Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

Author archive

Time for a New Image? was held at the Art Gallery of NSW on Sunday 4 June, 1995. The forum was the second in an occasional series organised by a group of artists, critics and curators who work with digital media: Maria Stukoff, John Potts, Rebecca Cummins, Nicholas Gebhardt, Victoria Lynn and Mike Leggett (who chaired this session) and was supported by the Australian Film Commission and the Art Gallery of NSW. The initiative began when a number of these people returned from the International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) held in Finland last year. Australian artists were well represented at ISEA, in the exhibition program as well as in forum sessions. However, many of those who attended had not heard each other’s papers, and also felt that it would be valuable to present the papers to an Australian audience. Australian artists working in new media are well represented at many international forums, but opportunities to present work and to discuss issues and exchange ideas are limited within Australia. Galleries and museums have been slow to pick up the work and support organisations for artists working in these areas – such as the Australian Network for Art and Technology in Adelaide, which was represented at this forum by Jenni Robertson – are poorly resourced and limited in the amount of support they can provide.

The aim of this series of events, is to provide a forum that is primarily about creating a critical environment for ideas and debate, using as a catalyst a series of short papers.

John Collette discussed the current hype surrounding interactive multimedia, questioning the much-touted CD-ROM boom. He contested the notion that information or communication will be revolutionised by repackaging existing information into CD-ROM format and argued a case for artists to be involved in the development of new media technologies. Collette argued that it will be artists who will push the boundaries of interactive multimedia: it will be ideas, not marketing, that will potentially produce competitive and challenging international recognition for Australian multimedia.

Sally Pryor discussed Postcards from Tunisia, an interactive multimedia work she is developing concurrently with her research and exploration of the human computer interface. She linked her research with an analysis of the development of writing, in an attempt to formulate new ways of navigating interactive space.

Darren Tofts followed on from Pryor’s line of thinking in a paper entitled The digital unconscious: the mystic writing pad revisited, in which he undertook to explore Derrida’s discussions of writing as a graphic process irreducible to speech. He went on to discuss digital art in terms of surrealism, analysing digital art as an aesthetic of the marvellous.

Jon McCormack outlined the emergent nature of his own art practice. He spoke of writing software as an intuitive process, a process which for him was one of creation. Writing software is as integral to artmaking for McCormack as the aesthetic decisions he makes in the development of the synthesised ‘unimaginable’ images he creates.

The opportunity the forum provided for artists working in digital media to discuss their work in terms other than as a technical exposition was extremely valuable. There was potential to link discussions of interactive media to debates about the aesthetic qualities of digital art, and the opportunity to debate issues of interactivity, connectivity and transformability of new media. This was a welcome change from the hardware, software and technical debates that have surrounded interactive multimedia in recent months and which have generally focussed on commercial product and export viability. The next New Media Forums are planned for October 15 and 22, where artists will discuss their experiences at ISEA ’95 to be held in Montreal in September.

RealTime issue #8 Aug-Sept 1995 pg. 8

“Those who fail to re-read are obliged to read the same story everywhere”
Roland Barthes, S/Z

I’m winding back through the preview tape of this year’s Matinaze screenings organised by the Sydney Intermedia Network (SIN), cross-checking artists’ names, recording, editing and delivery platforms, and the schizoid assortment of themes, work histories and promising futures. Something like Open Week at The Performance Space except that most of these young film and video makers – unlike their ‘performing’ counterparts – would probably not find much of an audience on the club and cabaret fringe. Perhaps I’m wrong.

The Matinaze scene at the Art Gallery of NSW could have been an end-of-year student screening or one of those big Combined Studies lectures that have become so popular within the arts and media faculties of our rapidly corroding university conglomerates. Sitting five abreast, waiting for the work of a friend to show. Rapturous applause and a lot of nudging and congratulations – self and otherwise.

My audience choice award for best work went to Fling (SVHS, 1994, 1 min 30 sec.) by Hazel Milburn and Sugarcoated (Shot on Super 8, completed on BW Highband, 1994, 6 min) by Niamh Lines. Falling outside the overused video clip or joke thematic, both these works addressed memory and desire within a carefully chosen (and obviously economic) mise-en-scène. No marks to the real winners of the audience choice award: John Curren and Jackie Farkas, for The Movie Or The Duck, and Back To The Happy Ever After by Philip Hopkins, Shane and Michael Carn. The sickly-sweet, over-crafted work of these seemingly established filmmakers gave me no pleasure at all. Their elaborate joke-work gave me no pause to think about anything.

So why did I persist with this feeling of being a teacher (rather than an experimental film and video enthusiast)? Probably because a good quarter of the audience present on those two days had probably been in film and media courses I taught in second semester of 1994.

I hesitated before striking the keys that would dismiss the whole event as ‘mostly student work’, deciding instead to talk to the people who taught them. So what are the causes and possible cures for the muddling exposure of something old, something new, something ‘enfant’, something ‘elder’ that was Matinaze 1995?

What the people who taught them have to say reveals not only the depressed state of undergraduate and postgraduate media education within the corporate cultures of some of our universities but also a history of community – and student – initiated media events which have been gradually undermined by bureaucratisation within the Australian Film Commission and various university departments. Uneven professionalisation within teaching institutions, coupled with the ‘take the money and run’ attitude of a beleaguered humanities sector, has created a stand-off between educators and administrators. Yet speaking out on these issues – trying to seriously address the micropolitics of media and arts education funding –is like not speaking at all.

In an attempt to give myself an adequate voice, I undertook a brief literature search on the subject, trawling through a CD-ROM version of the Australian Public Affairs Information Service (APAIS). The result: a mere handful of relevant articles written by respected academics over the last six years, including Stephen Knight, Anne Freadman and Simon During (whose article The Humanities and Research Funding, in a 1990 issue of Arena, still says a lot about the unspoken).

***

4-D Studies (covering film, video and new media) within the School of Art at the UNSW College of Fine Arts recently received $65,000 for ‘sight and sound’ research through an external Australia Council research grant application. Sounds great till you read the small print. The words ‘scientific visualisation’ recur with uncomfortable frequency, alerting the reader to how poorly scientific and humanities research are differentiated by the money-brokers servicing our cultural and educational institutions.

A senior lecturer in the same department receives enough AFC funding to take a year or two off; freed from the pressures of teaching to devote more time to multimedia research. All well and good until you discover how the college has arranged how these spare teaching hours will be covered. The number of students the remaining staff have to supervise increases dramatically as do the number of ‘just in time’ appointed casual staff. Second and third year undergraduate students are feeling drawn to become feature film makers one semester – experimental non-narrative mavericks the next.

At the moment there is much anxiety being expressed by contracted and tenured staff that course and departmental restructuring will further undermine the quality of face to face teaching. While professional morale plummets in a dignified silence, university administrators smile through the glow of recently obtained management awards for cost-cutting their lean teaching machine even further. Still I suspect that staff conditions, the quality of liberal, film and media education (in art colleges barricaded within the new university system) can only be improved by allowing art and media students freer (degree credit) access to the larger humanities faculty on a main campus. Why restrain the agonistic impulse (dare I call it competition) that draws someone from Anthropology to Italian, from French Literature to Philosophy, and back through the side door of an art and media education.

***

“Lest we forget – before too long – the difference between avant-garde, independent, experimental, mainstream and ART-HOUSE cinema, and those who served to program, screen (and make) the difference.”

I repeat these words from an essay-interview, The Liberator of Spaces, – RealTime 7 – on the work of Ian Hartley, with a small addition. I’ve been talking to media lecturer and filmmaker, Kate Richards, who – together with a number of students from what is now The University of Technology – programmed the first Sydney Super-8 Festival back in 1980.

The venue was the Film-Makers Co-Op, home to the 16mm experimental push of the 60s and 70s which peaked in the mid to late seventies with experimental feminist documentary pieces like Jenny Thornley’s Maidens. Resistance to the incursion of the new medium dwelt on both the form and content of works by Andrew Frost, Stephen Harrop, Kate Richards, Mark Titmarsh, Michael Hutak and Jane Stevenson. Quite a few of these filmmakers – apart from being film-literate – had been caught up in the new wave of post-Marxism, psychoanalysis and semiotics which had swept through fine arts, communications and film studies courses all over the country.

The event was a sell-out and the stage was set for four to five years of regular screenings, discussion and ambitious ‘no-frills’ funding. Reviewing the Fourth Super 8 Festival for FilmNews late in 1983, Ross Gibson was able to cast a critical eye over the diversification and development of the Super 8 phenomenon: – “The Festival also served as a reminder that the medium attracts the creative gamut, from beginners with much to learn through to aficionados and professionals with impressive theoretical and practical competence.”

By the mid-eighties, the weakness of Super-8 (as a non-reproducible recording and projection platform) started to wear on the artisanal economics – the short, inexpensive turnaround from filming to screening. The Super-8 Group became Sydney Intermedia Network and began to stage video as well as film events. Electronic Media Arts (EMA) hosted the first Australian International Video Festival in 1986 and a number of other smaller groups and events started to drag on the AFC purse-strings.

The new media/film festivals did not have quite the same integral audience-producer feedback as the so-called filmmakers’ culture that preceded it (from The National Film Theatre days to the cresting of Super-8). This created a dilemma for the AFC in its choice of sponsored players and events promoters – the result of its own inability to administer or even conceptualise the diversification of media and audiences.

Cinematheque programs continued to thrive however, with AFC-subsidised repertory cinemas screening historical retrospectives and special seasons. This seemed consistent with the assumption that industry development in the areas of film, video or new media requires balanced funding for both production of work and the education of producers.

The cinematheque culture seems vastly different from the ritualised Film Festival events which occasionally toy with ‘difficult’ cinema but end up dutiful servants to tasteful art-house and documentary styles. The single screening of A Personal Journey Through American Movies With Martin Scorsese during the 1995 Sydney Film Festival created an atmosphere of what I can only describe as cinephilic desperation in the Pitt St Centre. Doubtless this mis-managed must see!! video event will end up on the box in the not-too-distant future, hopefully in tandem with Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema which appeared – without the bellowing of trumpets and velveteen – during the 1994 cinematheque season.

*****

There was a time not so long ago where membership of the AFI (which cost between $20 and $40) automatically gave society membership to cinematheque screenings. This enabled continuous and inexpensive access for both students and enthusiasts. In and out of art school in the early 80s, my film education was cheap and easy, lounging through CAE film courses, NFT screenings and a more committed alternative section in the Sydney Film Festival.

These days, the choice of programs and venues has diminished drastically, and a user-pays philosophy makes it hard-going for cinephiles on a limited budget. Take the current crop of cinematheque offerings for example. At the refurbished Chauvel, the 1995 cinematheque season (programmed by Melbourne Cinematheque Inc.) – after a few years of much more detailed events programming – has collapsed into a mish-mash of cinema all-sorts. It looks as if someone has thrown darts at the National Film Library catalogue and chosen those films with the extra sprocket holes.

I spoke recently to a respected film historian who said he was told by the new managers that a proposed retrospective of Lumière films would not go down so well with its over-abundance of French sub-titles. Cultural or nuclear cringe? Hard to tell, really.

The Museum of Contemporary Art – which promises a proper cinematheque by the year 2000 – has made some effort to screen some interesting programs over the last few years as well as taking on part of the remainder of the 1994 cinematheque program when the Paddington complex closed for renovations. Lacking a desperately-needed government subsidy, the cost of attending all these film and video screenings for a 12-month period would probably hit the two hundred dollar mark. I’m hoping the Art Gallery of NSW will continue with a much more creative retrospective and contemporary program beyond the big cine-centenary of 1995.

***
“Film and video are more or less the
same thing
There might be a difference in the treatment of light
Like the difference between philosophy and science
Science is video philosophy is cinema.”
Jean Luc Godard

Past cinematheque screenings have generally manifested a collective will to learn (or remember) about cinema history and individual film-makers (in both narrative and experimental genres), attracting artists, writers and an array of film-making talents. Moving into a period of speculation and experimentation in multimedia formats, it is important that we maintain a culture of informed discussion and programming around innovative narrative and non-narrative forms within the celluloid medium.

In a catalogue essay for Passages of the Image (a huge anthological exhibition of video, film and installation which travelled through Europe and the US in 1991-92), Raymond Bellour put it this way: “Thus is the gradation that goes from one to two arts founded on mechanical reproduction and set beside the visual arts that preceded them, a pattern of possibilities is established, formed by the overlapping and passages that are capable of operating (technically, logically, historically) between the arts.” There is a small delirium of confluence implied here: the running together – backwards and forwards – of different media, concepts and personal poetics, an approach where the formal, technical and historical boundaries between different media become consciously interwoven.

I too would say – following on from these remarks – that for the benefit of our cinematheque and multimedia futures (which must be integrally re-connected without petty institutional and personal rivalries) that turning side-on to both of them may offer more hope for creative innovation than simply scribbling on the blank cheque of a new digital millennium.

RealTime issue #8 Aug-Sept 1995 pg. 9

Dancers in Perth who work outside the company systems often feel isolated from one another as well as from the dance bureaucracies, which do little to reduce the atmosphere of heap-scrabbling competition. Independent New Choreographers (INC), a bi-annual project funded by the WA Department for the Arts, is attempting to redress the balance. INC’s administrator, Gillian Edmeades, convenes programs by inviting available dancers to participate in a six week workshop process which culminates in the showing of works-in-progress to a paying audience. The latest offering from INC was shown in the performance space at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) in July.

In their respective dances for INC, choreographers Bill Handley and Sasha Myler both chose to construct a movement ‘score’ which drew the performers’ attention to particular body parts. This created in Handley’s Miss Understanding a meditative pace which brought new meaning to dancerly athleticism. Sasha Myler’s duet, An Exploration, A Relationship employed contact improvisation and spoken text. It subtly evoked for me the questions about cruelty, obsession, intimacy and passion which surround heterosexual liaisons.

These two explorations of body intelligence were complemented by the louder energy of Billie Athena Cook’s Turn Me On and her superbly executed acrobatic duet Shake It, Break It with Setefano Tele and Angela McDonald-Booth. McDonald-Booth choreographed a synchronised ‘techno’ trio This Is Contagious and the material in Tele’s self-devised solo Last pre-empted the trio Play It By Ear which he directed as the closing dance of the evening. This piece brought together the disparate energies of the group to finish with a humorously thoughtful impro-based experiment which ruminated on the implications for the individual of sensory/mobility deprivation.

The program juxtaposed young bodies flying in unison to a techno accompaniment against body-practice investigations of motion, creating a dialogue over the evening which was both strange and enriching.

INC provides an on-going forum for dancers to try out raw ideas on an audience even though much of the material is only at the beginning of its evolutionary path. The fact that dancers in such a vulnerable forum perhaps lose sight of this was manifested in the INC project by some of the rather self-conscious program notes.

Retaining confidence in one’s skills is, for any independent artist, part of the on-going challenge of participating in and producing art works. Dancers who generate their own creative work invariably supplement it with teaching or unrelated employment. Dancers Bill Handley and Sasha Myler, for instance, told me that they balance their performance passions with a teaching career in dance. They feel fortunate that their ‘day jobs’ are not completely disconnected from the business of creating art and find that the two activities inform each other very well.

In a dance community which rarely seems to publicly celebrate difference, projects like INC are important to the development of dance in WA because they bring together its disparate strands.

Mainstream dance discourses dictate that dancers and dance-makers subscribe to a putative universal standard of physicality which promotes an image of the dancer as young and supremely athletic. Consequently a dance mythology has evolved which discounts anything other than the extremely aerobic forms of motion. A mythology like this not only reduces the status of older practicing dancers and their valuable contribution to the dance community (the wider arts community does not seem to have this problem) but also devalues work which is motivated by a different intelligence from that of the conventional forms.

Many dancers believe that if the dwindling support for those working in the margins continues to spiral downwards, then less innovation will occur. And if the unmarked vitality which the independents bring to the practice is absent, then the mainstream dance body will also atrophy.

To invoke the rhetoric of the economic rationalists, “no business survives without creating new interest in its activities”, and if performance dance is to continue, then new audiences must be constantly generated. One way is to break down long-held stigmas, which for many are attached to traditional venues, by staging dance outside of the theatre.

PICA, in part, performs this function and bridges gaps for independent dancers with development opportunities for work such as Putting On An Act and its (inaugural) dance festival in November.

The eternal frustration for independent performers, however, is that the value to, and influence on, the mainstream that their work has is rarely acknowledged. Many independent dancers therefore must form their peer support group amongst the practitioners of other art disciplines. Without these liaisons, life for many independent dance artists would be very lonely.

RealTime issue #8 Aug-Sept 1995 pg. 33

Under the imposing shadow of the new Governor Philip Tower, the recently opened Museum of Sydney has emerged out of the rubble of the old Government House (1788–1846) to mount, what Ross Gibson, writer and director of the Museum’s Bond Store installation describes as “… a sustained and creative inquiry into the operations of power and commerce and colonialism.” Like many of the “new wave” of museums that are opening around the world, the Museum of Sydney produces itself as an entirely reflexive and reflective event that, in its very structure, in the very act of creating the museum environment, turns history into effect of interpretation.

The inert “ruins” of the colonial government are subsumed into a mobile, panoptic structure that imagines, and images, culture as the exchange between the microscopic and macroscopic dimensions of an everyday environment. It attempts to construct a multi-layered series of interpretative perspectives and projections that mark out the historical possibilities for any site, for all sites, at the same time as it vigorously resists any form of closure or completion of the past. In this sense, the Museum stands as a kind of fragile nexus of museology and informatics, of aesthetics and politics, where artefacts, narratives and events are reconfigured within a complex choreography of advanced audio-visual systems to mark out the site as one of an ongoing cultural contestation and negotiation.

For Gibson, the museum exists to demonstrate that “… the meanings of so many places around this inhabited country are always and endlessly questionable. As we go through the museum, we hope it becomes apparent to the visitor that there is a profusion of assertions, versions, stories, options, testimonies; and that they all interrelate and they all invite interpretation. And that’s what the place is about: the necessity for you to reason through, worry through, imagine through, and come up with your best preference for how to interpret the various narratives, rather than it being a place where you’re taught a given line. Of course that open-endedness is ideological as well.”

Approaching the design of his installation and the place as a whole, Gibson continually draws attention to the notion that “space is a live construction of meanings which is changing all the time and so the idea of spatial history is fundamental to the place. Nothing is impeachably solid; it’s there but it is only just there. And although you can see the outside world so readily though all of the glass, in this quite hi-tech, metallic design, no matter where you are in the space, a representation of the natural environment, of a pristine ecology, is always informing what you see and hear. You can’t go anywhere without the environment, as it is understood in a mediated system, being close by.”

Each installation or exhibit produces itself as both a singular point of attraction, of narrative possibility, and as an interconnected passage between the various levels of the site. From the subterranean image of the “dig” mapped onto the outside plaza, to Heidi Riederer’s and Colin Grimmer’s arcane, shifting panoramas of Sydney on the top level, there is a feeling of being drawn through a range of vistas, of ideas, of sounds, and of mechanisms that are, for Gibson, “… ghosted with the markings of previous struggles, previous occupations, previous institutions. It’s a site of transience, but even at this very moment, it’s also a site of contestings, of meetings and negotiations.”

In this way, Gibson sees the Museum as a place for devolving authority, for making it negotiable, changeable; a place of layering, of levels, and reflection that initiates an “interpenetration of outside and inside space, outside and inside light, outside and inside vantage points. Every surface that you strike, every surface that you encounter, has several latencies in it; and this idea of layers, this idea of having to continually look and shift your focus and know enough about any of the surfaces that you encounter is central to the direction of the museum. This is a space in which you can almost see the edges; you don’t become lost in it, and over time it alters itself endlessly.”

And yet, as we move through this “new” space of cultural production, what also becomes apparent is that the sheer indeterminacy of this interpretative surface carries within it the potential to dissolve, into its “aura” or spectre, the very divisions, the differences, the material conditions, of a colonial history; to subsume politics into aesthetics, critique into mediation, event into environment. To maintain its critical edge, the Museum of Sydney must become a site that not only negotiates or contends the assumption of meaning, but one that inevitably questions the whole categorical imperative of a mediated “culture” itself.

The Museum of Sydney opened May 20.

RealTime issue #7 June-July 1995 pg. 6

In the same moment that Luna Park, Sydney’s oldest amusement park apart from Kings Cross, has been threatened with closure, a new entertainment space has opened in a shopping centre in suburban Hurstville, far from the Sydney-defining harbourside spectacle.

Called Intencity, it’s part video arcade, pinball parlour, sideshow alley and simulated amusement park, billed as “intertainment for the new world”.

Perhaps it is no more than egregious inner city snobbery to wonder at the ambition to create a new world in Hurstville. Kogarah at least gave us Clive James and is home to the bank that brings us the cheerfully tinny sound of Julie Anthony.

But Intencity is in Hurstville, in Westfield Shoppingtown, backed by Australia’s leading entertainment companies, Village Roadshow (the movie distributors and exhibitors) and the Nine Network.

If American shopping mall planning strategies are being used in this case, Intencity is in less than intense Hurstville because the demographics are right. In other words, the audience profile in the service area will maximise the number of visits and the size of the spend of what they call, in the trade, ‘guests’.

According to publicity, 212,000 guests visited Intencity in its first three weeks of operation. That’s slightly less than the number of people who visit Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks Museum in a year. And they expect 20,000 to 30,000 a week. (It was a slow Friday night when I went but maybe that was because it was cold and wet.) It’s principally aimed, according to Gary Berman, the Managing Director of Village Nine Leisure, the company behind Intencity, at 18–39 year olds.

Intencity’s recorded message promo boasts that it is the world’s first indoor interactive intertainment complex — intertainment being a combination of interactivity and entertainment.

So what is Intencity? What happens there? And what does it mean? Is it a menace to society? Is it like the video arcade, to use John Fiske’s phrase, a semiotic brothel of the machine age?

Intencity contains elements of the themed restaurant, the video arcade, the pinball parlour, the funfair, the theme park and the museum. It occupies just over 3,000 square metres and employs a staff of 150 people.

The space is divided into a number of themed areas which offer different kinds of entertainment. There’s Virtual World, a game set somewhere in space, like Mars. Here speed is success and rookie players are advised, “Be a bully. Collisions are big points when done right.”

Groups of participants, up to eight, battle it out, the aim being to win a race. The lengthy introduction to Mars and the rules of the game by video presenters and staff takes up a large part of the 25 minutes the experience lasts. Then you climb into a pod which is designed like the cramped cockpit of a Martian mining vehicle with a big screen up front looking out onto the virtual world. Then the race through the Martian canals begins.

Afterwards there’s a debriefing which tells you how you went. Even virtual reality has a reality check.

The other game in Virtual World is called Battletech. In the 31st century, the promocopy runs, sport is a deadly thing and war has been ritualised into sport. Mechwarriors fight it out like knights of yore in jousting competitions. “In Battletech, you can play as teams, or in a free for all where it’s every man (sic) for himself.”

This is the most expensive attraction at Intencity and bookings are recommended (although seemed entirely unnecessary on a wet Friday night during school term).

The other big attraction is Chameleon, which is similar to Virtual World but with simpler controls — steering wheel, accelerator, brake — rather than the complex and graded control possibilities in Virtual World. And you get to go to some differently designed part of the Hurstville universe, with more vinyl and fewer metal finishes.

For 1–12 year olds there’s Hide and Seek, created by Keith Ohlsen, one of the people responsible for McDonald’s soft-play concept areas for kids, a huge tubular play space area with mazes, slides, tunnels and obstacle courses.

There’s also a Wide World of Sports Centre where you can play virtual reality boxing (this is certainly not a spectator sport) in which you put on virtual reality head gear and have a boxing match with an opponent whom you don’t actually touch. As well there are mechanised basketball hoops, computer golf and baseball batting cages.

Other areas relate to music and include a booth where you can singalong, karaoke style, to an extensive playlist of pop songs, record the result and take the cassette home. It also includes DiMMMensions (Village owns radio network Triple M) which I missed. (Intencity is structured like a simple enclosed maze and it’s easy to get lost or distracted.)

Intencity’s front of house staff are all young people. Apart from security, waiters and sales people, they are mostly integrators, because their role, according to the media kit, is to ‘integrate guests into the Intencity experience’. More on this later.

The term interactive has had two principle applications both of which find their way into the Intencity experience.

Interactivity was a concept essential to the science centre movement which began in the United States in the 1960s aiming to educate people, kids mostly, about science, by getting them to participate in experiments or demonstrations of scientific principles.

The role of interactives was as three dimensional ‘permanent’ science experiments, which demonstrated a scientific principle. In San Francisco’s Exploratorium, the first science centre established in 1969, demonstrators — young people, mostly university science students — explained the principles of prisms or magnetic fields. The demonstrators were supposed to interact with visitors, to answer questions, provide help, or explanations if required, like the integrators in Intencity.

Interactive came to be applied more generally to any installation in a museum which got a viewer to do something other than look at it or read a label. At its most elementary, you might push a button and a video would start, or you would, using a computer interactive, make a complex set of choices using either a touch screen or a keypad, to elicit different kinds of information — a video clip, a computer game, or more recently, sending e-mail on the internet.

By extension, there were interactive and non-interactive forms of entertainment. Reading a book involved low levels of interactivity. At one level, it could be argued most book narratives were closed in the sense that you couldn’t change or alter them by your intervention (although fiction with narrative options for different outcomes have recently appeared).

Interactivity’s other history was in computer culture in the 1980s, where it became a buzzword for the message-response relationship that was set up in computer interface design.

It was here that higher levels of interactivity — not simple mechanical button pushing or reading, were seen to be possible. Interactivity in both these processes was seen as the key link, a kind of negotiated performance between the computer, or the machine and the user. This was partly structured by the computer’s hardware and software, in particular its language and design, partly by the user.

In early studies of video arcades in the 1980s, based on Pac men style games, social critics like John Fiske argued that these games constructed a particular kind of subjectivity, a form of resistance to home, school, work and family.

The person in charge of the machine was generally young, in terms of social power in a subordinate position, and from non anglo ethnic background. Fiske argues that the machines give the young man a sense of control, and so of power and pleasure, which he could not otherwise access because of his social position.

Fiske also noted social criticism of the arcades, namely that they were harmful to young people – distracting them from school, worthy consumption and home life – and that they encouraged vandalism, hooliganism and petty crime (young people would become addicted to the machines and need to steal to support their habit).

In Sydney, video arcades were banned from parts of the gay and lesbian Oxford Street precinct, and were not permitted in some shopping centres because they were seen to attract young men who were prone to anti-gay and lesbian violence on the one hand, or vandalism and petty crime on the other.

Intencity’s location in a shopping mall and the involvement of the developer Westfield in its operation is significant because the design and management of Intencity enables some forms of social control. It’s like McDonald’s meets the video arcade.

While some of Intencity’s games can offer the same kind of subjectivity that old video arcade games did, the environment in which they’re placed is far more tightly regulated, and the ‘guests’ or users who might go to a video arcade might not find the Intencity experience that attractive. It’s safe, sterile, (if brightly coloured and shiny), family oriented and heavily staffed, unlike a video arcade.

While the subjectivity offered by those old Pac men machines is still possible at Intencity, the combination with other forms of entertainment and group-operated machines makes that kind of subjectivity relatively marginalised.

The subjectivity that’s created by Chameleon or Virtual World is the subjectivity of the cultural actor, in which pleasure comes from participating in a narrative. A subjectivity of resistance might be built around disruption, or stepping in and out of roles. Stepping in and out of roles, however merely leads back to the social, and one of the principal pleasures of Intencity is to make it a place to meet people. Hence there are lounges where you can talk with the people you played with in Virtual World. It’s another suburban heterosexual public place.

And unlike the arcades, Intencity is not largely a single sex space. It is designed to include young women. In Chameleon, for example, both the video presenters taking you on your mission are experienced, no-nonsense young women.

Symbolically, the central theme of Intencity, its creators argue, is music, movies and sport. But these are marginalised spatially and experientially. Movies are reduced to a series of decorative blow ups of big stars, music to music video, a narrow playlist of hits you can sing along to, and a DJ booth screened off by a thick window, and closed mostly except to integrators. What counts is simulation games and the narratives they present.

In this new goal-oriented world “a man is defined by his actions, not by his memory” as Cuarto the mutant rebel leader says to Arnie in Total Recall, and here we become cultural actors who act and perform action.

The point is that there is nothing else to do. In the narratives of action, the aim is to score the goal, or win the race; there is pursuit and flight, attack and defence.

The games are designed for an environment which is safe and sterile. Both the games themselves, and their physical and simulated environment, have many of the characteristics that George Ritzer argues, in The McDonaldization of Society, are being built into a fast food world: rationality, efficiency, calculability, standardisation and predictability.

Wherever possible, he argues, this McDonaldization removes the human. Staff become integrators, a role which is at least partly scripted and for which they are trained.

When integrators and actors step outside their roles, things become more engaging. Wandering around the corridors of games we meet up again with the young man who introduced us to the Chameleon. He asks what my score was and I say it’s so pathetically low I couldn’t possibly tell him, he’d just laugh. He laughs anyway.

Did I like it? he asks, and because he wants me to like it because he identifies so strongly with it, I say yes, sure, it was cool. But I’m not used to it. It made me feel, well it made me feel sick, I tell him.

He says he’s had hundreds of goes on it and you get better the more you do it. I want to say that like any reality, it probably looks better after a drink, but then I remember the vomit button in the cockpit pod and I start feeling clammy and nauseous again.

Jean Baudrillard has argued that the post modern involves the collapse of the real and history into the televisual and the disappearance of aesthetics and values in kitsch. If you take a particle accelerator to be high tech in the way that Last Year at Marienbad is high culture, then the games at Intencity are technokitsch.

So another suburban branch of the postmodern has opened in the decentred city. It’s free to get in, but prices vary depending on when you go. If you go during the week the main attractions are a dollar or two cheaper. At peak times over the weekend, Virtual World is $10.00 and Chameleon is $8.00.

Go with others. The constructed unit of consumption is, except for the sports and sideshow games, not the individual but the couple. Everyone was in groups and many of the games can only be fully played in pairs — there were young couples on a night out, girlfriends out together driving racing cars , buddies from a local gym practising their swing on the simulated golf range.

If you forget to eat before you go, the diner, Intake, serves what promo-language calls incredible edibles, or fast food. Incredibly it’s not that inedible.

Intencity, Westfield Shoppingtown, Cross Street and Park Road Hurstville Sydney. Open 7 days, 9.00 am to 12.00 midnight.

JP What have you found to be the most pressing legal ramifications of the new media technologies?

IC With multimedia, the most obvious issue concerns the way art forms can be transposed from a hard copy to a digital format. Whether that’s a CD-ROM or an on-line system, it provides an easier format from which to access, to manipulate and download. The difficulty is in monitoring that situation so that the copyright owner, the creator, is fairly remunerated for the use of that work. I think it’s the monitoring which is the real challenge at the moment.

JP It’s often said that the law covering intellectual property is a cumbersome beast lagging behind technology. Unless the law is amended, technological change makes it obsolete. Has that been your experience?

IC There’s no doubt about that. The Copyright Act, dating to 1968 with amendments in 1989, is basically looking a bit tired. The federal government is now in the process of producing a totally revised copyright. They want to simplify it and bring it up to speed with the age of convergence. The inadequacy of the Act at the moment concerns the transmission right, which in essence is like a cable right. It’s very limited in scope and really not sufficient to ensure copyright owners have some control over transmission of material down the line.

At the recent contemporary music summit in Canberra there was a demonstration where musicians put their work on the Internet. They were saying that people could access it without restriction. In theory they could, because the transmission right as it’s presently defined is so limited as to make it difficult to prevent people downloading music files onto their computers. The government has, through the Copyright Convergence Group, recommended a broad communications right which would be sufficient to restrict the free market downloading of this information. That would be OK in theory, but then how do you monitor people doing this, how do you police it?

The whole copyright Act is based on discrete activities, which are now overlapping so much that it’s very difficult. It was initially the right to copy, where the reproduction right has been the key right, to stop making duplicates, pirating. But in the convergence age, we don’t need to make a hard copy anymore, we can access it through a terminal , and get the same information. Likewise soon we’ll have cable music, CDs transmitted down the line for listening. The tangible items that we’re used to will still be there, but perhaps they’ll be more peripheral. Therefore the communications right, this transmission right, will be the all-important right, more so than the reproductive right.

JP Is that because the nature of information is immaterial? Information is malleable, and can take different forms depending on the information carrier.

IC Yes, because basically you’ll have things whizzing through the ether, from one databank source to your home PC. The main issue will be properly controlling that dissemination and making sure that when you use that information, the copyright owner is properly recompensed for it. It’s not so much the laws that are at fault, as we can amend the laws to fit the new environment, but there’s a technological solution – encryption schemes – by which people can’t download the material until they’ve paid the gatekeeper a certain fee. It may be that you can browse an abstract, for example, for free, but any accessing of information would incur a fee.

The other key issue in the digital age is moral rights. At the moment there is no moral right protection in Australia, although the government has confirmed its intention to introduce moral rights legislation. When artistic material is more readily available in digital format, it can be easily sampled and so on. Moral rights are the rights of owners to protect the integrity of their work.

It’s a difficult issue, because we still want that freedom to create new work based on existing work, and you don’t want moral rights or copyright to be a fetter on artistic freedom of expression. But you want to protect the integrity of the work from perhaps the more insidious commercialisation of it, where it gets re-hashed, as in an old Gaugin being used to sell pizzas. But there are two arguments here, and you have to try for a fine balance.

JP Here perhaps we have an aesthetic approach clashing with the law of copyright. There are many artists working with samplers and scanners who have a post-modern aesthetic of appropriation. There are theorists like John Perry Barlow who wrote in Wired that “everything you know about intellectual property is wrong”, in the information age. One argument is that there should be a greater public domain to allow artists freer access to images and sounds. Are such arguments doomed to founder on the rock of copyright law, or is there some scope for a compromise, in which the law can be relaxed?

IC A lot of people are sympathetic to these postmodern arguments – but then you get it from the other side. Take the example of multimedia. It’s like a hybrid, taking bits and pieces from different art forms. Some say that a multimedia producer could take a piece of a visual artist’s work, a piece of music, and put it altogether, and not have to pay those artists. But then from those artists’ point of view, if that multimedia work makes a lot of money, surely they should get some slice of the pie.
I think there’ll be a move towards collecting societies which allow you to use the work without being restricted as long as you pay fair remuneration. I think that’s probably the way it will go, and perhaps the only way. It provides access to the material, but ensures that the original artist gets a fair remuneration.

IC I think so, because it is fair that if you’re an artist by profession, you should be compensated if your work is sampled or scanned. But then I think in the past the pendulum has swung too much towards the owners of copyright and not enough towards allowing access to material.

The Arts Law Centre of Australia gives legal and accounting advice to artists in all art forms. Services include free preliminary phone advice, referral to solicitors or dispute mediators, legal advice nights, publication sheets and seminars.

The next seminar, Tales From The Infobahn, discusses developments in electronic publishing and the challenge presented to the traditional publishing paradigm. Speakers are Oliver Freeman, from Publish Australia, Lynne Spender of the Australian Society of Authors, and Colin Galvin, barrister and lawyer.

“We’re a youth arts organisation. Our bottom line isn’t theatre, it’s kids. If theatre stopped working then we’d change the way we work. We use arts and cultural activities as a tool.” I’m talking with Michael Doneman Co-Artistic Director of CONTACT. Ludmilla Doneman, the other artistic director, is busy organising the company’s move from the city to their new space GRUNT in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley.

1995 sees the company in a serious state of reorganisation. The Donemans spent eight months in 1994 away from the company gathering ideas to inform the future directions of the organisation. They founded the company six years ago and it now has a six digit turnover. “It’s time for us to move on.” They are currently organising a hand-over of the company to occur over1996-1997 when “the old and the new can segue. We’re organising a mentor scheme for our successors.”

Currently the company serves a range of clientele. “On one level we serve everyone.” The company involves disadvantaged young people who lack access to arts based activities. “This includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people with disabilities, young people in detention, young people in regional and remote areas, young people from a diversity of cultural backgrounds (ethnic, gender and sexual identification). Social justice is an area of passion for the company and initially we focused on indigenous communities, less so now, as we’ve morphed into general cross-cultural work.”

The company’s activities are extensive and push into areas not commonly associated with Youth Arts. There are four main areas in which the company is active: workshop programs, performance-based projects, outreach workshops and “other”.

These four areas are being pushed laterally as the company engages with technology. Its commitment to infotech is growing rapidly. The GRUNT space will be developed as a telecentre where groups can have access to technology. CONTACT is investigating virtual performance, establishing Perfect Strangers W3, national youth arts site on the world wide web and setting up collaborations with young people and companies who work with youth in global, national and local contexts through technology. The techno-work will also extend into multimedia and broadband with the company looking at making web pages and CD-ROMs, a music interface and midi files in live music. In broadband CONTACT will experiment with on-line workshops. The access to internet will feed back into other areas of operation.

CONTACT is also extending its work into “training” with the establishment of the Bush Pilots Project, a year long course to cater for the young long-term unemployed, “those people who fall through the net”. The focus will be on training young people through providing them with experiences which can prepare them for the “jobs of tomorrow not the jobs of yesterday”. CONTACT attracts a different league of funding through this focus, playing in the “big league”, with DEET (Department for Education, Employment & Training) for example.

The philosophy of CONTACT is based in access, participation, equity and empowerment. The subtext to the philosophy is based in a “serious and informed cheekiness”, the ethic of always working on the “front foot”. The company currently employs three full-time staff – two artistic directors and an office manager – a part time coordinator of cultural programs and around six casual arts workers and tutors at any given time. Pending funding the company envisages a growth in staff which would include a director for the Bush Pilots Program, more administrative assistance, coordinators for the formal outreach work in Redcliffe and the infotech work through Ipswich.

If all progresses as planned for CONTACT, we’ll begin to see the growth of a company in Queensland which challenges the scope and content of traditional youth arts work, informing it with a global perspective.

Jacques Tati’s final film, completed almost a decade before his death, was Parade (1973). It is a strange, decidedly amateurish swansong from this great director. Parade is a modest effort, shot on video and transferred to film, completely theatrical in its setting. Different groups of performers come on and off stage, doing their time-worn routines; Tati meanwhile concentrates on the behaviour of audience members as much as the acts themselves. The film ends with a surprising, ragged coda: children wander about the empty set, picking up discarded objects and letting out little noises that mean nothing and lead nowhere in particular.

Tati’s film is utterly entrancing because it gives the viewer the rare sense that, here, the very language of images and sounds, the potentiality of performance and space, the relationship of spectacle and spectator, is being discovered step by step, as if for the first time. Filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub described Parade as a film about “degrees of nervous flux – beginning with the child which cannot yet make a gesture, who cannot yet coordinate her hand with her brain, and going up to the most accomplished acrobats”.

Parade would make a good double bill with Arf Arf’s wonderful ‘performance film’ Thread of Voice (1993). Although nominally this work could be taken as an innocent ‘documentation’ of some of the sound pieces that Arf Arf have performed live since the mid 80s, the film confounds all categories. They use their sound work to transform the medium and language of film – and vice versa – just as the most inventive recent dance films, such as Mahalya Middlemist’s Vivarium (1993), have done.

Co-ordinates of time and space, and all the usual connectives between these filmic realms, are freely, lyrically distorted in the rigorous montage plan of Thread of Voice. Physical gestures begin in semi-darkness, get carried on by another body in another place. The film constantly displaces itself from one register to another: ‘direct’ filming, varieties of refilming, animation. A marvellous sequence, anchored in an aural performance of a blackly comic and unnerving piece about a violent domestic argument, visually weaves together ciphers, actions and motifs from right across the film. Silhouettes lumber and fly behind screens, a dream of silent cinema that recalls the shows of the Even Orchestra, or the childish pantomime of Wenders’ buddy-heroes in Kings of the Road (1976). Words and drawings, forever cancelled, restarted and superimposed, hurl past frame by frame. Previously seen images of the performers are retrieved, slowed down, frozen, caught mid-production of some odd utterance or gesture.

Arf Arf refer to their sound pieces as ‘songs’, which surely makes Thread of Voice some kind of mutant musical. Their entire fugitive oeuvre, down this past decade, is difficult to ‘place’ in an Australian context. The exploration of body and voice that goes on here, the haphazard constructions of ‘multimedia’ assemblages, the merry ‘deconstructions’ of sound, meaning and narrative draw their inspiration from some other bundle of influences and traditions than the ones we are normally used to recognising and citing in local performance art.

There are traces of art brut, arte povera, Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’, Artaud … and also the ‘chiselling’ practices of the Lettrists, the sound-poetry of Bob Brown, and Baruchello’s visionary uptake on the legacy of Duchamp. But, ultimately, a kind of hushed secrecy is the watchword of Arf Arf’s art. If there is a complex archaeology of influences in their pieces – across all the media they work in – it is a mangled, shattered, thoroughly transformed lineage. There is an extreme ‘symbolist’ legacy in their work, as in the avant garde films of Stan Brakhage or any number of the dense, allusive, little known poets they so admire: the ‘source’ of a piece has been lost or disguised beyond recognition, the key for its decoding has been buried, the ‘score’ they use is a dizzying, compacted mass of lines, dots, letters and markings.

“We do not concentrate on any one medium as we are specifically interested in how a particular medium can be transported into another one”. Arf Arf has always been interested in unusual, cryptic, almost fantastic correspondences and exchanges between different art forms and media. The principal members of Arf Arf are Marcus Bergner, Michael Buckley, Marisa Stirpe and Frank Lovece. Between them, individually and collectively, they have worked in everything from post-punk music (Melbourne’s ‘Little Bands’ era so feebly mythologised in the film Dogs in Space) to CD-ROM, via all the visual and literary arts.

As an ensemble, Arf Arf bears out an old motto of Philip Brophy’s – that it is better to have not artistic intention, just artistic tension. All the key members have different styles, approaches and strengths. Bergner’s forte is his experimental animation – drawing and writing on film – and his radical approach to artistic collage (both evident in his masterly Tales From Vienna Hoods, 1987). Lovece has a very distinctive, quite lyrical and aleatoric way of working with bodies, gestures and voices (as in Te Possino Ammazza, 1987). Buckley’s strength is in the poetic ordering of diverse materials in montage; his work is multi-layered, juggling anarchy and control (as in the excellent recent shorts Witness and Forever Young). And, as one of the best ‘songs’ in Thread of Voice memorably shows, Stirpe is a remarkable performer able to mutate herself with each new vocal inflection.

Arf Arf is a performance group that, it might be said, does not ‘communicate’ easily. But on the other hand, there is an utter simplicity, directness and transparency about what they offer. In their sound pieces, words appear from random noises, are momentarily played with, and then disappear back into a sound-mass. Nor is it much of a theatrical ‘spectacle’: very drawn to non-slickness and the pleasures of an ‘incidental’ art, Arf Arf do their shows in their everyday clothes, without fast or tricky transitions from one piece to the next. You see clearly all the moments of randomness and improvisation that go into their pieces. When they use ‘props’ or items of technology, these are deliberately primitive, clunky, exposed: bits of wood, transistor radios, a 16mm projector.

The artistic work of Arf Arf, across all the media they use, is vivid, kinetic, involving, very humorous, full of the rawness and randomness and mysteriousness of life. It is an extremely heterogeneous art, clashing different styles, timbres, textures. It is sophisticated, deeply considered, and also spontaneous and immediate in its emotional effects. It is full of almost violent juxtapositions and gear shifts – as well as sudden, hushed passages of calm, poetic grace.

This article is part of a series called Across Media written with the assistance of the Visual Arts and Crafts Board of the Australia Council.

“It’s like living on the set,” says Rosalind Crisp on the phone from the studio where she also lives and is now working on The Cutting Room, a solo piece that will be part of the performance component of the Time and Motion project, an ambitious event that brings together choreography, dance/movement and critical writing.

Rosalind Crisp began with Kinetic Energy in Sydney and went on to work in companies and independent projects in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne. In 1991, she received an Individual Development grant to work at Holland’s Centre of New Dance Development and stayed on for three years eventually working with dance/theatre companies in Belgium and Canada. Back in Australia she created throughout 1992-94 The Lucy Pieces, a set of three dance works inspired by a woman from her childhood. “She lived alone and like the rest of the neighbourhood I wanted to know what went on inside her.” Crisp adopted Lucy as her persona for these works and in The Cutting Room she picks up the thread, this time fleshing out her own inner feelings, delving into what she calls her “uncivilised moments.” Uncivilised? “Some mornings I put on Nick Cave and start working before I’m even awake. If I feel sad, bad or mad, I express it, then I press out into those areas of emotional intensity.”

As well as working from improvisation, Crisp has used for inspiration Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper as well as The Handless Maiden, a story that appears in Drusilla Modjeska’s biographical essay/novel The Orchard. Both are stories of women at the extremes, often interpreted as victims of social oppression. But Crisp is interested in exploring another perspective, from the inside. “A lot of The Cutting Room is about death and about female strength in vulnerability and grief. It’s also about the exhilaration of a body flying through space.”

Crisp, who has previously worked alone, is collaborating on this new work with Nigel Jamieson. She describes the relationship as bizarre and wonderful. “He was interested in getting me to backtrack into my childhood to find out where some of these ideas might be coming from. We came up with some strong images—watching my father killing sheep, animals hung in meat bags—though, for me, the piece is not about my childhood. Let’s say if the theatre had windows, you might look out on these real incidents like a disturbing presence. Nigel is interested in clarifying meaning while I’m more interested in the subtle, surreal meanings to the movement.” Movement? “Oh, I can’t decide any more what it is I’m doing! Maybe it’s more theatre, this extreme emotion in dance, or just dance that taken further by channelling it into themes like death and the breaking apart of a woman/myself.”

On the other side of town Julie-Anne Long has covered the walls of the studio with pink cards, each with a sentence, a story, a movement phrase—“sensual, grotesque-gestural, punchy, boppy,” and pictures: Sophia Loren gets an eyeful of Jane Mansfield’s awesome décolletage; a woman with one breast rubs shoulders with occultist Rosaleen Norton’s catwoman with six; a bouquet of burlesque beauties overlaps with all manner of creases, splits and crevices both human and geological; Siamese twins; a body stitched together post autopsy.

Working with Long as dramaturg, I use a sort of conversational method and we’re now at the interesting stage where our vocabulary includes a whole lot of gestures that pass for movement. She’s on the floor tracing scribbles in the air. I’m making notes. In the corner, the tape recorder blurts, “Let’s just relax and say tits.” She cuts across the words with some swooping phrases of her own, punctuated by strange little gestures—nipple snips? Whatever. She has a nice turn of phrase. She stops mid-movement. The definition dances before our eyes. Klividz defined biologically, geologically, chemically and last of all, colloquially, as “the cleft between women’s breasts.” From the tape recorder: “Cleavage is the promise.” Long flips into a set of balletic arm movements. She’ll put the feet in later. “Dancers’ breasts are usually the bits that get in the way.” From the tape: “Anybody tasted breast milk? How was it? Funny. Did you put it in a glass?” Inside this small room, Julie-Anne Long is taking on a word, shaking it around, flaunting it, re-shaping and revealing it for all its meanings. “What am I doing? Most women can’t stand people staring at their breasts when they’re trying to talk about something serious and here I am putting myself and the audience through exactly that experience!”

The Time and Motion project was born in recognition of the growth in volume and maturity of dance and movement-based performance commonly referred to as “independent” and in the significance of the individual exploratory processes that go with it. While opportunities exist for emerging artists to perform their work and profit from collective management and presentation, there are few such opportunities for seasoned artists with a more developed creative processes and artistic vision. Time and Motion comprises performances, workshops, creative development and critical writing.

In Where Have All the Dancers Gone? dancer Sue-Ellen Kohler conducts an intensive workshop on processes that keep movement of the body personal with an aim to develop different understandings of what dance can be. Helen Poynor’s workshop will focus on the non-stylised movement she has developed creating improvised site-specific cross artform collaborations and more recently her work in Java with teacher and artist Suprapto Suryodermo.

The two Creative Development projects are Thursday’s Fictions in which Karen Pearlman and Richard Allen move out of the duo and into the epic with a group of dancers and Body/Space/Language in which artistic counsel for the Time and Motion project Barbara Richardson is joined by teacher-writers Eleanor Brickhill, Kathy Driscoll and Karen Martin in presenting a series of critical writings that will situate local practice within the broader framework of contemporary performing arts theory and experimentation. The writing is intended to serve as a reference point for the artists involved in the project as well as to provoke a higher level of critical dialogue surrounding local dance/movement.

The Time and Motion project runs from July 1-16 at The Performance Space, the University of Western Sydney and Sydney University’s Centre for Performance Studies

Gary Rowe blows on a hand-painted slide in the cavernous reaches of the old Masonic Hall that is Dancehouse in Melbourne and we look for a patch of sun to talk. Rowe, a British artist and performer, is making a new work called Love Song After Death that will premiere here en route to London and Edinburgh.

Rowe combines a background in the visual arts, originally as a painter, with years of work as a dancer. In the 1980s he studied at Dartington College in the UK, an internationally renowned centre for new dance development. Under the visionary Mary Fulkerson, the course encouraged students to think of themselves as artisans—to experiment, make and show their own work. The list of visiting teachers sounds like a roll-call of pioneers of postmodern dance—Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Miranda Tufnell, Laurie Booth, Nancy Topf, Valda Setterfield, Simone Forti, Michael Clark, Richard Alston. Deliberately disoriented, the students had to find their own paths through projects that ranged from social dancing to trapeze or Skinner Release technique. Rowe’s own epiphany came in front of a Mark Rothko painting and he chose to continue a process of choreographic enquiry within the postmodern minimalist tradition.

In its most rigorous form, postmodern dance has relentlessly questioned the vocabularies, frames and artistic functions of dance. Addressing questions to the maker as well as the spectator. The choreographic process is used to test and extend relationships between the visual and the textual, the spatial and the aural. The purpose of art is viewed objectively in contrast to the personal, expressive or spiritual quest and the choreographer’s task is to make patterns of movement articulate and intelligible in very particular ways. Precise, individual offerings of human endeavour are placed inside conundrums of time and space.

Rowe’s first independent work, Eclipse: an Apparition, was shown in a tiny but unusually shaped gallery. Using a grid pattern, he plotted visual and spatial connections for duets between three women. A long and silent work, the bodies violently orbited from the structure before returning to their trajectories. Created with no emotional intent, it held and affected its audience intensely. Subsequently his work has been mainly in the form of site-specific installations combining strong visual images and lighting effects with stylised phrases of movement. In River Crossings, for instance, projected slides from the Queen’s Collection hung like tapestries on the walls of a building. Against a battle scene backdrop and the mixed sounds of water, Ella Fitzgerald and an echo of gunshots, two men danced. Behind them, a woman and a young girl in period costume whipped foils through the air.

Love Song After Death retains a strong visual texture in the slides projected on the wall, objects and bodies. But this time, a text locates an emotional field. Rowe’s autobiographical writing was first reworked by the novelist Peter Slater into fragments of prose. In performance, actor Paul Hampton’s Australian accent distances the identification of the words with a personal self.

Rowe and Alan Widdowson dance duets and solos, hooded and clothed in white. “The invisible man,” laughs Rowe, although the piece peels off the flesh on an emotional world. Perhaps he is the shadow and Alan the angel. The shrouded piano becomes a dream house boarded up with its door unopened. From it emerges the music of Benjamin Britten and Erik Satie—songs of memory and desire. The body is not nude but dissolved, naked in reflected light, a surface for touching, for tattoos and erotic sensation. Addressing both feminine and masculine, the dancer tiptoes across the stage. “I don’t know what those boundaries are,” says Rowe.

It is part memorial—a lover dies, this time of AIDS. The dance is painful—a relentless, physical shuffling. In another room 400 candles floating in wine glasses form a carpet of remembrance. Repetition and stillness inform the work. Freud says that melancholia is the effect of ungrieved loss. Performance is often a problem of unacknowledged loss, both a refusing and an incorporation of the lost figure. Is it also a lament for a positive masculinity, a loss that pervades our culture?

Rowe is grateful for the space, technical and administrative support that Dancehouse has provided for this project. In Britain, as elsewhere, there are fewer opportunities for rigorous investigation of the aesthetics of dance. Popular emphasis on technical prowess is a far cry from the minimal necessities of continuing to say things as an artist, not simply to be a choreographer. Far from home, Gary Rowe has not been distracted and is making another ‘new dance.’

In terms of an alternative dance form, which embodies a challenge to, an extension of, or a reaction towards traditional dance forms, Queensland artists are investigating multiple possibilities. What seems so significant for contemporary experimental dance in all its manifestations is the potential that this elusive form holds for creating new meanings and understandings of dance. The obvious dilemma in considering the contributions of Queensland choreographers within this context is who to include. It follows that this examination is necessarily a selective one. However, I wish only to share my perception of certain individuals whose work is fundamentally exploratory. Although the heterogeneity of new choreography is hardly a localised phenomenon, these artists are essentially re-investigating and celebrating possibilities within dance, and their choreography represents the profusion of new work in Queensland.

Helen Leeson, an independent Brisbane artist, has created work that manifests a collision of post-Cunningham strategies and contemporary experiment. Her Making Zero, performed as part of Brisbane’s Shock of the New festival in 1994, foregrounded the audience by presenting multiple sites for attention and thus demanding a selective viewing process. Four individuals perform separate renderings of movement in an exploration of the levels and parameters of the space and of the other performers. There are rare moments of uniform movement and weight sharing which blend into and out of individual performance. Making Zero is, however, only one representation of a practice that essentially resists categorisation. Leeson’s choreography is eclectic, sometimes utilising contemporary dance technique, sometimes site-specific, sometimes a juxtaposition of numerous elements. Leeson also performs in her own work and that of others. She met with Chaos theory as a dancer for Jean Tally’s A Strange Attraction (1992).

Tally is a choreographer and lecturer in contemporary dance, composition and alignment at Queensland University of Technology. My earliest memories of Jean Tally recall her abandoned laughter, her composed and yet effervescent manner and most significantly, her acute awareness of the moving body. Those first impressions remain valid today. Most recently, Tally has engaged in a creative dialogue with composer Andy Arthurs and designer Tolis Papazoglou. The abiding collaboration has been sustained through two completed projects, A Strange Attraction (1992) and Ritual (1995).

As the title suggests, Ritual is an investigation of the ceremonies that pattern our lives. The piece begins as the audience enters and moves around the circumference of the performance space. Papazoglou’s design is suspended from the ceiling to create a circular screen within the performance space, at times separating the audience from the performers, and at others containing the audience. Ritual is a physical and conceptual journey for its witnesses and the centrality of this aspect of performance communicates Tally’s awareness of the relationship between audience and performer. “I’m interested in ways of seeing, ways of participation,” she explains. Tally is presently acting as collaborator/director for Cyber City Cabaret, a production premiering at the Brisbane Biennial on 31 May. The work is another interactive experience for the audience, but in contrast to Ritual, Cyber City gives its audience even more freedom to choose their own pathways of meaning throughout the performance.

This acknowledgement of the autonomy of the audience is shared by the hybrid art collective, Montage. As part of the Fringe, the six artists who constitute Montage have devised Dormant, a work that communicates five different stories through movement, design and voice. The artists represent a variety of forms (hence the name Montage), and what I find particularly valuable about Dormant is its acceptance of the individuality of the moving body. Of course, this is nothing new. The non-dancer in performance was embraced as far back as America’s Judson Dance Theater in 1962, with artists searching for alternatives to the categorisation of the body in the traditional dance forms of ballet and modern dance. Today, many contemporary choreographers have since returned to technique, manipulating and interrogating it. However for the artists of Montage, individuality is central, as the performers travel divergent paths. This is what makes Dormant such a valuable experience; the audience witnesses a trained dancer performing alongside a vocal artist, and recognises the unique physical moments specific to each individual.

Coinciding with the Fringe is Tripping on the Left Foot of Belief, a program of three works by independent choreographers Clare Dyson, Brian Lucas and Lisa O’Neill. In meeting with Dyson I asked her about her contribution titled Water to a Morning Mouth—a collaboration with performers Avril Huddy and Alison St Ledger. Dyson courageously admitted that she was driven to create Water… as an experiment; that is, “something that can fail.” Dyson’s intrepidity is a conspicuous quality. She considers living in Brisbane part of an effort to somehow distance herself from the traditional expectations placed upon a choreographer in her position. “I try and stay as far away from everything that I’m supposed to do, or what I’m supposed to be.” For Dyson this isn’t so much a reaction against convention as an endeavour to be true to herself and her work. She has a sensitivity to gesture that is really quite remarkable. Water… is dotted with countless memorable images—a frantic rubbing of necks, Avril Huddy lifting her dress, then violently rocking in a chair—and infused with the resonance of St Ledger’s voice.

While the connections between movement and song seem almost tangible in Water to a Morning Mouth, the relationship between text, voice and dance in Maggie Sietsma’s work is more indeterminate. In the choreography of Sietsma, artistic director of Expressions Dance Company, the audience is compelled to create its own connections between the various facets of performance, and in this way she acknowledges the plurality and contingency of creating meaning. As Expressions celebrates its tenth anniversary, Maggie Sietsma and Natalie Weir have created two new works for the company. Alone Together, the director’s latest work, is characteristic Sietsma—an assorted characterisation of humour, melodrama, hopelessness and wretchedness—this instance being inspired by Edward Hopper’s paintings, particularly Night Windows (1928).

Weir worked from the same motivation in creating In-Sight, an integration of athletic and challenging choreography with ‘convention,’ and the imposition of conventional gender roles as one indication of this. Weir’s Burning (1994) was promoted as ‘new dance’ for Queensland Ballet’s contemporary season and the piece definitely manifests a challenge to traditional modes of performance for a ballet company. Needless to say, the choreographer’s utilisation of spectacle, illusion, virtuosity, technique and expressive movement wasn’t exactly ‘new dance’, but rather a re-orchestration of these elements within a familiar contemporary dance form.

Another night at the Opera House. Sue-ellen Kohler is seen outside. She looks sick.
Perhaps it’s her all-day-and-night morning sickness or has something she’s just seen caused that pained expression?

What’s the matter, Sue-ellen? “I have just sat through two hours of… of…” Her mouth opens but nothing comes out. She tries again but the words evade her. Finally. “There was…a lot of colour and movement. There. That’s it. I saw something with a lot of colour and movement.”

You’re talking about the latest Sydney Dance Company performance Fornicon. There must be more to say about it than “colour and movement.”

“Oh well, after what I just saw it’s hard to remember that there is much more to dance anyway. I mean, the audience seemed well pleased with a bit of light entertainment, a bit of a story taken from other stories and a chance to perv on all those glamorous, hot bodies—a bit like Baywatch, nothing too challenging or disturbing. What more can you ask for?”

I thought Fornicon was inspired by great moments of eroticism, love, sex, power, citing De Sade, Bataille, Calasso, Nin and Byron to comment on our repressive views of sexuality in a world terrified of AIDS?

“Exactly! You go to see dance that claims all those things and you find that there’s no danger there, just pretence. Gesturing towards breaking taboos while playing it safe. Safe eroticism—I didn’t know that was possible till now. The Claytons form of sex—spend with an eye on saving. Dance can therefore remain a powerless form of communication, commenting on nothing and no-one and (almost) everyone seems to be happy.”

But surely the work has merit. This company is one of the most highly funded in Australia—one of Australia’s cultural flagships adored by Paul Keating and dance critic Jill Sykes alike.

“I think there are individual merits but if I took either the costumes, the design or even the music out of context I would seem to be speaking of three unrelated contributions. You can see the skill and enjoy those elements on their own but in context with the work, they are all at odds.

“Fornicon is so underdeveloped that each element represents a different ego. Because the work in itself doesn’t have a voice or language to call its own, it then becomes transparent, leaving it at the mercy of either the glamour or ravages of fashion.”

“The story is a torrid little soap opera sorely lacking originality and shape. The ‘author’ (Graeme Murphy) is imprisoned for writing pornography. The scenes unfold as visions of his censored imagination. Drawing on the classic figures of love and lust including Eros, Paris, Don Juan and Helen of Troy, the author interweaves their stories and desires with contemporary icons including a pop star and a giant, winged penis. The steps were the same ones we’ve been seeing from Sydney Dance Company for years now—with the exception of Mark Williams the pop singer as ‘the Don’ who was doing more dancing and commanded more attention than any of the dancers.”

“My performer’s body is tired of watching these skilled dancers throwing themselves violently from one shape to another, performing steps that speak to the body (especially the female body) as if it is a commodity to be used and abused as the means for another’s end. There was a brief respite, however, with a short solo set within the surreality of an opium dream and performed by Wakako Asano. A dramatic contrast to the other scenes, it drew the audience into the sinuous quality of the dancer’s butoh-esque movement. The performance is driven by a strong filmic score by Martin Armiger who collaborated on the scenario with Graeme Murphy.”

“Audiences. They like to be in control, to commodify and ultimately have total power over our cultural experiences. To me, Fornicon is a perfect example of this. The erotic, the idea fundamental to the work, which is about breaking taboo, is here a neatly packaged, very safe expression of middle-class, repressed sexual desire. Perhaps Fornicon is so well supported because it is so safe and unthreatening. More innovative work by independent artists is ignored or denigrated. If in Fornicon we are supposed to vicariously live out what we can no longer do in real life, then one cannot help but feel repressed at all turns. The sexual fantasy of the ‘author’ provides no satisfactory escape for a culture that is morally cautious.”

Sydney Dance Company, Fornicon, Sydney Opera House, May 6-30; Adelaide Festival Centre from June 22; then Melbourne and Canberra.

FB Our funding was cut approximately 50% for 1995 so rather than spread that very thinly across the whole year, the company elected to use its funding over seven months, which is not that unusual for small companies working on tight budgets. The current company finish at the end of July.

Sue’s resignation forced us to look at what was going on. We stopped and asked how do we get our funding back and which direction do we go? So we’ve had consultations with the community, with funding bodies, dancers, and other artistic directors. We wanted to find out if there really is a desire to have a professional contemporary dance company in Canberra and what the form of that company should be. We held a public meeting at the end of April and more than a hundred people attended. There were lots of letters of support not only from members of the community but also from people like Meryl Tankard and Don Asker, the two previous artistic directors of the company. We got good media coverage and representatives from the Australia Council and Cultural Council (the ACT funding body) attended.

We presented a strategy paper for options for 1996. Although the need for a company was clear, the issue of what kind of future was not, because of the number and diversity of the people at the meeting. But it did make clear who we should keep talking with, including dancers and choreographers.

FB Very concerned that there might not be a company—with a loss of work opportunities, peer opportunities—just knowing that you’ve got a company in Canberra you can work with, get advice from, get support from—administrative support, classes, keeping up professional standards.

KG The federal cut was from $142,000 to $100,000, the local one from $150,000 to $85,000. What was the rationale for the local cut?

FB A lot of things. The bottom line was they didn’t feel that audience development was happening fast enough, that the work was inaccessible.

FB We’ve been doing surveys for a year now and no-one has said “inaccessible.” At the meeting with Cultural Council we asked, “Where do your statistics come from?” and they didn’t have an answer. They were correct about the high level of government subsidy but it’s on a par with other dance companies around Australia. Their argument was that in comparison with other non-dance companies in Canberra on lower subsidy, how could they justify funding this company.

FB Exactly. The result—no professional dance company and the loss of sixteen years of work. But the forum was a positive event and the board has an exciting concept for next year to answer everyone’s problems. We did a very successful tour to Greenmill in Melbourne and got excellent reviews. We took Succulent Blue Sway to the Gippsland Festival, an inspiring experience—so many people want to see dance. Then we did Askew, Dance of Line here—and it was well received. Finally, we’re doing In the Wind’s Eye comprising two pieces by Sue Healey and one by returning Canberran Phillip Adams. Then it’s over to the board for 1996.

It takes a while for a company to establish itself. Sue’s third year has been very good, so it’s a bit like it’s been cut out from under her just as it’s all starting. It shows a lack of insight from various quarters. We’ve also had the problem of negative arts journalists, even when they haven’t seen the work. But Sue is leaving on a fantastic note.

KG What is this concept for 1996 that’s going to “answer everyone’s problems”?

FB A choreographic centre with an artistic advisory panel (local and interstate). We’re calling for projects—these will be advertised over the next few weeks. We can provide administration, publicity, rehearsal space and a performance venue …

KG Is this an interim strategy or a long-term one giving the board more power in the absence of an artistic director? Could it be like the inclination to replace theatre company artistic directors with executive producers?

FB We definitely do not want to cut out the idea of the artistic director. The board will not make the artistic decisions; the advisory panel will select from the proposals submitted.

SH It’s not really dark, it’s just that Canberra is no longer the place I want to be. It’s a difficult place—it’s conservative, it can be small-minded and it’s small. But I feel I’ve done a lot of what I wanted to do and the company’s been a fantastic stepping-stone for me.

SH He was a student at the VCA many years ago when I was teaching there. I was intrigued by him. He’s a unique dancer and choreographer. In Australia, he’s only worked with this company; the rest of his time has been spent dancing in New York with many cutting edge choreographers. He’s ready now to make a work.

SH The emphasis is on distortion and restriction, how distorted bodies can be—it’s not a pretty little dance.

SH Saddle Up is light-hearted on the outside, but it’s really a comment on my time in Canberra. I did a sketch of it in our last season, Askew. It has a rodeo theme. Physically, I’m looking at the horse but metaphorically it’s about what a ride I’ve had in Canberra. It’s been tough but I keep getting on that horse. The other piece, more of a major work, is called Hark Back. There’s an ancestral element to it and also an evolutionary thread, and in a grand way, light evolving through the different elements from water to land to air—that’s the general structure to it.

SH The basis of my work is a fascination with the body but I sense a change in what I’m doing. I’m interested in what the body is saying and what the motivation for movement is, more in a theatrical sense.

KG How is this expressed—is it more psychological as opposed to working on form?

SH Yes, with a strong base in physical form, but the theatricality is vital and each performer explores genetic, physical and family origins. It’s fabulous for them.

KG Do you use speech? I ask because there is a proliferation of talk in recent dance and because the material would seem to lend itself to speech.

SH A little. I have used it before but only as an aside. Once people introduce language it can take away from what the logic of the body is saying. Speech has to be organic for me, to come from a central physical focus. My work in this show with the body is quite architectural. It’s the first time in Canberra I’ve worked with a set. I’ve designed it in collaboration with a builder. I’m working with the set and the dancers as I create it. It’s very three-dimensional, with lots of possibilities for changing spatial relationships—putting people upside down, placing them high in the air. We move on it but there are shifting elements. So it’s architectural in form because, as with the bodies and lives of the dancers, I’m looking at the evolutionary element.

The music is composed and improvised by percussionist Keith Hunter. I always have live music. He’s very much a performer in the piece. There’s also a Pianola activated by the performers—including myself.

SH I head straight back to Melbourne to teach briefly at the VCA and then I’m off overseas.

Vis a Vis new season In the Wind’s Eye commences June 28 at Gorman House Arts Centre, Canberra.

It’s almost expected these days that performances will appear at all corners of the room, offering the audience all manner of perspectives. My personal favourite is still the perspex panel inserted in the ceiling of the Performance Space to reveal earth shovelled above the audience’s heads, ‘burying us alive’ in the Sydney Front’s Passion (1993). Anyway, just when we thought we’d seen all the Performance Space had to offer, Next Steps uncovered more: an attic; a wall shelf; a window; a space above a doorway; and then a circle in the centre of the room, all of us sitting on portable stools. To our right, Fragment 1 by Leisa Shelton gave us a horizontal show of legs defying gravity, lining up and slipping out of view. And how strange legs are when you look at a line of them for long enough. This serious fun with movement and space included some very nice finger and footwork from accordionist Gisel Milon.

Along a narrow platform, Jean/Lucretia—Nikki Heywood singing beautifully from Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and taking a movement microscope to her grandmother Jean, guiding us through and into her stance, her gait, the way she stood when she laughed, taking all of this into her own body and out again, not quite becoming but commenting on it all in a personal, emotional and at the same time detached demonstration of memory.

In three separate spaces, Andrea Aloise and Katia Molino created Gynaecology I, II and III, beginning with some wriggly work through a see-through tube, some raunchy bum waggling and concluding with an evocative, silent scenario at a window that definitely has the makings of a longer work. Outside the door and in the ceiling, Alan Schacher retraced the steps of some former inhabitants of the Performance Space, recreating remembered movements from his own and other performances.

Anna Sabiel stepped inside her metal rigging and fell into suspended animation inside this external body while the machine breathed sound around her. In the studio and at the windows of the office space, photographer Heidrun Löhr created a theatre of images from the landscape round Tibooburra along with a set of tableaux containing suggestions of movement—boat, fan, tree, caught inside rusting metal frames.

In Fugue, a film directed by Louise Curham, choreographer Sue Healey’s four dancers moved through physical spaces, some we might identify as real, others far less certain. Bodies transformed, shuddered, flew across the screen in the (very) cool air outside the theatre. In Gideon Obarzanek’s postmodern apache dance with Narelle Benjamin, My Brother-in Law’s Most Disfunctional Marriage, movement became metaphor, the couple all angles and impossible connections.

Kate Champion is an inventive dancer with a nice sense of humour. Her pieces in last year’s Steps program (a woman falling upwards from her dress, a drugged girl barely able to stand) take some beating. This year, her work Of Sound Body and Mind lays bare the fears of the damaged body, complete with amplified sound of knees creaking (audience groaning in sympathy) as Champion repeatedly steps up and down from a chair to change a continually failing light bulb.

Finally, Jeremy Robbins explores all the gymnastic possibilities of a bathtub full of water in a very athletic striptease displaying the pure pleasure of the body at full stretch, directed by Gail Kelly with her usual theatrical flair. This year’s Steps program was a nice step up from last year’s Steps One. The participating artists are linked by their work being primarily physically based and by collectively representing dance/physical performance in its broadest terms. Curator of the program, Leisa Shelton (Theatre is Moving) has plans to tour.

She stomps on tattered shoes into the long, narrow performance space, all concentration, moving forwards along a line, looking straight ahead and into the moving light source. She switches her half smiling attention to the audience, flips into a set of sideways almost Indian dance poses, half-turns of the body. Her attention moves to her assistant with the light as he moves to another part of the space. The shadow of the tiny dancer shoots up and across the wall. Her movement is sometimes eccentric, sometimes reminiscent of something ‘oriental,’ sometimes ‘exotic,’ sometimes minimal. Loud grunge by Beck interspersed with silence counterpoints the performance. She completes the piece with a perfect swan dive into her tatty shoes. She brings the house down with her. Lisa O’Neill describes Sweet Yeti as “a movement based piece designed to take the viewer on a theatrical journey into the world of one small women. The piece is peculiar in manner with a sudden twist and turn of thought around every corner. The woman is both happy and sad, determined and carefree, loud and soft, but most of all, she is alive.”

Lisa O’Neill is an independent dance artist now based in Brisbane. She has worked as performer, choreographer and teacher both in Brisbane and with the Darc Swan Company in Sydney. She has a diploma in Dance from QUT. Sweet Yeti is her first solo work.

Father and son act, Richard and Sam performing in What to Name Your Baby, filmed and shown by SBS and screened as part of Tasdance’s first season under new artistic directors Karen Pearlman and Richard James Allen with dancers Joanna Pollitt, Gregory Tebb, Kylie Tonatello, Samantha Vine and Scott Graylands who will join the company after recovering from an injury he sustained while performing in Adelaide. Tasmanian reviewers and audiences took to the new company with praise and enthusiasm and not a little curiosity about work that features a baby and a strong emphasis on the spoken work. The company is based in Launceston and toured What to Name your Baby to Burnie and Hobart in April and May.

Spin has been initiated entirely by the dancers within the company as Chrissie Parrott herself is on sabbatical in France. The dancers decided to take a radical approach and invited me, as a visual artist working with hybrid art with a particular interest in collaborative processes, to work on the project with them as visual consultant.

The idea of the season is to create an unusual and exciting event for the audience. This huge old warehouse will be completely blacked out (no mean feat as the roof has acres of skylights!) and the audience will be led by a surreal guide through the space, from one event to the next. Each event will be like a strange fragment of thought that emerges out of the blackness in different parts of the space and then disappears. Each of the company members will choreograph one of these fragments and there will be an additional one from guest choreographer Sue Peacock. I am working with each choreographer to develop the best possible use of the space, lighting and the use of colour in the sets, costumes and props.

Claudia Alessi decided to combine gymnastics, circus skills and dance in her fragment. Her work will use ropes, trampolines and mesh walls. Helene Embling, the French aerialist, has been brought in to work with the dancers and develop the necessary rope skills. As Claudia wanted the audience’s eye level to coincide with dancers in full flight—up on ropes and jumping up from trampolines—her work is positioned down in the loading bay of the warehouse with the audience up above on the ramps around it. The piece will use a landscape of ropes, side lighting and slides projected up through the trampolines onto the dancers. As the predominant colours of the ropes and trampolines are greys and browns we decided to restrict the palette of the slides and to work with etchings and drawings.

One of Claudia’s central idea is an exploration of the human desire to fly so we concentrated on this and will use the extraordinary Leonardo drawings of flying machines as projections, interspersing them with his anatomical drawings of the body.

Paul O’Sullivan wanted to develop a solo in which the only light source came from lights strapped to his body. We are using smoke in the environment to make the shafts of light emanating from his body more visible. We are presently working on making his fragment more site-specific—his climb up into the roof will make the audience aware of the height and scale of the building and the piece will start to explore the relationship in scale between the dancer’s body and the huge old warehouse.

Lisa Heaven decided to explore a dark, emotional stasis. Through extended conversations an austere aesthetic emerged in black and white lighting and black costumes. The physical presence of water appeared as an important element for her. We decided to introduce a slight shimmer of water falling like mist into the circle of light in which she is dancing. A solo cellist will improvise in another circle of light. The other element is a male dancer suspended on a wall and transfixed in a beam of light, which travels the length of the warehouse to make a circle of light around him. The circle of light parallels the Da Vinci drawing in that it transcribes the exact limits of the reach of his limbs. Throughout the work, the dancer traces the limits of his body. The distance and blackness between the elements in the piece and the lack of contact between the performers heightens the dark sense of stasis central to the work.

Sue Peacock is choreographing a fragment to take place in the centre of the space. She wants to investigate lasting human values and emotions and has positioned her work in the heart of the space. Her work will be viewed in the round and is to be lit by a ring of fire.

Jon Burtt’s fragment takes place within a sculptural form composed of eight vertical shafts of light in a ring. It is an interactive work, which has been developed by myself, Jon and John Patterson, a sound artist and uses information technology to create an environment of sound and light, which allows the performer to generate sounds through his position in space. It becomes a tool to allow Jon to extend the potential of improvisation.

We also worked with performance artist Matthew Ngui, originally from Singapore and who has lived in Perth for around five years. We asked him to sing the first Chinese song that he could remember—a haunting and beautiful tune. It turned out it was the theme tune for a Chinese TV show! The dancer moves slowly within a circle of lights, which shine vertically onto the floor. When he moves he triggers short snatches of the song (via sensors) like half recalled memories. As these snatches of song start to layer over each other a reinterpretation develops which explores different understandings of time and memory.

Kylie-Jane Wilson is interested in extreme athleticism and fast, intensive movement. She suggested the use of Intelligent Lighting and we are working on developing ways of using it with smoke to generate huge sculptural forms in space—cones and sheets of light that inform the choreography by delineating areas within which the dancers move.

Peter Sheedy decided to explore the nature of work. His piece, “Grind”, looks at the fragmentation and specialisation of tasks, which have occurred in the workplace since the industrial revolution. He is using a gestural, minimal and repetitive movement language to reflect this. We decided to further investigate these ideas through the use of lighting states, which only partially reveal the space and the dancers in it. One of these states is a horizontal channel of light at waist height, which reveals fragments of the dancers locked into repetitive, gestural movement sequences, which echo the processes of workers on an assembly line. Another vertical shaft of light partially reveals a person suspended, working on a chain hoist.

The final sequence is danced with the dancers’ backs to the audience, their faces never revealed. The lighting shines from behind them towards the audience through a chicken wire fence. The patterning of the shadows cast by the mesh fragments and conceals the bodies of the dancers.

It has been an intriguing and challenging experience for me as a visual artist to work with seven choreographers with such differing aesthetics, collaborating with them to help develop visual environments that complement the full intention of the works. I hope that this radical initiative taken by the dancers of the Chrissie Parrott Dance Company will pave the way for many more such inter-disciplinary collaborations.

Multimedia Forum One—’Government Support for a Creative Nation’—at Sydney Town Hall on 8 March, was the first of a series of forums arising from the interactive multimedia (IMM) initiatives announced in the commonwealth’s 1994 cultural policy, Creative Nation. The event was primarily an information dissemination exercise—it provided a platform for besuited bureaucrats and corporate types to deliver monologues on the various programs established under the $84 million allocated in Creative Nation to the development of IMM in Australia. Absent from the vast bulk of the day’s proceedings was discussion of the role of creative artists in the ‘new’ medium, or indeed of the content of the multimedia “product” the emerging industry will be assiduously merchandising.

Richard Heale of the Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association kicked off with a hubristic SWOT analysis of multimedia in Australia (that’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats to those uninitiated into the arcana of corporate doublespeak). Heale advocated “harnessing the opportunities created by the new technologies to grow our own industry” based on the production of domestically and internationally saleable content. We must steer clear, he helpfully cautioned, of “multimediocrity” and “multimundanity”. His glowing reference to the establishment of the Telestra/Microsoft on-line network exemplified the total lack of a critical register in much of the thinking around CD-ROM and the infobahn, especially given the spectre of Australia as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. Tellingly, Heale warned of the “susceptibility” of the industry to “market intervention” by big government, which he believes can “distort the IMM marketplace and retard its development”. Paradoxically, he simultaneously applauded the proposed 150% tax write off for CD-ROM R&D, a replay of the infamous 10BA scheme which, in the words of one conference delegate, was “one of the biggest disasters ever to befall the Australian film industry.”

Communications and Arts Minister Michael Lee stressed the need to focus on content and to develop a coordinated approach to industry development to ensure that Australia is not swamped by overseas product. Lee underlined the importance of the development of an “open access regime” guaranteed by government for the on-line services coming our way. He emphasised the “hybridity” of the nascent media zones of the late 20th century and the need for “collaboration” between software and creative producers. Noble sentiments, but the remainder of the forum provided little opportunity for the articulation of exactly how such a collaboration might be effected.

Gwen Andrews from the Department of Communications and the Arts reported that the Australian Multimedia Enterprise—a Commonwealth owned organisation allocated $45 million under Creative Nation— will fund, through one off grants of between $200,000 and $700,000, “state of the art”, “world class” interactive titles which demonstrate significant “innovation” and “creativity”. Title development kicks off with the Australia on CD program designed to showcase Australian cultural endeavour by developing 10 CD-ROMs that focus on national cultural institutions. The Department of Communications and the Arts is currently calling for applications for funding under this scheme.

The AFC and the AFTRS are also winners in the world of Creative Nation. Jason Wheatley outlined the AFTRS’ plans for its $950,000 over 4 years allocated to fund the establishment of a multimedia laboratory and to extend the AFTRS’ advanced professional training in multimedia related areas. Michael Ward reported on the AFC’s $5.25 million over four years for developmental multimedia projects. The overall objective of the new AFC funding is to encourage initiatives which explore the creative potential of multimedia. The Commission will be targeting arts and entertainment in the form of interactive movie projects, computer game development and artists’ projects.

Ian Creagh from Department of Employment, Education and Training outlined the Cooperative Multimedia Centres (CMCs) program which has been allocated $56.5 ($20.3 million over the first four years) for the establishment of up to six CMCs around the country. The primary aim of the Centres—which will be operational by mid 1995— is to “facilitate the formation of the skills required to meet the needs of the emerging interactive multimedia industry”. Trouble is, it seems little thought has gone into developing a cogent picture of exactly what skills are required and who should have access to the training. How, moreover, are existing cultural producers—visual and electronic artists, designers, filmmakers, performers, scriptwriters—going to access the prospective cornucopia of training and industry development opportunities? How will their involvement, and their access to the brave new technologies of the information revolution, be ensured? Will the energies of the new techno-bohemians whose creation the CMCs will ‘facilitate’ be directed totally to, in the words of one conference delegate, “turning a buck”, or will there also be space for research, experimentation and a critical engagement with the formal and aesthetic properties of the medium?

Interestingly, the sole presentation by an artist—Tom Ellard of Severed Heads—elicited the most enthusiastic crowd response. Ellard demonstrated the CD-ROM Metapus which documents the band’s recording and performance history. His advocacy for the key role of musicians, i.e., artists, in the development of interactive multimedia in this country set in sharp relief the almost total absence of any engagement, on the part of the apparatchiks of the state and business, with the question of the involvement of individual creators. The only other moment in the day which drew a comparable response was Michael Lee’s collective mea culpa about the disgraceful treatment of the artist-architect Jorn Utzon by the myopic and philistine bureaucracy of the 1960s. Perhaps there’s a message there for the incumbent engineers of the ‘multimedia platform’ of the putatively creative nation. Stay tuned for further forums—the next series, on cultural creators, may hopefully address the key factor largely omitted from the first series.

Information on future forums is available from the Department of Communications and the Arts. The forum series will travel to Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra.

Shelly Lasica, Sandra Parker, Trevor Patrick, John Utans and Ros Warby are all mature dancers and choreographers who have worked in a wide variety of settings. All of them have choreographed and performed their own work, and collaborated with other performing artists in dance, theatre and opera. All have worked overseas, so understand their practice in relation to dance and choreographic practice throughout the world.

Their highly individual work has grown from explorations of a range of classical, modern and postmodern movement and performance techniques including classical ballet, American modern dance, European dance/theatre, release techniques, alignment work and improvisation. Their work is frequently performed without sound. When present, sound is just as likely to be spoken text as music. Although their movement is often subtle, small and slow, the experience of watching their work is vivid.

The questions “What characterises Australian dance in the 90s?”, “How is that shaped?” and “What is the future of dance in Australia?” asked of these five practitioners led to very general discussions. The conversations included issues such as the definition of an Australian dance style, the diversity of work here, support for dance and the impact of new technology.

Many of the conversations began with my asking what sense it makes to talk about Australian dance.

JU The push to find the ultimate Australian style in dance, as in any art form, results in token gestures such as the Australian Ballet’s commissioning of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie or Ned Kelly. I don’t think you can push an identity like that…I’m conscious of being an Australian choreographer and dancer but I prefer to place myself in a dance heritage and to reflect on myself as an Australian dancer from this framework…If there’s anything that characterises Australian dance it is its diversity.

RW When people talk about Australian dance in a positive way it’s all about the strength, the power, the athleticism and the space that Australian dancers occupy. When you think about that, it’s about people “doing” something, and dancers here are very good at “doing”. When I am working, I watch. The combination of doing, watching and sensing is very hard, very disciplined work and you come at it from a very rigorous process. In the training of dancers here, and in the social environment here, “doing” is a much more popular way of existing than sensing, watching and observing.

Australian dance, like many other art forms in Australia, is under constant pressure to make easily reproducible and digestible product. Popular culture’s aspiration to preserve an eternally youthful body, together with its stress on the visual and our culture’s limited understanding of physicality, encourage dance to be experienced merely as spectacle.

TP The institutionalised learning of dance is such that the dance scene is constantly moving from one wave of youthful exuberance to another and often does not reach the point where people are practising as mature artists and working with ideas. Few young artists think of themselves as artists. To most people who are practising dance, it’s a job. Again because it is so much tied with youthful vitality, the work being performed and made is imbued with that. The work is often about glamour, virtuosity, the spectacular…Where is the art amongst all this hormonal activity? It’s very difficult to fight that, particularly when people are funded in ways that encourage them to pursue that energy.

So who in the dance scene is working with ideas and how are such individuals supported?

TP Usually the people working in this way are older. They are supported by other artists and each other, and through personal exchange with the international community. They don’t get a lot of popular support. They tend to become known as the “dancer’s dancer” or the “choreographer’s choreographer”, but it is this body of work that is at the core of the development of dance in this country.

TP It has to, because one constantly feeds the other. Although it’s not often acknowledged, any developments that occur in the popular form I feel are made sourcing this other constant that is bubbling away beneath everything. To involve it in the hunger that is the popular arts would be the death of that sort of creativity. It needs to be supported to survive but left alone to do its work. If it was trying to function under the pressure to fill seats, I don’t think it could.

What is the diversity of dance in Australian in the 90s? A stunning Merry Widow; an elastic modern dance; a contact improvisation with text spoken by the dancers; a male dancer in a black frock; a story told in the gestures of hands and eyes; a solo dancer moving without a sound in a gallery; a Western-trained dancer, a designer, an actress, an Eastern-trained dancer and several musicians collaborating in performance; a raunchy rendezvous in a café to rival any Grand Marnier TV ad; a barefoot woman in a jumpsuit on a wooden floor listening intently for the next move; a woman with a birdcage on her head; a woman pulling an endless strand of red wool from her mouth; any number of people doing for the thousandth time something with a chair…The multicultural society is rich with diversity, but how comfortable is it sustaining difference?

TP It’s an interesting problem that I have noticed in the last few years, the dance establishment trying to homogenise the whole scene into one big, happy, harmonious community. I don’t think it is. I think there are a lot of vibrant, diverse forms and they need to be separate, they need their own space, and this corralling, it seems to me, from organisations that purport to represent the whole community, is misguided.

SL The homogenisation somehow goes in line with people trying to identify an Australian dance style. But there is no one story and no one history and to set up official histories is the predilection of reasonably unpleasant forces. It disturbs me immensely that the perception exists of a recent springing up of contemporary work from a single source, when if you look at the bigger picture you see how things grow and develop, how the diversity grows and develops.

JU It is a time of diversity. I just wish that people would accept that diversity. When I think of Melbourne and the different philosophies that different dance makers are employing, there’s a very rich and vital practice. What bugs me a little is the competition, or that …

So, as long as everyone’s fighting for the dollar, then everyone will have to step on top of one another, maintain and fight for their turf?

SL One thing that I think would have a very positive effect on dance in Australia and the arts generally is if the whole funding situation was exploded, so that there was not just one source of funding. There needs to be much more diversity: private funding, corporate funding and foundations. That’s quite hard to set up in Australia, but somehow it has to be nurtured. In this way you would end up with a far more multi-layered community, which can only be better.

In the last decade of the millennium, technology is the buzzword. Is there anything happening with new technology worth talking about? Are the computer boffins getting past gimmickry? Are we being transported into a completely new age?

TP Technology is having an extraordinary effect on the whole form: film, video, computers and interactive sound. And it’s not just because artists want to make the most of what is available to them. It’s also that funding bodies and governments even are legislating to manipulate the artistic community along particular lines of achievement, in what they perceive as the development of the arts and creating exportable commodities…One of the big dilemmas now seems to be how to integrate the body and technology in performance so that one isn’t just dancing around in front of a film, or dancing over music. There seems to be a quest to make that happen, and I don’t think it can. I think that a body will always be a body and it can’t deconstruct before your very eyes and fade in and fade out, and materialise and dematerialise except in quite a literal way.

SL New technology is not automatically superior to other technology. Technology is a wonderful tool but it has to be seen in context. It certainly has limitations and the idea that a live performance can be completely transferred into a new medium is nonsense. Why have people chosen the live arts as their medium? It’s about the experience. No matter how extraordinary a film or video, it does not replicate the live experience.

Another baffling thing is the belief that new technologies can be developed into something meaningful overnight.

SL You need only look at people who have been working in video art for over twenty years. It’s not a matter of running at it. It’s a matter of working something through. It’s very short-sighted of people to think they are going to develop this work quickly. That quick hit mentality is very much associated with a product-based view of art production.

RW If those individuals can just keep a certain persistence and integrity to their practice, then maybe there’s the possibility that an understanding of choreographic practice will extend.

SL The future of dance in Australia relies on the generosity of spirit among practitioners and an increasing belief in the practice, a realistic belief in the practice and an integrity about what it is that one does. Until practitioners have that sense, why should anyone else take notice?

How is the mediascape likely to change over the next decade and how does this affect the practice of new media art?

The changes in the technology of the media that are either happening or imminent have been much hyped, and not without reason. New media forms will open up some interesting possibilities for art practice, and perhaps close off some old ones.

Less often discussed is a second aspect of this— the changing expectations and competencies of audiences. The media often discusses the media as if the process of choosing, receiving and interpreting media flow were some kind of natural process. No matter how much the technoboosters might like to presume that the development of the new media vectors will automatically create a new audience and a new market, it ain’t necessarily so. The relationship between existing audience cultures and new media forms is always a complicated and quirky business. This is as true for the uses made of media by art as by commerce. Changes in media forms often appear to be driven by new technologies but what drives these new technologies is the problem foreseen and the opportunity seized by a number of media oligopolists. Basically, every medium faced the same problem in the 80s: costs were rising faster than audiences or markets were growing. This was the problem with the movie business, television, publishing, computers and telephony.

One solution to this problem was globalisation—the campaign against the cultural protectionism of countries like France and Australia and the privatisation of state telephone monopolies in many countries are examples of this strategy. A whole range of businesses, based in TV or publishing or telephony, from well developed markets such as Australia, Italy, England or the US, built global empires in a climate of reduced protectionism, and the privatisation of formerly public media assets or state industrial monopolies.

The second solution is to try to take a chunk of the media market away from some other media industry. In the US the phone companies and the cable TV companies have been contemplating this for some time. Cable network owners want to use their infrastructure to carry phone calls as well and vice versa. This would require pulling down the regulatory walls within the US and this in essence is what was behind the push for a new communications bill and all that guff about the ‘information superhighway’.

The third option is to develop a new technology for which one can charge a premium price or with which one can grab a big share of an as yet undefined new market for culture. The so-called experience industry (including ‘virtual reality’) and multimedia (including CD-ROM) are two different versions of this process.

The economics of the experience business are very simple. American punters will pay about eight bucks for 90 minutes of feature movie, but will pay eight bucks for 10 minutes of virtual reality or for 30 minutes of I-max format 3-D cinema. For the most part these are experiments developed by a combination of movie business cultural skills and Silicon Valley computer industry technology, a marriage dubbed ‘Siliwood’.

Since it is by no means clear who has the cultural capital required to make heightened experience media work, all kinds of people from cinema directors to video game produces to performance artists end up getting sucked into this development process. The experience industry is based on the premise of increasing the intensity of the spectacle. For example, Douglas Trumbull who produced famous special effects for 2001 and Bladerunner is now trying to develop experiential cinema. Brenda Laurel, who has a background in theatre and performance as well as a doctorate in computer interface design is working on a virtual reality environment called Place Holder. Ivan Sutherland, one of the most famous names in interface engineering is into 3-D interactive environments. Disney is also trying to turn animations like Aladdin into a virtual ‘product’ for its theme parks. Video game maker Sega has the AS-1, a highly kinetic ride designed for video game arcades.

If the experience industry is mostly about increasing the intensity of the spectacle, multimedia are about increasing the freedom of movement of the person using the media. VR is in theory an attempt to offer both simultaneously—but in practice ends up falling on one side of the line or the other. It simply isn’t feasible with present technology to offer intensity of experience combined with interactivity. Interactive media, hypermedia or multimedia are mostly pretty low resolution technologies compared to cinema or even television, but don’t limit the user to one narrative strand.

Interactivity can be delivered via some kind of portable product like a CD-ROM, or over a network, be it the telephone system used by the internet or cable and satellite vectors that presently deliver multichannel television. On the internet, the World Wide Web is growing rapidly and offers space for low cost experiments, like video artist David Blair’s Wax Web. CD-ROM is also a potentially low cost medium and many artists are presently exploring it. Interactive television is another story, and experiments here are mostly restricted to corporate test beds for commercial products. In the US, access to this medium depends on mainlining the community access principle already in place for pay TV.

In the relatively high tech area of the experience media, the talents of creative artists are brought in by investors hedging their bets on what kinds of cultural forms might work with as yet unspecified audiences. In those areas of interactive media that use established software tools and delivery formats it is often possible to create works on very small budgets. An example is the very successful CD-ROM Myst, produced by a team of three people working at home. Many visual artists and filmmakers are now experimenting with CD-ROM works.

The first big problem is distribution. There is as yet no easy way to distribute CD-ROM art. Book publishers and video game companies are rushing out CD-ROM based products, and these are distributed via computer stores and occasionally, on an experimental basis at this stage, by bookshops. Many of these products are very poor, particularly some of the crap authored by publishers and TV documentary producers, but because they have media conglomerates of the order of Time-Warner behind them, they are on the market.

Most interactive products from commercial producers are adaptations of existing cultural forms, including encyclopaedias, music video, documentaries and video games. They often have high production values but fail to maintain the interest of the idea or to really use interactivity in any interesting way. How is pressing buttons and waiting ages for the screen to redraw any more interactive than flipping the pages of a book? Where interactivity gets interesting is where the skills of film, video, music, games and publishing collide with each other. In Australia, producers with a diverse range of media experience such as Troy Innocent, Brad Miller, Linda Dement, John Collette and VNS Matrix are all producing interesting hybrid forms of interactivity, mostly using readily available delivery formats such as CD-ROM and laser disk. Jon McCormack’s work stands out in this company because of his abilities in computer programming. On the whole, however, the opportunities for artists, particularly for Australian artists, lie in bringing conceptual and cultural forms to existing technologies, rather than being on the so-called ‘cutting edge’ of technological change per se.

Television based interactive media are a long way off for Australian media producers. The collusive interests of the broadcasters have locked us out of multichannel television for a generation. To this one can add the enormous difficulties in raising investment money in Australia for any new media. Some community TV activists have a foot in the door with the Telecom cable roll out. For example, Metro TV in Sydney is involved in putting community TV to air via cable, and a small band of energetic community TV activists, such as the indefatigable Jeff Cook, have interactivity in their sights as well. The TV remote control is a pretty rudimentary form of interactive device but it can be used to drive a menu-based interactive information format.

In the Australian context, access to new media for artists, or indeed for anybody, is constrained by a number of factors. Pressures from globalising media oligopolies to relinquish cultural protectionism will increase. The Hollywood movie conglomerates lost on this issue in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, but are actively working for free trade in cultural commodities for the next.

Given the stranglehold media oligopolies have on mainstream Australian media, and their influence on the policy process, it will be extremely difficult to maintain spaces in the emerging media landscape for something analogous to public and community broadcasting and subsidised cinema and art. It was refreshing to see a strong commitment in last year’s cultural policy statement to experimentation and production of Australian content in film, television and new media, to be administered by a new committee, the Film Commission and SBS. That the ABC was unable to negotiate this policy commitment was very disturbing, as is the present government’s lack of commitment to the main public broadcaster at a time in which it has undergone massive restructuring to orient it to the new environment.

Community activities won a significant victory in 1993 in getting bandwidth set aside for a sixth TV channel devoted to community video access. Yet it remains an open question whether community media groups have the resources and experience to capitalise on this opportunity. The lack of coordination between arts policy, community media policy and new media policy on the part of government finds an unfortunate parallel in the lack of coordination between different interest groups in the media and the arts. Creating spaces for dialogue on media futures is very urgent.

There are now significant funds to disburse for new media experiments. This will work best if concentrated on the cultural forms of new media rather than on cutting edge technology. Australia is a technologically dependent media market, being a long way from centres of research and power in the emerging ‘military entertainment complex’ of California.

Art tends to occupy one of two margins in relation to the dominant media technology of the day. Either it colonises residual media left behind by changes wrought by the culture industries, or it forms an avant- garde in the emergent media that do not yet have a stable cultural form. The interesting opportunities for art practice at the moment are opening up in the emergent media zone. There is a narrow window of opportunity there for new and creative work, a window that it is more broadly important to keep open, given the instability of the whole nexus between media technology and cultural forms at present. The patterns of culture that will stabilise in the next millennium may well be determined by experiments and struggles undertaken today.

The rhetorical architecture of Paul Keating’s recent Creative Nation statement signals the growing realisation that the new media arts are emblematic of new cultural, economic and paradigmatic shifts in our everyday lives. Clearly, this document suggests a substantial shift in government cultural policy from the more traditional emphasis on direct assistance to visual artists, filmmakers, writers, performers, dancers, and all kinds of cultural producers, to a more recent one of supporting diverse institutions and mechanisms of cultural products and services in the context of local, national and global cultural spaces.

For the first time, aside from the more necessary concerns of supporting relevant arts funding institutions like the Australia Council and the traditional art forms, we have a focus on the way the new multimedia technologies connect to broadcasting, computing, telephony and information. This signifies throughout the document a sustained project to expand the economic export potential of the arts by encouraging the computer/multimedia sector of our economy to fund new digital media products. Further, it indicates the emergence of new post-biological art forms evolving from a multiplicity of interactions in electronic space.

Although Creative Nation possesses numerous worthwhile ideas, rhetorical emphases, and pragmatic funding suggestions, there is nevertheless a problematic Arnoldian characterisation of the traditional and the new media art forms in terms of cultural excellence, national identity, self-expression and quality. To a considerable degree, this is a valuable road map to our expanding techno-culture and its relevance to us as individuals and as a highly urbanised multicultural society. But it is a document that also typifies certain cultural, epistemological and technological pitfalls of a more utopian/ technophilic approach to the question of new media technologies and contemporary art practice.

Too much emphasis has been placed on how high-tech entrepreneurs have the magical formula for transforming Australia into a cutting-edge cultural producer in the Pacific Rim. The $84 million tha t is to be spent in the next four years is a positive step in facilitating new media products and services for Australia’s rapid entry into a post-broadcast world of global media, but little consideration has been given to the more marginalised artists, who are more representative of the postmodern technological avant-garde, in the emerging multimedia institutional landscape.

Too often reading Creative Nation one has the conviction of déjà vu: a naive belief in a top-down hierarchical model of cultural production, new media technologies as an expression of late-capital culture and Platonic cyberspace ideology. It is also assumed that new media art forms imply, ipso facto, new aesthetic paradigms. This does not mean that I subscribe to the wilder romantic excesses of Roy Ascott’s view of the new interactive media as a global “mind-to-mind” revolution nor to a Jeffersonian model of the information superhighway and its putative emancipatory possibilities as we read in Wired and other West Coast New Age publications. But I do believe in the critical project of conceptualising the new media art forms (as Ascott does) along the lines of a bottom-up paradigm of connectivity and interactivity.

The new “terminal identity” subjectivity that defines the young navigators of today’s computer terminals of multimedia forms has not been adequately acknowledged. Electronic art as an open-ended paradigm for re-thinking our institutions, our perceptions of ourselves and the complex continuity between traditional and new media has taken second place to the notion of new multimedia technology as a national educational “down-loading” technology. (This is especially evident in the “Australia on CD” Program). The proactive stance adopted by Creative Nation to engender a viable content- oriented multimedia industry suggests a limited utilitarian concept of the new electronic media. It rarely acknowledges that the genealogical formations of new media art forms are complex and that their innovative computer-mediated audiovisual concepts, forms, textures and cultural agendas are a legacy of modernism as much as they are of the post-war avant-garde arts. (This is tangentially indicated in the recent Nike TV advertisement featuring William Burroughs).

What is commendable in this cultural policy document is its underlying objective to locate the new media arts in the broader domain of everyday life. However, this does not negate the importance of creating new exhibition, production and rhetorical contexts for artists engaged in the new cultural forms, in the gallery and the festival world as much as in the proposed Co-operative Multimedia Development Centres. The electronic arts depend on our ability to question the misleading beliefs and assumptions of our cultural zeitgeist, whether they do constitute an “avant-garde” practice and how they relate to the more traditional art forms. Further, irrespective of the document’s practical strategies to create national multimedia forums, the Australian Multimedia Enterprise, the Co-operative Multimedia Development Centres, the “Australia on CD” Program and funding the Australian Film Commission to produce multimedia works, we need to ask the more demanding self-reflexive questions regarding technology’s masculinist conceptual frameworks, seeing how cultural institutions mask the vested interests of academic, bureaucratic and corporate culture and how our mainstream thinking about art, culture and technology is hopelessly inadequate in the light of the aesthetic and cultural turbulence the new cultural technologies are creating. (On the latter point, Laurence Rickels amongst others, has appropriately described our symptomatic inability to find our way from the inside of technologisation as “perspective psychosis”).

Where Creative Nation is correct is in stressing the diverse division of cultural labour that is required for the production of CD-ROM technology, broadband interactives services, and on-line PC services. It is confused and vague however on the complexities of training individuals in the new electronic media and on how established and younger artists will connect with corporate, software and tertiary personnel in these new production contexts. Creative Nation underestimates not only the experimental necessity of the role that more peripheral Nintendo literate artists have to play in the production of the new multimedia exhibits and screen-based electronic media, but it also overlooks the importance of how difficult it is to locate adequately trained new media arts personnel.

Consequently, artists familiar with the new media forms need to be situated in the chain of executive decision-making, they need to be empowered and visible in the new tertiary sites creating their hybrid works for the Internet as much as for the more orthodox forms of broadcasting, exhibition and critical reception. Bureaucrats, curators, producers and our museums and heritage sites need to commission new media artists to do new works for everyday consumption, something that is finally recognised in the Creative Nation document and is sadly lacking today with the exception of one or two museums like the Museum of Sydney.

It is crucial that we remind ourselves whenever possible that the emergent media arts are starting to represent a canon as much as the more traditional art forms do. This necessitates the hermeneutic awareness to question our established tendency to either subscribe to a utopian or a dystopic view of the new media arts.

As we approach the end of this century, what is clearly emerging in electronic media are the unpredictable non-binary intertextual forms between computer art, video, cinema, television, performance, virtual reality and photography and the increasing significance of computer animation and graphics in shaping the concerns and techniques of interactive installation art. Lamentably, Creative Nation does not give due recognition to these dynamic aesthetic, cultural and technological forms, nor to their multimedia creators and neither does it consider how they might be located in reference to education, culture and industry.

Notwithstanding the questionable nationalist slant of Creative Nation and its overall tendency to define the new media technologies almost solely in audience, economic, marketing and social terms, it nevertheless manages to address important issues relating to how the new digital arts are connected to the experience of our everyday lives. It is a significant “weather vane” signal by the Keating administration that finally the new media technologies are being factored into government cultural policy. But why should new media artists endowed with experience and knowledge of these art forms play second fiddle to our techno-corporate industrialists?

With Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and the Pope in Sydney at the same time in January this year, inevitably comparisons arose, with one newspaper declaring that “the Pope is here and God is too”. But while the Pope beatified Mary MacKillop, Gates preached a new religion of digital information.

Paul Keating ratified Gates’ vision in his Creative Nation statement, by committing $84 million to supporting the development of indigenous CD-ROM and on-line information services. But how can individual Australian developers take advantage of the multimedia hype and successfully build and market their own CD-ROMs or on-line information services?

Given that multimedia developers typically fall into two camps, the technoheads and the artists, the first challenge is marrying creative with technical and software skills. Here, the internet or physical bulletin boards of universities and colleges can help. Also useful could be Microsoft’s “Multimedia Jumpstart”, a CD-ROM developer’s kit, and Interactive Multimedia Development Guide, a free publication on how to develop CD-ROMs, available from Microsoft.

The second challenge is getting access to funding to develop your concept commercially. It can cost up to half a million dollars to successfully develop and market a CD-ROM globally. Commercial information services can cost similar amounts.

There are five main development phases for multimedia: market analysis and development of a proposal, including the business plan; scripting; prototyping; production; and marketing and distribution. There are several possible avenues to secure funding for each phase:

• Friends wishing to take a share of your business. Many small high tech companies begin this way.

• Small business loans from the bank, difficult to get if you are a sole proprietor, and do not have four or five years of business success under your belt.

• Australian or overseas multimedia companies that may want to invest in your title. All global multimedia companies have departments to assess acquisition or investment in start-up companies. New on-line information gateways being established in Australia such as On Australia, the joint venture between Telecom and Microsoft, may also be interested.

• Venture capital funds in Australia or United States. Depending on their assessment of your business plan, market forecasts and management ability, these companies take a share of your business in return for providing funding. • Federal arts or small business loans and grants. The Australia Council, Film Australia and the soon to be established Australian Multimedia Enterprise (AME) fund a variety of multimedia and will generally review your business plans in a similar manner to the venture capital funds.

Distribution is the third big challenge. With the flood of CD-ROMs coming onto the market there will soon be a ‘shelf space’ problem, where smaller independent publishers will have difficulty selling their products because the majors will dominate the shelf space for CD-ROM sales. The most successful approach seems to be negotiating a licensing or distribution deal with one of the majors, such as Microsoft or Brodurbund.

Independent developers will also need to rapidly acquire new skills in the field of user interface design. If Microsoft’s success in developing icon-based graphical user interfaces is any indication, the multimedia titles that are most intuitive for users will also be most successful.

When AME is established in March this year, its mandate will include providing advice to new Australian developers seeking multimedia project finance. This will go some way to creating a much needed information node and coordination point for the multimedia industry in Australia. It could be a useful starting point for you if you require advice about how to take your multimedia idea one step further towards commercial development.

Those of us who have been keeping an eye on the creative and meaning-making possibilities of the computer since the early 70s have always been daunted by the technology with which it is associated, by its cost and by the complexity of the metalanguage. The developments in multimedia computing technology of recent years have to some extent addressed these concerns, although the time, effort and precision required to assemble a series of images for interactive purposes are still considerable. The prospect of a crash is all too real, unless well-designed software runs smoothly from the memory store. It is here that the CD-ROM can make its greatest contribution to art production.

The CD-ROM has more stable attributes than the memory storage devices normally linked to the computer’s processor, such as floppy and hard discs, which are based on magnetic media and so subject to interference both electro-magnetic and physical. While artists have been working with computer technology since its arrival on the scene in the 40s, CD-ROM enables the digital data stream to be stored in a medium more stable than the magnetised surface, whose delicate and fugitive nature evokes the clay used by sculptors before bronze-casting arrived to maximise plasticity and permanence.

Recently, desktop CD-ROM burners capable of making an individual Compact Disc-Read Only Memory (CD-ROM) hit the market. Initially intended for the archiving of company accounts and records, increasingly, contemporary artists are responding to the potential of the computer/CD-ROM medium as several of the ‘problem areas’ are addressed:

• Where previously there was a whole host of ‘computing systems’ of infinite combinations of hardware and software, the CD as a publishing/distribution medium has encouraged the convergence of systems for making, and replicating, the artwork.

• The ephemeral and fugitive nature of much computer-based work has restricted its exhibition potential to one-off installations, or playout through video/film recording. The archival specifications of CD-ROM can more or less guarantee the integrity of a completed work as “art-on-disc”, as well as enhance the prospects for financial return to artists through purchase, editioning and licensing.

• The cost of transferring computer files from “the studio”(the workstation with hard disc/server) to “the gallery”(the Compact Disc) has been lowered, enabling relatively cheap ‘casting’ – AU$150 per copy commercially down to AU$30 material costs if a ‘burner’ can be accessed.

• The industry has designed tools for production, for specialist users rather than programmers, offering artists independence from profit-orientated facility houses at the production stage, although one has to be a truly Renaissance individual – simultaneously photographer, film/video camera operator, lighting director, graphic designer, writer, picture and sound editor, typographer, sound recordist, computer programmer and line producer – or play at “the real estate business” and raise a budget to be able to pay for the expertise required.

Whilst being regarded by sections of the industry as an intermediate technology awaiting the arrival of the ‘superhighway’ networks, the CD medium’s material immutability will remain a major advantage as a storage device. Through an interface with whatever distribution system technology provides, like the Greek bronze, the disc is a stable repository of cultural evidence capable of becoming knowledge.

Mike Leggett is currently preparing an international survey exhibition of artists making and distributing work on CD-ROM for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney to be held mid-year. This article is extracted from a paper presented at the Intersections Conference at the UNSW in September 1994. The full paper and further details about the Artists CD-ROM Show can be accessed on the World Wide Web at: http:// www. gu. edu. au/gart/Fineart Online/info/cd-rom.html [expired]

The MCA is on the lookout for artists whose work uses CD-ROM for possible inclusion in their show planned for September this year. The curators’ main aim is to represent the diversity of practice being pursued worldwide by artists working with computers, giving particular emphasis to work that is extending the possibilities of the medium, for example its potential to alter the nature of engagement between a work and its audience. Innovative presentations by artists using CD-ROM of work in other media will also be considered. The deadline for proposals is 17 February, 1995.

Doors of Perception 1994 was staged by the Netherlands Design Institute and Mediamatic magazine. Over 1000 delegates from all over Europe, the USA, Japan and Australia, from the fields of technology, design, psychology, philosophy, art, and architecture were in Amsterdam for the event.

The conference organisers started from the premise that when a new technology enters a culture, the culture changes. In response, speakers focused on a particular culture, ‘home’: home as market, as metaphor and as myth.

Speakers compared the qualities of telematic space and domestic space, and analysed changes to our sense of place, both public and private. They looked at the psychology of belonging – to a family, group, or community, and explored the architecture of information and the creation of shared meaning in virtual communities.

There was concern expressed that vast resources are being devoted to digital versions of existing human activities – teleshopping, video-on-demand, telecommuting, but attempts to create entirely new uses for the technologies have been unambitious, to say the least. As the concept of ‘home’ developed, various speakers engaged in debate about the political and cultural potential of new media and its impact on domestic space. What ‘home’ might constitute in light of advances in telematics physically as well as psychologically became a key issue for the conference.

For John Perry Barlow, lyricist for The Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the global interpersonal links facilitated by the “information superhighway” mean that one can go out and make everywhere ‘home’. Pauline Terreehorst, journalist and author, speculated on the other hand, that the introduction of communication technologies into the physical home would transform the home into a place where people could also work thereby fostering positive changes in relationships between men and women. Her argument was founded on the belief that home played a much more positive role before industrialisation forced people to separate the domestic sphere from work.

Amy Bruckman, a doctoral candidate at MIT, and founder of MediaMOO (a text-based virtual reality environment designed as a professional on-line community for media researchers), saw communication networks as a place – perhaps an extension of the home. She stressed the expressive powers of language and the role of the imagination in new media, pointing out that the network was a place or space to inhabit, and that MOOs are more about a sense of community than they are about information exchange. Mitch Ratcliffe, editor of Digital Media and co-author of Powerbook: The Digital Nomad’s Guide, was particularly concerned to ensure that freedom of speech and thought along with privacy in all personal transactions are protected by the technosystems. He stressed that public participation is crucial to the development of information networks, given that currently the networks simply resemble an “infomercial superhighway”. To Ratcliffe, the Church, the State, and the Corporation have to date been the dominant influences on society, whereas we now need to focus on a sense of community. Whilst the sense of family, or community on the net provided the audience with a positive – indeed almost warm and fuzzy feeling – as the conference progressed the issues related to privacy and access and the fear that the internet already appears to be slipping from the public sphere provided a counter argument. This tension exploded during David Chaum’s paper. Chaum is managing director of DigiCash, an Amsterdam-based company which has pioneered electronic cash payment systems and also chairs CAFE, the European Union research consortium investigating the technical infrastructure and equipment for electronic money in Europe. He described the possible introduction of purchasing power via the internet, which raised concerns amongst many of the conference participants about what sort and how much personal information about users would become readily available via the net.

Whilst artists such as Jeffrey Shaw from Karlsruhe, and Lynn Hershman from California provided some insight into how media art can provide a means of critiquing space and place in the impending telematic age, more concrete issues of how to maintain or indeed gain equitable access to the “infobahn” tended to be marginalised by the debate.

Given the multimedia-mania which has arisen out of the Federal Government’s recently announced Cultural Policy, you too may wish o participate in the echoes of these debates. You can do this by accessing papers delivered at the conference at the World Wide Web site set up by Mediamatic and the Design Institute, where, sitting in a dark bedroom bathed in the light emanating from your computer terminal, there is also the opportunity to reply. http://mmol. mediamatic.nl

The Netherlands Design Institute, established in 1993 as an independent foundation which receives core funding from the Dutch Government, aims to identify new ways by which design may contribute to the economic and cultural vitality of the community. It is a ‘think-and-do tank’ which develops scenarios about the future of design and undertakes research projects to test them.

Mediamatic magazine is a quarterly on art and media and the changes being wrought by techno-culture, hypermedia and virtual reality. Aside from the print and CD-ROM publications, Mediamatic magazine is also published on the internet. Mediamatic Interactive Publishing also offers content driven research and development.

“Making a dinosaur for Jurassic Park is exactly the same as designing a car.” That’s how Ed McCracken, CEO of computer mega-corp Silicon Graphics, figures it. Truth is, few of us would disagree.

Entertainment and commercial manufacturing have always made good bedfellows, though in the past we would seldom mistake one for the other. American industrial designers of the 1920s and 1930s like Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes may have dreamt up sets for Broadway, and General Motors car stylist Harley Earl may have lived in Hollywood, but that’s about where the connection ended. Well almost. But at least there was an epistemological difference between their stylised sets and props on stage or screen and the built environment of consumer products. Nowadays their interchangeability hardly raises an eyebrow. Hollywood and Detroit work out their ‘market ergonomics’ (a niche for every body) and concept development on the same computers, sell their products through he same media (TV, radio, print, billboards) and dump their goods in the same old places (western suburbia or third world economies). Makes no difference to them.

At the same time, television has been let out of the studio and shoved headfirst into the world of space, time and architecture – Natural Born Killers -style.

There’s no denying it. Media, telecommunications, marketing and computing are congealing into newly corporatised urban landscapes that bear none of the dark romantic hallmarks production designers Lawrence Paull and Syd Mead materialised for Bladerunner’s bad-new-future. Forget the utopian soothsaying and gothic crystal-ball gazing. For the large majority of us the future is already here – and it’s not what you’d call pretty. It’s planned, it’s calculated, it’s flashy, it’s corporate- global. It’s most probably at a shopping complex or video/computer/TV screen near you. And it’s gonna cost. Our sprawling cities provide the new outlets for a determinedly material culture in which design appears to have no limits. We see and hear evidence that things have been deliberately cast (as if we don’t know by whom and to what end) at every turn – from fetishistic consumer objects to urban planning; from TV graphics and virtual voyaging to the loud packaging of cereals for the supermarket shelf or for television; from the austere public bus shelter to the new tollway or tunnel that increases the distance between home and work even as it’s annihilated. It is increasingly hard to avoid contact with a world designed on the totalising scale of global media. Everyone and everything is plugged-in (especially when it’s advertised ‘Unplugged’). We all know this: the distance that used to separate the media and the world it conjures disappeared seasons ago. But here’s the rub: real life is now designed and experienced as an extension of commercial media, and not (as we used to think) the other way round. North America remains the pioneering source of material media – the phantasms and obscenities of traditional media (from Hollywood to the Fox network) have been concretised in a bombastic web (I hesitate to call it a system) of consumer objects and places. Small wonder American architecture and design are now so closely aligned with the diverse (often perverse) interests of multinational media conglomerates and magnates providing the model upon which countless other cities-as-urban-theme-parks around the world evolve. The following banal ‘framegrabs’ are not from the near or distant future. It’s still 1995, and the theme remains the same: consumption is fun. So what if it costs a little? Frame 1. Even at 30,000 feet, no-one can escape the right to consume, with the credit card of your choice. The High Street Emporium guide, just like the other Skymall shopping catalogues, gives me instant access to merchandise I wouldn’t look twice at on the ground. Inside I find exciting gift ideas for family and friends, as well as items I know I can’t live without. Like the solar-powered ventilated golf cap, complete with six 1/2-volt solar cells to power the fan, which directs a constant breeze towards my forehead. Or the vacuum-powered Insect Disposal System. It may look like a simple handheld cleaner but it’s not. Really. Lined with non-toxic gel (harmless to human and pets) and powered by a built-in rechargeable NICad battery, the 14,000 rpm fan System lets me quickly capture and dispose of insects at a comfortable distance without ever having to touch them.

Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing. I continue browsing: the Portabolt (to lock myself and my loved ones safely inside any opening door), the Auto Toothpaste Dispenser (of course), the world’s smallest 8-digit credit card-sized calculator that records up to 20 seconds of instant voice-notes, or the odour- absorbing PoochPads for dog owners who love their dogs but hate the mess. Just call the 1-800 number conveniently accessible on the Airfone Service the phone company have installed in the seat in front of me. These telephones aren’t for talking to people. They’re for ordering more stuff.

Frame 2. I remember this the next time I dial a 1-800 number to purchase some other stuff (tickets for a 3D Imax movie at a brand new retro-styled multiplex cinema at Lincoln Plaza, Manhattan – the screen measures eight storeys high).

The call is promptly answered by a friendly female voice who thanks me for using their service. “Welcome to the Sony Cinema Network. Please enter your zipcode to locate the theatre nearest you. Press 9 for more information, or 0 for the operator”. Nothing strange about this – though I can’t recall my zipcode, and the theatre I want is not in my neighbourhood anyway. I press 9 and the increasingly irritatingly calm voice thanks me again (as she does for the remaining nine multiple choices). “If you would like to see the following movie, please press the corresponding number now”. This is the future of interactive TV.

More instructions. If I want to see the underwater movie press 1, the Buffalos press 2, the … Next enter date of the booking. And the time of the session. “I’m sorry, the 3pm session is full. Please choose another time”. I do, making sure to punch in the number of tickets I require, the number of my credit card, and of course its expiry date (a rigorous safeguard against fraud I presume). Tickets confirmed, funds are invisibly sucked from one cyberspace to another. I’m ready to watch the show. After one more machine transaction that is – at the front of the lobby, attached to the wall, in front of the long line. Swipe my card, and out pop three tickets for the 5 o’clock show. Amazing. Only an extra buck per ticket.

Frame 3. At Universal City’s ET Adventure, ride, cards and telephones find another convergence. Sponsored by telecommunications giant AT&T, the ride flies dozens of bicycle riders at a time to land somewhere beyond the narrative limits of Spielberg’s original filmic universe. After waiting in the line, everybody gives their name to the tour hosts. In exchange, we are each given an individual “passport” (coincidentally the same size and dimensions as a regular AT&T calling card). Everybody clears “customs” and we riders soar off above the earthly world – with noisy jeeps and a swelling John Williams soundtrack in hot pursuit. On towards the night sky, and in a minute we’ve reached ET’s cute cartoon planet – a world we’ve never seen (in the movie at least). The most magical highlight is left till last. As we swing past the animatronic Extra Terrestrial waving us farewell at the end of the ride, we are all called – individually and by name – by Him, ET. After such an experience, who could ever forget to call home again?

Frame 4. At the motion-platform Omnimax ride, Back to the Future – a fifteen minute experience that ushers the participants through an architectural maze of corridors and checkpoints inside the neo-brutalist Institute for Future Technology – we make it home via other means. For a quarter of an hour at least, we’re supposed to go along with the idea that we’re actually participating in an extended narrative from the film of the same name. The uncomplicated labyrinth that distributes us from one checkpoint to the next – complete with surveillance cameras, familiar actors giving us backstory on video monitors, written LED instructions, and real institute “assistants” – is only vaguely engaging. Being strapped into the eight-seater De Lorean time travel mobile is another matter entirely. The reality effect rapidly accelerates, and time slows as in a dream (or nightmare). Crashing headlong through a seamless collage of 20th century shopping centres, town squares, Ice Age landscapes, Hill Valley circa 2015, prehistoric volcanoes, exploding Texaco signs and cineplexes of the future, the four-minute ride is the most visceral experience in the entire complex. Souvenirs can be purchased at the Time Traveller’s Depot on the way out. But everybody seems to know you can get that stuff anywhere.

Frame 5. Like the recently opened New York Skyride on the second floor of the Empire State Building, these flight-simulator attractions blur the distinction between architectural reality and cinematic illusion. The ride propels the traveller from the stasis of the monumental site to the mobile world of the camera. The mechanical simulation and computer controlled movement may be clumsy, but the thrill lures riders back for countless rides. Of course, it doesn’t compare to the “real view” from the Observatory on the 86th floor. But who said it would? It’s a supplement, an addition, an orientation to a world which is in its own way just as inaccessible. “Look at the cars down there! They look like ants!” Plenty of stuff to buy down there.

Frame 6. Which isn’t to say that the rest of the built environment hasn’t learned from such entertainment machines. The young LA-based architect Mehrdad Yazdani’s motion-reality theatre at Universal Citywalk also incorporates kinetics into its design. Its folded fibreglass screen on the facade functions like an electronically liquid marquee, as if to set static architecture in motion. Regardless of the building’s success, such considered designs endow these entertainment complexes with more than a little Culture. Like the radically deconstructivist KFC outlet in the middle of LA (designed by Frank Gehry disciples Jeffrey Daniels and Elyse Grinstein) or the Planet Hollywood restaurant designed by Anton Furst (the late production designer of Batman), these places make a virtue of the high pop-moderne culture surrounding us – by selling it back to pop’s corporate initiators as Status. So what’s new?

Frame 7. Indeed, Gehry, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Michael Grave, and Robert Stern have all furnished Disney (under the corporate leadership of Michael Eisner) with designs for some of its most critically successful buildings. Why stop at Florida’s Disney World or Euro-Disney in France? (For despite the failings of the European excursion, a Saudi Prince – assured in his wealth since Desert Storm – has poured over $300 million into rescuing the operation from its own unpopularity. Go figure.) If, as critic Michael Sorkin has recently put it, “in theme park nation, life is a ride and everything – transportation, assembly, learning, leisure – must therefore entertain”, we’re in for a lot more fun. Not just in theme parks either.

Frame 8. Disney again. This time with Gehry at the helm, planning to build a retail and hotel complex at New York’s Times Square, just down the road from Disney’s New Amsterdam theatre (currently under renovation). A Virgin superstore and an MTV complex are expected to follow hot on Disney’s heels. More tangible still are the hundreds of total experience entertainment retail outlets mushrooming in major cities – over 300 Disney stores worldwide, with Warner Brothers Studio Stores fast catching up. With over $US 65 billion a year to be made from merchandising, stores like those in Santa Monica Plaza or midtown Manhattan are blue-chip investments. That’s the image unstable media empires have wanted to project all along. Toontown is rock solid.

Frame 9. So is Sony. Not content with the string of movie theatres they inherited during their takeover of Columbia (not to mention the musical interests of CBS and Epic), they’re into diversification in a big way. Not only do they want a living museum like Sony World in downtown Chicago, they want kudos of the sort Philip Johnson gave AT&T with his infamous po-mo skyscraper on New York’s Madison Avenue. Now it’s called the Sony Building. Its public atrium was criticised when the telephone company (somewhat disingenuously) gave over its plaza to palm trees and wrought iron benches. All that’s gone now. In its place is a sprawling retail playground of Sony Style, Sony Signature, and – you’ll never guess – Sony Wonder Technology Lab. This 18,000 foot amusement park is free, and in America that is as good as being “public”. According to interior designer Edwin Schlossberg, “we wanted to make it human, but in a New York way … We wanted to fill it with props, with stuff.” Stuff you can buy. If not now, then soon. This is the Universal City of consumer electronics. Sony’s toontown sets are not quite inhabitable film or television, but they’re about as close as it gets.

Frame 10. That is of course until we finally get to see computer squillionaire Bill Gates’“San Simeon of the North”, currently being completed in the suburb of Medina, across Lake Washington from Seattle. Partially tunnelled into the hillside, the five acre waterfront house has journalists debating whether this is Batman, Dr No, or Citizen Kane, revisited. Truth is it’s probably all of the above. While architects James Cutler and Peter Bohlin say they’re trying to avoid ostentation and pretension, there’s no mistaking Gates’ intention to let architecture make concrete what Microsoft can only conjure with floating point geometry. William Randolph Hearst once had a similar scheme.

That doesn’t mean the electronic media baron won’t find a prominent place for software in the architectural scheme of things. As the New York Times has it, the Gates Xanadu will have a network of computers that “will alert the boulder-rimmed hot tub, the video art walls, the climate controls, the library, the trampoline room and other sections that the master has arrived and expects an evening tailored to his mood.” So why is Gates remaining so tight- lipped about the details for his intelligent entertainment mansion?

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the new Establishment leader’s current fascination with animation. It seems Gates is desperate to have designed a universally recognisable Microsoft cartoon character along the lines of Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson. But after a recent meeting with Ren and Stimpy creator, John Kricfalusi, uncle Bill decided his work was too cutting edge for the Microsoft demographic. And so the quest continues.

One thing’s certain though. When his search is finally over, you can bet your last megabyte of RAM it will only be the start for the rest of us. And we actually have to live here, on the edge of the next millennium these corporations are constructing so obliviously.

HS How did the exhibition An Eccentric Orbit eventuate? How did you become the producer of the show?

RH Basically through a trip that John Hanhardt made to Australia in the mid to late eighties. He was the curator for film and video at the Whitney Museum in New York and saw a lot of really interesting work in Australia and thought it would be great if some of it could be shown in America. As a result he has been encouraging a number of people to get a show together and helping to get it touring America. I didn’t want to do it personally but thought it would be a great idea, so I approached the Australian Film Commission. We came up with Peter Callas who is a very well known video maker in Australia and has an international reputation. He has curated quite a few shows of this kind. I became producer because of my contact with both John Hanhardt and the American Federation Of Arts which is a touring organisation. The show will tour America, Europe, Latin America, and possibly Australia. It’s designed for an American and European audience who have not seen this work before.

RH Basically to put together three programs that would present a coherent view of the sort of work that is made in Australia. The image of Australia overseas is quite different from what we experience in a cultural sense. We did not want landscape video or the sort of work that might be expected to come from Australia. We wanted to do something that was indicative of what has been happening here. Some works go back ten years while others have been recently completed.

RH These days people make videos in different ways using digital video, using computers to make animation. It’s a combination of forms. You can’t talk about pure video. People are making laser discs or CD-ROMs or computer animations that do not use cameras at all but their output is video. Does that make them video? We actually wanted to call it “New Media” but the Americans thought that “New Media” sounded like fax machines and beepers. The term “video art” is misleading but it sort of works. They need a category that their audience will understand. “Video art” is a term that has to incorporate all the developments happening in video and film technology. It is still an emerging form and that is why it is difficult.

HS Your video Immortelle which is part of An Eccentric Orbit comes under the heading of “The Diminished Paradise”. Ross Gibson has suggested that from an Aboriginal and Islander point of view paradise has been truly diminished. How does the theme “the Lost Paradise” refer to your work Immortelle?

RH Ross Gibson’s work on “the Diminished Paradise” deals with the way Australia has been imagined as this paradisiacal place where the closer we get to it the further it recedes from our view amidst the interior of a threatening, wild landscape. We have taken this view to its endpoint where this paradisiacal view of the world is no longer an issue – it has gone completely. Although my work does not necessarily illustrate this, it fits well with a number of other works which are about how we deal with our sense of place, taking into account the cultures of indigenous peoples, science fiction and cyber-punk .

HS With reference to your current exhibition, The Digital Garden, at the Contemporary Centre for Photography for EXPERIMENTA, what does the garden signify in this technological age?

RH The garden is a great place to think about ourselves, nature and the way in which we arrange nature. Classically, we do this through our technologies. The garden is a place where we can reflect on the cycles of growth, geometry, order and patterning, not to mention the naked beauty of the garden as seen through electronic and mediatised eyes. We look at it through the filter or the lens of our time, the time of TV, video, computers etc.

RH The wilderness is a construction of the twentieth century. We had to construct it in order to save it. We’ve also had to create parks and gardens in order to maintain a certain view of nature. Whether my work is essentially about that I am not sure. My point is simple that there is no such thing as a natural environment. Why didn’t we have a concept of the wilderness in the seventeenth century?

HS Why is it important for the viewer to interact with the computer monitor to move selected images, to navigate their own path?

RH For me it has to do with the idea of trying to make connections visually through inner space so that there is a series of repeated images which are themselves based on some simple geometry. I am interested to see what happens when you start with a few elements and then you multiply them out in space and over time. The touch screen is a data base of possibilities. There are various levels of interaction. I am interested in the relationships between images that have been grouped and patterned and constantly move in certain ways on very simple geometric principles.

RH They are like electronic life forms. They are created very simply using video and computer feedback.

HS Viewing the Taj Mahal it appears as a travel video. Why the Taj Mahal? What is its significance?

RH You put your finger on it. All the gardens are well known and tourist sites. Taj Mahal, Versailles, Hyde Park, all have strong spatial geometry and a singular access which leads you along the perspectival site line towards its ultimate point. The Taj Mahal ‘lakes’ lead you to the mausoleum which is also a place of love, whilst in contrast, with Versailles, you look away from the palace over the domain of Paris, France, the world, limited only by the horizon. The garden is organised to extend that view. These places are ordered visually. My piece on one hand is a representational space but on the other hand it’s also real space, you move through it, you don’t sit down in one seat and experience it.

HS Your image of the haystacks resemble a Monet painting, your flowers, Warhol. Was this deliberate?

RH Absolutely. These are all the different ways we view nature through representation so it’s quite important that there are art historical references. The image of forest greenery composed of moving rectangular intersecting panels, representing the substance of nature in solid planes of colour also make reference to the modernist works of Mondrian and Van Doesberg.

HS In Leo Marx’s book The Machine In The Garden he describes a garden as a “miniature middle landscape”. He goes on to say that it “is as attractive for what it excludes as for what it contains.” Marx views the garden as a ‘constructure’, a place of mediated nature, a place to resolve the dichotomy of nature and culture.

RH I agree. Leo Marx put his finger on a lot of things when he wrote The Machine In The Garden.

HS Do you see technology and the way it effects the natural world as positive or as alienating?

RH Both. People have an ambivalent relationship to technology and to nature. I do as well. We see the world through the eyes of our time but we should also keep ourselves open to new possibilities. I don’t believe that our lives are overrun by technology. It doesn’t overtly concern me because I believe in chaos. We are saved by chaos in the end, the fallibility of all systems. Things don’t work the way they should which leads to the unpredictable. It’s not like Demolition Man or Jurassic Park.

An Eccentric Orbit – Video Art in Australia, organised by The American Federation of Arts, includes works by Destiny Deacon, Stephen Duke, Chris Caines, John Conomos, Peter Callas, The Brothers Gruchy, Jill Scott, John Gillies, Cathy Vogan, Michael Hill, Troy Innocent, Phillip Brophy, Ian Haig, Linda Dement, Bill Seaman, John McCormack, Michael Strum, Randelli, Faye Maxwell and Jane Parks

It’s pretty hard yakka starting a festival—so much funding to raise, so many sensibilities to offend. A dance festival is particularly rough, dance being neither especially commercial, nor especially high up in the ranks of high art. All of the inclusions and the exclusions are fraught with meaning for the small and tightly knit dance community, and pretty insignificant to anyone else. But coming up in Melbourne in January 1995 is the Green Mill Dance Festival’s third year, so the organisers should be congratulated on their tenacity.

The Green Mill survival strategy seems to be to mix the mainstream, the experimental, the academic and the general public with a generous dash of government funding priorities. The program offers performances: this year an intriguing collection of seasoned professionals each of whom has a personal signature. The sum of this series should be a sharp, speedy look at the mid range of the Australian contemporary dance sensibility without digression to the extremes—neither fornication onstage nor pointe shoes on anorexics are likely to be seen. There are also forums that cover the spectrum from academic through technical to talk show. And there are classes and workshops for professionals and the general public.

Ostensibly the theme of Green Mill this year is “Is Technology the Future for Dance?”—a chic but ambiguous theme, and one that apparently was on the minds of many attendees at last year’s festival. General Manager Mark Worner says that in last year’s feedback sessions many people voiced their concerns about technology and dance: aesthetics, politics and access.

So the programming committee has put together an appealing series of events to address or circumvent issues of technology, dance and the future. Most of the blurbs about performances have managed to include the words “technology” or “computers” or at the very least “film” or “video”, though actually only Hellen Sky and John McCormack (Company in Space) have an extensive history of working the high wire of hybridity by mixing dance and computer technology. However, a company like Fieldworks, which, according to Mark Worner, uses little more than bodies in space and some light, has been included because of their particular relationship to technology—they’re having none of it. So it’s up to audiences to draw their own conclusions about those tricky “aesthetics, politics and access” issues when they see the two companies side by side.

The forums cover computers, science, cyber strategies, virtuality and other techno terms in relation to dance. There is also an extensive range of film/video showings or related discussions. And there are frequently scheduled personality interviews with the artists in the performance series and with the overseas guests. The schedule of forums seems designed on the same model as the Melbourne Writers Festival (not surprising since Mark Worner formerly worked on that very successful event). But Green Mill doesn’t have any officially schedule schmooze sessions, like book launches, which is a shame, because talking to each other is one of the most significant benefits the gathered dance artists can expect to get from a festival. Mark does say, however, that he hopes people attending the festival will find the opportunity to sit down and talk to overseas guests like Rhoda Grauer (US) and Mayumi Nagatoshi (Japan), since one of the reasons they particularly have been invited is to help expand opportunities for Australian artists overseas.

Finally there are the workshops, a wildly diverse collection of experiences available to the professional from a dance video workshop to an American postmodern workshop with Bebe Miller, to Body Weather with Tanaka Min, to Hip Hop, to Feldenkrais. And, for the general public, free classes given by professionals are being pitched like easy listening radio—accessible and not too demanding. The idea here is to give people a physical experience they can then relate directly to the work they see performed. Admittedly, the fear-of-dance factor is an important one to address when wooing a more general audience to the form. But it gets my back up a bit that professional dance practitioners who are notoriously impoverished have to pay for everything while the only mildly interested are offered the experience for free.

However, if you can afford it, it’ll probably be great fun and highly stimulating to attend Green Mill. And since it’s this year’s attendees who will determine the theme of next year’s festival, it might well be worth making your voice heard.

Julie-Anne Long and Sue-ellen Kohler were students together at the VCA in the 1980’s where they learned among other things that you couldn’t dance until you’d truly experienced orgasm. They ran with this advice noting at the same time that the life of a dancer could be a bit too closely monitored if you weren’t careful. For Julie-Anne dance education brought out her assertive side. Her work these days is disobedient when it comes to form, the shape of dancers’ bodies and tasteful costuming. She combines elemental movements (swinging, striding, turning) with everyday gestures and bizarre (sometimes kitsch) touches to create idiosyncratic dance narratives that often include a commentary on movement itself. This is where her work makes connections with Sue-ellen’s very different style.

Sue-ellen Kohler has over the last few years created a body of work which is minimal/epic in its concentration on movement as articulated by particular body parts. In Hybrid she writhed in a shallow pool of water, slipping and struggling to stand, while on a circular screen above, her pelvis (among other images) was projected in close up. In Bug she literally doubled up with Sandra Perrin, their backs bent into shapes that made their bodies look like insects crawling through the semi-dark.

The One Extra Company has brought the two of them together for Cannibal Race, the second full-scale work choreographed by Julie-Anne as Associate Artistic Director of the company. Her first, Suburban Pirates involved a cast of three dancers, one actor and 10 performers from the Flying Fruitfly Circus. REAL TIME caught them at the end of an 8 hour day in the beginning of phase 2 of their rehearsal period.

The 8 hour day is a “shock to the system” for Sue-ellen who starts with yoga every day at 6 and is more used to working 4 to 5 hours maximum in the creation of her own works which “take as long as they take – usually most of a year”.

So what’s a dancer like Sue-Ellen doing in dance theatre? “I’ve worn a lot of different hats. I worked with Tasdance, a Spanish dance troupe, walked on stilts. I worked with Dance Exchange and the Sydney Front – now there’s a contrast! I’ve been creating my own work for a while now, so when Julie-Anne approached me to work on Cannibal Race I said ‘Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?’”

Julie-Anne likes working with people who are not going to give her what she knows. “I’ve worked with actors, non-performers, all sorts of dancers. You and Trevor Patrick certainly bring a different sensibility to this work. Narelle Benjamin is someone who throws herself into dancing.” The cast also includes a child dancer and appearances by Julie-Anne and Artistic Director, Graeme Watson.

So how’s the collaboration going? A long pause as the two try to describe the stage of rehearsals when things could go either way. “Today I feel like I’m too old for this,” says Sue-ellen. “In the process of making my own work the patterns of my body have become more particular, my aesthetic sensibilities are more defined”.

JA A big responsibility. Closer to the way I worked 10 years ago. Normally I let the form develop. In this one I’ve let the music determine the structure.

SE The ones who thought of dance in terms of musical structures. I would have liked to be musical but I wasn’t.

SE My dance tends to coexist with music and other elements – film, sound, light.

JA In dance, Chopin is usually interpreted romantically whereas I find an uneasy undercurrent in it. It will be played live by Ben Abdallah and I love the sound of the piano in the space. Some of the music suggested narratives. Some sections are more like states of being within the story. Episodes interlock. But more than anything I’m trying to create something that moves, that moves me, moves along, makes me think of something else – like The Partridge Family!

JA I love watching what you do but I don’t have your patience. My favourite thing is watching people walk and run.

SE I’d prefer to watch walking and running from a great height or upside down.

JA I use steps to bring out the rhythmic quality of ordinary movement. I’m always uneasy when dancers don’t look like real people. While I think of it, what did you think about the exercise we did today when I just called out that quick phrase in words, “Back. Side. Step. Cross,” without showing the movement myself?

SE You got a whole world in each dancer’s version of the words. But what happens to the particularities of those movements in this approach? Do they just turn into your steps?

JA Once we’ve gone beyond a certain point, as the work settles and redistributes itself, you will have back all you have contributed.

SE Well parts of it are but it’s not just my work. It’s Mahalia Middlemist, Margie Medlin, Ion Pearce, Sandra Perrin, William McClure. I’m the frontliner – that’s all. Working with you certainly helps to illuminate my own process.

JA In your own work you invent from scratch. I tend to work from what’s already there.

SE So do I. I seem to be always on the point of knowing what my body is, but never “finding” it.

SE Well, that’s usually when you stop and eat, isn’t it. Making your own work is certainly intense. But here inside my body is not a fortress, it’s just another place. You and I have done a lot of dancing – most of it I never want to do again – all those swings in psyche and age, all those institutions! At the moment, I’m working on a piece called The Inadequate Body in which I dance in half a tutu and one point shoe. The other half of my body is naked. At the same time, I’m a dancer working with you on Cannibal Race and enjoying it.

Cannibal Race opens October 13 at St. Georges Hall in Newtown, Sydney’s second largest remaining Victorian Hall and much needed new dance / performance venue.

This being an article for Real Time about Bebe Miller, the name of it on my computer disc is RealBebe. But who or what is the real Bebe? Could such a seemingly easygoing woman as this really be one of America’s foremost, up and coming, exciting and tenacious choreographers? In a scene where blowing your own trumpet is pretty much required, she is known for being self-effacing and in fact, it would appear that she genuinely is.

On the question of how she feels about having been so influential, a simple (or could it be disingenuous?): “Have I been?” On why so many dancers say they want to dance with her (even ones I’ve met here in Australia who haven’t actually seen her work): “Oh, people want to dance like us, but students say that to a lot of people. That’s just a way of expressing curiosity about the world and a longing to try new challenging things.” As of this year, she has virtually a brand new company of dancers. With regard to training them into her work she says: “It’s really more a question of discovering what they do and how best to use it.”

Bebe (how else would I refer to her except by her first name?) is coming to Australia in January in 1995 to teach in Melbourne and Perth. She will be teaching movement primarily, her personal, highly developed code of squiggles on top of swoops, snaps in conjunction with suspensions and balances begun by ricochets. Although she herself has begun to explore more theatrical elements in her work – speaking, working with pro-active designers and with directors – movement is still a fascination for her. She loves to think about movement and to work on “elbows to heels relations” in complex co-ordination that demand speed, ease, fluidity. But for Bebe, the most important factor of learning movement in class is using it to “mine information about what your own body is doing”. She’s not teaching people to “move like me”, but rather using movement phrases as “objectively as possible”. In fact, if there is anything she’d like to be able to impart it is this: “to expand people’s idea of who they can be as dancers in a company and as choreographers.”

But really, what is this self she would like everyone to have the chance to express, to be, and where is hers?

As we’re talking, at the end of her long rehearsing week she starts to slow. She hesitates. She says, “You know what? As we’re sitting here talking I’m getting a rush of ideas.” She’s been troubled in rehearsal by making movement that doesn’t fit or say what she wants it to say. She doesn’t want to give up on all the years of accumulated information about making great movement, but new discoveries make it “unethical” to go backwards.

Right now she is working on a piece called Heaven and Earth about the relationship of the ecstatic to the mundane and finding a balance in the world. Maybe it’s sitting in a cafe overhearing tired New Yorkers’ conversations or seeing yet another headline about OJ Simpson, she “realises that what is missing is what’s outside of the movement. The requiems and gospel music lift it up, but it’s the stuff that’s not up there…”

She is working out her ideas right here in the cafe, as she speaks, and suddenly I start to feel responsible. Like a midwife or a fisherman whose job it is to catch, but not to mutilate with my own opinions and fingerprints. I try to help, to listen actively but not to pressure her as she haltingly articulates that what’s missing is not so much “where do we find exhaltation and peace?”, but “when in peace can we spare a thought for what we’ll make for dinner?”

I want to know how she’ll get from that thought to a dance. “I will look at the elements of the idea. Say I have a beautiful, exotic set and I put the Daily News in front of it. Does it resonate?

And now I realise that this is “Real” “Classic” Bebe. By making me responsible she makes me part of the work. This is how her dancers must feel, trying to catch, support, and nurture by being responsive, capable themselves, fully present in the process, not intrusive and not absent. For Bebe, being herself is partly a process of making her dancers, students, producers and audiences responsible for being themselves while engaging with the ideas. And partly a process of being responsible for continuing to uncover herself.

After all: “People respond to the humanity of what we dance about, to who we are. The mission for me is to think about how I can expand who I am in the company.” So RealBebe is in the work. Ironically, she remains elusive. “People never actually see the latest work because I’m always on to the next thing by the time it’s performed.”

Wendy and Shelley Lasica in Melbourne are organising Bebe’s visit and have organised visits by other teachers including David Dorfman and Lance Gries from New York and Lloyd Newson and Greg Nash from England. For more information call (03) 820-8620

This year, the Modern Image Makers Association (MIMA) and the Contemporary Music Events Company have collaborated in producing what will be the largest survey of contemporary electronic art, installation and film for 1994. This unique biennial event will also include seminars, public lectures and presentations by festival guests, and the publication (both electronically and in hard copy) of a comprehensive festival catalogue.

Extending over eleven days, the aim of this year’s programs, as with the previous four events, will be “to foster and promote Australian film, video and electronic media related art; by providing broader public access to, and critical awareness of this work in an international context.” To achieve this comparison, a number of programs of works by international artists will be run in conjunction with satellite exhibitions and programs.

Previous Experimenta events have profiled contemporary trends in cinema, the electronic arts, performance, and the visual arts, but have also included a substantial retrospective component. Experimenta director Peter Handsaker feels that this year’s event will have a more contemporary orientation.

“We don’t have such a large retrospective component this time around. There’s a larger international component, a broader survey of what’s going on in other major centres, including those centres that haven’t been represented that often—to also cover topics and themes—from the UK, South Asia and Japan for example—that represent the margin—or the minority within a dominant culture.”

Modern Image Makers Association are also working with the Contemporary Music Events Company to produce an extensive survey of Australian sound and time-based arts.

“Rather than trying to work on it ourselves—as we might have done previously— we’ve found the most appropriate organisation to put together a proposal and a budget to enable us to produce what I think will be a much stronger program for 1994. It’s also a model that applies to the international component. What we’ve done is identified appropriate curators overseas—gone to them and asked them to put programs together.”

One of this year’s international guests is Ian Rashid, who has curated a number of programs of film, video and installation for the Linden Gallery and the State Film Theatre. Beyond Destination (Beyond Destiny), is an exhibition of film, video and installation by 12 artists of South Asian origin (living and working in the UK, Canada and Australia) and includes work by Sutapa Biswas, Tanya Syed, Alnoor Dewshi and Emil Goh. “The artists in this program”, comments Rashid, “resist being among the exiled, of the diaspora, of always referring back to a mythical or real homeland.”

Alnoor Dewshi’s Latifah and Ilimi’s Nomadic Uncle provides no resolution to the drift between margin and centre, as the city of London is refracted into multiple landscapes. “The women are not able to map it – nor can they fix their identity against any bulletin board of history. They just continue on against an ever shifting backdrop, exchanging breezy wisdoms and checking out the territory.”

Uneasy Tales of Desire, also curated by Rashid, surveys recent British Gay and Lesbian works (film and video). David Farringdon’s controversial Continental Holiday (1992) uses found footage to explore the multiple worlds of gay tourism, while Derek Cerith Wyth Evans (a contemporary of Derek Jarman) explores desire in vision (through state of the art film and video techniques) in Degrees of Blindness (1988).

Curated by Misuzu Nishimura, Inside and Outside the Cocoon is a contemporary survey of films by Japanese women. Harumi Ichise’s Walking Man (1993) uses a Proustian trope of involuntary memory (the tying of shoe-laces) to produce a nightmarish evocation of what discrimination feels like. “I grew up in downtown Osaka”, Ichise reveals. “Every Summer, the BON dance festival was held at a nearby shopping area. Everybody danced there – gays, yakuza, storekeepers and so on. Although I loved the energy of this town, the word ‘discrimination’ has never left my mind.” Asako Sumi (whose film M for Menstruation also features in the program), will be a special guest for this year’s event.

Peter Mudie (from the School of Architecture and Fine Arts of WA) has curated a program of films from the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative spanning a thirty year period. Adrian Marc’s Orange (1962-64) is described as a random associative montage film that circulates around the idea of an orange. Valie Export is one of the finest representatives of feminist aktionism. Her work has evolved from “body at risk” performances of the 1960s into complex cinematic investigations of how the female body (as an assemblage of partial objects) is manipulated by the media and institutional discourses. Two of her films, …Remote… Remote…(1973) and Syntagma (1993) have been included in the program.

The Canadian film-maker, Mike Hoolboom will present two programs of experimental films dealing with sexuality and gender. The first, The Agony of Arousal, is a retrospective of his own work (from 1990-1993), including recent films like Shiteater, Frank’s Cock, and One Plus One (all from 1993). Hoolboom’s second program, Archaeologies of Gender, surveys recent Canadian experimental film which explore “masculine” and “feminine” identity.

Also included in this year’s programs is a survey of contemporary French experimental film (curated by Yann Beauvais), a selection of works of contemporary computer animation from the 1993-94 Prix Arts Electronica, plus the Australian premiere of two new works by Stan Brakhage, one of the great vernacular romantics of American avant-garde cinema of the fifties and sixties.

An exhibition at the Access Gallery (in The National Gallery of Victoria) will include installation and time-based work by Joanne Lewis, Michalea French, Greg Ferris, Laurens Tan and Natasha Dwyer. Greg Ferris’s Kinder-Und Hausmarchern (the title comes from the Brothers Grimm) continues an ongoing project of interactive video narratives which allow the reader/player to redirect the flow of the narrative along branches of their own choosing. Laurens Tan’s Lost Codes (Test Pattern X), refurbishes motifs within the SBS test pattern as screens upon which other images may be configured. Natasha Dwyer’s computer interactive, Choose Your Own Aphrodisiac, is based on the game of stone, scissors and paper, a critical parody of the system of symbolic exchange governing women as consumers.

Extra Terrestrial is an exhibition and forum to be held at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (from the 11th to the 26th November) and includes works by Ross Harley, Emil Goh and Jon McCormack. Ross Harley’s Digital Garden is described as “an ongoing computer graphic project which focuses on the changing relations between natural and artificial environments…The Digital Garden will imitate the patterns of biological and electronic growth in real-time, allowing the visitor to produce an ever-changing variety of life forms in a garden that is at once familiar and bizarre.”

Emil Goh’s Elements is a “sensory soup” of wind (generated by eight industrial fans), sound, and the visual sensation of fire (produced by a 3 x 5 m video projection). For this installation, the “spectator” will be situated so as to piece together a feeling for the social drama of the riot. Writer Jane Goodall (whose recently published Artaud and the Gnostic Drama is reviewed on page 21 of RealTime) will speak, along with other artists, at a special forum to be held on Saturday 12 November from 2-5 pm in the Erwin Rado Theatre.

Experimenta – a major exposition of film, video and electronic media art
will be held in Melbourne, 17 – 27 November, 1994.

Sydney Intermedia Network will screen Ian Rashid’s curated program Uneasy Tales of Desire at 2 pm, Saturday November 12 and Mike Hoolboom’s program The Agony of Arousal at 2 pm, Saturday December 3. Both screenings will be at the Domain Theatre, Art Gallery of NSW.

1994 (or 1995 depending on which camp you subscribe to) is the anniversary of the birth of cinema. It’s probably fitting then, that in the Sound Studio event at The Performance Space in October, film will disintegrate before the audience’s very eyes. In Alchemie, created by German artists Thomas Koner and Jurgen Reble, acid is poured onto unexposed film as it is projected, and the sound of physical and chemical catalysis is amplified, creating its own audioscape. Studio, developed by independent curator and audiophile Alessio Cavallaro, also features a number of Australian artists who work with a variety of reconfigurations of sound, music, the body and the image, using a range of the historical lineage of technologies of sound and image developed in the last century.

Catherine Hourihan, Garry Bradbury and James Whitington create a multimedia performance which resurrects ‘primitive’ super 8 film, a gauge currently battling extinction, projected onto the moving body suspended in a trapeze. Daniel Cole’s untitled work uses static projected images and sound drawing from Public Works film footage of 1960s Sydney housing projects. Cole and Jo Frare also present a work with an historical bent, this time drawing on the development of forensic science and plastic surgery. Sophea Lerner’s computer-based sound and image work moves Studio into the digital age.

Rik Rue’s Everything Changes, Everything remains the Same utilises his extensive library of found sounds in a semi-improvisational aural piece that eschews the visual dimension entirely, as does Charlotte Whittingham’s Signal to move, which amplifies the sound of technology. Thomas Koner’s soundscape, Kanon, engages with the subtle margin between the audible and the inaudible, representing the “acoustic shore to the sea of silence outside.”

In Melbourne, Earwitness, developed by the Contemporary Music Events Company and curated by Sonia Leber, also challenges the idea of sound as an “accompaniment” or form secondary to the image: a range of practitioners express ideas using sound as their primary medium. A diversity of approaches is the key here; as Leber says, “ Sound can penetrate so many sites. It can be used as a means of communication in many different ways.” The event, to be held in November at a range of sites including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and the Botanical Gardens, showcases many of the most interesting artists working in sound art in Australia in a range of installations and performance events.

The installations are a mixed bag, ranging from interactive computer based works, to conceptual works and acoustic environmental works. A collaboration between Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds will result in the engineering of a “new species”. The artists use the ambient, exotic space of the Glasshouse at the Botanical Gardens, an environment in which “transplanted sonic artforms” can migrate, cross fertilise and flourish, in a work which challenges the dominant perceptual role of vision. Derek Kreckler’s Boo! makes a witty, anarchic acoustic intervention in the normally silent and sacral white cube of the gallery. Graeme Davis creates a sculptural sound garden driven by wind and water. Joyce Hinterding’s custom designed electrostatic speakers use 8000 volts to create sonic and visceral energy waves where sound and space intersect: an architectonic acoustic environment is built into nodal points and planes where sound vanishes, juxtaposed with zones of high sonic intensity. Rod Berry’s Sound dial transforms solar power into acoustic energy: a set of solar panels activate organ pipes according to the arc of the sun, creating a slowly changing chord structure that ‘tells’ time audibly.

The performance series covers voice works, improvisations and works which focus on the body as the site of production and transmission of sound. Carolyn Connors will use vocal multiphonics to change physical objects, causing glasses to ring and possibly shatter. Anna Sabiel reprises her Tensile series: the suspended body physically orchestrates a subtle low-tech industrial soundscape. Herb Jercher performs a series of actions using sporting and archaic hunting ‘technologies’. Jercher plays with the way that simple physical technologies used in, for example, golfing or archery determine and shape the body’s movement through space and time, requiring kinaesthetic stealth, and producing an acoustic consequence such as the sound of the arrow in flight or the crack of a whip. Chris Mann and the Impediments will perform a ‘voice triangle’ using performers linked by technology but unable to hear each other’s voices; the performance works with a notion of information flow which uses the performer as signal processor or “biological computer”. Special guests for the festival are New York artists Ikue Mori, who formed the seminal No-Wave band DNA after moving to the US from Japan in 1977, and her collaborator David Watson.

These events are a kind of barometer for the current interest in sound art and performance, an impetus which has gathered momentum in the increasingly hybridised artworld of the 80s and 90s. Watch this space also for a national state of the art sound survey show to be held in 1995 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

It is one of the few heated moments at ISEA. Rejane Spitz, from Brazil, is chairing the Global/Local panel, provocatively subtitled Transcultural Approaches To Electronic Art: Do We Really Care? Are there only token references made to cultural differences, while the digital matrix imprints its Western profile on every colonial outpost? Will the information superhighway turn the whole world into outlying suburbs of Los Angeles? In this one little pocket inside the Congress Centre of Helsinki, Spitz is doing her best to agitate trouble.

“How many of you in the audience are not native speakers of English?” she demands. Two-thirds of the audience raise their hands. Emboldened by this showing, she later repeats the exercise, appending a challenge to the one-third without their hands raised: “You English speakers are in the minority! Why are we speaking your language?”

It’s true: English is the universal language spoken at ISEA (with the exception of one Romanian video artist, who uses a translator.) English is the dominant language of global media, of pop music, cinema and Euro-MTV. Spitz is doing no more than pointing out its ubiquity, yet she has succeeded in irritating some members of her audience (the ones without their hands in the air.) “What’s your point?” – an irate American accent – “what’s the problem? What other language can we all speak?”

Spitz refuses to become defensive, even though she acknowledges that nothing else comes close as a common language. Perhaps translators, UN-style, might preserve some of the cultural differences feeding into this universal gathering. The discord arising from Spitz’s provocation points, at the least, to the assumptions which otherwise go unchallenged about global electronic art: we meet and communicate in the one language, but how much gets lost, sliding away through the gaps where speakers give up their native tongues? Yet the issues are more complex than this, beyond the scope of a simple cultural imperialism model. As every European nation wrestles with the future of a United Europe, connected by information flow and infused with global media, what is the role of cultural difference? Is it subsumed into the transcultural info-net, or does it adapt new technologies to its own ends, resisting the homogenising wave that sweeps around the world?

This is one contentious point within ISEA; there are several others, deriving from speculations on the potential of electronic art forms. Is computer based art a continuation of Western scientism, or a break from it? Does virtual reality present a new metaphysical space for the imagination, or does it merely extend the Renaissance project of mastering space and nature itself? The debates extend to gender-related issues: what does it mean for women artists to work with this technology, the hand-me-downs from the military-industrial complex? The answers to this question, and the others, range from the creative to the reductive; or, at times, the issues peter out in confusion. A panel discussion on gender and technology becomes obsessed with the patriarchal nature of Cartesian rationalism, now perhaps under siege in a world of virtual spaces and interactivity. Yet a (male) American theorist effectively hijacks the debate with a laboured demonstration of the gridding of space. This is one occasion, of several, where our gracious Finnish hosts need to apply the hook from the wings, dragging the speaker and his grid off the stage and away out of the perspective.

ISEA brings together artists and theorists working in all manner of electronic arts. Video, sound, multi-media, interactive CD-ROMs, dance, music, VR, holography, performance, digital photography, digital painting, installations: you name it, it’s there on show, it’s analysed from all angles in three days of papers and discussions. The one common factor is the computer , as the base for most of this art. As Derrick de Kerckhove, from Canada, remarks in the opening theory session, the digital binary is now the universal translator of all substance. What are we to make of this endless flow of information?

Pierre Levy, from Paris University, has an optimistic vision of the future. The Internet, he says, is the first glimpse of a collective intelligence, a group imagination with the powers of growth. “A mutual rebound of singularities,” he calls it, in one of many lyrical catch-phrases, even after their translation into English. Hypertext is a “deterritorialisation of the library”; cyberspace creates a community akin to the pre-literary groupings of humanity. “We are nomads chasing after the future of humanity,” he proclaims; we will soon “collectively invent ourselves as a species.” These are fine visionary statements, and an uplifting start to the symposium; the only problem is that there is nothing here that Marshall McLuhan didn’t say thirty years ago. Has it taken the French, with their proud literary tradition, three decades to find this neo-tribal key to the future?

At least Monsieur Levy, via the old-fashioned medium of reading from the printed page, leaves us with some stirring phrases. Volker Grassmuch, from Germany but based in Tokyo, presents his arguments in hypertext: his non-linear assortment of material is projected onto a large screen while he mumbles into a microphone. The content of his presentation, again heavily indebted to McLuhan, provides a glimmer or two of insight into the media landscape in a computer age; unfortunately, in demonstrating the techniques of hypertext, he has lost the audience, which has become bored and restless. Still he flashes bits and pieces of hypertext onto the screen, but there is no insight now, and he is way over time with no sign of him finishing. WHERE IS THAT HOOK?

The Electronic Art Exhibition is held in Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art. What have the artists come up with? The best of them play with the space opened up for interaction between audience and artwork. This is a zone of chance, individual difference, and random creativity: elements not catered for in the good old Renaissance grid. Talking Picture by Kimmo Koskela and Rea Pihlasviita of Finland, appears to be a traditional painting of a woman: a semi-erotic representation of a woman reclining in a bath. But as you get closer, you can see her moving, and talking; if you stand in front of her, you can talk to her (in a number of languages.) A small camera and microphone in the frame allow the woman – a live and active video representation – to interact directly with whomever is standing in front of her.

A different form of interaction is possible with To Fall Standing by Rebecca Cummins, from Australia. The viewer shoots images with an 1880s shotgun; the images blend into others on video monitors, while drawing attention to a staple twentieth century feature: the fusion of camera and gun.

Interaction can take unforeseen twists, not always desirable, sometimes reprehensible. Cybersm III by Kirk Wotford and Stahl Stenslie, electronically connects two human bodies separated in space. Each wears a suit equipped with sensors; by touching a part of his/her body, one participant can trigger a heat reaction in the body of the other. Regrettably, the opening night demonstration of this cyber-connection leaves the female participant, surrounded by viewers, at the mercy of the male participant, hidden from view. “Don’t leave me with this man!” she cries, as it becomes apparent that this interaction is nothing more than an electronic feeling-up.

Interaction, however, is rarely put to such ends. Artists aim to create complex spaces where electronic properties blend with individual choice and pre-existing environments. Christian Moller’s Audio Pendulums connects huge steel pipes to a computer system via video signals. Anyone can alter the sonic environment of this space by moving one of the pipes: the resultant electronic sounds mix with the local ambience: passers-by, street traffic, rustling leaves.

Interactive CD-ROMs are also on display, attracting major interest. The strengths and weaknesses of this form are revealed when two of the artists discuss their work in a multimedia forum. Christine Tamblyn (USA) describes her CD ROM She Loves It, She Loves It Not: Women and Technology, as a revisionist history of technology, re-inserting women into technological history. Thematically, this is an important project, but the contents of the work – simplistic and unquestioned fragments of dogmatic text – mock the claims made for CD-ROM as a non-linear, liberating form of interaction for the user. The text-bites are reductive and didactic, with no alternative views: this CD-ROM is of Reader’s Digest standard in intellectual content. It leaves several in the audience reflecting on the inferiority of this form to the old-fashioned book, with its complexity and potential for a multiplicity of views.

The CD-ROM was redeemed, however, by Australian Brad Miller’s A Digital Rhizome. Although its text is drawn directly from the work of contemporary theorists Deleuze and Guattari, it augments this source with a parallel lyricism and labyrinthine quality. There is no didacticism or hierarchy here: the user is left to wander around the many paths of inter-connections.

The contributions of other Australians at ISEA offered a similar blend of theoretical sophistication and technical finesse. In the area of sound, especially, Nicholas Gebhardt, Virginia Madsen, Frances Dyson and Nigel Helyer gave incisive presentations. The critical dimension offered in their papers was generally unmatched by their American colleagues, while the familiarity with technique provided an edge over many of the Europeans. Gebhardt and Maria Stukoff injected, in their discussion of “Interactivity and the Labyrinth of Forms”, a much needed critical corrective to the romantic “revolutionary” claims made for the interactive technologies.

ISEA 94 placed a special emphasis on sound and electronic music: here too
some of the contradictions emerged. Electronic works were played in the Sibelius Academy’s electro-acoustic chamber hall, with its 32 channels playing through 96 loudspeakers. This hall is literally wall-to-wall speakers. And what are we listening to, through this astonsishing technical aray? David C. Little, an American composer, uses computers to analyse music and then, by programming chaos formulas, makes the computer generate electronic music.

The signs are not good. Here is the music now, and, as you would fearfully expect, it has all the aesthetic interest of a textbook.

But all is not lost in the Sbelius Academy. On the final night, Mari Kimura, a Japanese violin virtuoso, plays a number of compositions in interaction with a computer program. Here is a subtle exploration of dynamics, a diversity of shapes and colours generated in partnership with the computer. Violin figures are treated, echo longer and longer until they double back, resound in silence as they re-define themselves. This is human-computer musical artistry, a universe away from the “music” eked out by algorithmic plodding.

There are many more things to record, ideas and practices flashing around in these unformed circuits. Computer boffins and digital artists vie for control of the technology. Stelarc puts his stomach on display. Geert Lovink, a Dutchman and a “data dandy”, assures us that the European cyberspace will be distinguished from its American cousin by a “profound melancholy”, its unshakable European heritage. On Euro-MTV, identikit hosts speak Engish with a

Euro-blend accent, addressing music consumers as “Europeans”. AT&T promises its patrons that Europe is now delivered up without national borders or language barriers. But here in Helsinki, in the cobble-stone town-squares and market-places, no-one is rushing, no-one is worrying, and information superhighway or not, this does not feel like an extension of Los Angeles. And as for the language problem, next year’s ISEA in Montreal will offer a new twist: the symposium will be held in French first, English second.

“Welcome to the military-entertainment complex!” That’s not what the banner over the Orange County Convention Centre in Orlando, Florida said, but it might as well have. Siggraph is the great annual mating ritual of American computer graphics researchers, scholars, artists, technicians, hucksters and journalists. This year it attracted some 25,000 people.

Most come for the trade show, a handy place to check out the latest software, hardware and other doodads, all at special prices. Also not to be missed is the Electronic Theatre, a weird mix of high art and low commerce, but all brilliant examples of what computer animation can be. This year some remarkable 3D work screened as well.

You can have some weird experiences at Siggraph. Lockheed’s promotional video showing how they use integrated computer network systems to design their warplanes butts up against French computer art in which nudes from all periods of European art history breed and morph and cavort. You can strap sensors on your head and control the movements of a dolphin with your brain waves, or join the endless queues to stick those stupid VR head-mounted displays on and fly about in some cheesy virtual world. Honestly, you’d think people would get bored with all that sooner or later.

Every now and then you see something nice, and it’s a pleasure to report that two of the best things on display this year were by Australian artists. Jon McCormack’s installation Turbulence is a remarkable exploration of the idea of artificial life. McCormack studied maths before doing the film course at Swinburne, and has a rare combination of aesthetic and logical talents.

Turbulence presents a series of truly terrifying animations of non-existent flora grown out of McCormack’s own genetic software program. Terrifying because if you contemplate the animations for a while you quickly realise that they exist in a totally non-terrestrial space, and are observed from a totally non-human point of view.

I say non-human rather than inhuman. These things are as alive as triffids and are definitely being watched by something, but not a person, not even a camera. One only has to contemplate them for a minute or two and a big chunk of 70s screen theory goes straight in the dustbin of history and one is obliged to think again. The 3D animated versions that screened in the electronic theatre have haunted me ever since. McCormack is making what are, from the point of view of present aesthetics, impossible objects. That is what makes them so striking and so necessary.

Troy Innocent’s Idea-On>! is a more modest interactive work, made with off the shelf software, but it had something valuable to offer as well. Computer graphic work is about exploring new spaces, the ones on the other side of the screen, and representing them in our conventional world in ways that us earth and culture bound humans can understand. It is an ontological art, in that it shows that our understanding of being, in this place, this time, is historical and not universal. The confrontation with these most radically inhuman places and times confronts us with striking proof of the contingencies of the ways of being we think we know so well. Innocent’s work, for all its post-ironic pop charm, offers an endless invention of new codes of topography and symbol for moving around in these other spaces. In particular, Innocent offers us a way to play in places unknown, by coating them with a sheen of pop iconography.

Both Innocent and McCormack’s work are a tribute to what is unique about Australian new media arts training: its combination of technical, aesthetic and theoretical skills. This is a rare combination in the new media art world. Australian artists are inevitably too far from the California based military-entertainment complex to get their hands on the latest tools first. Yet they more than compensate by having a critical perspective and an aesthetic sophistication to their work.

Siggraph certainly offered many much bigger high-tech spectacles. Evans & Sutherland’s 3D interactive was a hoot, and SDI Research had one of the first immersive reality experiences with effective force-feedback. When you drove their simulated racing car the steering wheel really did resist you as one’s experience of driving and the laws of physics in this world would lead you to expect. This is a rare and difficult achievement. Ultimately, what’s more interesting from the aesthetic point of view is not the spectacle of 3D or the sensation of force-feedback, mimesis of this world, but creative explorations of how that other world out there in cyberspace might work when set free from mere mimicry.

Stephen Petronio doesn’t want to talk about it. But he’s affable and eventually just outspoken enough that he can’t resist. He says his dances are ideas-driven and, given the velocity of those dances, his ideas must be powerful fuel. But, he says, if he talks about ideas people look for their illustration in the dances and “you can’t read kinetic information like a book—it addresses another part of the mind; ideas style the body.” At one point, he thought he was so successful that he could say anything he wanted about himself (“I’m a fag, big deal. I’m not going to shut up about it, but I’m not going to let that message consume me.”) But he discovered that, like Icarus—who could dash around the heavens in a similarly dazzling, fleeting, audacious way—he could hurt himself by getting too “hot.”

The King Is Dead, the latest Petronio project, is about the death of the masculine icon. It’s about the idea of the death of the hero for him personally, as a sign and as a social entity. The process—neurological, emotional, formal or accidental—of transforming an idea into dance is hardly mysterious. But it is a voyage of discovery. Petronio can’t—or won’t—say how he gets from idea to action, only that it is a mark of success to come to a physical conclusion.

But he will talk about physical metaphors. The King Is Dead, he says, is full of “pelvis receding,” which is the opposite of the classical thrusting male pelvis. Perched on a fire engine red bar stool in a Mexican, unselfconsciously multicultural, noisy, cheap bar in Manhattan, Petronio rolls his head down to meet his tailbone. It’s an action that reveals an abandon and conscious ease with physical danger. (Anyone else would fall off the stool or at least have to uncross their legs and put down their Margherita!)

Stephen Petronio has a soft spot in his heart for Tasdance, the first company ever to commission a work from him almost ten years ago. When he arrives in August, the Tasdance dancers will undergo endless repetition to get the idiosyncrasy of an action right. The barely perceptible glee with which Petronio admits it will be “torture” for them is replaced by a rueful grimace when he confesses that, no matter how often he shows a movement to any dancer and how diligently they practice it, fifteen per cent of the nuance will be lost in translation.

His concern with speed and virtuosity, he admits, is very American. Certainly dance aficionados from other cultures have labelled his work “very New York” because of its concern with “more, more, more—more speed, more space, more money, and more success…”

Petronio is not concerned about the international epidemic of his trademark “fluidity of shape.” He’s not possessive, though he does think that if people are going to knock particular aspects of his work they should acknowledge their source. “It’s a language,” he says of contemporary dance, “people should use it… we’re living in a postmodern culture.” And the more that people speak the language, the more people he’ll be able to “talk” to without words getting him into trouble.

Here in New York, dance trends tend to have a ten-year cycle. Movement idioms change like shoe fashions. We get ten years of Reeboks and Nikes and now we’re back in platforms.

“After Trisha Brown” has been the flavour of the last decade. Fluid, overlapping actions flowing effortlessly from dancers who swing, glide, toss, swoop, flick and curl but never punch, strike, squeeze, hold or grab. Ironically, this movement style emanated from a cerebral woman working on formal concerns who may have agreed with Yvonne Rainer when she declared, “say no to sensuality.” But in the past decade the movement (not the formal concerns) became the sexy way to dance.

The popularity of the style has peaked now and will soon be on the decline. It is as much a cliché to the eye at this point as cross-dressing was a few years ago. The movement language was originally evolved as a tool to address formal concerns that have not been passed along to choreographers with the vocabulary. So the movement language, which was so laden with meaning and intention in the hands of its author has become gibberish in the works of a fifth generation of followers who seem like children imitating the words of their elders without knowing what they mean.

The release techniques in which Trisha Brown and company train remain very popular with dancers. (They can add years to a dancer’s career and many options to their movement vocabulary.) But even Trisha Brown is becoming less like Trisha Brown. Reviews of her latest work describe moments of stillness, strongly articulated, almost semaphoric gestures, a new (for her) bound quality, which wouldn’t have been seen earlier. One wonders how masters of dance feel about their followers. Perhaps Trisha Brown is evolving in part in response to the morass of clichés others have made of her deeply felt innovations.

If movement languages tell us something about contemporary social concerns, Trisha Brown and her first generation of followers (Stephen Petronio et al) articulated a glorious, impersonal complexity, fluidity and overlapping of actions as smooth and as dangerous as the computer technology spinning out of control on Wall Street.

What is replacing this? “New Expressionism” is the phrase today. It means dance has an emotional edge again, a merciful antidote after ten years of soft, seamless movement. And New Expressionism is coinciding with an increase in the presence or visibility of companies led by African-American, Asian, Hispanic and other ‘non-dominant’ cultures, men and women. They are looking at a mix of social issues, gender issues, personal stories and cultural contexts in work that freely mixes dance, story, song and any other elements that might be effective.

The leading company in this ‘genre’ is the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Company. Actually Bill T Jones has been defining new actions in dance for 20 years (just as Trisha Brown worked for 20 or so years before she was “discovered” by hordes of young wannabes). Bill T Jones has broken through as a leader not by being the first to try new mixes of movement stories and social themes, but because of the quality of the work.

Unlike Trisha Brown, Bill T’s contribution is not a movement style. For movement he takes what he needs. One minute he requires soft and released—surrender in emotional terms—and the next he demands furious attack. In dancers he wants the embodiment of all possible dualities—screams and whispers, amazons and sylphs, people who can be both mud wrestlers and ballerinas in action.

In these politically correct, multicultural times one could dismiss Bill T Jones’ current popularity by saying it’s just that he’s HIV Positive, black and angry. But I propose it is more than that—he is an original artist. And as such he is leading a movement, which will spawn followers and eventually clichés. What an artist of this stature does is to grasp and express the bigger picture. Bill T Jones doesn’t choreograph a dance about AIDS. He goes back to the Bible, to the Book of Job, and asks how we can have faith when we are visited by plagues. In The Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he crashed together the experiences of slaves with that of Jesus; somehow he made a meaningful ‘semioclasm’ of martyrdoms, so that we could look at our current predicament in the context of endless human suffering and momentary panaceas. He says his new work Still/Here is not going to be about how he lives with HIV, but how we all live with death. It will be about survival, and it will no doubt be an uplifting encounter with pain, ecstasy and lunacy.

Choreographers/movement theatre artists ‘arriving’ in the wake of Bill T Jones include people like David Rousseve (African-American and gay), Jowale Willa Jo Zolla (an African-American woman leading an all-female company); Patricia Hoffbauer (Brazilian); Amy Pivar (Jewish-American and gay), and many more. Their companies have names like REALITY or Urban Bush Women.

These artists are distinguishable from the ‘pants-off’ political work of the 80s by the evolution of their craft and the vulnerability found in their characters. Their take on sexuality/homosexuality, AIDS, cultural difference and social injustice is not as strident as it might have been a few years ago. Sweet stories, wit and self-mocking, and sensuality are evident too. Having a Democrat in the presidency means there is a less clear-cut enemy in power, and Bill Clinton is trying to address a lot of the same social issues as these choreographers. So perhaps artists feel they don’t have to scream to be heard. In fact, the very popularity of this kind of work at the moment means that they are being heard more than most people, and this creates a bit of a paradox when they talk about under-representation.

What is interesting about this movement is that the words used in the mix of dance and text cannot become meaningless in the same way that movement languages can become gibberish. The words are spoken, usually in simple declarative sentences in English. But what is scary is this: no matter how articulate, right and even moving the works of these artists are, their themes can become trivialised as they’re handed down. Sorrow won’t go away, but it will go out of style. And then how will we talk about pain?

Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century inspired a generation of female replicants. With cyborg replication uncoupled from organic reproduction, cyborg sex is a nice prophylactic against heterosexism—“My mistress enters my sensory orbit.” Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—gamegirls, simultaneously organism and machine, who populate cyberspace ambiguously and polymorphously, like Intelligent Mist. The cyborg is feminist ontology and epistemology and it gives us politics.
It is a creature in a post-gendered world—“I image a muscular hybrid”—resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity—“She decodes my perversities in nanoseconds.” It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence.

Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define different political possibilities and limits from those constructed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman—“I’m psyching for some hard downtime with a free radical.” Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden, ie through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished (w)hole, a city and cosmos. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. As illegitimate offspring they are exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their Fathers are, after all, inessential—“millennia later I am accommodated in an oral cavity which amplifies the workings of her secret cybernetic body … she transforms me into pure code, pure speed…”

All New Gen leading a band of renegade DNA Sluts, Patina de Panties, Dentata and the Princess of Slime, grants the wish for (s)heroic quests, exuberant eroticism and serious politics. She is omnipresent intelligence—an anarcho-cyber terrorist with multiple guises whose main aim is to virally infect and corrupt the informatics of domination and terminate the moral code. In this game you become a component of the matrix, joining ANG in her quest to sabotage the databanks of Big Daddy Mainframe…

Monsters still defined the limits of normalcy in the human imagination. Before they successfully interfaced their bodies with cybernetic matrices, human beings had to appreciate that any desire for stable identity was useless and retarded certain monstrous instincts necessary for healthy interface. Luckily, monsters represented a very large, indelible territory of habits, taboos and details in their psyches. Monsters still exist and their semiologies continue to proliferate. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallocentrism. The name of the game is infiltration and re-mapping the possible futures outside the (chromo) phallic patriarchal code.

All battles take place in the Contested Zone, a terrain of propaganda, subversion and transgression. Your guides through the Contested Zone are renegade DNA Sluts, abdicators from the oppressive superhero regime, who have joined ANG in her fight for data liberation…Transformations are effected by virus vectors carrying (hopefully) a new developmental code—Virus of the New World Disorder.

Humans were preoccupied with perfectibility. They often said, in the mirroring way they had of saying almost everything, “I want to make myself perfectly clear” and “I want to make my self perfectly clear.” Since the difference between these statements was evident only when the written form was carefully read or ‘self’ was correctly enunciated orally, human beings were prone to totalising arguments, theories of unity and hierarchical dualisms, Gamegirl Objective: To defeat Big Daddy Mainframe, a trans-planetary military industrial imperial data environment.

The path of infiltration is treacherous and you will encounter many obstacles. The most wicked is Circuit Boy, a dangerous technobimbo with a gratuitous 3D detachable dick, which, when unscrewed transforms into a cellular phone. The phone is a direct line to the Cortex Crones, brain matter of the matrix and guardians of the digi cryst. However, el clitoris es linea directa a la matriz.

Technological determinism is only one ideological space opened up by the re-conceptualisation of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage the play of writing and reading the world. ‘Textualisation’ of everything in post-structural, postmodern, post-real theory has been damned for its disregard for lived relations of domination that ground the ‘play’ of arbitrary reading. Postmodern (feminist) strategies, such as cyborg myths, undermine the certainty of what counts as real, probably fatally. The transcendent authorisation of interpretation is not necessarily cynicism or faithlessness like the accounts of technological determinism destroying ‘man’ by the ‘machine’ or ‘political action’ by the ‘text.’ What cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn’t we? On your dangerous and necessary journey to screw up BDM, Circuit Boy and the Cybermen: You will be fuelled by G-slime. Please monitor your levels. Bonding with the DNA Sluts will replenish your supplies. (I can vouch for this strategy, especially if you remove more than your shoes in the Bonding Booth). “She willingly slide into the other she had always felt herself to have been. She could use her body to connect with the networks of her choice.”

Be prepared to question your gendered biological construction.
Humans classified themselves by gender, which severely impeded the development of social relations such as those involving reproduction, science and technology. One by-product of gender identifications was labelled the Oedipal Complex, a kind of psychological virus. Recall this early but already lethal example from my databank: “Ladies and Gentlemen… Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of femininity… Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply—you are yourselves the problem.” The Oedipal Complex was promoted as an irreversible development and caused many disfigured identifications. Consider the transfer of guilt to an entire social class of women in this example or in concepts such as ‘purity’ and ‘mother.’ Such perversions almost certainly account for the brief appearance of Oedipal chimeras during early cyborg development. Fortunately, Oedipal chimeras extinguished themselves on cue by mirroring their identity in dualism. For this, human beings learned to distinguish illegitimate fusions that are ethically unproductive from those that are critically speculative. They are fast becoming post-Oedipal, like me. The potential of cybernetic worlds rests with the feminist cyborg. Salutations, pussy.

Once they articulate the representational problems raised by cyborg technology, they will have achieved the status of partial explanations. Then monsters will represent the potential of community of human imagination, and they will say, “I want to make my selves partially appear.” Enjoy. “We move through this post-real world at the speed of thought.”

VNS Matrix: artists Julianne Pierce, Josephine Starrs, Virginia Barrett and Francesca da Rimini working from Sydney and Adelaide. Their current project is the ongoing development of an interactive computer artwork titled All New Gen. VNS Matrix creates hybrid electronic artworks that ironically integrate theory with popular culture. As cyberfeminists VNS Matrix’ mission is to highjack technology and remap cyberspace.

This article was originally published by Contemporary Art Centre, South Australia under a different title in Broadsheet, 1993.

Keith Gallasch talks with dancer and choreographer Kim Walker about the influx of great choreographers for the festival season

Ten am, Darlinghurst, Sydney, and it feels like one hundred per cent humidity already, but in the pause that refreshes between choreographing the very physical realisation of Tim Winton’s That Eye The Sky, directed by Richard Roxburgh for that actor’s new theatre company, Burning House, in Sydney and the musical Jesus Christ Superstar in New Zealand, Kim Walker beats the heat in his express desire to get to Adelaide to experience the riches offered by William Forsythe and Mark Morris. In Christopher Hunt’s 1994 Adelaide Festival there are two programs by Forsythe, an American directing the Frankfurt Ballet, and three by another American, Mark Morris, with his own company and including a dance-driven version of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aenaes. This is a festival with dance at its centre.

When he first saw Forsythe’s work in the mid-80s, Kim Walker, no stranger to the demands of modern dance in the Sydney Dance Company, was “absolutely astounded and startled at the sheer individuality of the work, at the power of the ideas and imagery, that a ballet company was working like a contemporary dance company.”

I was astounded too. Chance took me to Forsythe’s Slingerland at the Chatelet in Paris, 1990. It was a giant work, a fantastic journey: dancers’ heads sprouting through small holes in the stage floor, a monstrous clawed foot consuming the theatre, lighting that was not afraid of the dark, un-camp dancing across ballet gender lines. It was a night of great theatre, not a soul from four years of age to eighty left before the end, much to the chagrin of the standing-room-only crowd. Forsythe is reputed to have said that the theatre is dead: well, he’s kicking it back into life. Thanks to Leigh Warren, Adelaide got a taste of his work, and, it is to be hoped, a taste for Forsythe in 1992 with his Enemy in the Figure. That work will be seen again, this time as part of Limb’s Theorem, the two-hour work on architecture, light and philosophy to which it belongs.

Walker says dance has changed enormously over the last decade—audiences are now used to responding individually to demanding works and making their own meanings. There are choreographers, including a number of Australians, who are not afraid, who can create huge works and intimate ones, and works like Morris’ version of The Nutcracker that disturbs as much as it entertains.

What Kim Walker likes most is the very idea that a ballet company like Forsythe’s is at the cutting edge of dance, and expects—and gets—a new, wider audience. It’s a visit, he says, that will also confirm just how good Australian dance is. It confirms the capacity for ballet and contemporary dance not to be insular, to give dance a place, for example, in opera (a word changed forever in the late twentieth century) as in Meryl Tankard’s integral participation in the Australian Opera’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and to re-frame the way we see and experience our bodies. Forsythe’s dancers seem to lead from the most unexpected parts of their bodies, inventing new spaces.

Virtuosity is distributed across these ensembles and not safe-guarded for a few stars, generating both a tribal feel in the big works and an acknowledgement of each performer in the collection of curious shapes, skills and ages of idiosyncratic dancers. They create performances for audiences to work at, choosing where to look (you can’t take it all in at once), who to follow, who to desire, and yet, suddenly, pulling you forwards into a powerful central image. You don’t have to like dance or ballet to face the exhilarating demands of Forsythe and Morris; theirs is performance at its most powerful. You’d be mad to miss seeing them. You’ll be a little less sane when you do.

Before Kim Waker heads out into the steam, reflecting on his experiences in Java with traditional dancers and the One Extra Dance Company (and the subsequent Dancing Demons in Sydney), he happily observes that contemporary dance is fuelled by both its latest rapport with Asia (Chrissie Parrott’s Satu Lingat at the Perth Festival being the most recent example) and its own phenomenal energy, a capacity to re-invent itself both as pure dance and as an intensely theatrical experience (lucky Perth also has the remarkable Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Rosas Danst Rosas and Achterland). Working in dance, opera and musicals and not feeling a stranger in any, the experiences slowly shape Kim Walker’s own next project as far away as he feels it might be. In the meantime he’s not going to miss out on Morris and Forsythe in Adelaide. We both wish we could afford tickets to Perth.

Keith Gallasch talks to Julie-Anne Long about workshopping with the internationally renowned french dancer-philosopher

“He has extremely intense, unblinking, blue eyes and an unbelievable memory.”

Julie-Anne Long (Associate Director of The One Extra Dance Company and long time collaborator with the Open City Performance Company) is describing Jean-Claude Gallotta at work with twenty-two choreographers from Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

“In the initial exercise he asked us to read each other’s bodies as maps, looking for detail to spark a memory. The next day he remembered exactly what we’d done. His feedback to us was individual, perceptive and detailed with no throw-away comments.”

I’d seen a piece of Gallotta’s shown on SBS’ Eat Carpet, a group of twelve or so overcoated dancers in a field on a chill, sunny morning stamping the churned earth, momentarily bird-like, horse-like, moving individually and then with a sudden collectivity without any musical prompting, just as suddenly struck, as if by a virus, falling into the earth. Like the best postmodern dance, here was everyday movement made strange by unapparent motives, possession, alternation between individual preoccupation and group forces. It was not surprising then to find that the likes of Long, Cheryl Stock, Chrissie Parrott, Leigh Warren, Sue Healy, Jane Pirani, Maggie Sietsma, Jim Hughes and Paige Gordon signed up to work for two weeks with Gallotta in Melbourne in January.

“His background is in the visual arts and he came to dance late. He’s a philosopher of dance in search of ‘degree zero’, encouraging us to pare down movements to an almost neutral state, free of any embellishment. Even the tiniest everyday gestures”—Long reaches for a cup in progressively simpler moves—“are overlayed by habits and personal style.

“In the mornings we were dancers learning a vocabulary for the afternoon workshops. This was a bit much, but like the rest of the process, people got into it because it was sustained. I liked the afternoons. Gallotta would outline a bizarre story and we’d each have time to choreograph and perform our solo or duo version of it. 1—You arrive in a malicious manner. (I was never quite sure if he was being translated correctly.) 2—You see a book. 3—You eat it. 4—You are in front of the fire curtain. 5—You touch your head to it. 6—The curtain goes up. 7—You enter the stage. 8—Use a phrase from the morning class vocabulary ‘as a memory’. We’d perform and he’d give his response, which, to me, added up to a dramaturgy of movement focused very much on timing and rhythm. You still had your own language of steps and movements but you had new ways of dealing with them.

“We’d absorb his astonishingly detailed comments and take them into our work on a new story the next day. In many ways it was about responding to and understanding rhythms internally. Gallotta’s focus on the interior is something not often offered dancers. I was very attracted to it. It was a good group experience and a great individual one.”

Norrie Neumark will morph (or at least she’ll talk about it). Allucquere Rosanne Stone will talk of desire, vampirism, memory and multiple entry from the standpoint of cultural and trans-human theory. Linda Dement wants your body bits, and Minski will take you on a mouse-sexy hyperware tech tour. Ready?

The day is February 26; the place: Elder Hall, Adelaide; the event: Future Languages, as curated by VNS Matrix, four cyber-feminists with attitude.

The members of VNS Matrix end Artists’ Week in the future: “from cyborgs to VR, life in the ‘developed’ world is increasingly mediated by technological devices. How will we experience ourselves and others in the future?” they ask. “Who will be in control?”

Future Languages, with the help of a host of international and Australian artists, will investigate the challenges of high technology culture. The first challenge of the day will no doubt be Simon Penney, beamed as a welcoming tele-presence live from his seat as the first Associate Professor in Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Post-Penney, Future Languages starts talking.

Queenslander Glenda Nader is fascinated by the voices/languages of answering machines and other recorded messages as private/public, differently sexed, tele-presences. During Future Languages, she’ll discuss the techno-anatomical body as aesthetic model. Nader, an artist and writer, says she has a compulsion to seek out the points of rupture in the ‘informatics of domination’ (to quote Donna Harraway). This compulsion has taken the form of research into “how women can/are making themselves in cyberspace rather than see ourselves as we have been seen in the old media.”

One artist who will be remaking women literally, and inviting participation, is Linda Dement. Throughout the day she’ll be co-ordinating the workshop Cyberflesh Girl-monster in the tradition of Mary Shelley, Identikit and Helene Cixous. Dement asks that you “donate your bits—whatever you can scan in will be what she is made of.”

The workshop will be an opportunity for women to put their own flesh and thoughts into cyberspace as a bodily presence, using languages of gesture, skin, muscle, fantasy, flesh and words. Participants will be able to take the bodies of data away on floppy disc for further manipulations.

Dement says that the workshop is to be a women’s representation in the new techno realms: something other than Macplaymate, Virtual Valerie, calendar girl screen-savers and online porn.

Maria Fernandez will discuss technology in the colonial and post-colonial cultural inflection. Sally Prior, an Australian computer artist, will explore the possibilities of interactive multimedia through an artwork set in a Tunisian context and Ken Wark will talk about computer games in techno-speak.

Sadie Plant from the UK will deliver a paper titled “Cybernetic Hookers: Women, drugs and intelligent machines.” From Western Australia, Zoe Sofoulis is on the same panel, titled Cyborg Surgery, and will present a text dealing with women artists and technology, cars and prosthetics.

Ian Howard, an artist and academic from Queensland, has for more than 20 years concentrated on an investigation of the relationship between military and civilian populations. For Future Languages he poses the question, “Wailing over spilt milk: the legacy of the military century, what might have been.”

The growth industry of the 90s is not multimedia, cyberspace or virtual reality. The growth industry of the 90s is hype about multimedia, cyberspace and virtuality reality. Apart from the video games industry, which took off like a rocket, there are more sound bites and press releases about all this stuff than anything else. Still and all, it’s fun hype. Reading all the hype might not tell you about much, besides the future of hype, but hype may very well be the future of culture.

But let’s turn the hype mode off for a minute and take a look at this new media hype industry itself. New media hype spawned two glossy magazines, which are now infesting the newsagents: Mondo 2000 and WIRED. Both are from San Francisco and combine that city’s liberal intellectual confidence with Silicon Valley info-capital. Being a last, late spin-off from the military industrial complex, new media hype is an odd blend of state-subsidised knowledge-capital and free wheeling small business hucksterism.

Both these magazines are aimed at people who want to scramble to the top of the new middle class of the emergent information economy. Mondo has fringe culture, neo-hippy pretensions, but is not that different from WIRED, which is pretty tight with the heavy industry types. If you want to know who’s most heavily into self-promotion in the info-celeb stakes, read Mondo. If you want to know who’s hawking this week’s hot product data, read WIRED. Or if you’re a serious, aspiring cyberpunk, read both. They may be mostly hype, but they are also guides to the expanded production of hype, which is precisely what the new information economy is all about.

The main thing one can observe about the expanded production of hype is that there are three kinds of info-hacking that cut it in the hype economy. One is hardware hacking—actually having technical skills. This is now pretty much essential. Like the old days of the art academies, you have to be down with some kind of technique. Modernist arm waving is passé. There’s no room any more for amateurs.

Of course, you can specialise in data-hacking. If you can surf the endless wave of raw data pumping out into the info-sphere every nanosecond, there’s a place for you. This is not so much a skill in finding information. Any fool can do that now—the stuff is everywhere. The skill is rather in not getting bogged down in yesterday’s news, in eliminating the inessentials. It is not so much about finding data other people can’t hack, as recognising the significance of something else, right in front of everyone’s nose, that everyone else has ignored. This process even has its own terminology: you can grep, grok or zen information: to ‘grep’ is to recognise patterns; to ‘grok’ is to drink it all in and distil the contours; to ‘zen’ is a far more elusive form of abduction for really hardcore data hackers. These are things they don’t teach you in school.

Then there’s a third option: style-hacking. Every cool info-hacker has her or his limitation, and that limitation is style. But somebody has to form the styles—the look, the package and the concept—for everyone else to wrap their bodgie bundle of skills or good in. So if you know nothing of Unix and can’t find a relevant piece of data in three minutes if your life depends on it, try style- hacking. Mondo 2000 is basically a style-hack mag. WIRED is data-hack. Hardware-hackers pretend not to read either.

Needless to say, all this is somewhat under-developed in Australia, but that will change. The publishers of Rolling Stone can see which way to wind is blowing, and have floated Hyper. It’s a video games magazine with aspirations to something grander—aspirations as yet unfulfilled, but worth keeping an eye on.

The video game culture covered by Hyper matters, because Nintendo and Sega are actually making new media happen. Like much new media, it starts as rudimentary trash aimed at the bottom end of the market. That’s how cinema started. Sega is raising a generation of teenagers acculturated to the post-broadcast age. Whatever form culture takes in the future, this is the audience it will have to understand.

Up the other end of the scale, check out the ‘Art & Cyberculture’ special issue of Media Information Australia. It’s a good collection of articles by and for people trying to put the new hardware tools to creative use. New media are not going to go away. The clumsy goggle and gloves ‘virtual reality’ is neither virtual nor realistic and will probably disappear into the museums alongside the Vita-phone and 3-D movies. Yet ever more abstract, flexible, accessible media will continue to arrive on our doorsteps, whether we like it or not. Whoops, looks like the hype mode is back on again…

Find

Author archive

realtime