Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

August 1995

TRACKS, the Darwin based dance collective, grew out of the dance development program at Browns Mart Community Arts under the direction of dance officers Sarah Calver and David McMicken. Last year it acquired its own name and consolidated its direction. TRACKS functions as a part-time innovative dance company and full-time community dance program supported by the Northern Territory Office of the Arts and the Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council.

The community it serves is broad in dimension and geography. In Darwin TRACKS runs classes for adults and teenagers, and a program with a 50-plus group, The Grey Panthers, as well as workshops with Corrugated Iron Youth Theatre. It also provides choreographic support for Darwin Theatre Company productions and directs Gathering Ground, an annual community dance event at Browns Mart, which brings together the diversity of dance in the town. Its activities outside Darwin are focused on Aboriginal communities, in particular Lajamanu.

This year TRACKS has staged a Darwin season of their work Boundaries and Beyond and taken it on tour to remote communities in the Territory, and just completed a five week residency at Yipirinya School in Alice Springs. In September, they are remounting My House, a dance theatre performance project in conjunction with Corrugated Iron Youth Theatre for a Darwin season and a tour across northern Western Australia in September. To finish off the year TRACKS will direct a cabaret show with the Grey Panthers.

Boundaries and Beyond showcased work from the last two years and included two extraordinary original works – Silent Thought and Sacred Space. While Calver and McMicken constantly hanker for more time to do this sort of thing – developing their own art as dancers and choreographers, they are the first to say that it is the community dance work that feeds their creativity and to imagine abandoning it would be cutting themselves off at the source. TRACKS’ position is akin to that of many other contemporary dance groups across the country producing innovative work – funding structures and constraints mean they work as pick-up companies. However, TRACKS is in a stronger position than many because they have always combined community dance development with their own artistic exploration, rather than being force-marched that way by funding bodies.

In Darwin and the NT, the small population, the geography of distance and the relatively minimal professional arts infrastructure has meant that a contemporary dance company or a contemporary art space (the position of 24 HR ART is very similar) must address itself to more than the cognoscenti. Rather than seeing such breadth and inclusion as compromise, TRACKS and 24 HR ART have used that matrix as a strength. Such an approach has led to an exploration of form coupled with content drawn from the community. The work is broadly accessible, strengthens regional identity and develops an audience through recognition of content, in time the audience becomes confident and familiar with the form and recognises style and innovation.

Such work is frequently celebratory but it can just as easily be critical and provocative and make its terms of reference for its audience as it goes. In this context Silent Thought and Sacred Space can be viewed as addressing gender relations between black and white Australians in works that both celebrate and provoke, and are read by predominantly white audiences in Darwin and Aboriginal audiences in communities in different and interesting ways.

Silent Thought was conceived and choreographed by Tim Newth for Calver and McMicken. It was inspired by the Ted Egan song The Drover’s Boy – a tragic lament about the coupling of white drovers and Aboriginal women.

Shoot the bucks/Grab a gin/break her in/
Cut her hair/and call her a boy/
the Drover’s boy.

The practice was common but rarely publicly acknowledged. Silent Thought is a subtle and very moving piece about the reining in of public emotion, as the song hinges on the observation of another stockman who watches the drover silently mourn his love and sees him steal a lock of hair from the dead ‘boy’.

Ostensibly the piece reclaims a hidden history and honours the work and contribution of these women to the pastoral development of the NT. It also shows that despite the brutality of the breaking-in, there was a mutuality, companionship and passion across the racial divide. Interesting-ly, because Calver is obviously not Aboriginal, it subsumes, even subverts the category of race allowing the audience to focus on the secret relationship between a man and a woman and the pain of concealing the extent of feeling.

But it also works at another level – not only is the dancer meant to be Aboriginal, she is also meant to be a boy – she does the work of a man and no concessions are made to her femininity, so it is possible to read it as if she were a boy which raises further questions about sexual politics on the frontier. Newth says that it was those very ambiguities that attracted him to the story. In Silent Thought, he has made a piece about sexuality and work which is about gender and race but does not lock the audience into the fixity of either. It is about a larger and more felt emotional truth. On this frontier socially constructed boundaries are malleable, and in the aftermath of brutality there is space for an essential connection between two individuals.

Silent Thought is riven with ambiguity. Even the sequence of the ‘breaking-in’, by its repetition and subtle shift of attitude transforms from an image of subjugation into an expression of need and desire, with the boy holding the reins. It’s a very sensual piece, its eroticism is understated, and true to the shyness of one and the awkwardness of the other there is very little eye contact between “the tall white man and the slim black boy who never had much to say”. Significantly, in the fucking sequence, there is eye contact preceded by an image of the two looking into each other’s faces as one is supported above the other, and what it suggests is Narcissus drinking in his reflection; that recognition of love being recognition of the self in the other.

The feeling is elegiac and the pleasure in the physical is felt through the work rituals and the sense of freedom and expansion of self in doing this kind of work. The music takes the song in John Williamson’s version and cuts into it the plangent cellos of G Clef by Kronos Quartet, and, to suggest the galloping hooves of horses, the syncopated drum beat of Not Drowning Waving.

The movement phrases are strong, graceful and elegant. Both Calver and McMicken employ the other’s body as horses to mount and ride, as rocks or saddle bags to sit on by the campfire, and at other times carry one another. In the repetition of these actions with the roles reversed, the polarities of subject/object, active/passive, strong/weak dissolve into mutuality. Real actions are distilled, abstracted and repeated in sequences which resonate with charged emotion.

Sacred Space was created and performed by Calver and McMicken in collaboration with writer and performance poet Karyn Sasella, and centres on the community of Lajamanu in the Central Desert. From living and working there, all three have formed strong connections with the community, though they have never been there at the same time – each person’s experience has been discrete and particular.

In that hot/red land/I learnt/
so clearly/that it’s not/
the tyranny of distance/
but the opportunity

Sacred Space is about culture shock but firmly poses the question: Whose culture is shocked? Compared to Silent Thought, which had an historical distance and suffused feeling, Sacred Space is set right here in the full blinding glare of the present. It announces itself as a distillation of experiences lived by the two performers with their feet firmly on the ground and their eyes out on stalks. Sasella’s poems, which are threaded through, are another experience which often parallels and complements Calver’s and McMicken’s.

Sacred Space is structured in three sections – getting there, being there and internalising there. The space is divided down the middle by an invisible line. At first this seems merely to reflect Calver’s and McMicken’s sides of the story, as we see them packing up to leave Darwin and then driving the long long way to Lajamanu. But once they arrive it becomes clear the space reflects the Walpiri division of the world into men’s business and women’s business and parallels the separate but continuous spheres of life they encountered at Lajamanu.

Only in the duet Lover Boy Lover Girl do they come together in the space and in so doing literally cross the line as the dance is not simply about courtship but about wrong skin love – a taboo but common occurrence in Aboriginal communities. The dance is set up with a game of flirting with torches in the rec hall after everyone else has gone to bed. The dance is both furtive and shy, cheeky and bold, pervaded by play and risk, and regarded as a wicked hoot by Aboriginal audiences.

Sacred Space is shot through with wit. We laugh with them laughing at themselves as we see ourselves reflected as strangers in a strange land. We feel the awkwardness and confusion of being on the outer, in the minority. The piece is serious and respectful of cultural difference but is never precious or earnest. There are hauntingly beautiful images – McMicken binds his clothes with string into a rope as thick and lumpy as an intestine, or a snake, while exquisitely fine sand falls from the ceiling and Calver dances in its rain. The sand falls slowly and keeps on falling. There are movement sequences based on Walpiri sign language which look at the disjunction between the simplicity of hand sign and the complexity of meaning it evokes. The power of the imagery in the piece comes from the lived experiences of the dancers.

Sacred Space speaks most clearly and loudly of the trust and connection between these white artists and this Aboriginal community. This relationship of exchange and collaboration has been built slowly over the last eight years and produced a series of works for, by and about the community. Like all good exchanges it has been properly two way; Lajamanu Kurra Karna Yami in 1992 brought the community – men, women and children, dancers, performers and painters – to town for a show and art exhibition at Browns Mart.

In 1996 TRACKS is planning to take Silent Thought and Sacred Space and a group of traditional Lajamanu women dancers, Yawalyu, to Melbourne for Greenmill Dance Festival to present their work alongside an exhibition of Lajamanu desert painting. It will be interesting to see what a national audience makes of this unique collaboration. Greenmill next year will coincide with the Dance Alliance, a biennial event, so TRACKS will be exposed to international dance aficionados. What will they make of it?

RealTime issue #8 Aug-Sept 1995 pg. 3

“How long is this bloody thing going to take?”

I want to slap the screen to wake the computer up. It’s been sitting there for at least five minutes doing nothing but giving an occasional vague flicker. This is barely enough to keep me from reaching for the reset key just to relieve the suspense.

But then I am confronted with a lurid red and green graphic and in heavy blue letters, the title Putrid Afterthought. It’s a web page at http://underground.net [expired], from somewhere in the US, with a new series of beckoning buttons underneath. It claims: “Putrid Afterthought is what is seen at the end of the double-barrelled, shotgunned cesspool of hyper reality. View at your own risk. May cause irreparable libidinal damage.”

Once this appears it’s a matter of following further hyperlinks, more waiting and potential frustration.

With all the hype in the media about the Internet you would think browsing the net should be a more dynamic experience. But it isn’t. It’s sometimes tedious. Often frustrating. Using the net is quite mundane.

When I say the net at its best is mundane, that’s not actually a put-down. It is mundane in that it’s a day-to-day thing. It’s not extraordinary. It’s ordinary. And once you have been using it for a while, it becomes just a part of your daily routines.

The World Wide Web is the most popular way of publishing material on the Internet. It’s only one of the ways the Internet works, but is the best way to publish documents because it is easy to use and combines graphics and formatted hyperlink text.

(See How the web is woven).

Net publishers name their sites by using familiar metaphors: sites are exhibits, publications, or spaces. Things on the net really are not much like the originals. The metaphors help give focus for the authors and set expectations for the viewers.

Check out on-line exhibitions

If you visit a gallery you expect to see pictures. In fact, quite a few art galleries have a presence on the net. The Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh in the US, for example, has a site on the World Wide Web. It includes a ‘guided tour’, which lets you choose a floor, see the floorplans of each floor, and a list of every work on display. There are images of many of these works. The site promotes the gallery’s permanent exhibition and events, and is an end in itself.

Unlike a real-world gallery, you don’t have to be in the same place as the exhibition. Without travelling or paying entrance fees you can see all sorts of contemporary art works or older collections. The only difference between a virtual gallery in Paddington and one in Pittsburgh is the time it takes for the images to download.

But the time you may have to wait can be annoyingly long, even for the ‘local’ gallery. This affects the experience. Where in a physical art gallery you can shuffle from one picture to another in a matter of seconds, on the World Wide Web an image takes anything from a few seconds to several minutes to turn up on your screen. What you can see is confined to the size, and the resolution of the screen (usually around 640 by 480 pixels at 72 pixels per inch).

Visiting a virtual gallery makes you aware – by its absence – of the sense of place you feel in a real gallery. This sense affects the way you experience the artworks. It takes effort to get to a gallery – arranging the time, travelling to the gallery, bringing friends and so on. Once you are there, you feel a sense of place: the space of the gallery, the light, silence and smells are part of the experience of the gallery that are missing from the virtual experience. When you’re browsing the world through the web what is stable is the machine you are using, and the nature of the way the Internet works.

Virtualler and virtualler

An exhibition on the net doesn’t need to have a real world referent. Kaleidoscope, a web site for independent artists includes a maze of metaphorical places: the art studio, centre stage, cyberfair, a newsstand and reading and screening rooms. At each of these, the metaphor sets the expectation about what kind of information you should find there. Based somewhere (or nowhere) in LA, Kaleidoscope gathers material from independent artists and gives them virtual place and meaning. There are interviews with various artists about current theoretical and practical themes, graphics, sound and video clips (although downloading many will take you all night).

A new site from South Australia, Parallel, is a ‘journal / gallery’ that looks beautiful, and is rich in content. It is both a journal and gallery on the web, using the tropes of both to set the tone and structure of the web site.

Parallel opens with a well-designed first page. This is crucial, because it sets the tone for the whole site. At the top of the page is a graphic of their logo, followed by a brief statement of purpose, and a table of contents for the gallery and journal. Each item in the table of contents links to the work itself.

Also on the first page are a series of links to other sites in related areas. The articles deal with theoretical post-modern and post-structuralist issues. The gallery of art works is small enough not to alienate users. From small ‘thumbnail’ images in the main gallery there is the option of downloading larger versions or animated QuickTime video clips. This site makes good use of backgrounds and design using the capabilities of the newest browsers. It also backs up the structure with solid content.

System-X is another group of electronic and computer artists. For some time they have used a bulletin-board, which is available through dial-up and they now have a net site. It includes exhibits by musicians, visual and installation artists. Work like Brad Miller’s digital rhizomes finds a natural place here, growing in the cracks of the post-Cold War technology. SysX sees cooperation and collaboration between artists through the net as equally important to exhibiting work.

Read, hear, see!

Web sites are a means of electronically publishing all sorts of information that used to be published on paper and in other forms. Sometimes publishers have a physical version as well; other times they don’t. The virtual version is different from the paper one. The virtual version has new possibilities.

Next Online is an elegantly implemented, commercially-oriented site from publishers of Rolling Stone. Their site includes an on-line promotion for Rolling Stone, an online games magazine associated with the publication Hyper, called Hyperactive, MM multimedia magazine, and Geek girl. Managing director Phillip Keir says attracting notoriety on the Internet today is easier than through traditional forms. The electronic version of Geek girl, for example, was called up 300,000 times, far more than the paper distribution of 500 copies. The net provides an international audience impossible to gain economically with paper distribution. It also includes multimedia material like sound and video that are not possible with paper.

Another site, Artsnet, has grassroots community-based material, from the Australian Society of Authors and the Australian Network for Art and Technology, but has a home page that at the moment is cluttered, ugly and unclear. There is some good material on the site, but the initial impression is bad. On the net, clever and appealing design are critical in the impression you get of the material.

You could easily say the net is not as good as other media. It is slow. It lacks the visual impact of TV advertising. It doesn’t have the sense of place of a gallery. It is not as easy to read as a book. It doesn’t have the resolution of a photo. Being silent (except for grabs that take minutes to download) it is no competitor for radio. It is impersonal and antisocial compared with meeting real people.

But the point is the net is really a different medium. It has grown very quickly, and in many fields is becoming a real, lived-in resource. The net is now remarkably unremarkable. It’s no longer a technological experiment or a spectacle, but a medium, where the attractions are what you can see and do through it.

******************

How the web is woven

The easiest, richest and most popular way of browsing the Internet is the World Wide Web (WWW or ‘web’). The web is not separate from the net, but is a way the network infrastructure is used. To use it you need a browser: a piece of software that runs on your machine to decode and display web ‘pages’. The must-have browser of the net at the moment is Netscape 1.1, which has Mac, Windows and UNIX versions.

The home page is what first comes up – the browser connects to it automatically. A page of text and graphics will appear in the browser’s window. From there you can follow ‘links’ to other pages by clicking on underlined words or icons within the text. When you choose a new link your machine sends a small message through the Internet to call up the information you want. This is the URL (uniform resource locater).

Three bits of information form the URL:

1 The protocol. On the web this is HTTP
(hypertext transfer protocol) – the standard
way the data is sent and received.
2 The IP address. The unique address of the
machine, in the form of a series of letters
separated by full stops: www.warhol.com.
The IP address can also be a number, and
3 File path for the document: the name of the
file and the name of the higher level
directories (or folders) that group the files.

That’s what those long strange addresses are: http://www.warhol.org/warhol/, for example, will use HTTP protocol to retrieve the file warhol from the machine whose IP address is www.warhol.org. If you know the address you can connect directly to it by typing it in rather than following other people’s links.
To use Netscape you will need a full connection to the net (using PPP or SLIP if you are connecting through a modem). Internet Australasia magazine has an up to date listing of Australian service providers and costs. CC

Sites referred to in this article:
Andy Warhol museum
http://www.warhol.org/warhol/
Kaleidoscope:
http://www.kspace.com/ [expired] Parallel:
http://www.va.com.au/parallel/
System-X:
http://sysx.apana.org.au [expired] Sydney Morning Herald:
http://www.smh.com.au
Next Online:
http://www.next.com.au
ArtsNet:
http://peg.apc.org/~artsnet [expired] Starting points:
Yahoo (General subject lists):
http://www.yahoo.com
Art History Research Centre:
http://www.cam.org/~harmsen/research/intro.htm [expired]

RealTime issue #8 Aug-Sept 1995 pg. 6

The second of the multimedia forums (presented by the Department of Communication and the Arts and the Department of Industry, Science and Technology as part of the Creative Nation cultural policy package) was a fairly predictable government/business talkfest: heavy on the market rhetoric and light on critique and analysis. Despite the misnomer – there was something about ‘creativity’ in the title for this forum – there was, once again, little genuine attention to the involvement of artists in the development of emerging interactive media forms.

Undoubtedly the forum would have provided some very useful pointers to aspiring commercial producers. Viktor Zalakos’ talk – he’s the marketing manager for Firmware – made it apparent just how very difficult it is to crack the CD-ROM marketplace. Producers are now, for example, paying for shelf space: retailers will not even take product for free. Most CD-ROM sales occur through bundling with other software and hardware; a recent survey showed that a very large majority of people with a CD-ROM drive had no intention of purchasing a CD-ROM unless it came bundled with other goods. Zalakos’ maxim: know your market, plan, don’t try to do it all yourself, and be aware of the risks.

Another useful session was a hypothetical role play. It concerned an inexperienced player’s attempt to engage commercial interest in – and retain control of – her idea for a CD-ROM on a pioneering Australian aviatrix. In the hands of the money-men (for they were mostly men), the idea mutated into an action game based on the rescue of the American pilot Scott O’Grady shot down over Bosnia, providing a cautionary tale for all those unfamiliar with the ways of the market and the all-powerful imperative to global market viability.

Stewart MacLennan, MD of the Garner MacLennan group, spoke about putting together multimedia consortia. It was at least heartening to hear this major player emphasise the depth of creative talent in this country – designers, filmmakers, writers – and the need for the multimedia industry to draw on these people if it wished to produce high quality titles. This endorsement of the role of artists raises the question, however, of how well the industry is prepared to remunerate these people, and to what extent (if at all) their conceptual, aesthetic and critical skills will be allowed to drive or influence production.

The impression one gets in all this hype is one of rampant technological determinism. The hysterical fascination with all things multimedia recalls the mid 19th century preoccupation with prototypical pre-cinematic toys such as the phenakistoscope and the praxinoscope, and the gobsmacked hysteria that greeted the first cinematic projections 100 years ago. What’s notably missing from the cultural policy agenda is even the slimmest commitment on the part of government to fostering critical practice and a theoretical engagement with the formidable conceptual, philosophical, aesthetic, educational and cultural implications of nonlinearity and digital technology.

The final multimedia forum in this series was held in Adelaide in July. It cost $150 to attend (excluding many individual artists, and those who don’t live in Adelaide and cannot afford one-day interstate jaunts). It’s focus was export. Needless to say none of the above concerns was on the agenda.

RealTime issue #8 Aug-Sept 1995 pg. 7

Since the implementation of Creative Nation in October 1994, the Film Development Branch allocates $1.2 million per year for multimedia projects. Funding is granted for script writing, preparation, and prototypes for CD-ROM and interactive forms which are then developed elsewhere. Some low budget artists’ titles are completely funded.

JP What are your selection criteria for projects?

MH Without wanting to sound prescriptive, we’re looking for innovative projects that engage with the medium in a creative way. If it’s on-line work, we’re looking for something that instead of merely presenting information on screens in the World Wide Web, uses the hierarchy of the Web in a way that might give us an indication of how on-line works in the future might actually work. If it’s a CD-ROM work, we’ll look at its interface: how do you interact with it, how is it new, how is it fresh?
There seems to be so much in multimedia that hasn’t been explored, so if people are producing copies of what they’ve already seen, we’re not that interested. We’d really like to see unusual things. The only thing that everyone in the industry and in the arts agree on is the poor quality of work so far, so it may be a challenge to say, let’s try and go as far as we can. Our guidelines are fluid, they encompass the unusual project, rather than the project that sees multimedia as merely a shell to hold information.

JP What multimedia works of the last few years are exemplary?

MH A few works stand out. Jon McCormack’s installation Turbulence is one. I’m very impressed by Troy Innocent’s work: he continues to create iconic languages that defy meaning. There’s John Collette’s CD-ROM, and Linda Dement’s work continues to affect me, makes me laugh, and horrifies me. They’re the people who extend at least one thread of current practice. With these artists you’re beginning to sense that you can have a personal style.

JP How do you prevent the perception that you pander to a coterie of artists?

MH We are about assisting a diverse range of people, and we’re a national organisation. We’ve found a growing band of people coming forward. We’re not only about making work, we’re about developing careers. We hope to assist people to go from a small project to a bigger one, so that they achieve something they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. We want to find new people all the time and develop their work, but we have to be sure that those people we’re assisting have the skills to do it. We’re not a training organisation. So if people have the skill to produce what they say they can, we’d love to support them.

JP Is there a fear that the hype surrounding multimedia creates a fad, and little else?

MH There is a sense of frustration that digital media have let us down already, maybe the circus will move on. Last year it was all CD-ROM, this year it’s all Web. I know the people in the ‘virtual reality’ community are very happy that the circus has moved on from there, and they can get on with their work. And I think that will happen with interactive art forms. But I think the major problem at the moment is the tools. The basic languages embedded in the computer systems only give a very limited sense of interactivity.

JP What of the question of aesthetic criteria? How do you judge artworks in new media forms?

MH You can’t help but judge them in terms of past art forms. But then I’ve seen works where you can say, that’s an elegant piece of programming, it’s unusual or exciting, so there is a sense of a new language emerging. At the same time, to dismiss the new media as mere novelties is to forsake any real thinking about what’s going on. What we’re doing in digital media is finding new ways to tell old stories. The bankruptcy of the novel, the bankruptcy of many feature films is telling us something important. At Perspecta, kids rush past the paintings and go straight to the interactive works. If artists are finding it harder and harder to speak to modern audiences in traditional forms, their ideas can be re-energised by a new form. I get excited that there must be new criteria, new ways of thinking that non-linearity offers, that random access to material offers. But at the same time, it’s important to focus on what the artists are saying, as well as how they’re saying it.

RealTime issue #8 Aug-Sept 1995 pg. 7

Alternative Realities at the Ian Potter Gallery featured “five Australian artists working with technology”. Though the work was individually impressive, and I admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the show, the ‘technological’ theme as curatorial strategy seemed insufficient to hold the pieces together. Why should technological dreams recoup the failed modernity of the gallery space?

This said, I was particularly impressed with Patricia Piccinini’s work, not only for its high, indeed, deliberately slick techno-production values, but also for its cunning pre-subversion of corporate plans for mass marketing genetically-designed babies. What better way to do this, she reckons, than by anticipating, then aping, a multinational-style billboard advertising campaign. Showing the same kind of insider ‘knowingness’ of a Barbara Kruger, she has designed giant glossy posters that display the babies of the future as yours to take home today. Like all good consumer items they come in a variety of colours, shapes and sizes. LUMPLand from TMGP1995 ™ shows five delightful little lumps, variously limbed and proportioned – doesn’t it warm the cockles of your heart? One wears an all-too-cute piebald bow on a bald head while another a Maverick’s Wild-Western hat – entirely appropriate for a frosted lunar landscape. Your Sperm Your Egg Our Expertise from TMGP1995 ™, while mocking the consumer empowerment strategy of big business also works as an educative primer for intending parents still presumably somewhat disturbed by the implications of the new technology for that obsolescent notion – biological paternity. Piccinini has also designed a hands-on computer baby designer program for intending ‘parents’ about to do it. Gallery goers get to create, view and cost their new offspring, simply by manipulating the mouse. A perhaps predictable evolution of safe sex.

Rosemary Laing’s computer manipulated photographic landscapes in the same show seem to acquire poignancy as critiques of essentialism filter through to the feral environmentalist movement. Her digital versions of sublime landscapes, including forested arcadia, open out a problematic hiatus between Greenpeaced nature and Baudrillardian simulacra. If transcendent-alism was once incorporated in organicism, is it now to be found in pixel ratios? Her large format images are at once Hilton wall decoration and metaphysical critique.

Shiralee Saul, a long-term player in the new media network, has curated a small but powerful show at New Media Network, Southgate. Titled Ada’s Spawn and captioned by the post-Kristevan cartoon cry “they’re back … and they’re meaner, slimier and smarter than ever before!”, it assembles the work of eight women. The ‘Ada’ reference is to Ada Lovelace, who collaborated with Charles Babbage to develop the first binary programming language. Amazing how these names conjure phallogocentric scenarios of vulvic seduction and cabbages! Ada’s occlusion from electro-phallic history merely reiterates the vaporisation of those women who inaugurated the loom. Is the patriarchal scenario so palpable now?

Linda Dement certainly thinks so. Her interactive multimedia work CyberFleshGirl Monster carries out Donna Haraway’s call for perverse cyborg unities to take on the “escalating domination of woman/nature.” By cloning direct scans of numerous female body parts into visceral hybrids, she not only hyperbolises the phobic construction of woman as formless castrating gunk, but also plays at re-inventing female bodies that can invade and collapse the male Cartesian body/mind split – that’s if they care to!

What I enjoyed about Ada’s Spawn, apart from its humour, was its appreciation of ‘technology’ as digital ‘state of the art’ and plastic techno-trash. Martine Corompt’s fluorescent wall piece, Two Face, was a parodic reworking of Munch’s The Scream. When you pushed the soft tongue, it let out a febrile electronic toy cry that seemed all the more poignant for being such a hopeless similitude of the ‘real’ thing. Here was the mechanical hysteria of TV soapies as well as the histrionics of cartoon culture.

Technothelylogia, at Monash University Gallery, featured the work of 20 women artists “in/on technology” as Zoe Sofoulis puts it in her catalogue essay Against the Grain. More ambitious than the other shows, it provides an opportunity to explore a range of feminist responses to technology and hence to notice some prevailing discourses. Viewers are also able to tease out the issue of whether or not (especially top end) technology might be considered a male juggernaut. It is at this point that a certain stress appears in some of the work between seeing technology as phallic extension and regarding it as a potentially liberating set of tools for re-imagining social structures and subjectivities – even those of sexed bodies and gender boundaries. Clearly, critiques and contending strategies within contemporary feminist theory and art practice are also invoked here. 1970s notions of women as domesticated and disenfranchised workers, or even as prime baby-producers, seem insufficient to deal with the complexity of how machinery is now employed within, across, at and out of the body, a body which is itself being remapped as a network of cognitive processes and energy pathways.

Janina Green’s manipulated photographic image of modernism’s Utopian promise of domestic bliss, Geodisic Dome 1993, with its potted cactus, vacuum cleaner, painting of solar sky and attractively reclining female mannequin complete with conveniently articulated joints, would seem to reveal how even the separate realms of public and private have collapsed into anachronism. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, Marion Marrison has taken Maria Kozic one step further, and beautifully morphed her own face into that of a fresh out-of-the-packet Cindy, thereby confounding the gap between her own body and that of the ideal. She’s a real living doll. In another droll enactment of penile fantasies, Michele Baker and Anna Munster have morphed a dick in four stages into an authentically muscled gun. Significantly, even the original was a dummy – a dildo. Is even that gun for real? Lynne Sanderson in her MTV spoof video, Need 1994, celebrates the lesbian S/M nightclub scene. “NEED SUCK PROBE,” says the text over and over, as bodies merge and penetrate in rhythm to the disco beat.

Does technology open out or fill holes in established meaning? Does it satisfy or aggravate our desires? “Do you always do what you are told?” asks Josephine Starr’s and Leon Cmielewski’s User Unfriendly Interface 1994. “Yes”, you click, feeling naughty for once. Next screen carries only a single instruction, “Don’t click here”. You click. There’s no other way out.

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.

“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.

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.

Find

August 1995

realtime