creating great things, the AB seems to be developing a special relationship with Twyla Tharp. Stretton has just sent six dancers over to New York to workshop a piece with her and to soak up her intelligence and input. One has to wonder here about the possibilities which might have been exploited in this relationship had the new Kennett Dance Company come under the aegis of the Australian Ballet. The dance community seems relieved that the company went to an artist rather than an administrator, but Stretton is both and his interest in running such an enterprise represents radical new thinking about the Australian Ballet in the wider context of dance in Australia.

Ross Stretton’s aesthetics and ideas were shaped by his kinetic experiences with choreographers like Twyla Tharp whom he worked with closely as dancer and administrator in New York and continues to work closely with now. He says about Tharp and about Glen Tetley, the other seminal influence he cites, that they share the quality of intelligence. “Great choreographers”, Stretton insists, “are intelligent choreographers”. Intelligence manifests itself in their ability to “explain the final result” before a work is finished. “Clear understanding of what he was doing” comes first in Stretton’s description of what it was about Glen Tetley which affected him so strongly. This was followed by “the power and intelligence behind him” and “a skill for choreography, not just thoughts he put out in the studio, but an understanding of where it was going and an ability to articulate it”. This is both a physical and verbal ability to articulate; Stretton says it was what Tetley or Tharp or a handful of others did as well as what they said which impacted on him.

Ross Stretton danced in the American Ballet Theatre in the 1980s when Baryshnikov was running the company and expanding its reach and repertory to take in works by Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp and others. This was radical at the time, but is now being taken up by ballet companies around the world. However, when Stretton and Baryshnikov were doing it, they were not picking up works from a menu, they were having them created on their bodies. Stretton, in fact, bristles a bit when I bring up the subject of the shopping list company which gets one ‘greatest hit’ from each of today’s biggest dance hit-makers. He’s obviously been accused of taking this approach, and it’s not what he has in mind at all. He recognises that dancers will grow most from their direct contact with choreographers, not from having works set on them by assistants (and the same goes for audiences). “My love is for creating new work. I want works made on my dancers, by Australians and by internationals”.

So Stretton’s New York experience is about to have a big impact on Australian ballet. But it is not a one-way street. Stretton believes that being Australian made a difference in his meteoric rise to a position of artistic influence at the American Ballet Theatre. He made an “instant transition from dancer to administrator” there, when Jane Herrman (then General Manager) asked him to run her artistic department after Baryshnikov left.

What was it she saw in him, to elevate him so rapidly? “Someone who understood the choreographic process and as a dancer had helped choreographers create their work. Someone who knew all of the dancers but didn’t have any grudges, vendettas, axes to grind or personal problems with people.” (I note a plethora of descriptive words breaking forth from a usually understated use of language. There must have been a lot of opportunities to develop this vocabulary at ABT.) Jane Herrman invested in Stretton “somewhat with an element of trust”, but, he says “she saw I knew and believed in dance”.

And, Stretton says, being Australian was part of it. It “helped him keep a distance on the backbiting” for one thing. But he also knows that Australian dancers are good. “They are adaptable, eager to please, talented, and non-threatening. No-one ever thought of me as someone who might do what I did—move from dancer to administrator, no-one was ever threatened by me”. So, the mild-mannered Clark Kent makes his first strike as Executive Apollo, bringing to the job the full force of a seasoned dancer’s creative ability to make the choreographic process flow and help choreographers realise their vision.

Ross Stretton believes that this is a most important ability in his new job, and thinks he got it from working with great artists. At ABT he had “the greatest” coming through his office—designers, choreographers, composers. He misses that and wants to create it here, “to create those collaborations of the greatest”.

His relationship to these artists and their creations is active. He understands that choreographers need help. “They can’t always just come up with the goods. They need understanding and someone to turn to, not just to be put in a studio and left to flounder—they may have a block, or may need to talk through their work. As a producer I may not know that unless I am working with them on developing the project”.

He says that development is about more than just giving choreographers space and dancers. “Choreographers are always on the output”. He is hosting a workshop right now to give them input. “A week of talking and listening about how concepts of dance can be combined with elements of design and lights. A think tank.”

Stretton believes design is one of the big things that is changing in ballet—“Scenery and costumes have changed, space can be carved out by light, there is more room to dance onstage”. This workshop which is focussed absolutely on process, not product, will be a week of discussion, moderated by Dr Michelle Potter, between three choreographers, three lighting designers and three set/costume designers.

Ross Stretton sees it as part of his job to reap the “seeds that have been planted to make great Australian choreographers. They need input, not just space, but guidance from people who understand how to choreograph. Someone to cut the earth from under them and make them understand the form.”

Lest I whip him into the nearest phone booth before he’s ready to unmask Clark Kent as a radical force, he is quick to add, “I want newness, but I’m not getting rid of the past”. He will keep up a relationship with the traditional classical repertory. For one thing, it is part of his job to keep the company afloat. But for another thing, he really believes in the “classics” (which are actually mostly “romantics”—ie Swan Lake, Giselle etc) for their expressive possibilities. As he said in his Green Mill keynote address, “Sometimes in the middle of a performance I would be overwhelmed by a total sense of identification with the character I was dancing—my dance and the dance became one. It always left me completely stunned, in awe of the power of dance”.

Great dance, he says, “is from the body”, it’s what he’s drawn by, what he loves. “It is when 14 dancers go to another place—it’s what happened last night in In The Upper Room—14 dancers were transported onstage by what they were doing, giving them such pleasure. The dancers’ pleasure is what the audience feels—twice as much. The audience’s pleasure in dance lies in that excitement, that purity, which can be in any kind of work.”

Ross Stretton is motivated and informed by his kinetic experience, his notion of intelligence springs from that source, as does his administrative instinct. In putting together a program he says he “is guided by music” almost, I think, in the way that a dancer’s performance in a ballet would be. And he thinks that it is fair enough for a dancer’s art to move a choreographer. He believes that the choreographic process works best “when a choreographer finds in a dancer a muse, rather than trying to impose their personal dance on a dancer. If a move is well co-ordinated a good choreographer goes with it, draws it out and develops it”. In other words, the best in a dancer will bring out the best in a choreographer.

And Ross Stretton is dancing well now, in his role as Executive Apollo. His co-ordination of a program by Twyla Tharp, Stephen Baynes, and Stephen Page (choreographing Rite of Spring at Stretton’s suggestion, using Bangarra and AB dancers) is an activitist piece of lateral thinking about history and contemporaneity, culture and dance. It could, if it reaches its promise, also be an outstanding example of Apollonian intelligence in dance.

Quiver, the new program from Leigh Warren and Dancers is continuing evidence of the company’s invention and excellence. With last year’s return season of Klinghoffer and now, the unveiling of two contrasting works, Shimmer and Swerve, Leigh Warren’s signatures are becomingly increasingly apparent. His work is disciplined, elegant and has the added intensity which music performed live can bring. With Klinghoffer, he borrowed ethereal choruses from John Adams’ opera, performed on stage by a score of Corinthian Singers. For Shimmer he has used the sparkling playing of the Australian String Quartet and in Swerve, the frenetic rhythms of cabaret favourites Pablo Percusso.

Under the scrutiny of Robert Hughes, film-maker Ken Burns and others, the Shaker movement has received renewed attention for its minimalist ingenuity, its diligence and apparently serene other-worldliness. No longer intact—unsurprisingly after ten generations of planned celibacy—the most enduring legacies of the once-thriving and financially successful Shaker communities are their quilts and collectable chairs. And, of course, their eloquent witness to the radiance of belief.

Composer Graham Koehne’s String Quartet No.2 “Shaker Dances”, celebrating the pastoral virtues of this gentle, quietist sect, provides the score for Shimmer. The performers, dancers and musicians, assemble silently on stage, their backs to their audience in frozen tableau. Then, successively, the members of the Australian String Quartet separate from the group, take up their seats downstage prompt-side and begin tuning up. Scraps of tunes can be heard, including a few bars of what sounds like Simple Gifts, the religious folk tune used as central motif in Aaron Copland’s Appalachan Spring. The cello joins, then the others, as the six dancers begin their demurely exquisite movement.

Leigh Warren’s splendidly assured choreography uses the dancers in pairs and gendered threes. There are echoes of square dance tropes as they form parallel lines and dance in profile, moving enticingly close but retaining modest distance. Top lit by Geoff Cobham the dancers move under vertical spots that seem at any time to raise them in some sort of beam-me-up rapture. The effect—enveloped in the warm, vibrant playing of the quartet—is fluid and unaccountably affecting.

Central to the success are Mary Moore’s costumes—silky, iron grey frock smocks with yellow-gold linings which button to the navel and then flow across and away from the body with notably erotic ambiguity. Powerfully dramatising the tensions of religious ecstacy, the costumes carry both male and female signification, puritan concealment and then—unbuttoned over the dancers’ flesh-toned body stockings—unexpected sexual abandon.

The movement parallels these dualities. The dancers, in diagonal formation, work in repetitive hoeing and chopping movements, or, hands prayerfully clasped, rotate their elbows in undulating rhythm. Elsewhere, when they raise their arms full stretch, roll along the floor leg over leg, or dance in balletic pairs, they achieve a contrasting sensuality—enhanced by Cobham’s buttery lighting, the throaty repetitions of cellist Janis Laurs and Elinor Lea’s fluttery pizzicato.

Shimmer is a fine work and must rank among Warren’s most accomplished. Carefully conceived, intelligently designed and beautifully performed with solos from Kim Hales-McCarthur and duets from Csaba Buday and Rachel Jenson, it uses Koehne’s appealing composition to good effect. This production is beautifully framed from the opening fugue to the final restatement of the musical theme, and then the curtain image of dancers and musicians gathered midstage as top spots fade to a beckoning side light. Shimmer exploits the conflicts of introspection and worldliness, of piety and a kind of pleasure, which may be secret but never guilty.

By contrast Swerve is a metal-rattling, taiko drumming display of athleticism and grunge style. From behind the curtain we hear the sounds of heavy spinning chrome plates wobbling into silence. Then as the curtain lifts we see Ben Green, Josh Green and Greg Andresen, aka Pablo Percusso, strapping on a variety of hubcaps from Kingswood to Nissan Bluebird and tapdogging up a storm.

The dancers, in skateboard baggies, black vinyl hot pants, leather and leopard skin, enter browsing newspapers as they nonchalantly stack themselves on one another. As the band take up drum kits at the back of the stage the dancers begin to slap each other with the papers setting up repetitions and syncopations. It is reminiscent of Stomp, Luke Cresswell’s kitchen cupboard of found-sound, but Swerve has plenty of its own zing as well.

Lit low from the side of the stage and then washed in heavy scarlets and torquoise, the dancers meld with the rhythms. An angular, exuberant solo from Delia Silvan is followed by a trio of rapping garbage bins then another burst from Rachel Jenson and some breakdance variants from Peter Sheedy and John Leathart.

The “auto”-erotic motifs continue from hubcabs to tyres to traffic as Pablo Percusso take up drumming stations in tilted-back car seats while the dancers let rip in a blaze of foot and sidelights.

Swerve moves into high gear for the fourth section, Head On, with thunderous drumming, spliced-in highway screeching and choreography ready to crash through to Cronenberg.

Leigh Warren and Dancers have compiled a program both meditative and high octane. For many the sustained energy of Swerve is the high point. However, for all its technique, it is more fizz than substance. But those Shakers doing their shimmer…? Well, that’s a road much less travelled.

Co-operative Multimedia Centres (CMCs) emerged into the atmosphere at about the same time as the Cfcs were destroying it. The atmosphere surrounding the newly identified ‘clever country’ at the time contained the heady technology of ‘new media’ and all things digital—interactive multimedia, the internet and the world wide web. Australia, in the view of the Labor government, had been at the end of the communication line for long enough and needed to be aboard the band-wagon that would deliver global proximity, as well as a new employee hungry industry.

The intervention that Keating and Canberra wanted to make was announced in Creative Nation, that policy document which spoke in October 1994 of “being distinctly Australian” in the face of the “assault from homogenised international mass culture”. After the inevitable wrangling, the six Centres that had been proposed were open by mid-1996. What impact have they had? What has been the quality of the services provided? What plans do they have to survive a non-interventionist, market-place government?

The mission for the Centres was to “offer education, training and professional services, access to state-of-the-art equipment and facilities, access to leading-edge research and development, and assistance with the handling of issues such as intellectual property and product testing and evaluation”. To greater or lesser degree each of the locations have and are delivering in each of these areas, but with differing degrees of emphasis—“complementarity” was the word used by Professor Guy Petherbridge, CEO for Starlit CMC and spokesperson for the Association of CMCs, to describe how the strengths of each enterprise are shared between all. It seems that it is early days for such an ideal to become evident, like many of the projects listed by each CMC.

Web sites are an obvious point of contact with the Cooperatives, some of which are non-profit, and the QANTM site (www.qantm.com.au) explains in the clearest way their business model summarised as the “brokerage of skills and related services for the interactive multimedia industry”.

QANTM is now operational in Darwin and Brisbane with 20 staff employed in four areas: Youthworks has trained over 200 young people in basic internet skills. Indigenet has developed approximately 15 major projects and with the leadership of Chris ‘Bandirra’ Lee will achieve placing digital networks parallel to traditional ones. Eventually, some access to Indigenous culture will be given to the wider global community. Australian Silicon Studio Training Centre (ASSTC) has received over 200 scholarship applications for 3D animation scholarships and the first 10 students have completed. QANTM Edge has five major development projects in the multimedia arena, all staffed by local contractors or individuals. CEO Olaf Moon admits that “research and development is a minor part of our activities, apart from research into five copyright projects”. Queensland government sponsorship is for two years and the Federal Governments will continue for a total of three. “At the end of this time, we expect to be self sufficient”.

QANTM is one of two Queensland CMCs. Starlit (www.starlit.com.au – expired) focuses on the tooling needs of educationalists and trainers, and instructional design, utilising the accumulated national experience of ‘distance learning’. In a bid to challenge the US heavies of on-line courses, the new academic year will see Swinburne University launch 56 courses, Griffith Uni just behind, all distilled from Australia’s unique pedagogical expertise.

“Western Australia is now poised to become a Mecca for digital artists throughout the Asia Pacific”. The team at Imago in Perth (www.imago.com.au – expired) identify their work with the art and cultural sector as their main achievement. One project with the Film and Television Institute established during July is DAS (The Imago/FTI Digital Arts Studio), a facility specifically designed to allow access for screen culture artists to modern digital production facilities. With financial and technical support from Arts WA, the Australian Film Commission and the Australia Council, the production facilities include interactive multimedia, digital sound, 3D modelling and animation, digital video and web authoring. The essential and primary purpose of DAS is to provide a facility where artists can access computer equipment for experimentation, production and training, and become a hub for critical arts activity.

CEO Mike Grant observes that “at this early stage there has not been a lot of cross-over between the technological researchers and artists”. Another facility, the Imago Sun Research Centre, is also open and equipped with high-end workstations. “A number of leading local artists are already designing projects to work on utilising the resources and expertise of the centre”, says Grant. Imago also works with PICA in the implementation of a bi-annual funding program which provides small amounts of money to artists for research and development. In addition Imago covers programs addressing education and training, industry development, content development, and research coordination.

Ngapartji (www.ngapartji.com.au – expired) launched onto coffee saturated Rundle Street, Adelaide in August 1996 with a state of the art multimedia centre containing studios, seminar and exhibition spaces, and a spectacular pavement cafe—up to a 1000 people every week have a hands-on experience with interactive multimedia, predominantly on-line. Training is either informal from trusty cafe staff or from high level trainers.

Carolyn Guerin, Ngapardji’s manager of applied research explains that the centre assists with “a range of on-line activities with real life elements such as the Virtual Writers in Residence Pilot Project (funded with the Australia Council), and Ngapartji Interactivity and Narrative Research Group (“Rosebud”) which, besides holding monthly seminars, has a web site with papers consolidating the group’s work and, soon, a research database. We have also sponsored and promoted the work of artists including Linda Marie Walker—exposure to new work is key to the centre. With so many mainstream industry people participating in activities at the centre, exposure to art-based work is inspiring and often commented on—the last Australian Multimedia Enterprises board meeting was held here during Jon Mccormack’s Turbulence exhibition. Most of the board members were blown away by it—you could see their minds ticking over like mad”.

Ngapartji Nodes will bring other Adelaide organisations on-line—Tandanya Aboriginal Centre is the first—self-managing the kind of computers available in the Ngapartji cafe. Nodes is about on-line activity and has included virtual community components—interactive communications capabilities rather than your usual brochure ware.

In Sydney, Access Australia (www.cmcaccess.com.au – expired) and its unwieldy consortium including Telstra, NSW Department of School Education, NSW TAFE Commission and five metropolitan and regional universities, have just appointed its third CEO in two years, Rim Keris, who comes from a hardware marketing and business background. He will need to bring substance to a program which includes Propagate, a key national project allied with the European Commission, on multimedia copyright.

At the other end of the financial scale also in Sydney, MetroTV (www.home. aone.net.au/metro/-expired now Metro Screen http://metroscreen.org.au/ Eds.) launched Stage One of a New Media Laboratory in November 1996 then last month received State Government funding to set up Stage Two—this includes ten high-end Apple Macintosh 9600 computers on an ethernet network with high speed internet access. Since January, in conjunction with other screen culture organisations, a range of digital courses have been run at Metro.

In Melbourne, it is the screen culture sector again setting the pace in giving access to digital media facilities. With financial backing from the state-run Multimedia Victoria, Open Channel (www.openchannel.org.au) will augment its digital video editing facilities with four 3D animation suites and a dozen high-end PowerMacs.

In the smart end of town, eMerge (www.emerge.edu.au – expired) is about to pilot a project with cultural institutions and individual artists to establish a Virtual Cultural Centre, “a complete experience rather than a collection, going live in 1998”, according to CEO Terese van Maanen—surely an opportunity for vibrant links with Melbourne talent? On the web, the iSite resource directory for the national industry will list personnel and clients. A range of other projects will address pedagogical and curriculum concerns at all three educational levels. Links with San Francisco and the ‘Malaysian corridor’ are also advanced.

Many, including Colin Mercer at the Griffith Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy, wonder about the marginalisation that the more creative communities are being forced into by the majority CMCs pursuing industry and training objectives. “Interactive multimedia offers a chance to break down a whole series of barriers between genres, disciplines and artforms. Convergence of mind-sets, not just technologies, is the issue,” according to Mercer, “with the ability to think laterally and more creatively”.

Professor Petherbridge feels that it is the industry support area rather than the cultural area that will continue subsidy to the nascent multimedia industry, “because it provides a message to industry and the public at large that this is a very important part of public policy…that if we slip in the next year, we’ve really slipped”.

“What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.”
Yoshida Kenko c1330

While no-one can claim immunity from nonsensical thoughts—some can be charming and witty, like those of the Buddhist monk Kenko—others are merely stupid. One would be hard pressed to find a better example of wilful stupidity than our government’s recent announcement of “principles for a national approach to regulate the content of online services such as the internet”.

A joint press release from the Minister for Communications and the Arts, Senator Richard Alston, and Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, proposes a “framework [that] balances the need to address community concerns in relation to content with the need to ensure that regulation does not inhibit industry growth and potential”. This ludicrous proposal, which can only have been dreamed up by people who have never had any contact with the internet, envisages that the online service provider (ISP) industry will “develop codes of practice in relation to online content, in consultation with the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA)”.

As a result, anyone unhappy about online content must first complain to the relevant ISP; the ABA then has the authority to investigate unresolved complaints. Conceptually, it is similar to the way in which film, television, radio broadcasts and computer games are currently regulated. A distressed viewer might call a television station to complain about nudity or language in a movie. If they do not receive a satisfactory response (whatever that might mean) from the television station, they can then complain to the ABA which conducts an “inquiry” and, if it finds the material was inappropriate, tells the broadcaster not to do it again. Prosecutions are exceedingly rare.

The system works tolerably well because there is tangible evidence of any “offending material” in the form of reels of film or videotape, audiotapes of radio broadcasts, and floppy disk or CD-ROM games and, because potentially objectionable content has already been filtered out by the censorship system. In the case of the internet, this process can already be effectively mimicked by filtering and parental control software such as CYBERsitter, SurfWatch, Net Nanny, Rated-PG, X-Stop, Cyber Snoop, and Cyber Patrol—just a few of the alternatives which render internet regulation unnecessary, as long as parents are prepared to accept responsibility for limiting their children’s access to the net.

But let’s assume, adopting the position of the fundamentalist Right, that these software safeguards are only partly effective and that “harmful” material slips through. Only a tiny fraction of internet content is stored on local (ie Australian) servers. What can the ABA do about a complaint concerning “offensive” content on a web server in the US, or Italy, or Japan? What kind of response is the offended web surfer likely to get from a foreign content producer or ISP? Incredulity? Derision?

And so much of the content is ephemeral anyway: chat sessions exist only in real time, web sites appear and disappear, e-mail and Usenet news is stored only temporarily on an ISP’s server. Internet content resembles, as much as anything, telephone conversations and facsimile transmissions. In a sense this is the core of the problem: the “regulatory framework” attempts to impose a broadcast metaphor on what are essentially telecommunications carriers. They may as well attempt to control the air Australians breathe or the water we drink.

The whole idea of regulation is so divorced from reality that it is difficult to explain why it is being proposed. Put to one side the government’s duplicity in not admitting that regulation is largely unnecessary; perhaps the legislation is a cynical attempt to appease Senator Brian Harradine, the Lyons Group and other conservative elements in the Liberal party, put forward in the knowledge that it is unworkable and will inevitably fail.

Alternatively, could it be that Australian politicians are profoundly unaware of digital culture and the way it is reshaping our world? That this lack of understanding is not restricted to federal politicians becomes depressingly obvious when you observe in NSW the Carr government’s tubthumping about internet pornography while they shovel computers into state schools and hook them up to the net without making any real provision for teacher training.

Ultimately, it is not this whacky censorship sideshow that is truly dispiriting. It is that at a time when we need to formulate an imaginative and courageous response to the radical social and economic transformation about to be wrought by the internet, our politicians are jockeying for position like amateurs at a provincial racetrack. Which horse do you bet on when the only starters are confusion, dishonesty, cynicism, stupidity and ignorance?

Catalogued, packaged and displayed, looking through glass at our history. Corridors of locked cabinets within which are stored a phantasmagoria of human inquiry; screens we dare not touch, through which we can only gaze. Down every corridor of this mighty building, on either side, butterflies of every imaginable colour; shells the size of emus; skulls of men, women and children who knew well the primal dark; skeletons of beasts of unimaginable proportions—all protected within controlled atmospheres where humidity measuring devices murmur quietly amidst the shuffling feet of visitors. A sarcophagus of speculation and intrigue down through which we wander, in awe, in dreams, inside the Museum.

For many of us, this was the kind of museum we grew up with, one where history was untouchable, but presented with a sense of showmanship. The museum was filled with drama: frozen battles, hunts and representations of historical moments stimulated the imagination much like a waxworks museum on steroids. But these are museums of the past. They may one day be on show themselves within a Museum of Museums, but such a place would no doubt be virtual, to be explored, perhaps more interactively, via another display case of sorts, the computer screen.

In Melbourne, we are losing the last remnant of our once magnificent Museum, its Planetarium. A few moments in the Planetarium, seated in one of its cozy chairs and you were transported into the heavens. No VR goggles, no 3D glasses. An early 1960s Japanese-made projector with multiple lenses, a domed ceiling for a screen and reclining seats was all it took. But it’s going, perhaps to be replaced by something akin to the infamous CAVE, a walk-through virtual environment driven by two powerful ONYX computers, a suite of video projectors and an armory of 3D glasses. Sounds great doesn’t it!

Visitors to the launch of the Ars Electronica Centre, Austria’s Museum of the Future, first saw the CAVE in September 1996. Ars Electronica is host not only to the CAVE, but is a screen-based display and interactive environment of research and inquiry. The Museum has grown out of the spectacle into an “intelligent environment”.

Ars Electronica describes itself as a “knowledge machine” with a mission to help visitors attain information “fitness”. A kind of mental gymnasium where science, art and business are seen to be working together in an “interdisciplinary interface between technology, culture and society”. More a museum of concepts, ideas and the commercial development of them. In fact, changing the notion of museum as historical archive to an open laboratory.

Keeping its foot literally in the new media door, Ars Electronica has founded and continues to host international forums from which it draws its conceptual framework. This year, from September 8–13, Ars Electronica mediates its annual festival and symposium. This year’s theme, titled “Fleshfactor: Informationsmaschine Mensche”, is the Mensch, the human being. Festival Directors Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schôpf are creating an investigative environment around their short, but potent, manifesto for Fleshfactor:

In light of the latest findings, developments and achievements in the fields of genetic engineering, neuro-science and networked intelligence, the conceptual complex now under investigation will include the status of the individual in networked artificial systems, the human body as the ultimate original, and the strategies for orientation and inter-relation of the diametric opposites, man and machine, in the reciprocal, necessary processes of adaption and assimilation.

Participants in Fleshfactor will include Donna Haraway, Neal Stephenson, Steve Mann and Stelarc. The net version of the symposium has been active for several months, consolidating the key issues and subject matter that will be explored throughout the duration of the festival.

Each year, in collaboration with the Upper Austrian Studio of Austrian Radio, Ars Electronica invites artists the world over to contribute new works to the Prix Ars Electronica. This year, four out of the 900 entries won a total of $135,000.

Many of us hold Ars Electronica in great esteem. It is a place where innovation, the edge of new media arts, has both a home and centre for research and discourse. That it is, but on the ground, it’s also a business and a very young communicator. It has created expectations of itself through its manifesto, its vision—much of which it is still learning to accommodate, let alone live up to. That said, Ars Electronica is most certainly of the ‘brave new world’. It displays both courage and a commitment to experimentation that we have yet to see in any equivalent institution in Australia. We have Scienceworks and its successful Cyberzone exhibit, but it is a long way from the technology and cultural incubator that is Ars Electronica.

e-media, a new gallery space dedicated to the display of computer-based art, kicked off in June with the presentation of Bronwyn Coupe’s interactive CD-ROM The Inside of Houses. A thoughtful and whimsical work, The Inside of Houses offers the user a guided tour through the memories of the author’s family. Each family member was asked to contribute their recollection of the floor-plan of a house inhabited by the family years before. The user is invited to navigate their way through each floor-plan, drawing out hidden sounds and video footage in the process. The vast difference in the floor plans produced by each member—and the sounds and images they invoke—is then used as a device to prompt the user into contemplating the way in which, to use Coupe’s words, “notions of size, distance, direction and connection are influenced by each person’s personal mythology”.

The work cleverly draws attention to both the computer’s status as a memory machine and its ability to archive and cross-reference. It does claim to allow the audience their chance to add to the work with drawings and stories about a place they have lived in, but I wasn’t able to get it to do this. That aside, The Inside of Houses runs well and provides the user with an enjoyable experience.

An initiative of the Centre for Contemporary Photography and Experimenta, e-media is a welcome addition to the electronic art scene. Look out for future programs featuring Sally Pryor’s Postcard from Tunis and Megan Heywood’s I am a Singer.

e-media is open Wednesday to Friday 11-5 and Saturday 2-5 at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, 205 Johnston Street, Fitzroy 3065

High and low tech, static and dynamic, permanent and transient, eMedia 97 embraced a paradigm of multimedia as the fusion of diverse artistic practices with emphasis on interaction and participation. Conceived by the Queensland Multimedia Arts Centre as a vehicle to allow Queensland artists to develop, realise and distribute multimedia art, the festival’s hybrid of performance, photography, sculpture, internet and rave culture created an arena for vigorous engagement between art, technology and audience.

Sculpture and photography combined with CD-ROM installation in the 240 Volt group show at Metro Arts, to envelop the viewer in a perpetually evolving mesh of structures, images and sounds. A (seemingly) random sonic loop of grunting, pissing, laughter, coughing and teeth brushing accompanied Mark Parslow and Stuart Kirby’s In the Wolerverine’s Web. Its dissonant tones bled into the space around Nicole Voevodin’s mystery cabinets, Cash Corpus #3, and James Lamar-Peterson’s animal sculptures fabricated from obsolete circuitry. Simultaneously menacing, cute and annoying, the soundscape was, intermittently, peppered with gunfire from Lucy Francis’s wicked reworking of the grassy knoll: Jackie O. Clicking on a screen-sized image of the first lady, the viewer provides a catalyst for the assassination (and Jackie’s pupils ricochet satisfyingly around her eye sockets in tempo with the shots). Gunshots reverberated throughout the gallery, over the delicate seaside ice-cream van chimes that attended Benjamin Elliot’s vacation theme interactive photography. The intricate aural and visual environment fluctuated constantly as viewers navigated sculpture and interacted with installations.

Elaborating on the possibilities of audience participation in a mixed media event, Gigga Bash (Global Overload) produced by Jeremy Hynes of MomEnTum Multimedia, featured the interior of the Hub Cafe covered with 450 metres of alfoil by Cyber Nautilus Performance Group. Members of the audience were wrapped into the environment with alfoil—living sculptures at 16 work stations linked to the internet, searching for visually stimulating material to project to the remaining spectators. Simultaneously, the event was filmed, remixed with audience-generated images from the net, distorted with other footage and extruded back onto a nine screen TV wall which was itself in turn filmed and re-projected, condensing the media into a ultra concentrated compound of film, production, cyberspace and audience collaboration.

Metal framed novajet prints in Close as Life at Secummb Space, the Plastic Energy dance party with visuals by Troy Innocent, music by Ollie Olsen and Cyber-femme Griller Girls exhibition, further expanded the diversity of the festival, providing additional opportunities for engagement and interaction with a variety of technologies and practices. Workshops in multimedia authoring and the internet, lectures from Dorian Dowse on the implications multimedia holds for fine art, Troy Innocent on the possibilities of artificial life and video conferencing from New York with internet artists discussing issues facing web designers in the US and Australia, meant that eMedia avoided becoming a superficial feast of images and sound, achieving instead, a forum for erudite discussion of and energetic experimentation with multimedia.

eMedia97 QMAC; Metro Arts; QUT; Qld Museum; Hub Cafe; Secummb Space; Out!; Quantm; Brisbane May 23-June 6

The idea behind Green Mill’s 1997 program, Heritage and Heresy, is timely. There’s a feeling in the air; dancers looking back to see their tracks stretching behind them into the distance. Perhaps they seek proof that they’ve really gone somewhere. The subject matter of much recent work, at Green Mill and in Sydney, is indeed lived history, and we’re shown these tracks, paths of complex endeavour, entwining personal and professional experience, a detailed and private history of growing up and settling in, an embodiment of craft.

Sue Healey’s own history starts with ballet. In June, The One Extra Company presented her Suite Slip’d at The Performance Space, but I was happy to have seen it first in rehearsal a week earlier, prior to the addition of costumes and set. There’s something special in the fearlessness and ease of rehearsal, where sequences and physical relationships are still somewhat open-ended, without the fixity that performance requires. In the first trio, the dancers took the behavioural and stylistic elegance of 17th century French court dance, throwing it (and each other) around the spacious bare studio, with a quick, sweet understatement which belied the fast, slippery complicated precision demanded by the choreography. For someone who knows ballet, a slight tilt of the chin, a glancing epaulement, a sudden flutter of hands, all embody a world of meaning, both then and now, within which the dancers’ social and professional lives are played out.

The second half presented a kind of dramatic confrontation: two new dancers, new style, new material. With the addition of set and costumes in performance, I could barely shake the Sharks and the Jets out of my head, as subtle posture became a social currency no less extreme than that of 17th century. Both choreography and dancing in the first section were hard to fault, and while the suggestion of dramatic narrative might have been a persuasive guide, I preferred the more ‘abstract’ interrogation of dancerly ritual which was becoming visible prior to the complications presented by staging for performance.

Some works at Green Mill seemed to embody a kind of artistic coming of age. Trevor Patrick’s solo, Continental Drift, was one of these, performed as part of Dancework’s presentation of Leap of Faith. The weight and pathos of this work catches you by stealth. Small words, phrases, gestures accumulate and pack down, like strata in a land mass. He shifts sideways, black-suited, across the stage, backed by burnt orange screens. He bumps up against shadow, unknown experience, until it recedes. His movement is clean, the text simple but pervasive. He speaks of experience, events which just happen, ways of learning to do and to be; progress through life is measured by an accumulation of such events, which by themselves do not provide actual direction. The shape of his life becomes simply doing what he has done, going where he has gone, “dense episodes of experience” packing down into a pathway of sorts. When the other side of the stage is reached, the end of the road, he has cleared that space of shadow, and the ground is firm, marking a place of experience, for us as well, between the sacred and the profane.

Suite Slip’ed, by Sue Healey, The One Extra Company, The Performance Space, June–July 1997

Continental Drift, by Trevor Patrick, part of Dancework’s Leap of Faith, Green Mill Festival, June–July 1997

When the Marrugeku Company presented MIMI: a Kunwinjku Creation Story in Arnhem Land last year, word has it that even the sky held its breath. This remarkable collaboration between Stalker, the Kunwinjku people of western Arnhem Land and a number of Indigenous artists incorporating stilt walking, acrobatics, dance, light, fire, smoke and Indigenous music is one of a number of contemporary performance works in the Festival of the Dreaming, the first of the Olympic Games Arts Festivals, opening September 14.

In Wimmin’s Business, Rachel House performs Nga Pou Wahine by Briar Grace-Smith with musical composition by Himiona Grace; interdisciplinary artist and a leading figure in Native performing arts in Canada, Margo Kane presents Moonlodge; in More Than Feathers and Beads, Native American, Murielle Borst performs a tragi-comic routine about the lives of Native women; Deborah Mailman recreates her powerful monologue The Seven Stages of Grieving; Leah Purcell, who trained as a boxer and a singer, bolts through the harsh culture of country Queensland in Box the Pony based on a real life scenario and written by Scott Rankin; Ningali Lawford is back with her remarkable stand-up performance Ningali and Deborah Cheetham manages to interweave a few operatic arias into White Baptist Abba Fan accompanied by the Short Black Quartet.

The plays on offer are similarly broad in scope: Bindenjarreb Pinjarra is about truth and justice the Australian way. Using satire, improvised performance and a strong physicality this work premiered in Perth and is a collaboration between nyoongahs Kelton Pell and Trevor Parfitt and whitefellas Geoff Kelso and Phil Thomson. Meanwhile, Bradley Byquar, Anthony Gordon and Max Cullen perform Ngundalelah godotgai (Waiting for Godot) in the Banjalung language with English surtitles. Julie Janson’s historical odyssey of the Aboriginal bushranger Mary Anne Ward, Black Mary, which premiered at PACT Youth Theatre, is given an epic new production by Angela Chaplin at Belvoir Street Theatre’s vast Carriage Works venue. Noel Tovey blends Elizabethan, Aboriginal and contemporary theatre styles and an all-indigenous cast in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with dreaming designs inspired by the works of Bronwyn Bancroft, computer animation by Julie Martin and musical composition by Sarah de Jong. Unashamedly feelgood is Melbourne Workers Theatre collaboration with Brisbane’s Kooemba Jdarra on Roger Bennett’s Up The Ladder, an affectionate evocation of the 1950s sideshow boxing matches. NIDA students will present Nathanial Storm, a new musical by Anthony Crowley, directed by Adam Cook, musical direction by Ian McDonald.

The street theatre program includes Malu Wildu, a new indigenous music ensemble performing original song based on the Dreaming stories of the Torres Strait and Flinders Ranges. Also on the streets are Tiwi Island Dancers, Janggara Dancers from Dubbo, Koori clowns Oogadee Boogadees, and Kakadoowahs, a new work from four Koori artists produced by Tony Strachan of Chrome.

The festival opens on September 14 with a smoking ceremony staged on the site originally known at Tyubow-Gale (Bennelong Point). featuring large numbers of dancers, singers and 30 didjeridu players directed by Stephen Page.

There’s a strong focus on dance-music works in the festival. For one night only there’s Edge of the Sacred, a collaboration between the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Company choreographed by Raymond Blanco and with Edo de Waart conducting the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in Peter Sculthorpe’s Earth Cry, Kakadu and From Uluru. And on the same evening an all too rare opportunity to hear the haunting opera Black River by Andrew and Julianne Schultz with Maroochy Barambah performing in a semi-staged performance with the Sydney Alpha Ensemble; the performance is conducted by Roland Peelman and directed by John Wregg.

Bangarra Dance Theatre dust off the ochre to explore water worlds in Fish choreographed by Stephen Page with music by David Page. Didjeridu player Matthew Doyle, choreographer Aku Kadogo and percussionist Tony Lewis give modern voice to a Creation story in Wirid-Jiribin: The Lyrebird performed by Matthew Doyle in the Tharawal language.

International guests include the predominantly Maori and Pacific Island all-male contemporary dance company Black Grace who were first seen and much enjoyed at Dance Week at The Performance Space last year. They return with the premiere of Fia Ola. Silamiut, Greenland’s only professional theatre performs Arsarnerit, a dance-theatre work about the northern lights; and also visiting are the ChangMu Dance Company from Korea. There’ll be free performances in First Fleet Park by The Mornington Island Dancers (NT); Doonoch Dancers (NSW south coast); Yawalyu Women of Lajamanu (central desert); Tiromoana (Samoa); Ngati Rangiwewehi (Aetearoa); Naroo (Bwgcolman people, north Queensland) and Papua New Guinea’s Performing Arts Troupe.

Visual arts by Indigenous artists will be showing at all major institutions including an exhibition about Indigenous Australian music and dance at the Powerhouse Museum; the Art Gallery of NSW hosts Ngawarra in which artists from Yuendumu create a low-relief sand painting over five days in contact with their peers by satellite; at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, twelve artists ask, “What is Aboriginal Art?”; At Boomalli, Rea uses mirrors to engage viewers in her interpretations of the Aboriginal body in Eye/I’mmablakpiece; fourteen indigenous artists ‘live in’ and work together at Casula Powerhouse; multimedia artist Destiny Deacon is in-residence for three weeks at The Performance Space Gallery working with local school children on the installation Inya Dreams (website http//www.culture.com.au/scan/tps). At the Australian Centre for Photography a retrospective of works by the late Kevin Gilbert and photographer Eleanor Williams; at the Hogarth Gallery, Clinton Nain gives three short performances of I Can’t Sleep at Night to accompany his installation Pitched Black:Twenty Five Years celebrating the history of activism among Indigenous peoples.

The Baramada Rock concert hosted by Jimmy Little, David Page and Leah Purcell features Yothu Yindhi, Christine Anu, Kulcha, Aim 4 More, Laura Vinson from Canada, Moana and the Moahhunters from Aotearoa and special guests Dam Native and Southside of Bombay.

The Paperbark literature program brings together indigenous writers Herb Wharton, Anita Heiss, Archie Weller, Romaine Moreton and Alexis Wright with international guests Keri Hulme and Briar Grace-Smith in readings, storytelling and forums at the State Library of NSW.

The Pikchas is a week long festival of films screening at the Dendy Cinema, Martin Place and the Museum of Sydney—“no roped off areas here, mate”. Highlights include Mabo—Life of an Island Man (1997); The Coolbaroo Club (1996), Jedda (1955); the Sand to Celluloid series (1995-96); Backroads (1977) and in the bar, a continuous reel of provocative archival footage. As well as the Australian program there are films from Canada, Aotearoa and Germany. Makem Talk involves local and guest film-makers in discussion and debate.

The considerable appeal of the visual arts and film programs aside, for RealTime fans of contemporary performance, theatre and dance the festival holds special appeal in the productions of MIMI, Fish, The 7 Stages of Grieving, Ningali, Bidenjarreb Pinjarra, Fia Ola, Arsarnnerit, ngundaleh godotgai, Black Mary, Up the Ladder and wimmin’s business.

The Festival of Dreaming is an astonishing celebration of the achievements of contemporary Indigenous artists in theatre, performance, dance, film and the visual arts. Rhoda Roberts’ programming achievement is considerable. That she draws extensively on the achievements of recent years, shows just how much great work is available, some of it already nationally and internationally travelled. The addition of new works and international Indigenous guests, makes The Festival of the Dreaming potentially one of those events that festivals so rarely are these days, a genuine celebration rooted in a coherent yet remarkably diverse Indigenous culture staged with a sense of the present, of achievement and with an optimism especially needed at a dark political moment.

The Festival of the Dreaming; Artistic Director, Rhoda Roberts, Sydney, September 14-October 6

Casting an eye over the program for the Australian Youth Dance Festival in Darwin in September-October, it looks like the young artists and community dance workers expected from around Australia will be kept on their toes. Early morning warmups in drumming and capoeira begin at 8am followed by discussions on daily themes (Partnerships, Culture & Dance, Collaboration and Initiation, Dance at the Edge and the big one—The Future), sessions beginning with keynote addresses from some notable speakers, opening out to panel discussions with audience participation.

Those not taking part in the discussion can choose from a variety of workshops—teaching methodologies for Primary and Secondary students; workshops with young professional artists; making dance with members of Ludus Dance Company who are visiting from the UK; or take classes in specific aspects of technique (Pilates, contemporary, ballet, tap, capoeira) and then catch video showings.

It’s anticipated that relationships established at the festival may produce some collaborative works and this possibility has been factored into the program with some ‘free’ time allocated after lunch to work together with focus groups or to create pieces with mentors and facilitators. There’s the potential for showing works completed or in progress in the afternoon. Got a minute? Access the internet or attend a workshop with Kristy Shaddock, Clare Dyson and Susan Ditter on how to make a web page. Sponsors QANTM Multimedia have provided hardware and training. If you can’t get to Darwin, daily proceedings will be accessible on the festival website at http://sunsite.anu. edu.au./ausdance.

In the evening, there’s a program of performances including works from Expressions Dance Company (Brisbane), Restless Dance Company (Adelaide), Stompin’ Youth (Launceston), Boys from the Bush (Albury), Corrugated Iron Youth Theatre and Tagira Aboriginal Arts Academy (Darwin).

The program is still coming together but confirmed festival speakers include: arts administrators Michael FitzGerald (Youth Performing Arts Australia—ASSITEJ International), Danielle Cooper and Jerril Rechter (Youth Performing Arts, Australia Council); artistic directors Mark Gordon (The Choreographic Centre), Genevieve Shaw (Outlet Dance and Outrageous Youth Dance Company) and Sally Chance (Restless Dance Company); dancer-teacher-choreographers Christine Donnelly, Michael Hennessy; and dancer-film-maker Tracie Mitchell. Also on the guest list are a number of dance mentors (Cheryl Stock, Maggi Sietsma).

Ludus Dance Company, a leading British dance company for young people will be special guests of the festival (courtesy of the British Council’s newIMAGES program). Based in Lancaster, Ludus tours for 32 weeks a year. The company has a strong reputation for innovative performance and for challenging educational and community programs. Especially interesting for Australian practitioners, is their focus on combinations of cross-cultural dance forms and mixed media (puppets, masks, original music, adventurous costume and stage design).

Much recent youth theatre work in Australia has had strong dance and movement components. It’s not surprising that a discrete area called Youth Dance should emerge. As early as 1994, the Australia Council commissioned a report on the area as part of their review of Youth policy. Merrian Styles from the NT office of Ausdance says, “We’ve organised this event in response to strong demand from our under-25 membership. An advisory panel of young dance practitioners from cities and regions throughout Australia decided that a festival would bring young people together and give us a clearer sense of the directions they want to go”.

Well into rehearsal, I ask the conceiver-performer of Awakenings, Zsuzsanna Soboslay, is it the envisaged work that is emerging? She explains that the structure is becoming more overt, “a good thing, the outward shape, but I’m waiting for the interior to re-emerge, the inflections in the body that the work began with. They’re coming”. This waiting happens to most of us to some degree mid-rehearsal process, but food-poisoning in Istanbul over two months ago on the way to LIFT97 in London, has left her asking “Is this my body?” and querying judgments made in response to it in rehearsal. She seems confident nonetheless that the body, and the vision of the show with it, is there.

I ask designer Tim Moore if the set’s evolution has been subject to transformations. He explains that the set was ready for the first day of rehearsals so that the performers could live with and learn it, especially given that “it has a life of its own, has four or five actions—parts of it slide up and down, it revolves, has at least two levels to work on physically and is both reflective and transparent”. The initial inspiration came from a workshop two years ago at the Centre for Performance Studies at Sydney University and from Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, the German classic of thwarted and brutalised child-innocence which has inspired Zsuzsanna’s Awakenings. This is a set then that is expressionist in impulse, a device of discovery and grim witnessing, a window on a child’s world, “a massive window which is also a door”. “It’s monolithic,” says Moore, “but now I’ve disappeared it a bit, changed the surfaces—you can see it and see into it. Originally it was a staircase on wheels but it’s transformed into a room that can become a cage, a space for the performers to discover things, with room to move”.

Zsuzsanna comments that the set has provided “landscapes, corridors, circles, a sense of window and horizon”, that the capacity of the set to revolve has enhanced the relationship between the performers; the way a door turns helps realise the transformation in one character oscillating between mother and daughter roles, amplifying swings between innocence and knowledge, showing what gets hidden, what disappears.

Complete as the set is in construction and in its life in rehearsal with the performers, it awaits the transformations of light and video projection. The latter, as often, is quite a design challenge, having to find the right surface to project on, where to place the images, and how to make them complementary or counterpoint to the set and the action, not a distraction. This is especially the case, says Zsuzsanna, when the images are about “going inside memory, into the body”. Already the scale of the set and its proximity to the audience will amplify their own recollections of innocence and awe. The video imagery will take them further in and back, but with its own dynamic and in relation to what’s happening live: “A soft-shoe dance on video”, says Zsuzsanna, “doesn’t yearn, but the accompanying song does”. The challenge of the meeting of live and recorded actions and of creating a soft surface to hold projected images clearly preoccupy the thoughts of Awakening’s creators at this stage of the work’s development.

As does the music. “Sound”, Zsuzsanna retorts. “We might have started with Schoenberg, but save a brief quotation, his music is not in the show. We don’t have big slabs of music from the late 19th century, early 20th (Spring Awakening was published in 1892). It’s in our bodies, the music is ours, in our movement. We are aware of sources of sound—the pulse of nursery rhymes, marches, beer hall songs; these melodies can block out other, earlier melodies.”

The sound score for Awakenings is being created by sound artist Rod Berry and is about to enter rehearsal with its own vocabulary for the performers and the set to work and live with. It’s a process in which “movement can evolve into sound, sound into movement”. “Rod will create sounds around the silences. He won’t fill the space. He’ll make the blackboard and different parts of the set speak. Sound helps one travel in time, shifts you historically, for example as a performer transforms from youth to crone; sound can demonstrate time as contiguous—the past and present in one moment.”

This moment, for Zsuzsanna and Tim, is one such combination of past—the inspiration of Wedekind, the seminal workshop of some two years ago, the recent creation of the set—and present—living in the set, working with projected images and sound, the interior of the work re-emerging and, doubtless, transforming. Awakenings is about change: “Change comes from vulnerability. Change comes from desire. Can a culture change when it holds fiercely to its identity and power?”

Awakenings, conceived, written and performed by Zsuzsanna Soboslay, with Benjamin Howes; sound, Rod Berry; images, Peter Oldham, Alan Dorin; set, Tim Moore; lighting, Peter Gossner. The Performance Space, Sydney, August 14-24

The Sydney Morning Herald’s dance writer, Jill Sykes, in her not-so-kind comments about the performance programs in The Performance Space’s antistatic festival must have known she was poking a stick in a hornet’s nest. Perhaps she was emphasising her desire (Performance Space Quarterly, Autumn 1997) to express ‘one person’s view’ in what should be— ideally, but is not—in our economic rationalist climate, a widely diverse debate about innovative dance practice. The sort of attitude expressed in Jill Sykes’ review reveals the ease with which alternative discourse is effectively silenced. Different notions of the body have engendered much innovative dance practice, but in Australia, these differences seem doomed to invisibility within the larger public domain.

To wit, the National Library of Australia is currently host to a travelling exhibition, Dance People Dance, curated by Dr Michelle Potter. Despite the Director-General’s comment that the exhibition “examines how theatrical dance in Australia has moved from its strongly Western European beginnings to now also reflect an ethnically diverse society”, this exhibition tells a story of Australian dance shaped entirely by its relationship to European tradition. Max Dupain’s photographs bring to life the early tours of Pavlova and the Ballet Russe which were so influential in developing our national ballet. Thrown into prominence are a group of contemporary Australian artists defined by this same theatricality: Meryl Tankard, Graeme Murphy, Stanton Welsh, Gideon Obarzanek, Paul Mercurio—all with European balletic pedigrees falling clearly on the right side of well-worn tradition.

For reasons unspecified, there are few developed references in the exhibition to other non-balletic dance traditions practiced in Australia for generations. Early Modernists are given little more than glancing recognition: the odd TasDance and One Extra poster. Neither is there material from more recent visits of, say, Steve Paxton, whose work has inspired generations of dancers in Australia. There’s an awkwardness in the way that Indigenous Australian dance is barely accommodated within the body of the exhibition.

Can interesting, successful dance be conceived of as more than commercially viable entertainment? Might different understandings of the body and dance centre on a person as an inherently mobile and expressive being? Can the body be seen as a site of inquiry, investigation and negotiation, rather than some unruly and inchoate pit of desire and impulse requiring severe discipline in order to achieve a pre-established social demeanour? Certainly these used to be fashionable ideas. The early practices of Murphy or Tankard were well-funded, ostensibly on the basis of their ‘modern’ desires. To see clearly where an artist’s aesthetic aspirations lie, you simply look to daily technical training regimes. These individuals have always sat comfortably within balletic practice. Whether they have “dented the canon” or not, to use Russell Dumas’ description of innovation in ballet, is questionable. The point is that if the idea of innovation is fashionable, its actuality is usually too problematic for public presentation.

The suggestion that our Western European theatrical heritage still provides the most influential model, would probably raise little dispute among the six member panel at the surprisingly named National Dance Critics Forum: Dance: What Next? Who Says So? Few of the panellists would have experienced dance which was about physical negotiation and investigation rather than proclamation and spectacle.

If Valerie Lawson sees the cult of the creative personality as ‘unhealthy’, to be discouraged in favour of ‘creative collaboration’, I wondered, without denigrating such enterprises, where Sydney Dance Company would be without the public charisma of Graeme Murphy. Simultaneously, even from within this ‘cultist’ mentality, contemporary economic argument requires that singular innovative artistic vision be smoothed out by less problematic, consumable, easily-toured, blander ‘international’ fare. In the case of Western European dance, you’re always in reassuringly familiar terrain, knowing how to talk, what values to acclaim. One talks about a certain style, extreme physicality and virtuosity. Dancers can travel all over the world and all partake of this same discourse. Perhaps this is what Robin Grove referred to, when discussing classical tradition in the 21st century, as “the high democracy of this art, where everyone is king”. And he wasn’t just talking about ballet, but about a classicism in which one apportions “harmonious lines in an internal coherence”, a notoriously and meticulously de- and re-constructed idea, within the post-modernist frame.

Lee Christofis, commenting on funding problems for independent artists, equated the term ‘independent’ with ‘emerging’, conveying the idea that once artists have ‘emerged’ they will no longer be ‘independent’. Further, he implied these artists might just be unwillingly ‘independent’ of funding bodies’ financial assistance. Either alternative misunderstands a more pertinent notion of independence, ie mature, wilfully artistically independent choreographic artists deliberately seeking to develop practices which speak diversely of the body—not as a well-oiled culturally ‘international’ machine, or couched in pre-defined terms which devalue difference. Such artists engage in a dialogue about practice that acknowledges Australia’s monogamous relationship with its Western European cultural referents, at the same time setting about widening cultural precepts and creating a truly independent identity.

To this end, perhaps, the antistatic festival’s centrepiece was the three ten-day workshops conducted by guests Jennifer Monson (NY), Julyen Hamilton (Spain via UK) and Gary Rowe (UK), designed to develop choreographic and improvisational practice and performance—the very practices evident in the performances which failed to impress Jill Sykes.

If a choreographer makes work to which only a specific audience can relate, is that grounds for dismissal? Such was Gary Rowe’s A Distance Between Them, in which the iconography may well have related to an audience (HIV positive men?) which did not attend. Indeed, the images remained static, distant and difficult: tight in a circular frame a woman singing Doris Day love songs, a sparse film showing a mother’s pregnant belly, a man’s throat. A tortured dancer, pinned in a hard-edged spot, dances as if forever on a steadily speeding treadmill. Tiring, repetitive phrases accumulate. Unexpectedly, sympathy finally arises for someone caught in the grip of a difficult life.

Julyen Hamilton’s 40 Monologues was like being taken for a ride. No need to specially watch for anything in this pre-edited stream-of-consciousness movement and dialogue. His art of movement non-sequitur used physical latitude that would amuse fans of old John Cleese-type word association football games. It was probably in that same wave of innovation 30 years ago that his technique developed, on the contact improvisation platform, fused in his case with more established modern techniques. These days he moves and talks with the facility and impeccable timing of a well-practiced comic.

On a similar ‘contacterly’ platform, Jennifer Monson’s work, Lure was far less straitened by early modernist vocabularies. Her strength and fluidity revealed glimpses and passages of tricky sensibility, of magical ticklishness. Sometimes the sea, its myths and enticements manifested. She stepped through waves of piquant suggestion, continuous currents of shifting sensibility. Dynamics grew and abated. She gathered her energy and hurled herself in belly flops to the floor, or else engaged with feathery and evasive wisps of tiny paper sails which rode on her breath.

New work rarely springs from nothing. Russell Dumas’ and Lucy Guerin’s works The Oaks Cafe —Traces 1 and Robbery Waitress on Bail shared a stylistic linearity given vigour and depth by webs of allusion. If, as Dumas says, ballet, like most hybrid arts, is sterile, The Oaks Cafe Project seemed to assert that the accumulated contributions of individuals (Sally Gardiner, Trevor Patrick, Pauline de Groot, Catherine Stewart), because of their particular relationships with Dumas’ artistry within their own layered experience, can suggest ways of escaping such perceived aesthetic inertia.

Lucy Guerin’s allusions perhaps highlighted an uneasy relationship between Australian/American and European escapist imagery, throwing together bland journalistic accounts of a Pulp Fiction-like restaurant theft story with the angst-ridden world-weariness of say Anne Teresa De Keersmaker’s women, who show their legs and nickers with a familiar double-edged indifference.

Lines of movement inquiry can become inert behind stylistic facades. Butoh Product (de Quincey/Lynch Performance Union) refers to ‘traditional’ Butoh, which, having been engendered in revolt, can only continue to exist by undercutting and shattering its own halo-effect, so that innovation cannot become canonised. The artists set up scenes of serious intent—’performer’, ‘singer’, ‘dancer’, ‘guest’, ‘audience’ and then proceeded to expose their flimsiness. An on-stage filming later revealed a rearrangement of the same performance elements, delivering quite a different version of events.

Martin Hughes did not deal well with the familiar technical skills of straight contact improvisation. Helen Clarke-Lapin, his highly-skilled partner, might have taken this dance much further on her own, or with musician Ion Pierce, without losing that vital sense of physical negotiation, the raison d’être of contact, and without becoming lost in the look.

It’s a big ask of any one artist to delve into totally unknown material, as Tony Osborne may have tried to do in the velvet ca. The results, for an audience expecting refinement at least, could be construed as adventurous, if undeveloped and fairly yukky as the dancer dredged up his psychic child to play with.

A duet which did not lack refinement was Duet from Trio choreographed by Ros Warby with Helen Mountfort (cellist). Warby’s as sensitive as a delicately boned, two-footed creature can be, her movement almost disappearing in an ecstasy of sentience. In this vein too was Alice Cummins’ Lullaby, where simple, sometimes foetal movements seemed cradled in an adult text. The sound of her words soothed a difficult transition from the familiar to the unknown, like rocking soothes a baby. Six Variations on a Lie didn’t work as well in this cavernous space as it did in its more intimate home venue. There, performers formed a sparse and elegant quartet, an ensemble of soloists (dancer Rosalind Crisp, singer Nikki Heywood, sound artist Ion Pierce, and visual artist James McAllister). In The Performance Space, without the focus and cohesive physical relationships that confinement produced, the four seemed to wander alone.

Jon Burtt and Alan Schacher are both comedians, perhaps of different sorts. In Cars, TVs and Telephones, Burtt was a gangly, fashionably nerdish but charming kind of guy, whose understated-yet-sexy chat about household appliances to the accompaniment of funky music and articulate movement, made this work totally watchable. In trace elements/residual effects Alan Schacher, working in caricature, tried to make visible his gnarled and inexplicable life in a dusty Central Australian landscape. His movement captured parched, twisted branch, dry reptilian skin, and a lost, alien and absurd human, in what started and finished as funny and moving, but fell into a hole in the middle.

Helen Herbertson, in a strange excerpt from her full-length Descansos, was revealed in less sympathetic light (and shadow) as a lone, almost comic figure, without the dignity and stature which characterised the original work. Shelley Lasica (Square Dance Behaviour—Part 6/version 4) spent a lot of time taping padding under her costume. If her comments referred to ‘embodiment’, or shape and line and their interpretation by an audience, the ‘deformities’ seemed to make absolutely no difference at all. A stronger statement might have been to simply leave the stage after the padding had been strapped on. No dancing at all. Leyline Co’s comment on the facade of clothing and appearance was no more compelling, despite (or because of) the high-heeled déshabille of the two dancers as they pretended to clamber unbecomingly along parallel catwalks.

During the second weekend (March 28–29), the antistatic forums opened appropriately with Libby Dempster (“Ballet and its Other”) discussing the negative ‘otherness’ attached to non-balletic forms which, by default, are defined within the binary opposition which ballet sets up. Dance is either ballet or not ballet. Her paper was complemented by Russell Dumas’ explication of the way in which traditional European practice has defined all Australian practices in one way or another within this inescapable binary construct. With its persuasive employment of all the theatrical forms—stage design, lighting, music, set, costumes etc—it provides a kind of inscription to the mind and muscles. Unbeknownst to many practitioners, choreographic practice in Australia is situated as an art by way of its association with this inscription, the ballet trained body. So for Dumas it becomes irrelevant whether it’s deployed by MTV, musical comedy, Gideon Obarzanek, Meryl Tankard or Graeme Murphy, because what you’re seeing is a dancer trained in a regime, and the authority of this dancer’s presence is the outwardness of the display. Other traditions too, various manifestations of Expressionist angst, Butoh, ‘new’ dance practices, are paraded as innovative, but then put within this theatrical context, which simultaneously invigorates the relationship with classical tradition, while suppressing any consciousness of that relationship.

Russell Dumas outlined a different choreographic lineage: the early German Expressionist school of Laban, Wigman and Hanya Holm, having developed as an oppositional practice to European balletic tradition, escaped to 1930s America, and being full of the angst of that position, invigorated a different kind of cultural stance—one which is traceable to that country’s foundation, a rejection of these European values, and one which did not develop in opposition to the European balletic tradition. It defined itself in terms of independence, national pride, the rhetoric of which, noted Libby Dempster, Americans have felt able to work to their own ends in a variety of ways.

Dumas’ intention was not to deride Australian choreographers—despite his comment that “this is indeed the land of the dance Demidenkos”—or to persuade us to emulate the American model. Rather, he suggested that by being able to cite our cultural references, understand our historical precepts, and recognise our relationship within that tradition, we might infuse life and real innovation into an otherwise derivative national choreographic enterprise.

Dance People Dance, National Library of Australia, curator Dr. Michelle Potter; National Dance Critics Forum: Dance: What Next? Who Says So? April 26; antistatic, The Performance Space, Sydney March 21–April 4

Video Positive 97: Escaping Gravity (VP97), billed as the UK’s biggest ever festival of video and electronic art, spanned two cities (Liverpool and Manchester) and 12 venues. With approximately two hundred artists included in the various exhibitions, installations, film and video programs, festival audiences needed serious doses of caffeine as well as dedication to experience all that was on offer. The festival also included three conferences: LEAF 97 (exploring art, society and technology from an east-European perspective) Cosmopolis: Excavating Invisible Cities (investigating the transition from the post-industrial to the digital city) and Escaping Gravity: The Student Conference.

As well as presenting work at standard festival venues such as galleries and theatrettes, VP97 also placed work in less traditional venues including Cream at Nation, a popular nightclub venue in Liverpool, cafes, and the Museum of Science and Technology in Manchester. The Liverpool cathedral’s oratory was the site for Bill Viola’s video installation The Messenger, a mesmerising work showing a submerged, almost lifeless, human figure slowing rising to the surface and gasping air before again descending to repeat the sequence over and over again. Viola’s work was an eerie experience for viewers who became aware, as their eyes got used to the dark interior, that they were standing amongst lifeless stone statues. The VideoWall at Wade Smith, a sports store in Liverpool, was another imaginative but somewhat problematic foray out of the art institutions into the ‘real’ world. Audiences trying to view George Barber’s Video High Volume 2 were just as likely to be greeted with a half hour Nike ad which was alternated with Barber’s work.

There was a strong Australian presence at VP97 in the form of the aliens.au program curated by Linda Wallace and financially supported by the Australian Film Commission. Jon McCormack’s startling and poetic ‘artificial life’ progeny were exhibited in his Turbulence installation in the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.

In Lyndal Jones’ From the Darwin Translations: Spitfire 1.2.3. audience members moved through a room full of monitors displaying images of poppy fields with an accompanying soundtrack of birdsong into a darkened room dominated by a large screen showing footage of a pilot’s eye view from the cockpit of a Spitfire fighter plane. An intimate atmosphere was created by headphones which positioned the individual audience members in the cockpit’s aural interior (engine and propeller noises), as disembodied women’s voices told stories of their sexual fantasies about the archetypal warrior pilot.

Gordon Bennett’s Performance with Object for the Expiation of Guilt (Violence and Grief remix) was presented via video with artefacts from the performance (black whipping box and stock whip) adding a disturbing physical presence. Exploring the complexities of black/white racism and the construction of the Other, his was one of the most overtly political works in the festival.

Also included in the aliens.au program were two video programs and five CD-ROMs: Martine Corompt’s The Cute Machine, Josephine Starrs’ and Leon Cmielewski’s User Unfriendly Interface, Brad Miller’s Planet Of Noise, Lloyd Sharp’s Invert and Patricia Piccinini’s Genetic Manipulation Simulator. These works were presented as part of a ‘CD-ROM Forest’ in the Museum for Science and Technology; inexplicably, the sound was turned down very low on these works creating a somewhat barren experience as audiences wandered between the discrete computer terminals.

Other highlights of the festival were Jaap de Jonge’s (Netherlands) Crystal Ball, a magical kaleidoscope eye mounted into the wall of the Cornerhouse Gallery in Manchester. Viewers responding to the message touch me were rewarded with fragmentary images of TV and cable broadcasts scanned from the mediascape. In Liverpool at the Open Eye gallery, Thecla Schiphorst’s (Canada) Bodymaps: Artefacts of Touch incorporated sensors under a white velvet surface. A near life-sized figure projected onto the surface twisted, turned and moved in response to audience members touching and stroking the velvet. Jane Prophet’s (England) high-tech fibreglass cyborg Sarcophagus was animated by the audience passing their hands over different ‘body’ zones—head, heart and stomach—which displayed images representing biological and informational systems.

The success of the exhibition installations was due in no small part to the impressive array of equipment the organisers of the festival, FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology), based in Liverpool, were able to secure for the artists. A pool of equipment from MITES (Moving Image Touring & Exhibition Service)—including 25 video projectors as well as computers and laser disc players—made up approximately half of the equipment used, with the remainder secured through various sponsorship deals.

ISEA98 (themed ‘revolution’) is set to build on the VP97 collaboration between Liverpool and Manchester and is being organised by FACT in conjunction with Liverpool University and Manchester Metropolitan University, and with the support of local councils which are demonstrating a high level of commitment to the cultural and economic opportunities presented by new digital technologies.

More information on the festival and the artists can be found online at: http://www.fact.co.uk/VP97.html [expired]

There are times when what we see in performance or visual art speaks more about us as witnesses than it does about the artist. So it seemed for me with Ricochet, the latest work presented by Perth-based independent contemporary dance company Physical Architecture is Dancing at Canberra’s Choreographic Centre. The bureaucratic game is the subject here, explored and teased out in all its nightmarish incarnations.

There is a worshipping of false gods to open the work, as six power-suited women move through the space, each carrying a different plastic icon on a platter—toy car, Barbie’s couch and taut Ken doll. A confession-of-sorts to the plastic demi-gods gets the piece going, and the momentum is maintained.
Running towards us, stomping, marching, sometimes bouncing, slapping the floor, vertical lines in the space, backwards and forwards. Voices hang in the air, almost tangible, but more often creating a layering of sound with Lee Bradshaw’s original sound composition. There’s mention of ‘quality assurance’ and a meeting about ‘how to cope with change’. The text sits remarkably well in all this, set against the pace of the movement in one section and mirroring it in the next.

Choreographer/Artistic Director Tamara Kerr has also drawn on mask work—a result of the developmental creative process that a residency at the Choreographic Centre affords—and it is effective. Twisted, exaggerated expressions with lips absurdly distorted. Lunging towards us, declaring, “make my day” and “kiss my arse”, the women play up their roles oh so deliciously.
Ricochet is noisy, manic and energetic. It is also a tongue-in-cheek examination of the juggling game of women’s goals and desires in the corporate world.

Ricochet, Physical Architecture is Dancing, The Choreographic Centre, Canberra, April 19

What I wanted, more than anything, for this piece of work was a clearer commitment to abstraction in its own terms. All of the elements of the work—the dancers, the choreography, the engagement of music to movement, us sitting there in an implausible performance space, were diminished for me through the application of narrative. I wanted to honour these parts of the sum, to follow the lines offered up through the dancing bodies, through the very idea of that hotel dining room being the space to have generated the work. I have been in enough old buildings made into museum sites to know about the layers of story, traces left behind. I wanted to be allowed to do some of that work of interpretation myself without the imprint of storytelling.

Aside from that interpretive space I yearned for, the work with all of its leaning, its support and withholding, of passion and its repercussions, was pretty satisfying. To start with, the dancers were fine and spirited, making dramatic the otherwise prosaic space. Paul O’Sullivan, Setefano Tele, Jane Diamond, Shelley Mardon. In solo and in often fiery relationships, the register of passionate gestures and movement was always engaging, as long as it wasn’t trying to illustrate words (ban the words!). There was some deeply sexy choreography here, bodies slamming around in quite a charge. An encounter between the two men was a particularly thrilling, physical delight.

I don’t want to deny dancers their voices, but the eloquence of their movement surpassed all story lines offered here. Fieldworks continues to attract fine performers, and the collaborative approach of making work is also to be admired. The inclusion of blues musician Ivan Zar to provide what sounded like an improvised guitar and harmonica track was another delight.

I Lean on You, You Lean on Me, directed by Jim Hughes, Fieldworks Performance Group, Old Peninsula Hotel, Maylands, Perth. April 1997

There is a lot to be said for grunge in the digital realm: the seamless perfection of much digital imagery and the regimented order of the corporate web site are very familiar and very…banal. These days when everything is so over-designed and carries with it a tasteful Photoshop blur filter, it’s refreshing to stumble across some real grunge for a change, which reconfirms that the real world is full of crap and grime just like you always thought it was. It’s often when the dirt gets in the system that things get really interesting after all.

www.jodi.org is perfect web grunge, if there ever can be such a thing. There is something about this site which makes you want to go back again and again, something engagingly low tech, simple and funky about their catalogue of web works—100cc, Goodtimes and their latest %20 (http://www.adaweb.com/context/jodi/index.html). There is no sign of the generic hand of Photoshop here, or names like ‘virtual gallery’ or ‘cyberart’, just a dizzying array of in-your-face, free-formed, computer game bitmaps and data corruption that takes control of your computer. www.jodi.org manages to capture something inherent about the web medium to the extent that the works are wonderfully self-referential: computer viruses, scrambled error messages, corrupted data and chunks of computer code make up the overriding aesthetic here. However, it’s the way in which the works have the capacity to take control of your browser the first time you visit it and infect your monitor with what you swear is a computer crash, or some serious memory fragmentation, which is the crucial element in the work. Unlike so much web art, www.jodi.org understands the notion of ‘noise’ on the web, putting back what is normally left out or relegated to the trashcan.

www.jodi.org also manages to take things way beyond the notion of ‘browsing’, a metaphor with problematic connotations at the best of times. You don’t so much browse these works; you are infiltrated by them, taken over by them and consumed. Here, there are some similarities with the acclaimed work of etoy (www.etoy.com—Sigue Sigue Sputnik meets Mondo 2000) but, ultimately, www.jodi.org is more inventive and demystifying of the medium, and manages to explode so many of the cliches associated with producing work for the web, in particular the notion of reinvesting the control to the interactive ‘user’. Sure, you’re free to explore www.jodi.org through its maze of imagemap viruses and data refuse, which is an experience in itself, but essentially you get the feeling that there is some other force at work, directing your every move and monitoring your movements. The user here is just one in a long line of guinea pigs under some weird surveillance. This is territory which many interactives rarely venture into—territory where the user is not ‘in control’, but ‘out of control’ of the work.

The scrambled error messages moving across your monitor recall much of what the web is really about: those spaces in between web sites, the files not loading correctly, the error messages, files not found and ‘error 404s’ which constitute so much of the experience of using this medium. Here, Netscape frames the work as a self-reflexive cultural interface, and, apart from the occasional hypertext link and imagemap, the notion of interface design is done away with, as something which simply gets in the way of the work. Interface is superficial window dressing, surface detail obscuring what lies below. In a very real way, www.jodi.org is the underside of the glossy veneer of the web, the underground trash and grunge, discarded and left to fester and to hopefully mutate into something even more compelling.

When Tim Berners Lee, in the early days of the medium, was thinking of what the web could possibly become www.jodi.org was probably the furthest thing from his mind; and in many ways www.jodi.org is about as far away as you can get from the bevelled-edged buttons of corporate web hell, or yet another banal ‘virtual gallery’. For that alone it should demand your attention as one of the most interesting web art works to ever come down the pipe.

One of the more interesting aspects of the web is the phenomenon of the useless web page. Sites like the Rotting Food Home Page, or The Virtual Tour of the Gas Station Toilet compel the question: Why? Why on earth did someone even produce such a web page? For me these are some of the highlights of the web, the points where the web crosses over into a kind of reality television and touches the lives of real people. The web is the perfect medium for wacked out, deluded weirdos to actually say something to the world, no matter how inane or stupid they might appear to the rest of us. While it’s easy to dismiss such pages as just ugly examples of HTML grunge, the better ones are complex, fucked-up messes of desires and opinions—perfect web crud.

If you buy into the hype which invokes this medium as the great democratising, utopian delivery system, the useless web page is probably a far more accurate realisation of such hyperbole than, say, www.sony.com. And as the experience of browsing the web increasingly becomes about as compelling as flipping through the yellow pages, these useless web pages (http://www.go2net.com/internet/useless – expired) and sites like The World Wide Web Hall of Shame (comprising web ‘abominations’) manage to break down the medium, demystify it, in ways which even more experimental, creative web projects fail to. It’s these pages that remind one that this is a web constructed by people, not corporate search engines, or infobots—give me the losers, freaks and weirdos any day. The rest of web culture is busy applying pre-existing technical models and paradigms from the world of graphic design, desktop publishing, 3D and CD-ROM based multimedia to the web, hoping that they will reveal the ‘truth’ of the medium and take it to the promised land. I, for one, think that in some ways at least the useless web page has already found the true web, encapsulated in those raw, weird glimpses of the world at the other end of the modem.

You are in an intimate theatre of displacement, a contemplative, stylishly fashioned space yielding to alarms, clocks that lie and multiply, a phone call, an ice-flooded mouse-pad, a chorus of voices recollecting losses of memory and tongue, an elderly voice reliving the shock of endangered hearing in 1944. You are the performer, Kafka mode, silently acting out a scenario of someone else’s inventing. But there are no visible human agents. You are being programmed…to be interrupted. The sound cuts out, mid-story, the light turns itself off, a sound erupts from the other side of the room, the phone rings. You answer it; is it listening, or indifferent? What time is it telling? But you have picked it up. You’re curious. You’re looking to pick up, weave, complete little stories, half-pleasures, beautiful voices. As you linger and the more you linger, the less automaton you are and discover that you can play the voices and slices of music, repeating and overlapping them with your magic mouse. Darkness. A crash beckons. Someone beats you there. A theatre of impatience, envy and competition rudely intrudes. Are you missing something significant? You would ‘mouse’ better than that. And then they’re bored and gone and you’re trying to pick up where you were, wanting back into the reverie, back into the little jolts that force connections, “red as blood/yellow as fat”, your mouse-pad a painting with its own moves, glass breaking beautifully over you, and too real…but it’s only sound. The light draws you to sit at an elegant wedge of a desk, between designer lamps and speakers. You contemplate a tale of torture, irritated by pathos overscored by a set of strings, but you sit like and you are lit like someone being interrogated. A voice crackles and it’s 1944 again, a landstorm south of Darwin, lightning, eardrums. You could keep subjecting yourself to this dark pleasure, never sure if you’ve heard the whole story, played every delicious, anxious word, because you know very well with the many permutations offered by interactivity, someone will say, did you see, hear, generate that bit? It’s nice to experience an interactive work with sound at it’s shifting centre, with inventive mousing, with physical requirements for the performer-user beyond the mouse, and a fine sense of theatre and of collaboration: Richard Vella (music), Maria Miranda (painting and screen design), Greg White (programming), David Bartolo (interface design), Neil Simpson (the room), the eerily present voices of Evdokia Katahanis, Gosia Dombrolska and others, and the guiding hand and ear of artistic director Norrie Neumark. Artspace, April 17–May 3.

LOUD, Australia’s first national media festival of youth culture and the arts, was launched in April by Senator Alston, federal Minister for Communications and the Arts, and Michael Lynch, General Manager of the Australia Council. Scheduled throughout January 1998, the festival will encourage youth (12–25 years) creativity in print and electronic media (television, radio and online) to produce documentaries, short film, soundscapes, vox pops, photography and written articles.

In the television arena, young people will have the opportunity to produce, write, direct and film a range of subjects, ranging from short pieces which focus on themes of identity and place, to involvement in documentaries which voice the perspectives of youth. Networks which have confirmed their participation include ABC, SBS, Network 10, the Comedy Channel, V and Optus Vision’s Ovation and Local Vision. The programming includes LOUD dox, a showcase for young documentary filmmakers. Our Place is a national video project involving filmmakers from all over the country producing short documentary self-portraits that reflect both their own viewpoints and youth diversity. The works will be produced for TV broadcast with seeding funding and resources which filmmakers will be able to access locally.

LOUD bits, a national competition revolving around the interpretation of LOUD, invites submissions of funky, funny and in-your-face experimental or animated pieces of between three seconds to three minutes duration. Airtime will be secured for the LOUD short film festival.

LOUD online will bring together established and aspiring net heads to create a collaborative web site with the support of a range of new media companies and ABC multimedia. Chat rooms will enable young people from around Australia to ‘meet’ and share interests.

A multimedia magazine featuring moving images, music, sounds, stories, animation and design will evolve continuously and an online exhibition will showcase the best emerging digital artists, while the national home page competition will thrust young backyard web designers and artists into the public eye. RT

LOUD, Media Festival of Youth Culture and the Arts, January 1998.
For more details about submitting project proposals, etc, visit the LOUD website at http://www.LOUD.org.au [expired]

Adelaide based Simone Clifford’s current program of work, Fast Editing, is part of the Festival Centre Trust’s Made to Move season. Formerly a dancer with ADT (Australian Dance Theatre) during Jonathan Taylor’s artistic directorship in the early 80s, Clifford went on to work in Jiri Kylian’s Nederlands Dans Theater for five years.

Fast Editing consists of two works: a new piece titled Reluctant Relics, created in October and November of last year and Chasing Chambers, a work begun in London in 1994 and completed with ArtsSA development grants in 1996.

Working with a group of seven dancers (six females and one male), a number of whom have come through the Centre for The Performing Arts dance program in Adelaide, Clifford has brought together what promises to be a third force in dance in a city already graced with the talents of Meryl Tankard’s ADT and Leigh Warren’s company. Clifford’s work is not only distinctive but sufficiently familiar and accessible to engage young audiences—like the crowd who responded enthusiastically to the Friday night performance I attended.

The opening piece, Reluctant Relics, begins in complete silence with a solo dancer standing on one leg while raising the other to waist level, clasping it in her hands and swivelling around. Her arms are raised and then lowered along with her whole torso. It requires an acrobatic poise the dancer appears not quite to possess and it lends the movement an oddly poignant vulnerability. In another movement the dancer drops to the floor, raising her legs gauchely before turning on to her stomach and raising her rump to inch slowly across the stage. It is, again, unguarded, a stolen moment, erotic but innocent. We are intrigued but the gaze is not compromised. We have caught a human glimpse, literally an unthinking moment.

The silence continues as the soloist joins the male dancer for a classically inflected duet. Then, like emergent chrysalises, the remaining company moves slowly across the stage on their backs, propelled by raising their knees and sliding in unison like strange solipsistic figures in those George Tooker paintings where human figures yearn to connect but are separated by cells and compartments like so many pale bees in a hive.

The work strengthens as Catherine Oates’ percussion, performed live on the stage, begins to insinuate itself into our hearing. The tentative scrapes and cymbal strokes give way to a steadier beat and with it the performers develop a fluency and harmony of movement—like stepping from a distracted inner world into a socially ordered one. Oates’ beat grows more insistent and segues into a mesmeric barrage from New York ensemble Bang on a Can.

Lit strongly from the wings in Geoff Cobham’s design, the dancers are momentarily soaked in a stripe of white light over their faces and shoulders only to have the signature reds and blues resume. The rite ends abruptly and soloist Alissa Bruce returns to restate several of the opening figures to the haunting sounds of Evan Ziporyn’s work for bass clarinet, Tsmindao Ghmerto.

Simone Clifford describes Reluctant Relics as a pivotal work in her development. She abstracts it by suggesting it is “a work about perspective and perceptions of mind”. Her comments are cryptic, but she elaborates: “I kept saying to the dancers, ‘You don’t need to try to perform the work to the audience, but rather concentrate on your own commitment and meaning and the audience will then observe you.’”

Chasing Chambers is a more external work but also a pleasing counterpoint, an exhilarating second course in Fast Editing’s appealingly succinct 54-minute running time. Built around Steve Reich’s chamber work for strings and voice, Different Trains, Chasing Chambers is lit with a row of white spots set low along the back of the stage, the performers dressed in black pedal pants and black anklets. Moving in staccato fashion they could be a eurythmics class in 30s Berlin, the white light licking over them as triumphs of physical culture. But as Cobham’s light mellows, so the movement becomes more playful and humanised. Just as suddenly the vigorous strings in Reich’s infectious composition create a flurry of Chattanooga choo-chooing, energised by a row of vertical spots sidestepping over the dancers as they take their seats near Track 29.

Simone Clifford’s work is an interesting mix of classical fluency and idiosyncratic personal expression. The contrast between the self-conscious, almost ungainly Reluctant Relics and the exuberant facility of Chasing Chambers is refreshing. The choice of accompaniment is also interesting. Reich’s work may be, for some, not just last year’s model but a rather unfashionable exhumation. Perhaps it is the refreshing youthfulness of both the dancers and their audience that reminds me that everything is always new to those who are coming along next. Clifford’s work has integrity and wit and it is building valuable bridges. I hope their plans for a regional tour come to pass.

Fast Editing, choreographed by Simone Clifford, The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, May 1–10

Annette Shun Wah, Chair of the Board of the One Extra Company, believes the secret of longevity is adaptability. As she stepped into the spotlight at the very showbiz launch of the company’s new season at The Seymour Centre, she announced that the Board had taken a long hard look at the way the company serves the dance community and meets audience expectations and consequently adapted the position of Artistic Director to Executive Producer. This decision follows a trend in senior appointments in performing arts companies (see Eleanor Brickhill’s article in RealTime 17). This Board’s brief to their EP is “to guide the artistic vision of the company in a program which offers possibilities to a range of independent artists—choreographers and dancers as well as designers, musicians and visual artists, brings in new audiences and presents attractive opportunities for new funding partners”. A very full dance card indeed even for the energetic and confident EP, Janet Robertson.

The institutional architecture of the York Theatre was transformed into an unusually moody and intimate setting for the launch in which the audience of dancers, arts bureaucrats and well-wishers shuffled conversationally to light lounge music. Janet Robertson spoke from the seats accompanied by backing vocals and video clips. She quoted from Culture, Difference and the Arts—“Innovation is a dialogue between tradition and possibility”—before elaborating on her plans to build on the twenty-one year history of the One Extra Company founded by Kai Tai Chan with a season of works by some of our brightest choreographic sparks.

Reflecting her own background, Robertson sees the featured work as being highly theatrical and speaks passionately of One Extra’s firm commitment to dance that questions and reflects Australian culture. The season begins in June–July at The Performance Space with Sue Healey choreographing a new version of her work Suite Slip’d which premiered in Canberra when she was artistic director of Vis A Vis. One Extra’s invitation offers her a rare opportunity to re-think and extend a work. In October–November the company presents Two, a double bill of two new works from Lucy Guerin and Garry Stewart to be performed in the York Theatre at the Seymour Centre.

In Suite Slip’d, Sue Healey begins with the movement patterns and demeanours of 17th century French courtly dance—”But don’t expect a period piece”, says Janet. The dance suites are the impetus for more contemporary explorations. Rather than using a conventional theatrical framework, Sue Healey is creating a work in which performance structure and character spring from the movement itself. The dancers, Philip Adams, Michelle Heaven, Nicole Johnson, Luke Smiles and Sue Healey move from tightly interwoven ensembles into spacious solos and duets. Music by Darren Verhagen is as slippery as the movement, veering from Handel to noise. Costumes and design are by recent NIDA graduates Michelle Fallon and Damien Cooper. One Extra has plans for a tour of Suite Slip’d to regional New South Wales in 1998. Sue Healey will also take the work to Auckland and in February to the Dance Space Project in New York.

One Extra’s main program is supplemented by an Affiliate Artists program which invites artists to use the resources of the company as a place to explore work with other artists and as a venue to show new work in development. The impressive list of affiliates includes choreographers Kate Champion, Rosetta Cook, Bernadette Walong and Garry Stewart, lighting designer Damien Cooper, dancers Lisa Ffrench and Felice Burns and stage designer Eamon D’Arcy. As well as strengthening links with the Centre for Performance Studies at Sydney University and the University of Western Sydney’s Dance Department, the company will institute a series of schools-based workshops. Importantly, One Extra is also in the final stages of securing a home base as company-in-residence at The Seymour Centre.

Formalities over, Annette Shun Wah and Janet Robertson sashayed onto the dancefloor to begin their dialogue of possibilities. They had no shortage of partners in an air of genuine excitement and celebration. Janet Robertson has come up with a program that is ambitious for artists, integrating new collaborations and connections with institutions, with clear goals for developing audiences and with a theatricality that builds on the tradition of Kai Tai Chan’s One Extra.

Photographer Sandy Edwards was invited to Indonesia by Russell Dumas, an Australian choreographer who has a long association with the distinguished Balinese choreographer and musician, I Made Djimat, a master in the classical Batuan style of Balinese dance. In the village of Batuan, the most treasured classical dance—Gambuh, Topeng, Calonarang and Wayang Wong—still flourishes and is an integral part of temple ceremonies. In preparation for a forthcoming film on I Made Djimat, Sandy photographed the master preparing a young pupil for his first public performance in which he would play an old man.

On another night, under a full moon, she photographed the Rejang, a dance performed by women each night over three to four months of the year to ward off illnesses associated with the rainy season. In the public square at Batuan village, the women dance in lines, moving slowly in elegant, tai-chi like movement towards the male gamelan orchestra. Children move through the space, life goes on around the dancing.

Some of the photographs were exhibited during The Performance Space’s antistatic festival in the Dance Exchange Sydney studio. Some made small dances on the wall. Others were displayed on drying racks, some spilled onto the floor, awaiting assemblage, in progress. In another part of the room, videos showed the dances in more complete form. The audience entered the white studio through an ornate Balinese stage curtain.

Even as the Gonski Report hangs poised like Poe’s pendulum above the guts of Australia’s Screen Resource Organisations, a new era dawns. One by one, with minimum fuss, they are opening their new multimedia studios for business.

The studios are modest. The intention is, after all, not the display of technological toys but a continuation of the SRO’s common philosophy: providing the essential basics needed for the development and expression of ideas. At its best, this entails an exploration of the nature of the medium itself and no moment is as exciting as discovering the possibilities of a medium still in its infancy. The studios also testify a crucial step forward in resourcing this developing field, complementing the work of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) on one hand and providing a recruitment base for the multimedia industry through connections with the Co-operative Multimedia Centres on the other. So what can we expect to see from these new resources?

Perhaps it is too early to say. The Media Resource Centre has established an artist in residency program in tandem with its acquisition of the studio. Noted VNS Matrix collaborator and usually rudely masked Gashgirl, Francesca da Rimini, is at this moment building a new website. This places expertise, with the emphasis on content and process, on the premises even as the first studio bookings are being taken. Using relatively low-end equipment, I would expect the final product to exemplify da Rimini’s typically simple but powerful economy of expression, the consequence of evocative concepts. When asked what she was working on, she replied: women in the Zapatista movement in Central America, Japanese dolls and ghost stories. Titled Dollspace, it will soon haunt various internet sites (System-X, The Thing NYC and LambdaMOO). Well, the beauty of this medium is its ability to marry apparently disparate topics in unexpected spaces.

It is perhaps an adage to say that postmodernism is the result of our inability to say anything new. This appears to me to be patently false: the ability to speak in a new way is inevitably to see things anew, to change the essential relationship between language and the world. Others, such as the film documentarist Chris Marker, have studied the effect of 20th century technology on the process of political resistance and popular memory highlighting the role of technology to act as a prosthesis to memory, and its potential to serve as an antidote to the horrors of an historical amnesia that results from our very corporeality. Ghost stories could be an earlier version of this process, the ineradicable ashes of an otherwise forgotten trauma lingering as a signpost to its erased existence. And dolls? In Sunless Marker films a Japanese ceremony where broken dolls are collected and burnt annually, the avatars for our broken selves which must make way for the new. Marker is, however, an exception to the usual rules of production. The closer we move to this cyborg world of digitally enhanced memory, the more our films and television fantasies emphasise the machine in flight, glossing over the consequences of death or political struggle. Taylor Harrison’s brief article “Weaving the Cyborg Shroud” (in Harrison et. al, Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek, Westview Press, 1996) theorises exactly this deferral of mourning and its affects in the space opera Star Trek: the Next Generation, where the very issues raised by the medium itself must be glossed over and transformed into the entertainment of action.

All this does is confirm my enthusiasm for projects like Francesca da Rimini’s, which offers some kind of beginning in the emotional enterprise, emphasises the need for access to technology based outside mainstream commercial interests, and sets out to explore unchartered possibilities of digital texts, new ways of speaking (and forgetting). This is also the charter of the Electronic Writing Ensemble, also based in Adelaide. As an ongoing affair, the ensemble has at its fingertips virtual connections with theorists and writers around the world, yet is never as delighted as when it uses what is to be found in its own backyard. Explore such concepts as the non-linear possibilities of hyperlinks, moving written texts back and forth in an apparent defiance of linear syntax, playing precisely with the effects of memory and temporality, on line at www.va.com.au/parallel/. The Ensemble (Linda Marie Walker, Jyanni Steffensen) will be collaborating on a project with ANAT later in the year, no doubt prompting a further report, at least in old-fashioned ink. In the meantime, these modest experiments forge their contributions to the future of digital communication and our commitment to the fusion of flesh with technology, as writing and as performance.

PICA’s contribution to the opening of the Festival of Perth resolved that three days of art(iculations) was the way to go, and electronic media, including the techné exhibition, had pole position in the race for early attention. In Sydney’s south-west, the Casula Powerhouse hosted Cyber Cultures an event which may well become an annual national survey of new digital art.

The variations on the term ‘work in progress’ is on view—processes of experiment, lines of inquiry, informal research into multimedia. And the tools themselves are subject to continuous redefinition as a set of technical and therefore aesthetic options. These parallel processes of evolution become content, the very notion of ‘completion’ is in question, thereby creating problems for visitors seeking ‘product’.

techné

This exhibition of new media art was co-curated by Michelle Glaser, and Rick Mason from IMAGO Multimedia Centre. techné combined the full gamut of current activity into four spaces at PICA, adjacent to the touring exhibition Burning the Interface: International Artists’ CD-ROM, thereby providing a perspective across both shows and the astonishingly short period of five years. Two installations, a video lounge, and some 30 multimedia pieces—most produced since mid-1995 by international and mainly Australian artists—were available on six computers for interaction via mouse and keyboard. Of these, about one third were works from recent Australian graduates which, whilst demonstrating competency, did not always develop ideas or the potential of the medium beyond a well established mean. Graduating students are demonstrating the conflicts inherent in exploring the less-than-new media by not only pursuing the necessary research and development objectives, but also by trying to attract the attention of potential investors.

Other works displayed the broader and less literal investigations that need to occur at an advanced level in order to expand the use of multimedia. Shock in the Ear, devised by a small team led by Norie Neumark, places sound into the frame for careful scrutiny as the under-exploited medium amongst the multimedia. Fragments of sounds and sentences are triggered by mouse rollovers, movement across painted images and graphics—the cursor might contain a hand-written word: “how”, “where”, “what”, the word repeated and developed in a cadenza of narrative and related and unrelated sound effects and music. Neumark’s long association with sound works accounts for a maturity in the architecture of her poetry and the way it becomes performance, open to variation and nuance according to the response of the interacting subject. Similarly, the visuals perform in various juxtaposition, though not as lyrically. Instead of the concrete, the visual track relies on the expressionist, using typography and the obfuscation of reprographics. Navigation is complex, causing loops to repeat and leave you wondering whether you had influenced a flow or simply observed a pre-determined change.

Martine Corompt’s The Cute Machine (also exhibited at Cyber Cultures), takes the spherical render into the kind of artificial life areas invented and perpetuated by Disney aesthetics, re-defined and re-distributed by Japanese comics’ obsession with the Euro ‘round-eye’ infant-being, and identified by zoologists as neoteny. (Is that teeny as in tiny?) Well, infantile traits it seems under the Neotenic influence can remain with otherwise fully matured adults and become an aesthetic which Corompt demonstrates as a mutational form. The lurid pinks and sickly greens on the screen and the vinyl ‘skin’ of the installation are suitably unsettling, reminding us of the proximity of bovine to beef, cherubs to nappies, round eyes to famine appeals…cute to lie.

Linear electronic forms in the video lounge did not all have those smoothly rendered surfaces. Sam Landels’ Hydra revisited systems of representation based on persistence of vision, ingeniously adapting video technology to the formal task in hand. Strobing and fragmentation foregrounded the image as object and, with a dynamic relation to the frame, process.

techné demonstrated that artists have reached a critical mass in relation to interactive multimedia, particularly by visiting the web sites that had been bookmarked. The informative catalogue reveals that many of the new and younger artists have been trained straight into multimedia, without bringing the baggage of the Jurassic—this has clearly weakened some whilst liberating others, depending on their points of reference and I suppose, your point of view.

Cyber Cultures

Cyber Cultures was curated by Kathy Cleland and David Cranswick through Street Level, which supports and advocates contemporary art initiatives for artists and audiences in Western Sydney.

The expansive physical framework of the Powerhouse provided draped nooks and crannies for video projector-based interactive installations, and a screenings area. Two seminar days and evenings of performance complemented this rich survey of new media work.

Thematically, the ten interactive installations were concerned “…with issues of human identity and its boundaries…”, in the evolutionary sense. They were also linked financially: nine of the works represented the outcomes of the Australian Film Commission’s investment in artists’ projects; the Australia Council assisted with two.

Troy Innocent’s Untitled, as the title suggests, is in development but advances loudly into the AL (artificial life) area. Innocent moves away from an obsession with shiny and globular entities towards the generation of (loud and shiny) sounds created by the visitor drop-and-dragging globular creatures into a circle projected onto a camera obscura-like table-top. It has something of the feel of an ornamental pond where the fish breed simply to provide the unsettling sounds of industrial mayhem!

The User Unfriendly Interface from Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski assaults the sensibilities of gentle nerds with a lot of impertinence, puns and other slippery slopes designed to remind us in faux troglodyte style that the personal computer is a dubious thing. The customised casing looks ready to rip your eyes out.

Merlin Integrated Media’s interactive CD-ROM, Metabody, documents one of the most interesting collaborations to occur in Australia last year between Stelarc, Merlin and Mic Gruchy, which included an ‘electrifying’ live world wide internet performance at Artspace last April. This interactive is encyclopedic, ranging from Stelarc’s hook suspensions to the direct wiring of the audience. It is the snapshot of a career, but has built in the ability—via an internet connection—to not only update but also extend the means by which the audience may participate.

The long anticipated Bad Code from the VNS Matrix team made a sneak preview, treading “a fine line between artwork and commercial prototype, aiming to inject alternative narratives and characters into a ‘shoot-em-up’ dominated games market”. The All New Gen mob together with the DNA Sluts up against Big Daddy Mainframe (BDM) is the basic scenario that has been rehearsed some time now, and one has to ask in these days of internets and intranets, how has BDM survived as the villain? Whilst ‘the look’ is intriguing, the feel for the game is obscure and it currently remains true to its title.

Invert is somewhat enigmatic. Lloyd Sharp’s “organic artwork” is about organs…and other processes, and parts, and orifices…about various of our physical functions, vectored through the sensibilities of the artist’s own experience of challenged health. It is an interactive partially using the game metaphor but mainly approached using Sharp’s idea of the metaphor of “personality”—which could be another way of saying unpredictable. Hence the enigma. Whilst the piece is life affirmative and has amusing cursor devices that ambush one another on screen, its personality swings between the pedagogic statement and a visceral space of images.

This is quite unlike the clear spaces that are created in another internal journey, Isabelle Delmotte’s Epileptograph. Large high definition images and shattering sound provide internalised glimpses of the experience of epileptic seizures, from which Delmotte suffers. Sequences of these images are shown on small video screens. (The process of making this work has also enabled the artist to reclaim to consciousness parts of the experience which are otherwise entirely erased from her memory.) Finally, a word description of the five stages of a siezure from the artist’s point-of-view. As a totality, we comprehend, through the cognitive process, and at a safe distance.

Both exhibitions had major involvement from the Industry and Cultural Development Branch of the AFC, and a haggle of others. Audiences can now look forward to a period where, in the public spaces, work is prudently selected, where the time required for participation or even interaction with multimedia work is in relation to the kind of concentration that most people can sustain during a single visit. On-line participation, the promised connections permitting, will become like videos and television—subject to the vicissitudes of the audience in response to the matrixes of options. Whilst techné, gave us another glimpse of this future, Cyber Cultures not only celebrated the physically interactive exhibition spaces of Casula but enabled the socialisation of many of the exhibits, a step away from what one arts commentator has helplessly observed as the “diminished aesthetic experience of a video monitor…”

Cyber Cultures, presented by Street Level at the Casula Powerhouse, Casula, Sydney, March 9–April 6, 1997

Using his body as a template, Sydney-based new media artist John Tonkin has created a corpus of static faces and morphing bodies which the viewer/user is invited to adjust, tweak and—ultimately—pass judgment upon.

Tonkin developed an interest in pseudo-sciences relating specifically to the body after viewing an exhibition of physiognomic drawings and artefacts in 1992. He was particularly interested in how such theories could interplay with emergent morphing technologies.

Elective Physiognomies and Elastic Masculinities are the outcomes of Tonkin’s exploration into ideas relating to the face and body as sites of identity, in particular, identity which can be culturally mapped through the employment of ‘scientific’ modalities. Both works were recently shown at The Performance Space and at the Cyber Cultures exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse.

Elective Physiognomies comprises an interactive, authored in Hypercard, and a series of printouts of digitally manipulated faces and fictional DNA code. The interactive invites the user to prioritise a number of these faces (which use the artist’s face as starting point, or source code if you like) according to criteria including most-to-least trustworthy, most-to-least intelligent, most-to-least homosexual. The interactive then tabulates the user’s response against the combined average of all previous user responses to ascertain the consistency of response to each face.

For Tonkin, this statistical component, while interesting, is not as important as the creation of an interactive structure which, through the user’s navigation, gives rise to the ideas and themes of the piece. In this manner the task structure of Elective Physiognomies insists upon the disturbing outcome of codifying faciality to such levels of rigidity and generalisation.

Tonkin takes this notion further in his most recent work, Elastic Masculinities. Here, the artist uses his full body as a point of departure to question the perceived alignment of masculine attributes with particular body shapes. Similar to Elective Physiognomies, the piece comprises a series of printouts of fictional bodies alongside a Java-authored interactive. The user is invited to adjust the dimensions (height, chest, hips, etc) of a randomly generated body and is then asked to classify the constructed body according to sliding criteria which includes gentle/forceful, graceful/awkward, masculine/feminine.

Elastic Masculinities is currently at beta stage; future versions of the work are intended to provide the user with an image of the statistically average body (again using tabulations of previous user responses) for each chosen position along the sliding criteria. In doing so, Tonkin hopes to prompt the user to question the validity of systematisation in such diffuse areas as gender and subjectivity.

The next piece in Tonkin’s evolving body of work will investigate eugenics and genetic modelling as they relate to morphing technologies. Currently in development, the work stems from the artist’s response to a perception that biological metaphors and allied evolutionary navigational systems are on the increase.

For further reference, the 1996 Ars Electronica network symposium—Memesis: The Future of Evolution—is particularly useful: www.aec.at/meme/symp [expired].

I am confused about the space I am in. Several weeks ago this room was much smaller. I’ve never known the PICA performance space to extend so far (seemingly to infinity), but stretch away it does and its angle and the images projecting onto the division add to my confusion. In I Am Nijinsky Stefan Karlsson is Nijinsky, sometimes. I’m sure that this space was smaller when I watched ID339 move around The Living Room they created back in November.

Can this be the same space? On that occasion there were corrugated cardboard walls as obviously flimsy as the facades of so many human relationships. This dancing trio’s fragile relational world orbits around their (and our) omnipresent host, David Hobbs. He spins discs, plugs and unplugs lights, moves and removes furniture. I expect him to give us the Terry Jones grin at any moment, but no Pythonesque cliches here.

The angled wall in front of me is hinged and I am witnessing a new episode in Nijinsky’s life opening, with the space, to reveal an oblong (one that Vaslav’s obtuse creativity may not fit into)—all around is monochrome. He dances or Stefan Karlsson does. His partner is Margrete Helgeby. I’ve seen her dance before. It is her. But only Karlsson confirms his identity. Then subverts it. They dance in real space as some other dance overlays their presence. (How did they do that?) These are phantoms I’m seeing—a virtual Karlsson and Helgeby—spirits of themselves floating impossibly away from real time.

There was none of this virtuality with The Living Room. I knew where I was! Bill Handley’s foot-tapping, Paige Gordon’s obsession with the marking out of the floor, feet on the ground! I know this hop-scotch cum Olympic pool game, it’s familiar. When the mediocrity becomes too much, oppress or compete. Handley restrains Gordon. She thinks she is free he pulls her back again. Why? Hobbs organises some music, something from the modern jazz catalogue on a monaural gramophone just like my Dad had in the 60s. He needs to change the lights—he tugs on the double adaptor. This show is so low tech it’s nerve-racking. Paul Johnson starts a card game. I’m feeling the claustrophobia now, the cardboard walls have been erected to stand one third of the way into the space. I want to cut my way through them, get away from the interminable swish of the ceiling fans, the looks that pass between the performers and the conversations that go nowhere.

Now Nijinsky begins to collapse. His various mentors and ‘friends’ (Boris Radmilovich and Claire Jones) discuss his dilemma as Karlsson contextualises the historical Nijinsky within his own 1990s symbolism. What did this man mean to dancers? What does the Nijinsky canon represent? I’m feeling closed in again but this is the crowd around me causing my discomfort, tonight is a sell-out.

As I leave I wonder about the theatre of Sally Richardson moving toward dance and the dance of Paul Gazzola’s ID339 moving toward theatre. It’s an important shifting of ground. I suspect that the two genres cannot continue to be successful without amalgamation. The design conduits provided by the expertise of such people as Gary Chard and Graeme MacLeod may provide the route along which these journeys will travel.

I Am Nijinsky, written by Sally Richardson, produced by Deckchair Theatre and Sally Richardson, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, January 8-February 1, 1997.

“Direct images of matter. Vision names them, but the hand knows them. A dynamic joy touches them, kneads them, makes them lighter. One dreams these images of matter substantially, intimately, rejecting forms—perishable forms—and vain images, the becoming of surfaces. They have weight, they are a heart.”
Gaston Bachelard

In a cavernous iron warehouse at the back of the old Brunswick brickworks, behind the vertiginous chimneys of the kilns and the blackened skeletons of derelict machinery, an island of moist white sand floats in a sea of powdery grey brickdust and rubble. Prefiguring its future performance space in the city, the rehearsal space for To Run—Sand has been installed in the bowels of an abandoned industrial workplace—a site still palpably ghosted by its former function, and by those that worked and sweated and dreamed there. The only sounds now are the muffled wingbeats and cucurucus of pigeons far overhead. Until the digging starts.

Every session begins with digging. The island of sand, both setting and generative source for this dance-theatre performance, is on the move again. The impact of footfalls and bodies disperses the sand, it flows outwards, a slo-mo crystalline liquid. We rebuild two mounds, one as conical as a Hokusai Fuji, the other slightly flattened, volcanic. Our digging is punctuated with jokes about (im)possible careers with Vicroads. The remaining sand is raked, and the rehearsal begins.

Heraclitus suggested that one could never bathe in the same river twice; similarly, every time the performers return to the sand its reality shifts, literally and metaphorically. It possesses the pulsional mutability and discontinuity Gaston Bachelard called “intimate immensity”. At moments it suggests a pocket of coastal dune or beach, a lovers’ retreat, a children’s playground, or an island of enchantment and imprisonment, like Prospero’s; at others, it becomes battlefield, labour camp, post-industrial wasteland, mountain range, moonscape—or desert, that core postmodern metaphor for the nomadic and the dis/appearing. And it is the fluidity of the sand’s topographic referentiality that allows the performers (and those watching them) a remarkable associational freedom in narratives enacted and images inhabited.

Material is generated primarily through games, tasks, structured improvisations and free play; once Alison has set up an activity, she rarely intervenes. Images cluster around primordial transformations of status in the flux of inter-relations: playing, working, running, fighting, falling, burying, birthing. The three performers are developing quite different relationships with the sand, each one contradictory and polyvalent. And it is the materiality of these relationships that generates narratives, images and ‘characters’. Today Evelyn’s actions suggest elegant entrapment, a kind of perky buoyancy against all the odds, like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. Adrian is both ever playful and consumed by reverie, encumbered by the gravity of possibility; with the smile of Sisyphus, he moulds his desires and memories in the sand. Yumi is explosive, she leaps and digs with an energy that irradiates far beyond the outer edge of the sand—but her contact with it is consistently light, she touches and brushes with quiet patience and focus.

In many ways, the group’s recognition of the sand’s active role as trigger and co-performer celebrates Bachelard’s “material imagination”, which, “going beyond the attractions of the imagination of forms, thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materialises the imaginary”. In Bachelard’s phenomenological poetics of the elements, matter (“the unconscious of form”, the “mother-substance” of dreams) reverberates to become “the mirror of our energy”, producing images “incapable of repose”.

In rehearsal the sand becomes a register of the actions and emotions that it has elicited from the performers; it mirrors their energy. Intimate, substantial afterimages of what was are retained within what is, although these trace impressions of the contours and gravities of presences-now-absent are always temporary, fleeting. Like memories, like identities, the marks in the sand are continuously overwritten or partially erased. But in the materiality of the instant, for those that work and sweat and dream there, they have weight, they are a heart.

To Run—Sand by Alison Halit, performed by Adrian Nunes, Evelyn Switajewski and Yumi Umiumare at the Economiser Building, Spencer Street Power Station, Melbourne, April 8-20, April 22-27, April 30-May 4

We arrive at the performance on a busy street at night. Brian Lucas is sitting opposite us at a small table, writing. Cars obscure our vision. Candles, a table, earnest writing, lots of smoking. This is Brisbane’s industrial area. His presence nearly causes an accident. Milling about on the street opposite we are handed a program folded like an old letter. Inside are instructions and guides to letter writing from Routledge’s Complete Letter Writer for Ladies and Gentlemen. Looking across three lanes of traffic, Brian is still smoking and writing.

Intimate Letters entices and suggests. All the works are short—small windows into other people’s lives. Are we to be voyeurs of their intimacy? Letters are the starting point for this show, curated by Shaaron Boughen.

We are ushered up a narrow staircase and find ourselves in a small first floor warehouse. Incense hangs heavily. Murkiness cloaks the space. We are in someone else’s room. A shaft of light struggles through the pungent smell and settles on a crumpled letter that has been dropped on the floor. Electric shadows project on the wall in front of us what we have just witnessed live on the street below: Brian writing. The heavy Gorecki music adds to this overwhelming atmosphere. This show is a constant play with shadows and light, with reality and recollection.

Brian Lucas begins by forcing us into watching vulnerability, exposure. His enormous frame is surreal in such a small space. There is too much of him, but his nudity is neither vulnerable nor small. Crouching on a shelf, he unfolds himself to step onto the floor, chanting the words from a child’s game, “I wrote a letter…” He moves forward in the corridor of light, slowly singing, “…and then I must have dropped it”. Slowly moving toward the rectangle of light he stumbles upon the letter he dropped. The piece is clever and simple. The dancer consumes your attention whenever he is on stage. He mixes intensity and humour into the same piece and makes it work. He leaves the stage with a bittersweet joke.

John Utans’ piece begins with projected images of a young couple. The back of her neck, him laughing. Sleeping. The two of them lying together. We are forced to choose between the images and the shadows of dancers. The two performers slowly move from behind the screen in the middle of the stage. They are young, both wearing white underwear. The movement is tentative, slow. Shadows and reality. She is restrained. He is fluid. The duet progresses in tempo. The sinewy movement becomes familiar. Their inexperience is endearing. They show us the gestures of lovers. New lovers. Sitting together. Sleeping. The choreography reveals innocence and captures naivety. New emotions. I am shockingly reminded of the morning hours spent with a lover.

Scotia Monkevitch has created a work from a letter written to the unborn child of a friend. It is a personal issue: a ritual of sorts. It is a prayer for the safe journey of a child. The space is beautifully set behind a gauze screen, but as a performance work, none of the intention is clear. Slow movement and repetitive text. I give you back your word. A phrase endlessly repeated. This work is reliant on the merging of movement, text and design but results in none of these elements working well together. The detached music and repeated words alienate, clouding the original intention, making it difficult to enter the world of the performer.

In the corner of the room a cage is revealed. In Gail Hewton’s piece a woman performs simple gestural movements around its periphery. The cage is restricting and menacing. Is it her mind? Society? A relationship? Or all of them? She breaks out of the cage only to crawl back into it again. Defeated, she slowly unfolds a plastic barrier to surround the cage. Janacek’s music has clearly been imposed on this work, incongruous with the building of tension, detracting from the woman’s emotional journey. The final image is the strongest: the woman is naked, revealed, isolated and captured in the centre of the now opaque cage. A defeating but beautiful image.

Shaaron Boughen’s work retains obvious links to the original inspiration: letters written in 1928 to her stepmother from a boyfriend the family was unaware of. The work begins with a man and a woman sitting on separate piano stools in front of projected images. The images are of the same couple on a stool together. The couple in the film begin a duet of intimacy, trust, weight, beauty, punctuated by flashes of black. Moving carefully. The couple in the film have a private life. The couple in front of us do not move until the film ends. Their duet is dislocated, as if they have just missed each other. They are in the same space and yet are unable to interact. The couple do not touch throughout the live duet. This work is simple in construction but effective, and the film highlights the performers’ strengths. The boy leaves the room and the girl slowly walks down the external stairway. The piece ends with a projected image of the girl walking across the road below us to sit at the table where Brian Lucas was originally writing.

Moving away from conventional modern dance, these choreographers have made work that takes the audience on an emotional journey and it is refreshing to see dance that is looking to be more than vaudeville. Shaaron Boughen has curated a show that feels like one work with many journeys within it. She has made musical choices that mostly work and Matt Scot consistently created magical lighting. Without funding or the time to research and rehearse adequately, independent artists often have to show work that is two dimensional. This show had a fantastic sense of continuity, of unity, but more time to reveal another layer would add to some of the works presented.

Intimate Letters, Choreographers Brian Lucas, John Utans, Scotia Monkivitch, Gail Hewton, Shaaron Boughen. Curated by Shaaron Boughen. The Cherry Herring, March 12-16

Early aspirations of Company in Space for this venture included not only simultaneous interactive transmission to Sydney, Perth and Brisbane of The Pool is Dammed: Trial by Video—staged live this month in Banana Alley Vault 10, Flinders Street, Melbourne—but also the performers working from each of these scattered places. Using time variations between cities, there might have been a kind of piggy-backing of performers flying around the country, simultaneously creating a nationwide net of live activity and simulacra. Logistically a nightmare, of course, but if big ideas don’t always come off, the effort to realise them can produce brilliance.

The permutations of Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech shaping national consciousness have become the stuff performers dream of, rendering visible the issues of belief and truth and how they operate within the media’s shifting parameters. I anticipated something special, as I sat ready to watch the Sydney performance, waving briefly to Lucy Guerin as she put her lipstick on in Melbourne. The performance began there, for me, without any sense of a division of boundaries, because I had anticipated that somehow ‘interactive’ augured a different kind of involvement.

Two screens: one vertical and one across the floor which was strewn with sand. The sandpit attracted any child within crawling distance. A video camera on the ceiling squashed children and other patrons’ wandering images flat against the vertical screen, somewhat scrambled and delayed. The vertical screen menu directed that movement across the sand would activate sound events in Melbourne, and you could also acquire other information, such as titles and participants’ names.

Mentally picking my way through the technology, I caught on that the work was divided into sections: Speech (a solo by Trevor Patrick), Dissent (Hellen Sky), Translation (John McCormick), Diplomacy (duet, John McCormick and Trevor Patrick) and Trial (Lucy Guerin). Each dancer had originally developed a kind of character using their own gestural vocabulary, and this gesture was then treated and transformed into the images we saw. The sound collage was a portentously shredded and rebuilt version of Pauline Hanson’s maiden parliamentary speech, also partly manipulated by the audience at selected moments of interaction. But Andrew Morrish’s character of the Orator provided a mostly untreated voice-over explanation of events.

EB Sue-ellen, you saw the original live Melbourne performance as well as the Sydney transmission. How do they compare?

SEK Rather than in those rough-hewn vaults in the Economiser Building, the video performance was staged in an old tunnel underneath Flinders Street Station. It really seemed to make the ideas clearer, having the bodies positioned there with the technology. The impact was so much richer, and the issues seemed much closer, more felt. The highlights for me were definitely Trevor Patrick and Lucy Guerin’s solos. But you missed so much of what Trevor was doing when you only saw the video. I couldn’t even get a sense of it.

EB Yes, that ominous pointing, like some angel of death, it seemed so epic, but you weren’t quite sure why. I guess the subtitle is apt, Gesture, Race and Culture on Trial. What people make of gesture, although it may not be related to the truth, becomes the truth.

SEK Well, you understood why in the live performance. The live bodies spoke so much more eloquently than the technology alone. Especially during Trevor’s solo, you could hear words from Pauline Hanson’s speech, not the actual speech, but a distorted version. He stood on a pedestal. Above and in front was his huge, silver glowing distorted image. But you also saw Trevor, the person, a live, normal, cool body, and you realised just how unlike him the distortion was, even though people might still say that’s him. And not just the performers, but the subject matter itself is totally mediated by the technology. When you see both together, there’s the possibility of a different level of understanding.

EB Believing what you see and hear. I loved the oration, Andrew Morrish talking about teflon suits, persuasive speakers, how we need to believe: “I believed everything that was written…I believed that Spot could run”. Our capacity to learn and understand language and gesture depends on a capacity to believe that what we hear and see is true.

SEK In Trevor’s dance, with his live presence, the video screen, and the distorted sound, you get confused as to where the authority is coming from. Then you see it’s about manipulation, all those Hitlerish gestures. Manipulation by the media, and by politicians. There seemed no freedom, no freedom of speech.

EB I found the interactivity disappointing. I think it was more fun for the technicians running around and setting it up. In the end there wasn’t much to do. I was all prepared to get up there and jump around, but all you could do was play with the sound. I was hoping for a different kind of interactivity, enough so maybe you could talk to dancers while they were actually performing. One’s imagination sets impossible tasks.

What was Hellen Sky doing in the section called Dissent? It was hard to know what sections were about if you didn’t read the program. I remember she was wearing pearls, and I remembered Pauline Hanson’s photograph. And once again, those epic gestures had to mean something, but what?

SEK I didn’t really get a sense of what the performers were doing through the video, but I remember that sense of distortion. For instance, with the sound, all those words from Hanson’s speech, some like ‘multicultural’ stood out. They took on a new kind of currency.

EB The distortion and complexity becomes the point, doesn’t it? I don’t think most people know what was actually in Pauline Hanson’s speech, or what she meant by it. But there’s been so much talk, everyone thinks they do know (Frontline recently demonstrated that really well). People interpret speech and gesture in ways that make them happiest.

SEK And Lucy’s solo, in the Melbourne version, was emotionally so strong. She made me feel that the effort to communicate, with those anguished gestures, seemed doomed to fail. We were all on trial.

EB In the video, it was hard to see what she was actually doing. I guess that’s the point too. Like Chinese whispers, you remember the clearest gestures best—like the slash across the throat, the red dress. That’s a distortion of the message. People had to sweep the sand from the screen to see her.

And maybe the fact that it’s A Trial by Video means that we miss a lot of the detail of what’s really going on. When witnesses speak via video in court, it’s because they are fragile or vulnerable for some reason, like young children. It’s easier for a child to cope in a court when they don’t have to experience all the frightening detail of the flesh. At the same time, that’s a distortion of the real message, without all its emotional nuances. News clips about current events are generally all the information people get. You know it’s tampered with, and yet you have no option but to accept it as genuine information, at some level.

SEK It wasn’t a brilliant piece, but it was more than ‘arm and leg dancing’, to coin a phrase. I think it made sense in the context of Foucault, the medicalisation of the western body—showing freaks, bodies pushed to extremes, and our cultural obsession with that. In the context of all those elements, the way it was designed, the mixed media, the costumes, I could enjoy watching the movement, and for once, dance that’s extreme, hard and fast and pushing bodies to a level that ordinary bodies never even dream about, it actually made sense.

EB I wondered how purposeful Garry was in using that western modern ballet material, and those extreme physical states the dancers needed to go to, to perform his particular choreography. Justifying that by using yoga to demonstrate just another kind of ‘freakish’ physical state one can aspire to, seemed thin to me. I don’t feel he took the philosophical implications of any of that material into account.

SEK I think he made a real effort to stand outside the language, to comment on our culture’s need for those extremes, pushing the excitement boundaries, and I like that, but I suspect that he really does love the physicality more than the discussion of it, even though he couches his desires in that questioning kind of way. I could appreciate Craig Proctor’s yoga demonstration (I hate it when yoga is called ‘contortions’), but it bothered me slightly that the context Garry offered gave it no meaning other than contortion, extremity and abuse.

But I don’t know whether he had complete control over everything. When you’re about to perform, a lot of things happen that you’re not really author of. So, maybe it was a happy mixture of many people’s input.

SEK It doesn’t matter whether it’s accidental or not. The issues raised are worth thinking about.

The Pool is Dammed: A Trial by Video—Gesture, Race and Culture on Trial, Company in Space. Conceived by John McCormick; score, Garth Paine; lighting, Greg Dyson; cameras/photography, Gary Sheperd, Oliver Uan Qiu Wang; computer graphics:, Luban White. On-line from Melbourne to PICA, Perth; Experimetro, Brisbane; and The Performance Space, Sydney, March 4-15

Helmet, choreography by Garry Stewart, designed by Brett Chamberlain, Daniel Tobin, The Performance Space, February 3-14 1997

Falling from grace—It is the place she dances from which is so astonishing—a place where decades of maturing consciousness, of lived and stored experience, are all wiped clear. Her feet have never touched the ground. She has never cried or smiled. There is nothing, no one else, but her. Yet all through the piece voices speak. Their recorded discourse is a familiar one of donors and surrogates, implanting and freezing, of hungering and dying for a baby. It is the kind of talk in which sometimes I engage. But not now. Now, I am absorbed by the dance and the words serve as markers of how far away that talk is.

moebius loop—Atomic tests and ballet exams…Camelot, moratorium marches, The Australian Ballet at His Majesty’s…an arts grant, No Sugar, protests at the brewery…The words themselves suggest connections, and Alice, as she speaks them, colours and redraws the links from memories in her bones and skin and organs. 1950…1965…1970 …1990. Behind the tumbling mix and match—and sometimes over it—a slower, stranger history is projected. We see close-ups of a giant, watching eye; a nipple puckered like a sunflower; wet and hairy flesh-folds that are only possibly an armpit.

lullaby—I remember the asymmetries, a dance of intimate, ungainly beauty: Alice folded over from the hips, one arm stretched downwards, the hand turned in and resting on the floor; Alice on her back, limbs raised to plough the air; stretches which luxuriate like yawns; explorations of the kind which dreams pursue, curling back upon the past without object or intent in view. Within the confines of a spotlit island, within the boundaries of her skin, Alice is tracing threads to the unknown.

Broadcast Dancing: Three new works by Alice Cummins, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, December 4-8, 1996

Performances utilising new technologies or an ‘interactive’ media environment are like waiting for Godot. The Pool is Damned opened with an explanation of the set-up—the cameras, the computer system and crew connecting us to Perth—but because it was five o’clock in the afternoon our solo audience at Perth Institute for Contemporary Art was the technician, who duly sent us a cheerio wave. And at midnight in Melbourne, when the audience in Perth were comfortable, the dancers had been performing in the vault for a handful of friends. The potential of this project is to merge dance with video via teleconferencing through which audiences can share a focus or trigger special effects that might also change the dance.

In spite of this virtual possibility, I was pleased to have seen the first incarnation of this piece as Part 1 when it was presented in the haunting brick shell of the ‘economiser building’, Melbourne’s first power station. Nineteenth century dirt floors and mortared walls provided a context that contrasted sharply with the digitised programming system projected on large video screens. Here, the itinerant audience encountered the dancers in suddenly illuminated lightwells, sometimes glimpsing their frantic signals better in the distortions than in the darkness. There was also an urgency about it, compounded by its immediate address to the race debate then at fever pitch in the mass media.

For almost 15 minutes the sound-modified text of Pauline Hanson’s maiden parliamentary speech filled the air whilst dancer Trevor Patrick slowly outlined the rhetorical style of rage—his images on a large screen becoming vitriolic, red, blue; or baboon-like in an x-ray vision of hollow cheek and bared teeth; and a silver foil effect turned him into a robotic magnification of power.

A series of cameo performances each worked with gestural vocabularies to frame modes of contemporary social hysteria. Hellen Sky’s crippled posturing of the socialite, the embrace of charity and pity—the crossed fingers, the licking of thumbs, the nervousness of smoking and the ineffective peace sign suddenly becoming the pointed gun. Memorable was Lucy Guerin dressed in Barbie pink shirt and red plastic mini with her mop of hair rolling and vibrating between two poles against a sky blue background. Her frantic washing of hands—to get rid of stains—replaced by a clutching and pecking. Pressed against the wall, she counts desperately—two fingers to lips, one in mouth, one zips lips shut, five cover mouth, 10 curl up into a ball.

And a duet of corporate masculinity between John McCormick and Trevor Patrick made you ignore the screens and become interested in these two slight and suited men holding each other up, pushing, clutching, hugging and then saluting. The Caucasian and the Asian in the embrace of patriarchal capitalism. The complexity of the issues at stake—the rhetorical vocabularies of racism and their manipulation of the public—seem to have been eroded in Part 2. Presented in more intimate, more pristine circumstances the ‘virtual trial’ overtook the performed event. To counteract audience confusion, there was now an actor, who set out to normalise the technology and simplify the objects and structures of racism. He tells us, too directly, about “the polite-ician; poli-technician who thinks that in their fish and chip shop they have the truth”.

But unexamined were the silent technologies of power enacted in the spaces between performance and video. Clever technology can both disintegrate and construct the power of the speaker but it cannot replace the subject-dancer’s capacity to reveal the gaps between real and imagined effects. When a train passed overhead, in this brick bunker underneath the city, the rumbling was louder than the computerised sound and the walls trembled against my back. My fear then was of being trapped in a world where audiences were compelled to watch mediated images whilst all around the bricks fell.

Sydney Intermedia Network (SIN) will present its seventh annual survey of Australian screen art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, April 5-12. In addition to the regular film and video component, this year’s Matinaze will also include a multimedia exhibition of interactive CD-ROMs and a forum/presentation by three highly acclaimed new media artists.

SIN, formerly the Sydney Super 8 Film Group, has been promoting the innovative use of film, video and new media since 1990. Matinaze, a major showcase for experimental film and video, has continued in the tradition of the earlier organisation’s hugely popular annual Super 8 film festivals which began in 1980.

The film and video program (screening Saturday April 5, repeated Saturday April 12) now comprises work produced on a variety of formats including U-Matic, SP Betacam, 16mm, and computer animation. Highlights include John Tonkin’s man ascending, Merilyn Fairskye’s Plane Torque, Paul Winkler’s controversial Time Out for Sport, and Miriam Stirling’s take on Peter Greenaway, titled Wednesday, 11th May, at 1pm.

SIN’s newly appointed director, Alessio Cavallaro, is especially pleased that Matinaze ’97 will provide the Australian premieres of CD-ROMs by Megan Heyward and Sally Pryor, and the Sydney premiere of Norie Neumark’s interactive. “These are impressive works, and particularly interesting in that sound design is a major element in each of the productions”, said Cavallaro.

The three artists will demonstrate and discuss aesthetic and technical aspects of their work at a forum on Sunday April 6. Heyward’s I am a Singer explores notions of memory, culture and identity. The interactive’s user assists a pop star with amnesia to reconstruct her identity through media reports, diaries, anecdote and dream. Pryor’s Postcard from Tunis, a rich audiovisual collage that reflects the artist’s impressions of Tunisian culture, is essentially about inscriptions: ancient and contemporary Tunisian scripts and drawings as inscribed through the computer interface. Both CD-ROMs were featured in the New Talent Pavilion at Milia, the major European multimedia exhibition held in Cannes earlier this year. Neumark’s Shock in the Ear is a sound-centred interactive of “shock aesthetics” which describes deep and abrupt physical, psychic and cultural change. The gallery installation version of Shock in the Ear, with multiple computer screens and “sense sites”, will open at Artspace, Sydney, on April 17.

A week-long interactive multimedia exhibition in the foyer area of the AGNSW’s Domain Theatre will include recent works by Bronwyn Coupe, Ross Franks, Janet Merewether and Lloyd Sharp, as well as Neumark’s and Pryor’s CD-ROMs.

Events such as Matinaze are vital for the continuation of a vigorous screen culture. Internationally renowned Australian video artist Peter Callas—who was on the event’s selection panel with interdisciplinary media artist Nola Farman and screen culture commentator Annemarie Jonson—noted that “it’s very important to have survey exhibitions like Matinaze on a regular basis…to see what other people are making in a non-competitive context”. Alessio Cavallaro explained that Matinaze, like other SIN activities, is about cultivating the talent and profile of both emerging and established independent screen practitioners, and developing broader audiences for their work nationally and internationally. He emphasised that these and other activities by related screen culture organisations will be severely affected if certain funding recommendations contained in the Gonski Report are adopted. Celebrate innovative Australian screen art at Matinaze ’97-’98 might be too late.

Sydney Intermedia Network’s Matinaze ’97, April 5-12, Domain Theatre, level 1, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

From humble beginnings, brainstorming in West End cafes 18 months ago, the Queensland Multimedia Arts Centre (QMAC) has grown from a core of seven to nearly 200 members, creating a strong support network for Queensland’s fast-growing art and technology community.

The success of projects such as the Multimedia Arts Forum at which 150 people braved thunderstorms last April to attend workshops and lectures and Byte the Big One, a series of workshops and concerts broadcast live to TV and the internet in November has helped solidify QMAC’s role in serving artists.

In May and June of this year as part of the Brisbane Fringe Festival, QMAC will present eMedia, a festival of Brisbane’s emerging and electronic arts with a hefty program of exhibitions, film showings, seminars, workshops and performance art. The festival is designed to enhance the emerging arts and technology industries in Queensland by assisting artists in creative development and distribution while also showing businesses multimedia market potentials.

eMedia will inhabit various sites around Brisbane, the major event set for the Grand Orbit on Sunday, June 8. Overload will inundate the senses with exhilarating artwork and fast-paced, techno rhythms. Satellite link-ups will beam participants into New York for interactive seminars from some of the city’s new media artists; experts around the world to discuss technical, commercial, creative and philosophical developments in multimedia. Overload will also launch three of Queensland’s most exciting art websites: the Queensland Museum, Brisbane City Council’s Suburban Stories and Artscape.

Elsewhere during eMedia the Griller Girls will take over H Block Gallery at QUT with a multimedia exhibition spinning off from New York art terrorists Guerilla Girls. The festival will also host the Queensland premiere of Mic Gruchy’s new documentary, Stelarc/Psycho/Cyber. As a development project, QUT Communications Design students will create an eMedia commercial to be aired on Channel 7.

QMAC president, Scot Thrane says “eMedia is designed to provide a structure for artists to create, develop, produce, exhibit and distribute their work. Queensland doesn’t have a central multimedia core. There are many different groups and they all do their respective bits but they’re not all interconnected yet. This festival has been initiated so that the artists can have a place to create work and distribute their art. Queenslanders haven’t realised the potential of their content yet. We’ve got things happening here that aren’t happening anywhere else. Equipment like QANTM’s Silicon Graphics studio—there are only three of those in the world and one of them is in Queensland. eMedia is providing a pathway for artists with no computer experience to be able to work on any level of technology they choose”.

According to electronic artist Paul Brown, Brisbane resident for two years, “I think there’s a far more egalitarian art scene here than in southern centres. It has helped a lot of arts communities. John Tonkin came up here on a residency a couple of years ago and he was quite amazed at the number of mature-age students embracing new media technologies. It was clearly part of an encouraging Brisbane culture”.

Brown is concerned about the so-called brain drain of Australian artists shifting overseas and Queensland artists taking their talent south and hopes that eMedia will help stimulate the state’s industry. “eMedia and QUT’s Communications Design course and other initiatives will make it attractive for artists to stay in Australia. Being exposed to what’s being produced is very important for an emerging art, which is why eMedia is important for students. When you’ve only seen a small amount of work with a new medium it’s very hard to know where to push the limits and where the potential is. It is a fundamental relationship between the Arts and Industry which makes up the foundation of the eMedia philosophy. Neither can survive without the other and when united they form a powerful cultural force. It is hoped that the energy created by this union will provide Brisbane with a showcase of what’s really happening in the nether regions of our mother boards.”

The challenge of writing about dance was one of the topics for The Performance Space’s anti-static forum (the whole event will be reported in RealTime 19) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I don’t write about dance, but sometimes I feel compelled to, just as Virginia Baxter did in RealTime 17, reading Molissa Fenley’s Sydney Festival performance from another angle, the face). Seeing American Jennifer Monson’s remarkable contribution to anti-static, with its absolute shifts from nuance to explosion, from interiority to consuming gaze, from the mundanely material to the spiritual, made me re-think/re-experience Rosalind Crisp’s Six Variations On A Lie (Omeo Dance Studio, March 7-9). Six Variations…is a diminuendo, from physical explosion to stillness and silence, a vast and exhausting release, the dancer’s bursts of energy recurring less frequently, more slowly (revealing their choreographic and especially gestural shape). Against and eventually into this pattern, Ion Pearce plays a delicate cello composition while a very pregnant Nikki Heywood sits still, watching, muttering a barely intelligible mothering ‘are you okay?/pull yourself together’ type tongue. A third accompaniment is a sole male figure climbing down a ladder and crossing the performance area with a parcel towards an unspecified destination at slowest Butoh pace. While this variation seemed too familiar, the Pearce and Heywood presences were rich in the evocation of a dialogue between pent up physical force and the ambiguities of advice and consolation. In Rosalind Crisp’s work the meaning and source of emotion is not always clear, and for some that’s distancing. But she is one of Sydney’s most indiosyncratic self-choreographing dancers, and, for me Six Variations…got closer to the release of an essence.