Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

August 1996

Filth and frivolity often gets you a long way, and for four cLUB bENT performers, all the way to Great Britain. In May, Azaria Universe, Derek Porter, Dean Walsh and Moira Finucane [directed by Jacqui Smith], travelled to Manchester’s It’s Queer Up North Festival and also to shows in London and Brighton. But how long does overseas fame really last for our home grown talent? Was Queer Up North just a momentary piece of glory before a return home to the bills and banality, or has a real and lasting cultural interchange been established?

Majestic diva, Moira Finucane comments, “The Australian work was very strong. I was proud to be part of an incredibly strong team. The type of work that The Performance Space has taken risks on and promoted internationally is very physical and multilayered…The English work was much more cabaret-ish and verbal.”

There are rumours afoot that some of the British performers will come here for cLUB bENT 97. Can cLUB bENT’s distinctive brand of off-the-wall art forms and askew cultural persuasions become a world-wide affair without losing its experimental edge? According to dancer from the dark side, Derek Porter, “It’s called Queer Up North, but I still found it more mainstream oriented that our queer events. He remarked that some of the British shows deal with ‘pretty run-of-the-mill issues’ like ‘demystifying gay culture, a drag queen’s search for love, a stripper who can lip-synch and sing. I feel some of us went beyond what queer was expected to be.”

Porter’s betrayal of a character’s chaotic change from gender dysmorphic male to cat woman left London audiences in eerie silence. “Although they were hard to tame through some of the performances, there was a sinister silence through Misfit,” he says.

Porter’s work explores the territory of androgyny in a style redolent of German cabaret. “I think transgenderism is still taboo,” says Porter. “Transgender performance is different to drag. We are not popping on a frock and being frivolous.”

Porter alludes to a sense of bleakness in postmodern Manchester, comparing it to post-war Berlin. “Every time I come back from o/s, my desire to be in Sydney is even stronger. The grass always seems to be greener back home each time…There are more opportunities for queer performance here,” he says.

Daddy’s boy, Dean Walsh, has created a new form of drag called “muscular drag”. Wanting to keep his suitcase light, he took to the British stage in nothing but high heels. When he whispers that his heart belongs to “DDDDaddy,” to whom is he speaking? “Daddy to me personally is this strange intangible kind of character,” says Walsh. “He’s not daddy necessarily, he’s not the father. He is a taboo lover.”

What is muscular drag? “You can hold your muscles around your bones”, says Walsh. “It’s almost like dressing the flesh. You can release that and become quite feline…I wanted the male body to be exposed without big throbbing cock…I’m breaking the stereotypical male thing.” Naked, boldly, Walsh goes into a headstand. “You have the male bum being shown, the anus being show, the very vulnerable part of the male body. I’m opening that as wide as I possibly can while I have my thighs held in strong masculinity,” he says.

In Hardware, Walsh moves fluidly between masculine and feminine bodily forms, capturing a realm of lost innocence through his newly created drag form. But some gay British skinheads felt short-changed by its powerful simplicity. “These guys came and saw a show and said to me later, ‘You fucking Australians need to get off your angst ridden arse! What about Priscilla? Where is Priscilla? What are you trying to fucking show us…Wipe that fucking Australian smile off your face. You’ve got a big attitude, haven’t you?’” There was indeed a big expectation amongst a small section of the British gay community for all Australian gays to be glitterama, high camp drag queens.

Azaria Universe, described as a “good-time showgirl drag queen trashy slam silver screen scene buster,” did not make it back home with the rest of the troupe. In a fax from London, she wrote she’s “…been watching shows and performing constantly, which is heavenly.” She has been invited to perform in an old Music Hall, “where drag queen DJs play Suzi Quatro tracks.” Universe describes the British experience as “a strange combination of exhaustion and adrenalin, an awesome performance cocktail.”

A reviewer described “Ms Universe” in Manchester as “sans clothes, pubic hair and some might say, talent.” Finucane says, “That response doesn’t surprise me, because she’s young, she’s beautiful and her work is extremely physical.” Azaria belongs to “another generation”, says Finucane, who do not question their right to “get their gear off in gay abandon.” There is still an out-dated notion that naked women with shaved pubic hair are merely playing to the fantasies of men. When Azaria Universe brings you her love from high upon crudely bandaged stilts, there is passion and power in the air.

Was the satiric tradition of British culture reflected in the queer works? “They’re taking the piss out of their own society even more than we do as Australians,” says Porter. Moira Finucane was enamoured with the intimacy of traditional British theatre. “There is something very celebratory about the old fashioned theatre that contemporary theatre doesn’t do. You are immediately surrounded by a sense of importance and luxury. It’s very intimate and beautiful being part of the audience. The world that those old theatres create is a world in the same way that cLUB bENT creates. It’s very human.”

RealTime issue #14 Aug-Sept 1996 pg. 6

Next Wave—festival of manifestoes, words not spoken and visions splendid—occupies a place in the nightworld. Time spent in the darkness of travelling, waiting and watching. I sit until the shape-shifters emerge and shake, blur and stop; this nocturnal in-and-out is unsettling. It is meant to be.

When the organisers of Melbourne’s biennial festival of young and emerging artists (born-again from a youth arts event) invited proposals for their performance program, apart from Brisbane’s Kooemba Jdarra (not covered here), they ended up with dance collaborations. So my black nights were spent in the following black holes.

It began with Character X, asking its audience: “What sort of information do you need to make a place for something to happen” (program notes). A character without a narrative is a distinct possibility (let’s not forget Pirandello) but what does a character “without context and meaning” look like? When five women arrive in Shelley Lasica’s alien nowhere, they have become silver clones—I think of them as lunar worms—twisting through the hips a half turn and a hold. Later, when dressed in the extravagant pink and purple fake fur of designer Kathy Temin, they travel as a protean clump before becoming a series of jesters, clowning in bonnets, boas and booties. The comic possibilities of this costume disrupt the previously languorous dancing but I would have liked more. Between desultory solos and nurturing group exercises, the collective dynamic loses energy with the sparkling exception of Lasica and Sandra Parker becoming a polyp—a jelly of bodies cowering and covering itself with tentacular limbs. Character X evokes a longing for a vaguely feminine utopia/

In Josie Daw’s Downloading the dance floor is an archaeological site; a place for retrieving knowledges embedded in books as well as the formal logics of gestural repetition. The set is littered with piles and platforms of books, frames and pedestals of books and a wide armchair lovingly made of books. The performers traverse with their noses pressed to the page; silhouettes of steps become bookmarks; a Chinese whisper of personal signatures coils its way around the bindings; a duel is fought with books as swords. Codes accumulate in the clash of dance styles, literal objects and improvised sound but the messages don’t transfer from one labouring body to another spectating.

At the door of Help—Multi-Dimensional Performance Enhancer, a lady in fluorescent tights gives me my 3D glasses and invites me to relax. Super-saturated landscapes illuminate horned androids whose plastic skins slide through fern gullies, oceans and psychedelia. There is a powerfully receding doorway—a gate into, a hallway, a courtyard, a corridor whose shadows hover at the edge of perception. These dancers are crystalline, bubbles of physical energy whose outlines dissolve into colour. For Cazerine Barry and Tao Weis et al ‘the magnet of curiosity’ reside in the kinetic arts of technology absorbing human materiality. In a majestic emerald rainforest where trees hover and glow, lines become zigzag and bodies climb into the picture. A harmonising of powers that reproduces another utopian, if more cosmic, vision.

I don’t know whether Grind is quite the word for the onslaught of raw adolescent energy generated by the Stompin Youth Dance Company in the concrete bowels of a decommissioned power station. This was the only performance one might seriously label ‘youth’ and for the two teenage girls accompanying me it was the ultimate expression of the desire to dance. Thirty blue and red corpuscles bump against walls and slink through bursting arteries of human movement. The non-stop gang rhythms of running, shaking, posing, moshing, flipping, looking-in or looking-out displayed only passion and commitment. Jerril Rechter, the Launceston choreographer/co-ordinator has achieved a remarkable feat of disciplining techno culture for a refreshingly ordinary group of kids—guys in glasses, girls of all shapes and sizes—into an aesthetic event whose terrifying sexuality you can’t help but latch on to, even if it does nearly land in your lap.

By way of contrast, Rub the Angel is an ethereal world of scrim and pale tarquette; suspended in a harness is Barbie, of blond hair and stiffened limbs. A bonanza of visual images melts into a wrap-around of clouds, waves and sunsets—nature still a favourite signifier of transcendence. The mannequin rocks back and forth until she drops close enough to the floor to begin crawling. The video shows a child’s nursery looking out from her cot, the arms reaching towards her, the handle of the closing door. The girl lets us know she wants to fly and fly she does, over the rooftops, over suburbia, into the playground where children throw tan bark at her, fleeing down an avenue of trees until nothing. Her hair is pulled off and she is flesh-coloured plastic all over. Human semblance gone, she jerks and slaps herself, fingers up her crotch, hand in mouth, legs pulled apart, doll’s arms bent at the elbows, fondling and pushing hands away. A mother’s skirt and hands appear reaching towards her and a blood-red light absorbs the image of her bed. Julia McDonald calls her dance-image-making ‘flight paths’ in which she wants to set her audience free with a metamorphosis. And whilst I travelled with this toy ‘angel’ into her bad dreams and fantasies—red velvet theatre seats, fairgrounds and knights in shining armour—something very strange happened when she decided there was nothing more to fear. From under the mat arrived a Man, who unwrapped her real hair, caressed her, climbed up ladders into the sky with her, fell into bed with her and then walked into the sunset with her. With Her, ‘growing up’ was a Hollywood romance and not the sordid terror of the girl-doll after all.

Black coat, cold night, black cat, night cat—we leave Next Wave and go for a drink where another dance event is happening. Some Deakin graduates have initiated their own season in a nightclub. Mafiosi inhabit the underworld of violence and late-night bars, drinking and fast footwork; watching the clock and greasing the palms. The five female gangsters enter—dropped shoulders, a curve in the lower spine, a shuffling walk—and move to the bar. There is the ritual of sitting down—slide the head to check out the room; brush off the stool, step to one side; bend back and land on the seat, lean on the counter, skol the drink, slide the head and scan the room again, laugh—it’s their world. We sip red wine in the low lights and keep our eyes on the spiders crossing the floor. Has all this dance really been dangerous?

RealTime issue #14 Aug-Sept 1996 pg. 7

“Art, which was previously so concerned with a finite product, a composed and ordered outcome, an aesthetic finality, a resolution or conclusion, reflecting a ready-made reality, is now almost totally preoccupied with processes of emergence and of coming-into being.”
(Roy Ascott, Communications and Consciousness in the Cyberspace)

For some time now, a shift has been taking place in art from object to process, from the tangible to the phantasmic. The observer of art is now in the centre of the creative process, not at the periphery looking in. Art is no longer a window onto the world but a doorway through which the observer enters a world of interaction and transformation. All of this raises many critical, theoretical and aesthetic questions. And it is these questions that were foregrounded by the 1996 Next Wave Festival’s Art and Technology program. The theme of the festival’s third biennial gathering of national and international work in Melbourne was ‘perception and perspective.’

Curator Margaret Traill described this year’s program as having shifted the focus from ‘means’ to ‘meaning.’

“We no longer feel we have to wave the flag for the media: it’s obvious computers have arrived and they’re entering mainstream culture and we no longer have to say it’s art. Now we have to ask what sort of art is it? What does the art do? Hence, ‘perception and perspective.’ We’re saying it’s not so much how the things are made ie computer-generated, but what they do, how they affect our perception, and therefore, how they affect our perspectives on the world, the values we have, the judgements we make…we’re looking at what impact technologies have on the way people see the world and think about it, and therefore act in the world.”

Five linked but quite individual exhibitions were spread across five different gallery spaces. The major exhibition of the program (Perception and Perspective) occupied the Murdoch Court in the National Gallery of Victoria. Members of the public were able to interact with Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starr’s User Unfriendly Interface, a program designed to make you mistrust computers; step around Natasha Dwyer’s bathroom scales as if they were stepping stones and follow the text directions they proffered; and be overwhelmed by Czaby Szamosy’s commanding digitally collaged mural Procumbere (and when you tell lies an angel dies) dissolving, through its combination of image fragments, different moments in the history of art. John Tonkin’s Elective Physiognomies used the face as a site to compare the Enlightenment science of physiognomy and modern genetic research generating multiple facial forms as still images and in an interactive program. Whereas for Keith Piper’s Surveillances (Tagging the Other)—a 4-monitor video installation with 35mm slides—faces provided a target onto which the language, motifs and forms of surveillance technology could be layered. Patricia Piccinini’s work was to be found in two gallery spaces. Love me love my Lump (digital photograph) is part of The Mutant Genome Project (TMGP) series—an ongoing work discussing issues surrounding physical difference, as seen through the lens of genetic science and the Human Genome Initiative—a worldwide scientific project dedicated to cataloguing human genetic material with a view to being able to change it. The designer baby proposed by the TMGP Corporation is called LUMP (Life-form with Unevolved Mutant Properties). It has been genetically designed for maximum efficiency—disease free, intelligent, long living. Its striking, garish plasticity in its many mutations confronts our very humanity.

Nothing Natural in the Basement Gallery exhibited the work of four artists who are all exploring the body in relation to popular culture’s new technologies of games, interactivity, advertising and merchandising. Here Patricia Piccinini’s images show actor Sophie Lee in pop art dream landscape cradling her LUMP. Ian Haig’s Mighty Morphing Muscle Men are digitally morphing figures produced in response to a hideously obsessive body culture. Haig’s work conceives a de-evolution of the body at that very moment when modern medicine enables us to be artificially enhanced. Martine Corompt’s Activity Station forms part of her Cute Machine project that examines our culture’s obsessions with ‘cute iconography’ in relation to that imperative of ‘user-friendly,’ which is currently determining developments in computer technology. Christopher Langton’s Ecowalker is a hypothetical exercise machine—an artwork that resembles a consumer item.

Ruins in Reverse at the RMIT Gallery was a show conceived by curator Susan Fereday to tackle the relationship between art and architecture; in particular the predicament faced by art within the new gallery. In her catalogue essay, Fereday states:

“(There) are spaces which direct attention to the present moment of exhibition before awareness of the gallery, while RMIT gallery is visible before anything else it contains or displays.”

Thirteen artists were asked to contribute sculptural works in response to the space, and their mixed mediums included Masonite, MDF, cardboard, concrete, vinyl, Lurex and fake fur. Work varied from Chris Ulbrick’s sound piece which incorporated the building’s air conditioning, to Lauren Berkowitz’ mountain of polystyrene fruit boxes stuffed into a corner, to Chris Langton’s oversized PVC inflatables which drew attention to the confusing perspectives.

Issues of perspective in the show at Gallery 101—Distant Relations—were concerned with historical, temporal and spatial distances. Greg Malloy’s work tried to transcend time and specific cultural differences by evoking universal humanistic ideals such as democracy and beauty in his series based on Hellenistic art. Hou Leong’s latest project is a series of digitally manipulated landscapes that collage clichéd geographical icons of Australian and Asian cultural identity into hallucinatory multicultural spaces. Heather Fernon, also working in allegorical mode, based her work on the Cerberus, the old warship that lies rusting in Half-Moon Bay. Its uneasy status as a deteriorating historical icon foregrounds our own difficult relationship to the past as well as providing a focus for Fernon’s own concerns about new technologies.

The exhibition that engaged me most was Lumens 3 at the Centre for Contemporary Photography where three artists investigated light—the essence of their practice—as a kind of sublime metaphor in photographic processes. Dan Armstrong’s installation Displacement de-constructed the light box to its component parts and these lined the walls and the floors of the gallery space. Among the steel frames and phosphorescent tubes I found a celluloid fragment of a face, losing its definition, strangely moving. Marion Harper’s installation Default charted another kind of dematerialisation in bringing the underground to the surface White moulded plastic boulders were strewn about the gallery; boulders appeared in negative, CAD animated sequences projected across a curved screen; and light boxes displayed vividly coloured gravity maps of underground forms. James Verdon’s installation Keening was the most evocative—a floor plan of a 1950s Australian rural cottage was drawn onto the gallery floor, its corridors littered with memories. Window frames and photographic easels further reframed flashes from the past—a child on a swing, a certificate of merit, entry tickets, recalling events, textures and people, spasmodically illuminated by lightning flashes sparkling behind strips of celluloid.

Be Your Best, 2nd Next Wave Artech Symposium provided a forum where practitioners, theorists and the public could meet and address many of the questions raised by the work in these exhibitions. It is clear there is much to be said. Just as the relationship between art and technology occupies a liminal space of becoming, more questions are raised than can be answered; this is evidence that the debate and the work it generates if vitally alive.

RealTime issue #14 Aug-Sept 1996 pg. 8

Susan Leigh Foster recently published an essay entitled “Choreographing History” in which she contemplates the intimate partnership between writing and moving bodies that lies at the foundations of revealed history, both inscribers of and inscribed by culture.

Many performances at the World Dance ’96 conference New Dance From Old Cultures vividly showed that dancers are historical bodies, people whose traditions are deeply etched in their own present personal mobility. Sometimes however, there was an uneasy relationship between individual dancers and the traditions they sought to acknowledge. It’s not as if dancers slide effortlessly through time just by an act of will. More often there is difficulty and loss in the passage. More formal, choreographed references to older traditions sometimes seemed laboured, unformed, or superficial.

Performances by two groups of Aboriginal artists—Ochres (Bangarra Dance Theatre and Yawalyu Women of Lajamanu) and The Opportunity of Distance (Tracks Dance Collective) threw into relief this problematic relationship. We watched the Yawalyu Women in a congenial group, painting each other’s bodies, in slow preparation. Unhurriedly, they shuffled through short phrases of small hitched jumps, their feet shifting as if through dust, not over bare floor boards. They often broke the passages while waiting for each other or the accompanying chants to begin. I had an unusual feeling of never having seen this before, of something genuinely ‘authentic’, unlike my experience of Ochres. The two groups seemed engaged in very different enterprises.

You might imagine the dancers’ movement in Ochres being like an archaeological reconstruction. Tiny washed and polished fragments of material arranged in order, then plastered together with an expanse of late 20th century rendering. The dancers’ bodies bear no resemblance to those of the Yawalyu Women. Having cultivated all the nuances of western dance deportment, they seem like observers of the culture from which the fragments come. Any desire for authenticity on our part could only be hung uneasily on the central Ochres Spirit character, played by Djakapurra Munyarryun who carried the weight of the piece. His cultural responsibility seemed onerous, unlike that of the Yawalyu Women.

Two forums for Asian Pacific performers included International Soloists (Korean Nam Jeong-Ho, Japanese Kazuco Takemoto, Indonesian Martinus Miroto and Australian Sue Healey) and Showcase, highlighting work from six tertiary dance schools, three white Australian, one black Australian, one from Hong Kong and one from Taiwan. If it was momentarily unclear whether the institutions’ works were selected for their differences or similarities (perhaps in some ill-conceived gesture towards multicultural exchange), the fairly blah choreography seemed indisputably a product of identically constructed European syllabuses. It produced a bland, easily practiced, homogenised, institutional kind of dance, which managed to asphyxiate most cultural differences.

The four solos I saw out of six from the International Soloists moved in another direction. Four dancers’ individual histories claimed our focus, their bodies telling very different stories of cultural affiliation and personal growth. Takemoto’s Peace of Mind and Healey’s Zella were both conceived through deeply excavated remembering. Healey’s story of three women, different generations, grew from past to present, her light physical style slipping easily from there to here. “My muscles were talking in tongues, my cells thinking, my skin remembering about something it knew a long time ago… .” Takemoto’s trajectory was less linear, moving deliberately, her thoughts visible and palpable, as she seemed to painstakingly carve herself out of the dense cultural air she breathed. She defined herself as poised, wired, subtle and very clear. Nam Jeong-Ho’s Kasiri was made of softer stuff, a little fog-bound and drifting, but still there was a sense of a journey somewhere, small, inconsequential jobs done, people changing and time passing. In Miroto’s Penumbra, change was more galvanic. With tiny steps, his body swayed, strong and controlled, to a drum beat. Finger and hand gestures had an undulating, spider-like intensity. His feet and legs seemed deeply rooted in the ground. He removed a mask to reveal his own fragile being, but the mask retained its independent persona, something to be reckoned with.

I remember Danceworks’ Descansos—resting places as visually stark and much more than a simple duet (Helen Herbertson and Trevor Patrick). The work created a profound sense of place, given body and depth by the very specifically sculptured and tiered areas. The audience looked down into a dark field where thoughts floated, isolated, disembodied; across a gap into a dim room where a presence wandered. The light fell in certain special ways, passing headlights through a window, sharp-edged slabs lying like a grave, oblique beams, isolated pools perhaps falling on the slow, small shifts in a single dancer’s face or body. Together with lighting designer Ben Cobham and sculptor Simon Barley, director Jenny Kemp has distilled these rarefied images, waking dreams live in these places of meditation.

The imagery of Douglas Wright’s Buried Venus is at first strong and startling, the dancers conveying a pace and tone at once fluid, plaintive, passionate and dangerous. They build a kind of visual anthology of human relationships with many images from other times and other dances. But eventually the theme falls apart under the weight of jumbled associations.

Sexed—Legitimate Images by Bryan Smith also piles up images, ubiquitous and highly cultivated, drawn from every Hollywood movie, soapie and American nightclub fantasy you can think of. Shelley Lasica pouts, drawls, and saunters, long-legged and red lipped, across the stage, dragging classic Monroe/Melrose Place lines in her wake. In the dimly lit territory behind the scrim, a chorus line of disco dolls dance with the demeanour and dress expected at every dance club in town. Sexed says our humanness, from the most profound and fundamental expressions of love and intimacy, is allowed to exist only via narrowly defined precepts formed by the glossed and fired imaginations of a few image-makers. But these legitimate images risk creating the same dead-endedness and predictability which Smith seeks to expose. Unless you already know Smith’s agenda, his commentary might be hard to decipher.

There were many other performances in the Green Mill program, some ‘successful’, others not. But all of them together illuminate us as a cultural species, a fact which is simultaneously as obvious and as forgettable as gravity. Sometimes, however, we are fortunate enough to notice that our perception of reality, even co-existent different realities, our capacity to believe certain things and not others, our judgements, even who and what we love, are all effected through an accumulation of cultural images and texting, from histories present and past, remembered and imagined.

–

Green Mill Project, Melbourne, July 1-20, 1996

RealTime issue #14 Aug-Sept 1996 pg. 10

There is an analogy I like to use when discussing the arts and digital technology: primitive cinema. It too was an artform born of an industrial age, dependent on technology. Its inception gave no indication of what it would become—the greatest narrative machine of the twentieth century. Cinema’s existence in an industrial form only became possible through a period of intense experimentation, trial and error, an extraordinary confabulation of artists, business and a fascinated public. It borrowed from all of the pre-existing artforms that it would eventually exceed—theatre, the novel, the visual arts, symphonic music—until resisting all other possible paths, it claimed its current domain and colonised the world. So we sit amid our visionaries, versions of Méliès, the Lumière Brothers and Porter, wondering where it’s all going.

As usual any close scrutiny will support the analogy and show where it disintegrates. Such is the case with the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT)’s small funds for art and technology projects, comparative peanuts strategically thrown to the cutting edge. In this case that edge is so multi-faceted it puts good postmodernists to shame. This is best illustrated in the diversity of projects selected for funding, possibly a reflection of the applications rather than their assessors’ agenda. At best they capture the concept of boundary pushing—addressing the tension between creativity and technology—with just the hint of a time where the arts and sciences can inhabit the same field. The renaissance whiff is reflected in the diversity of the projects; in sound, websites, performance, exhibition and installations, fusions with established artforms and more, and in ANAT’s strategy, which emphasises the conceptual work over realisation and outcome. So, despite the booming technology and infrastructure, despite the fact that digital media seems unlikely to homogenise content in the way the cinema did, we are clearly in uncharted lands seeking the face of the next century. And ANAT is at the forefront of the all-important terrain of content development.

A one-off increase from the Australia Council (doubling last year’s grant) provided $80,000 to fund twenty proposals. ANAT has selected a mix of established artist, from those not necessarily known for their work with technology to those who have established their practices in digitally generated work. Prominent in the former category is painter Juan Davila, who continues to experiment with computer enhanced 3D images. If this is an extension of his previous work exhibited in Adelaide two years ago (large wall mounted pieces viewed with 3D glasses) he will use this technology to enhance his characteristically wide palette of tones and moods. This technology added an entirely new dimension to Davila’s signature of sensuous brutality, giving some of the images the feel of a hagiography for the next century.

Other established artists to attract funds include Greg Schiemer (NSW) working on non-score based forms of music resulting from emerging technologies. SA’s Junction Theatre will be able to fund a consultancy on incorporating video and multimedia into more traditional performance modes. In the area of performance art Arthur Wicks is also being encouraged to explore the web’s potential for virtual events. Like many other past and present recipients, his proposal is as much about exploring the relationship between the virtual and the physical. This seems fundamental to the fund overall. Most ‘art’ currently available on the web is basically treating the technology simply as a new way of disseminating pre-existing forms, like those early films, which basically used the medium to record theatrically arranged events. Few funds address the context this immediately poses: the language of digital media itself and the transformations that are inevitable when pre-existing artforms collide with it.

Urban Exile, for example, have utilised a gallery presence for their collaborative efforts, but cite the simultaneous use of the Internet as the reason for the success of the ‘hard’ exhibitions. Their permanent presence is now on the net, with new exhibitions added to the site regularly no doubt contributing to the high number of on-line hits, about 100,000 fro each exhibition. They have been funded for TOOL 02, a collaborative project which is again intended to have both hard and virtual counterparts. At heart, it’s not just their popularity that makes Urban Exile interesting. It is the conceptual frame behind the work. One of the starting points for TOOL 02 is Gilles Deleuze’s notion of subjective machines, an extension of the post-structuralist conceptualisation of identity as the product of fragmented experiences, the place where often contradictory or conflicting influences intersect. This seems to me more than a perfect metaphor for the web, and the kind of thinking that is as important as the execution itself, which can be clumsy or constrained as often as it is successful. It is also indicative of the criteria ANAT has set for itself in determining funding.

Other artists have also adopted the web as their prime means of exploration and expression. Lloyd Sharp’s beautifully enigmatic website has secured funding for further development again for both his conceptual approach as well as access to appropriate technology. His current work at the opalm site was easily the most lyrical of those I visited in researching this article, and is found at www.ozemail.com.au/-opalm [expired] or www.ozemail.com.au/-mcool [expired]. Agent All-Black are to stage a two-day “multimedia extravaganza,” which will also then move on to the web. Some of their current work is to be found on the Electronic Media Group’s site www.world.net/-quiffy/emg/emg.html [expired]. Amanda King is likewise linking an outdoor exhibition/installation with her virtual work. The difference here is that where the above sites originate in Sydney, King operates out of rural Queensland, a reminder that actual location is simply irrelevant when it comes to the virtual world.

Other projects have an intriguing community involvement, such as producer Sharon Flindell’s proposal to distribute DAT recorders to Aboriginal people in the Kimberley, and present the results in a sound installation in conjunction with the Festival of Perth and Aboriginal cultural and media centres. The Victorian College of the Arts has funds to contribute towards a residence for Stelarc, which will include a collaborative project for students as well as the vital opportunity to relocate one of our most important artists back into the country, at least for a while. The true beauty of Stelarc, and the reason he is such an important artist is precisely his distinction from the virtual. He brings technology back to the body itself, a corporeal testament to the subjective machine. Links here with perhaps my favourite project, computer artist Richard Stanford’s collaboration with forensic anatomist Meiya Sutisno to develop a prototype for the facial reconstruction of an unidentified human skull. Not far behind is Stevie Wishart’s work in creating a virtual instrument based on, among other things, the hurdy-gurdy.

Other projects not mentioned (for lack of space, I assure you) extend existing work like Mutley Media’s Booth, and collect work produced for ABC’s Art Rage for regional and public gallery distribution. In another project, Brendan Palmer will produce an anthology of young composers working with experimental electronic music. ANAT’s selection of a nationally derived assessment committee with combined experience in a variety of cross-artforms has done them proud.

In May this year we packed our bags and shunted off to JavaOne in San Francisco. More than 6,000 nerdy men and a few women were there to learn everything they could about Sun’s new programming language, Java. The conference sold out, even at registration prices of AUD$1,250. It wasn’t hard to see what they’d spent their $7.5 million on—lights, cameras, carpet, coffee and special gifts such as the very useful JavaOne Maglight torch.

“We’ve spent more money promoting Java than Sun has spent on marketing since we began!” James Gosling, the ‘Father of Java,’ proudly announced. Although we were in the same room, it was easier to see Him in one of the numerous overhead video screens. In real life Gosling was a speck on a stage a hundred metres away, with its purple and red JavaOne logo carpets and ribbons strung all over the place. At first glance the event was reminiscent of an Amway convention.

At the opening keynote address Gosling took to the podium and basked, reminiscing about the team of six people who worked, tucked away at Sun, for five years on a device control language called Java. He demonstrated a gadget called the Star Seven (*7), a hand-held colour palm-top computer with a very high-speed (256 kbps) wireless Internet connection. It was the first proper Java machine, built almost six years ago using what Gosling referred to as Hammer technology. “You know, you take a hammer and smash apart the things other people have built to get at the bits you need.” He cited the forced removal of range sensors from Polaroid cameras as an example.

The *7 is amazing. The only interface to it is your finger on its pressure sensitive colour screen. You navigate by sliding your finger around, pointing, dragging and pushing components of the scene to navigate from one ‘space’ to another. Cartoon as interface!

Elsewhere people could be found in the Hackers’ Lab, 60 or so high-powered Sun Ultra Sparcs, SGI Indis, PowerMacs and Pentium machines connected to the net at a screaming rate for attendees to play with. We principally used them to check our email and show off our work back home to any audience we could attract. In the corner, a laidback band played world music. At lunch time airline food was churned out for the very hungry.

“When you come to the next JavaOne (JavaOne II) we won’t be giving away backpacks and torches, we’ll be giving you PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants).” Lines like this throughout the keynote addresses made spines tingle. Java was only announced to the public around 12 months ago and in that short space of time it has spawned an entire industry. Everyone from major multinationals to hobbyists are embracing Java

Java is an ‘object oriented’ language which essentially means that information comes bundled with the necessary ‘code’ to act upon that information. For example, a photograph would also come bundled with the appropriate software to display or scale that photograph. The photo can then be used anywhere and collections of photos can be all sent messages like ‘draw yourself’ and they would know how to respond.

Java is platform independent. It will run on any computer capable of running the Java Virtual Machine (a computer running in software within another computer). There are JVMs for Macintosh, PC and Unix machines freely available now from java.sun.com and many companies are releasing chips that support the JVM inherently.

Java is a network language. As most people who have used the web would be aware, the information you get is quite static. With Java, however, the user’s computer actually runs small applications (applets) written in Java that come off the network. These applets can be as simple as a fancier button, or as complex as a video conferencing solution.

During the Adelaide Fringe Festival we used Java to control the motion of a robot surveillance camera sited 40 metres above the main Fringe Precinct. This meant people could pan, tilt and zoom the camera from a web page. Our next project calls for much more sophisticated behavioural modelling of both real and virtual robots, and the promise of Java chips running a universal programming language was too intriguing to ignore.

There were several significant announcements made at JavaOne. Adobe (inventors of Postscript, Photoshop and Premiers, among others) announced the licensing of their font and path technology to form part of the standard free Java distribution. This lets developers use specific fonts and curves in on-line environments. If an on-line gallery relies on the presence of the font ‘Grunge Update,’ the Java aplet displaying it will look first on your local hard disk and if it’s not there, will fetch it from an on-line font bank.

Other Java libraries announced include database access tools: a general set of media tools providing 2D, 3D, video and audio; commerce tools like the Java wallet (digital cash); encryption and security tools; and remote object tools which allow one Java program to call another and interact. There are tools for building servers, browsers and hardware controllers.

Java chips, which execute Java ‘byte-code’ directly, run Java software much faster. Mitsubishi displayed a chip the size of a thumbnail and the Government of Taiwan announced that they have licensed Java for development by all of their regional microchip factories. These chips will be in everything. Mobile phone companies announced support for Java chips and Nortel even had diagrams of their new phones

Network Computers (general purpose computers which have no hard disk, but instead get all their software off the network) are set to do to the personal computer industry what PCs did to the mini and mainframe market. Early critics see this as a return to an age when great big mainframes served information out to dumb terminals, but Network Computers are much more than that. Based on Java chips, these devices are super fast, super smart and able to get exactly what they need off a global network to the user. Most importantly they will begin retailing this year for under $US500.

There are many new artforms arising out of this new networked world. Ed Stastny whose Sito and Hy-Grid projects won him an honourable mention last year and a distinction at this year’s Ars Electronica is taking network art into its next stage of evolution. Sito challenges the notion that artwork can exist on their own and encourages people the world over to create works designed specifically to be manipulated by other artists. Annette Loudon from Construct, a company based in San Francisco developing Internet sites using VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), has gathered a loyal band of contributors with her Stratus project—an interactive 3D environment where artists can host and display their work.

There are challenges for artists working with a global, all pervasive network where the computers themselves are peripherals hanging off the network. We must assume that processors themselves will become smaller, faster and more numerous. Advances in network speeds and wireless communication will provide a soup of micro devices each with access to this global network.

This exchange was conducted by e-mail with three people in two states talking to one another on a project that roves over distance, time, interpretation and single-project status.

DV Booth—a definition, please! A travelling cinema space? Prototype for future new media exhibition and distribution?

JV For me, primarily, it’s two things: a site-specific new media installation—

JV —and a customised venue for the exhibition of linear and non-linear film, video, sound and desktop authored artwork.

GH And through the process of using it visitors have the opportunity to contribute to and access a companion Boothsite on the web.

GH As an object it honours the form and function of the ‘classic’ black and white photo booth, preserving the contract of the vending machine: $4 in the slot for a strip of four different portraits.

KB So you get this familiar token made strange; a photo strip, which is—as always—a photo souvenir of a sequence of moments, but is in the case one which also souvenirs a particular, customised screening experience. Consider then that it is the filmmaker who gets to determine the exact points within the screening of their work in which the Booth will take its photos of its mini-audience. Photos the visitor might then choose to see pasted into our Boothsite photo album—a cumulative record of all who sit in it, all over the country.

DV Your call for entries will be announced soon. What are the selection criteria?

KB We’re opening a national call for entries for short, time-based, purpose made work to screen in Booth. Work can be produced in any format in the span from super or high-8 to high-end desktop generation and will then be pressed and accessed to a series of CD-ROMs, each containing a curated ‘season’ of around an hour of material—or around 20 works.

GH We will be asking each program maker to structure their three-minute piece around four designated cut points; each point is both a literal trigger for the Booth’s camera eye to take its portrait of the viewer, and a potential cut point between any one work on the CD-ROM and any other. Booth works as a kind of editing suite, offering each visitor the option of editing together sections of the contributed works into amalgam ‘films’ in various improvisatory ways.

DV To what extent will artists need to design their ideas around its sonic/physical space?

KB To a great extent. For all the things it is and all the ways it works, it is primarily a venue. We were interested in this notion of a ‘film’ production practice that could also be site-specific.

JV It’s a chance to redress some of the disempowering aspects of exhibition for work of this nature. To take an example, desktop work is often exhibited either on a videotape loop if linear, or on a desktop machine if non-linear; often time-sharing with other works, unoptimised for any pieces with regards to navigational access and calibration of hardware and with no independent technical support to ensure the work will in fact be displayed or interacted with as the artist intended for the duration of that show. Booth can target specific works and treat them in the best way possible.

KB Booth sets out to lock down a series of known’s for contributors to riff around in configuring the environment, we’ve artificially extended those aspects of the screening situation which always lose out—like sound.

GH It was important that sound not be an afterthought to vision; a true stereo field is produced by speakers inside the Booth, as well as a separate speaker system in the equipment cavity of the box that gives a ‘voice’ to the Booth.

JV Via the Boothsite, the remote visitor can rifle through the archive of photo strips of all Booth visitors, access the evolving soundscape, check information on touring, on contributing artists, on ways to contribute to the curated CD-ROMs, as well as being linked very directly into the physical Booth via a (broadcast delayed) live video feed signal from the Booth itself.

DV Tell us about the video postcard. Are there any other ways the Booth will ‘archive’ its travels and the presences of the people who visit it?

GH We’ll be asking people to bring along 30-second VHS video postcards of their town, which can be fed directly into the Booth via a VHS slot, digitised and posted to the web site.

KB If we’re going to have some representation on the Boothsite of where the Booth literally is, we want it to come filtered through local versions, shot on domestic equipment, edited in camera and contributed direct-to-Booth. The total Booth experience is shot through with various plays between what a visitor might ‘put in’ to the Booth (like their image, their voice) and what they might take away.

JV A visitor gets to manipulate his or her own image before taking away the ‘hard copy’ record of the session in the edition of the photo strip, but also to upload their strip to the Boothsite to join other portraits in an online photo album, or send an email from the Booth—their photo portrait plus a short message.

DV How soon before the box in question hits the highway? And where will it go? What are the logistical problems of getting the booth on-line in remote areas and does this limit the Booth’s frontier?

GH The Booth is set to begin its tour in force at the start of next year, looking towards a Perth launch. Obviously there are still vast areas of Australia that have no local access to the Internet, even thought diverse groups are agitating for change. The National Farmers Federation, for instance, is active in trying to ensure on-line access for its members. The map of local service provision could be very different by mid-1997, but it is crucial for the Booth’s success in remote areas that we can tap into the shifting ground of local access. It is a situation that redefines ‘remote’ and ‘local’ in Australia. You can be living only a couple of hundred kilometres from Sydney and still have to dial STD to be on-line; the touring Booth serves to underline such anomalies. In developing the Booth we have been guided by two central questions: who has access and to what?

In September/October 1996 the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) is co-ordinating Virogenesis 2, the second cultural infection of the Australian body. Replicating and mutating the touring template of Virogenesis 1 (Graham Harwood, September/October 1995). Euro-data deviants Fuller (UK), Gomma (Italy) and Scanner (UK) will present talks workshops, gigs and informal exchanges in Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne.

“The great demographics of Web users—according to a recent A C Nielsen study, the 17.6 million people using the Web in the US and Canada tend to be young, upscale, educated professionals with a household income over $80,000. Also approximately a third of all Internet users are women.”
www company ‘X’

The three artists/activists work with old and new media anarchically, creating hybrid forms, slick grunge, dirty code, infiltrating mainstream and underground zones. Agent Gomma aka E. ‘Gomma’ Guarneri has been deeply involved in the cultural and existential underground since his early teens. In 1985 he managed the punk section in the Calusca bookshop (opened in 1972 in Milano on the model of the San Francisco City Lights bookstore). In 1987 he founded the cyberpunk magazine DECODER, which brought to the project diverse cultural and political experience: anarchists, punks, communists, liberals and autonomists, all working in the field of communication—music, video, radio, graphics, literature, computers, photocopying and mail art. In 1988 he founded the SHAKE co-operative, a publishing house that translates into Italian significant works from the cultural front, including Donna Haraway, Hakim Bey, J G Ballard and Re-Search. Gomma writes for the daily newspaper il manifesto on technology and society, directs a series for Feltrinelli and uses the internet as a site for political activism. His distinctive aberrant poetic style and anarchic attitude permeate the DECODER/SHAKE media projects and disturb the authorities. This is cultural production continually in a state of tension—disruptive, egalitarian, and heretic. Stuff you can be imprisoned for in Italy.

“We’re like many Frankensteins, composed of human members and artificial elements created by technology. I’ve seen one whose hand had three fingers, with the thumb and index finger substituted by a pair of pliers and functioning like a crooked beak. A small antenna came out of his mouth and he spoke in megahertz to a woman who had no ears, but instead two parabolic dishes to capture television messages. Not being able to comprehend each other, the two made love, in such a way that it excited my pity, now with clogged movement from the wheels on his feet, now facilitated by her tongue, magnetic-tape-made, sixty minutes long, while following the rhythm of the electronic drum that beat in their chests. From this incest, DECODER was born, the son of communication, of diversity, and of provocation. It has no more mutations like man, it’s completely technological. A small automaton, self-composed by many means of communication, assembled anthropomorphically with the greatest esteem of speaking a universal language.” Gomma

'The phenomenal growth of the Web—the Net is adding new users, new Web sites, and new capabilities at an incredible rate. Hembrecht & Quist, a leading investment firm, forecasts 200 million Web users by the year 2000.”
www company ‘X’

Agent Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud began his musical explorations at age 11 when, having been exposed to the work of composer John Cage at school, he took to the family piano with nails and screws and hung a tape recorder inside to record the reverberations. He later formed the band Dau Al Set and compiled Peyrere, a cassette AV ‘zine with featured new material by the prime movers of the industrial music scene including Test Department, Coil, Lydia Lunch and Derek Jarman.

One day he chanced upon a tiny mobile radio receiver called a scanner and saw the creative possibilities. Discovering that it could surf through the airwaves and intercept personal telephone calls he began mixing it live into the four-track recordings he’d written. The first Scanner CD was issued in 1992 followed by Scanner 2 and offers of commissions for compilation albums, including Artificial Intelligence 2 for Warp, Trance Europe Express 2 and Types from Kudos. He set up and still runs The Electronic Lounge monthly at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London with DJs including Mixmaster Morris, Locust, Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia, David Toop and Paul Schultze/Uzect Plaush.

In the 1994 Terminal Futures conference at the ICA, Scanner ran a workshop on scanning. He completed writing the soundtrack for the exhibition entitled Fuse at the Royal College of Art in association with graphic designer Neville Brody and has remixed among others, Immersion (Swim), As One (New Electronica), Scorn (Earache) and Oval (Mille Plateaux). Spore, his double album on New Electronica, was released in 1995. He is currently creating radio works and participating in numerous European performances and installations. Scanner’s recent collaborations have included Icelandic singer Björk and American filmmaker David Lynch.

“I believe that there is no such thing as real privacy any more. Video cameras survey [us] in the streets, the underground, the buses, the shops. We are all featured on countless home videos without consent. There is this paradox of privacy and invasion that interests me. What I use is simply available on open access in the shops, but what else exits? What do higher authorities have access to? How much are we being watched without our knowledge? My work is partly about taking technology and finding an alternative use for it so that it becomes relevant to society. These kinds of [surveillance] machines are developed to help those in power keep us at arm’s length. In some ways I feel that my use of it subverts that. Then again, consider—why does someone invent and commercially market a device such as this?” Scanner

“The ability to shorten the distance between advertising, information gathering and sales—[our company] offers instant gratification. Your customer sees your ad, clicks on it to get more information and your information immediately pops up on his screen. Then, he can click on options to receive more info, ask to be contacted by you, send you an inquiry, order your product, whatever is appropriate.” www company ‘X’

Agent Fuller is on the editorial group of Underground, an artists’ free mass-circulation newspaper focusing on critical cyberculture. He is editor of the interactive disk and internet based magazine of fiction and art, I/O/D. Fuller is completing a hyperfictional novel Automated Telling Machine and has published two previous books, Flyposter Frenzy—posters from the anti-copyright network and Unnatural, techno-theory for a contaminated culture. He is a contributing editor to the excellent Alternative X web site.

“[I’m interested in] the wider dynamics of information movement and the intersection of what is in the abstract an open system, with manners of speech, cultural poise and economics that militates against it being such. It might even be possible that the totalising metaphor of the ‘community’ and the false warmth from its hearth both masks a wider and more radical conflagration and fails in its supposed task of providing people with the tools to negotiate the increasing subsumption of the networks with the imaginary, and the attenuating dynamics of the market. The internet constitutes a bifurcation in information dynamics. As an event it is exemplarily complex and cannot be reduced to the sum of the factors that make it possible. A politics of the networks therefore will of necessity be just as seething with what George Bataille called “those linked series of deceptions, exploitations and manias that give a temporal order to the apparent unreason of history.” On with the road rage.” Matt Fuller

“In most cases [our company] is able to ascertain from your network address which organisation you belong to or the service provider you are using. Once we determine your organisation, we are able to better determine information about your organisation such as size, type and location. We do record your interests, which are determined only by [our company’s] member Web sites you visit. However, we only summarise this information and do not retain logs of your specific visits to these sites.” www company ‘X’

Virogenesis 2, curated by Francesca da Rimini, has been funded by the Australia Council (New Media Arts and Community Cultural Development Funds) and is presented in association with participating parties including United Trades and Labour Council, Ngapartji Co-operative Multimedia Centre, Experimental Art Foundation, Carnivale, Art Gallery of NSW, The Performance Space, Artspace, Street Level Inc, University of Western Sydney—Nepean (Department of Design), Zonar Records, Australian National University (Canberra School of Art), Institute of Modern Art, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art and Experimenta.

If asked where the island of Kauai is, could you pinpoint its location at the centre of the circle we commonly describe as the Pacific Rim? If you could, then your geography is better than mine. In the last week of April I was fortunate to travel to the county of Kauai, northernmost island of Hawaii, to attend a conference and workshop series entitled Story Telling for the New Millennium. This conference was touted as focusing uniquely on the role of the artist in the new technology, drawing together strands from filmmaking, new media, graphic design, music and sound design, website publishing and ‘the story.’

I had only just absorbed the contents of the Australian Film Commission’s publication “Language and Interactivity,” and more than a year of multimedia gabfests. On the flight to Kauai I had to ask myself how many more multimedia clichés I could bear.

Surprisingly, Story Telling for the New Millennium was, as described in the advance publicity, indeed a unique occasion.

To start with, on offer was a series of hands-on workshops. One stream offered three-day intensive workshops in writing and assembling narrative for interactive media, while another offered a practical smorgasbord of insider tips on graphics, video and audio software, primarily for experienced new media artists and practitioners. Unable to secure a place in the first stream, I was more than compensated, taking five workshops from the second. What was so valuable about these hands-on sessions in Photoshop, After Effects and digital audio design was that we were shown secrets by the people who made the software. As a practitioner, I got inestimable value from techniques and features that ‘never made it into the manuals.’

Thanks to the ubiquitous web, speakers’ papers and interviews were made available almost the moment they were uttered. If you want an insight into some great new media minds the website is well worth a look.

Among the speakers who really shone was keynote Peter Bergman, whose Radio Free Oz website—‘the funny bone of the Internet’—makes the web seem as natural as radio.

Michael Nash and Rebekah Behrendt, pioneers of the interactive publisher INSCAPE (The Dark Eye, Bad Day on the Midway) told us how they preferred to work with artists, alternating story point-of-view and plot lines. CEO Nash was formerly a respected fine arts critic, and suggested that the reason so many multimedia titles suck is that too many are the products of solely market-driven business plans.

Linda Stone of Microsoft demonstrated that company’s foray into virtual worlds. V-Chat is unabashedly derivative of Neal Stephenson’s SF epic Snowcrash, where people connect on-line, meeting as avatars in the metaverse. V-Chat is, for now, a Microsoft Network-only service, with no projected release on the web. For those lucky enough to connect via V-Chat, the worlds are (for on-line chat environments) richly detailed and personalised.

Tom Reilly, founder of Digital Queers, is currently president of Plant Out, a network catering to gay and lesbian net users. Among its services, Planet Out operates a V-Chat world where users’ avatars can freely flirt and pick each other up.

Other memorable presentations came from former pop icon and now multimedia sound producer Thomas Dolby, and from the producer of From Alice to Ocean, Rick Smolan, whose 24 Hours in Cyberspace is perhaps the most visible community art event the net has yet seen. Many of the American audience were there from the film and television standpoint. The event was co-hosted by the American Film Institute and Kauai Institute for Communications Media. Judy Drost Director of KICM, showed how a four years young organisation can ably attract enormous support for a worthwhile event.

In July RealTime took up residence in Perth with Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter working with nine WA writers on their responses to PICA’s annual season of new performances, Putting on an Act. During the week, the writers balanced their experience of the work on show with the urge to judge, and co-edited two editions of RealTime@PICA for distribution at the event. Their participation required endurance—five nights watching performances of varying quality and type, five days of fast writing and debate. Often performances felt too familiar (poets reading, men in dresses, empty gestures). Sometimes it felt like community service (quaint family circuses). Sometimes, as with Rocky Bay Insomniacs, wheelchair performers, we were truly surprised and impressed.

PICA director Sarah Miller worries at the concept of such open seasons, the risks involved in staging incomplete works by inexperienced performers balanced against the need to provide public space for independent and emerging artists. She is acutely aware of the need for more workshops in which collaborative works are developed with experienced artists. Whatever the best solution, Sarah Miller and her team at PICA are working hard at building a performance milieu in a city that hasn’t really had one and the expertly managed season was sold out most nights. Following are responses to some of the performances from the RealTime@PICA team:

Cornflakes: Lucas Ihlein

Denis Garvey
The table is set by two stage hands. Tablecloth, bowl, spoon, milk, sugar, Corn Flakes. The performer moves from the audience, sits down at the table, serves himself and eats a bowl of Corn Flakes, then returns to the audience.

Jiminy Cricket!! No existential dilemma here. Blocks come forward to eat. Simple as that. Betcha I can anticipate your moves! First look. Waxy inserts disappeared down cardboard sleeve. He unfolds. Rolls it up. Crinkles right. Stops moths breeding. Never had that problem at our house. Packet didn’t go right back in again. If you took it out, searching for some gun or horse to race other plastic horses your brother collected to see who crossed the table top first. Upend packet. Into bowl. Fuller than I would have thought. No poncy fruit on top. That’s right. Hey, wait a minute. You don’t have milk in fuckin’ jugs. Where I come from it’s carton or nothing. And you don’t take the spoon out if it’s already in. To put sugar on. Sugar bowl’s OK, I suppose. And a tablecloth? Nice touch, but a red gingham tablecloth? Funny, I’d have picked him for a two sugar man. It’d have been funnier if you’d kept piling the sugar on. Tablespoon after tablespoon after tablespoon. Like Buster Keaton. My Mum did for my Dad. Killed him in the end, you know. Now, the milk doesn’t have to go round the same configurations as the sugar. As the sun. Push down with your spoon! Sounds right. Now eat. Great big spoonfuls. Spoon’s full. Open wide. Lockjaw. Remove spoon. Crunch! Spoons are the only eating utensil allowed in that cavity. You put those things inside your mouth in the 1950s. Read the packet. Thiamine, Riboflavin, Niacin, Iron, Protein, Fat, Carbohydrate, Sugars. Sugar? Turn the packet around again in a wider configuration. Read the back. How nowadays you stand to win a car. The real thing. Come to think of it, wasn’t Kellogg some sort of paedophile or something? Perhaps that’s the answer. And didn’t the world war machine keep on supplying Pol Pot with Corn Flakes, guns—into the 1990s? There’s nothing to say popular culture must be original. Better if it isn’t really. Like the Marlboro man you smoke for the same taste each time. Killed you in the end. It killed him. Tilting of the bowl. Spooning up the last of the milk. Will there be a Corn Flakes Man of the future? Doing counter ads on prime time TV? This is what Corn Flakes did for me. Look away. Cutaway. Stomach. Shot. To bits of ant-like pincers putting us in stitches. You don’t think so? And wasn’t the ending a little too pat? Peremptory? The world war machine didn’t keep supplying Pol Pot with Corn Flakes into the 1990s. You deserve to flee. Escape. Your addiction. I mean back to the audience. Me. I’d have, I’d have savoured the moment. Gone. For another bowl.

Rotations: Dancer Vivienne Rogis, Choreographer Tamara Kerr

Fiona McLean
Marilyn: The building I work in rises tall and white like an elongated rib cage. So deep is the curve of ribs to sternum, it is, even more, an enormous long-line bra. This building also has legs—stocky but sharply tapered—and between them, marking the entrance are flounced canopies of Perspex. Each morning as I pass beneath her skirts, my mind turns to Marilyn Monroe.

Vivienne: She is standing in a circle of bright light and first from one joint, then from another and another, and then from all of them at once, the body of Vivienne Rogis is rotating. It seems less an ordinary body which has learned extraordinary movements than an extraordinary body performing movements which, to it, are ordinary. An up-turned hand turns at ground level and her whole weight arcs across the space. A roll that begins precisely in one vertebra sends flesh in waves across her abdomen and chest. This body is pliant as putty. It has drive to more than match the synthesised accompaniment. She is a girl-machine moving not as rectilinear robot but with the fluid dynamics of fractals.

Tamara: Tamara Kerr who worked with Vivienne Rogis on Rotations is part of a company called Physical Architecture. She has plans to use computer images to track the movements of a skeleton in rotation and to project these up beside the same rotating body in the flesh. I ask Tamara is she knows what Vivienne is thinking about when she dances and she tells me she is focussed on each rotating joint. I think of Marilyn and how much goes on under the skin and behind the eyes. I think of Vivienne and how exciting it is to see the strange ways her bones and muscles work.

One Full Moon: Sandy Mujadi, Susan Allwood; Bumpkin Babes, Clare Christie, Samson Zaharkiv and another

Erin Hefferon
Rash. I’m sick of men in frocks, even beautiful ones. Men? Frocks? It seems so easy. Shock? No. But a beautiful man playing a woman in a beautiful frock next to a woman? What is she, a wound? What’s she doing, writhing, rolling, and picking at herself like a giant scab? Like she’s got some kind of rash. And she’s pure soap. “How can I survive?” she says with a humph and starts her slow, strange dance. Picking at herself while he says—another he, not the he/she of the frock—while he says on the telephone, “Fucking useless bitch, you bitch, answer the phone. I know you’re there. I want the dog back!”

No. I can’t believe it’s happening—Patsy Cline in slo-mo. Three performers, a man in a frock (no surprises here) two girls (ho hum, no surprise either, they’re in frocks too). No cheap one gag for them, they’ll have to try harder and they do. It’s painful to watch. Another scab lifts. He’s so funny, look at him in white face, grimacing, playing with his dress (yes, it’s a dress, I’m a man and I’m wearing a dress. It’s funny, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t it?). He’s in the spotlight. The audience laughs and laughs and laughs. The girls work around him, bitchily trying to outdo each other. I am hysterical. Hysterically angry. Hysterically bored. Hysterically saddened. One of the girls teases her hair, drops her comb. The other smears lipstick on her face. While he lip-synchs to a brain-damaged Patsy. The girls face the audience, and then face each other, competing. One turns her back, pulls her dress down to her waist. I see her black bra strap. Is she going to strip? This is bad. How far will she go? The other mimics her. This is pathetic. They keep their clothes on. I am disappointed. Something almost happened. Something horrible. Something to inspire pity, not terror, but the terrible.

Terror, Tour 1: devised and performed by David Fussell

Fiona Kranenbroek
We’re getting used to him now. Installed, almost in the Hay Street Mall, him in his wheelchair, in his facial muscles, neck and arms that twitch in a continuum of unpredictability that could be sustained only by permanent neurological damage. This is not pretty. This man is a performer, a professional busker. A small keyboard placed across the arms of his chair, some vocals but no words I can decipher, no tune I can make out. The busker in the wheelchair confronts our expectations—his mumbled cacophony, his disability on display.

David Fussell’s performance has all the decorations of title, of occasion, executed in the safety of an indoor art-space. He does not attempt to play at music—he stands awkwardly, begins to speak, and breaks off. He doesn’t know…he isn’t sure. I know how he feels. His gestures are not unlike the busker’s but Fussell is privileged by an audience held captive by theatre walls and conventions. Is he the real thing? A person who has suffered some sort of breakdown? The bulk of the audience trusts not, they laugh shamelessly during his painful pauses. Through a layering of repeated phrases, artifice emerges. This is an act. I relax somewhat but I still don’t laugh. Is David Fussell with shoelaces undone, being cruel, doing a piss-take of a damaged person? He’s certainly getting laughs. I’m suspicious and yet held by my uncertainty.

In the middle the piece gains intensity, the timing steadies as words are delivered in bursts that seem to take the greatest summoning of courage to issue. More and more I am drawn in, not out of sympathy, but in sympathy with the performance. Because, really, I’m not sure either. I too really don’t know, though I’m pretty sure I don’t know much. Like David Fussell, I’m not really sure what I want and this is why, like him, I don’t really do anything. Because I don’t know much. The one thing David does know is that, so far, this has worked for him.

That’s okay for me, but I’m going to try something else for a while. I think of the busker, of the Hay Street Mall, of trying to make something of my own.
Stillness/Panic: Peter Toy

Paul O’Sullivan

A man? Naked! On his back. On a table. Under a spotlight. Wrapped in the plastic you’d use to wrap your lunch to keep it fresh. But Peter Toy didn’t look fresh. He looked to be on the edge of death.

I feared at first that he wasn’t breathing. Then, that he was over-heating. Then, even if either or both were true, how would we know? Would he tell us if he could? I was afraid that we would be accomplices in his death and even imagined us all being arrested and tried for complicity. I wonder if the Third World (assuming that we are actually the First) could hire a good enough lawyer? Would it find us guilty of standing by as it starved to death? I felt a callous bystander at a terrible accident. Is that what you meant, Peter? Does our voyeurism prevent us from acting, from doing something? Are we all armchair experts on the world we live in? When nothing much is happening on stage—but the little that is happening is remarkable—the brain goes on terrific flights of fancy.

Eventually his arms and legs succumbed to gravity, or perhaps his resolve waned. How long could you keep it up? Did you get bored? Or was the timing just right? It was just right for me, though I desperately wanted to peel you out of your synthetic sarcophagus, pour you a cold one and ask what you were thinking.

Living Dolls: performed by Marlene O’Dea, directed by Sian Phillips

Helena Grehan
A woman stands in a spotlight. She is dressed like an aberrant jewellery box doll. The clothes are right but the hair makes her look like Rod Stewart. She makes the right movements and speaks: “I’m Clare. I like you”. I’m reminded of Rachel Romano (Glory Box) on Thursday night as, again, we are confronted by a middle-aged woman questioning her achievements and oppression. “What are you doing?” “Don’t leave me!” Classic dependent stuff. The movements become jerky. It seems someone has wound her up too tight. Eventually she moves on. She changes costume to Geisha Girl. At the insistence of a bell, she performs, waving her yellow fan, tossing it in the air with precision and then catching it. The action is repeated until like the actions in the jewellery box, it too becomes taut and aggressive. She is letting herself be manipulated. She begins to resent it, drops the fan and disrobes. This is where Living Dolls begins to live. She grabs a drill, mimes sexual actions—the power drill purrs to her command. She is finally taking control. Singing “Mean to Me” she saws wood/phallus in two then moves to a grinder and begins to hone a metal rod. She moves downstage and begins to run on the spot. New Age music floods the space as she spends several minutes in “free” movement. Where does this fit? It’s curiously out of synch with the rest. The performer in her attempt to comment on her “epic journey through the facets of love” has meandered off to another journey altogether.

Can’t Sleep in my Dreams, written and performed by Rocky Bay insomniacs, with playwright Jan Teagle-Kapetas; director, Simone Bateman

Terri-ann White
Works in progress: words and images that show there is a distance to go, give explicitly the message that attention is being applied to the making of this work. Questions, interrogations and things to learn.

Friday night. Another full house, this time uncomfortably so. Spill-over audience sitting on the stage and most didn’t wear the right clothes for it. Getting them all in has taken some time, and all of those nine wheelchairs on stage are occupied. Hope the performers are patient. The opening is dramatic: seven wheelchairs upstage, backs to us, a chair coming on the stage with a woman draped across its occupant. They present stories, these performers: the sort I like—fragments, unfinished, provisional utterances. Sometimes they come directly from the teller, sometimes one of the three floating ‘assistants’ gives their story in parallel. Slow-moving, considered, sometimes tentative, sometimes I couldn’t hear the words but could understand the passion. My sense was that many of these performers had not told these stories, or even been listened to much before, certainly not in such a formal and highly valued way. Personal stories, some private, some of them dreams. The combination of dramatic intensity, the presentation, the austerity and self-containment, and the bodies with their voices, their struggle towards the articulations we understand made this work my highlight, the most fully realised work in the week’s program. I appreciated the spare space, the gaps evident, the integrity of the voices and the shape of the stories. The little moments of pleasure: getting seven electric chairs around in a tight circle in the confined space; the turning on of the spotlight torches hanging above the bodies on the chairs, how that lighting design made drama. And the moment for me: which was felt, sentimental as anything but authentic. “Do you want to know the song I requested? Do you?” he asks. Finally, he answers himself. Roberta Flack singing “Killing Me Softly” and the able-bodied woman helps him out of his chair and holds him and they dance close. His pride and pleasure. Her love and care. The catalogue of items, movements no longer possible, memories forgotten or mislaid. Right through our lives. Finding, or re-finding your voice and using it.

The How-to series #1, devised and performed by Paul Gazzola

Jane Cousins
On the home stretch after chancing the open cauldron of a 100km wind on the long bridge over the river, arms rigid on the steering wheel, I stopped for a man on the road. I don’t normally stop for hitchhikers but on such a night, with such a wind…He swayed against it, barely able to stand.

“Not a night to be out,” I said, swallowing against the strange, rich smell of a body too long in the same clothes.

“I like being out. But I don’t like to walk too much. I got a bung foot. Hit and run ‘bout a year ago. Police see me walkin’ funny. Pull me up. Reckon I’m drunk.”

But how do we know a movement for what it is? How do we read a gesture’s truth?

This is what Paul Gazzola stands asking before the audience, a portable gramophone at his feet, at the end of his right arm held perpendicular to his body, a tiny plastic owl, its minute parts articulated. The owl performs the most delicate of movements. And a split second later, the performer mirrors its moves. The record provides accompaniment: “Hello,” it says, repeated perkily with the oblique intonation of an alien or a machine. It becomes a chant. Exquisite miniature gestures. Repeated and amplified. Paul Gazzola is attentive; a small frown of concentration furrows his brow. Suddenly the owl drops its wings and throws back its head. A moment of exultation, abandon, surrender. Gazzola follows suit. Someone in the audience gasps. We hold together. Performer, owl, audience, rapt.

The end comes suddenly when the record moves on to “How Are You?” The audience laughs. We are meant to ignore this bit. But for me it is the moment which encapsulates all. We learn through repetition, through mimicry, we learn by watching others. We become ourselves, human or owl, a collection of habits, movements, gestures. On the basis of these, assumptions are made.

Jimmy asked me for [a] train fare for the following day. I hesitated, then told him no. He said thanks anyway and…by the way, he’d been puzzling over this, “Which finger is the wedding ring worn on?” I held out my hand and pointed, “That one, I think.” “Ah, so you’re not married then?” “No.” He laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not a rapist or a murderer or nothin’.” He got out and closed the door. “Thanks for the lift, bub. See ya round.”

I drove away, arms rigid on the steering wheel, heart beating fast. Senseless acts of kindness. What a night. I thought of Lear, stripped of artifice and made to see. I’d been kind hadn’t I, fearless, open minded? But underneath it all…well, Jimmy could tell.

Civic Poems: John Mateer

Jenny Silburn
To John Mateer:
You stand in an arc of light
pressed into the microphone
Poet in Jewish and English
and Polish and Irish
and Tristan da Cunhan and Scottish
and unknown
exile

Unknown?
In the silence
your ancestors stand behind you
fanning out against the black cyclorama
observing you
the audience
the work

The words stick in your throat
you eat them like that devil the dingo
while the hyena stands behind you
lips curled into a snarl of laughter

Civic poems
the word seems curiously arcane
Civic?
So this the space you metered out
the territory you now occupy
while the spectres of
Alan Bond and Ned Kelly
Mudrooroo and Arne Naess
spin
in the desert
of the psyche?

You are and are not
you walk in the line in elevated places
you know the abyss
and it is from here
the voice on the wire sings.

White praise singer
sing your song
Sangoma
dance between
Your voice is sweet
Use your cultural weapons
machete the silence
and let the ancestors
speak

Compression 100: 100 performances in different venues and sites around Sydney during May; artists Tess de Quincey and Stuart Lynch performing with a wide variety of collaborators, from dancers to writers to musicians to visual artists.

True to its name, Compression 100 was actually 111 performances. The first and last days (May 1 and 31) began on Compression Highway—Parramatta Road—the most loaded space in Sydney. I commute on it every day, trying not to think about it. Since May, though, I feel differently towards it. I’ve moved from dissociation to mild fixation. I’ve developed a perverse sense of attachment to this roaring, ugly, clashing, hot, polluted environment. I’ve taken to walking along it, sometimes for two hours a time, to writing about it and to driving down it in preference to using the freeway. Now this is perverse and Compression 100 was, amongst other things, a shared exercise in sustained perversity. Its legacies are likely to be random and widely dispersed. Perhaps all over Sydney there are people who are experiencing altered relations with particular spaces.

As an exercise in perversity, Compression 100 is firmly in the tradition of performance art where endurance, purposelessness and risk have worked together to effects that criticism has been at a loss to define. Not for want of trying, of course, which is part of the sport. To do several performances a day, every day for a month, with dozens of different collaborators, some of whom you have never met before, in places where you will have little and sometimes no control over the conditions, to audiences gathering at random who will sometimes not have a clue what to make of whatever it is you are doing, begs a lot of questions. And the questions came like some kind of inflamed outbreak, a virus that everyone caught. What is it? What’s it for? Who are they? Who do they think they are? What are they doing? Why? Occasionally, some stray explanatory statement would be in amongst them. They’re making a commercial. He’s a fruit. Must be for TV. It’s a witch, mum. They should be in the zoo.

Compression 100 did go to the zoo, and of all the place it went—including the cemetery, the Opera House, the dog pound, the jail, the top of Centrepoint, Observatory Hill, and an assortment of tunnels—that was where it seemed most to belong, amidst an array of strangely determined behaviours, all on show for an audience. Everywhere else, the performances looked like pieces of escaped behaviour, serving to generate awareness, perhaps, of the extent to which behaviour is category confined: related to gainful employment, the fulfilment of need, or the pursuit of identifiable forms of leisure. A version of behaviour labelled “performance” has wide currency, but this is conditional on its conformity with established categories. Audiences at the Opera House, well trained to tune into performance, responded readily to something that looked like it, happening on the steps outside. But this was escaped performance: not performance of anything, just the performance principle gone feral and hyperbolic amongst a group of people apparently possessed by it, posturing in derangements of operatic costume. “Is it Butoh?” someone asked me, his face almost aglow with the pleasure of catchment.

As performance, most of Compression 100 was exploratory and erratic, but there were emergent moments that created an intensity of attention sufficient to kill the question virus stone dead. Stuart Lynch and Tess de Quincey take off into pure virtuosity improvising movements to a sound track made by John Gillies—a collage of rhythms from traffic and instrumental percussion, that just keeps on producing inspired shifts in direction. Nikki Heywood, barely visible and standing in several inches of water in the tunnel at St. James railway station, generates stray bursts of sound and movement which fuse quite suddenly into miraculous familiarity as the cadences of Che Faro…from Gluck’s Orpheo. The idea of producing the voice takes on uncanny meaning. The line of the melody is breathtaking, the voice swells into it, and then it’s gone again, perversely, like some kind of apparition that you know won’t come back. Isn’t this what the opera is about? Maybe we heard the definitive performance of Orpheo.

Compression 100 had a mixed reception. That’s a cliché, and how could anything else have been expected? There was a lot of discussion and some agonising about reactions to the performances throughout the series. But much more interesting than what people thought of it was what it made them do, by serving as a strange attractor, drawing them away from their regular business, into unfamiliar parts of the city at weird times of the day and night. How do you get three office-bound workaholics to find their way onto Bondi Beach in the middle of a weekday afternoon and stay there until the light fades? How do you get a bunch of performance artists to the Opera House? What if you walk the Parramatta Road, the whole way, from Parramatta to Sydney? The perversity principle is a catalyst which has most effect when generated within strictly designed parameters. It’s only the most experienced and disciplined artists who can get it going, set it loose and leave it to reverberate. I’d credit de Quincey and Lynch with that.

Mixed Metaphor 96 at Dancehouse presents “new collaborative works blurring the boundaries between movement, text, image and sound.”

Week One. I take my seat. A woman appears to be asleep on a pile of mattresses. The Princess and the Pea? But then the lights go down. In Now I lay me… Rochelle Carmichael and Kerrie Murphy evoke the thousand moments of a single night; the conscious, dreaming and twilight states as well as the nightmare of sleeplessness. Carmichael’s dance is at moments contorted, animal-like, a St Vitus’ dance displaying the ritual behaviours of autism. My fascination with this psychosis however is repeatedly interrupted by the need to make sense of narrative signs, such as, when Carmichael caricatures frustration. Thereafter the dancer becomes a character and I flounder in the attempt to force other images into the service of a story—and fail.

Upstairs to Tongue Fence by Entropy Productions. Ushered along a corridor towards a hideous cacophony and smoke. I love the terror/wonder when conventions of entering the theatre are altered. Around and through a rough assemblage of black plastic screens mayhem can be glimpsed. The noise is glorious. Instruments careen across the room, a cellist shrieks, dancers move past in formation, a digital clock blinks, a TV hisses. I am wide awake and listening, what does this chaos mean in 1996?

My eye is drawn by emerging patterns—I notice the noise-makers with one exception are male, the dancers female; the young men’s faces are unpainted, the young women’s nicely made up and hair gelled. My euphoria deflates. Given the evidence of such marked and traditional theatrical conventions, I doubt a radical performance analysis is at work. The challenge of this event begins to look merely like performers’ pleasure. Disappointed, I was ready to participate but am left feeing a witness, a mother.

Back downstairs, in An-Alice-is by Strange Arrangements, the unconscious unfolds again. This time in homage to the great explorers of that realm: Freud, the surrealists and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Nigel Luck and Janet Lee, doll-like automata inhabit a space of shadows and eerie projections. They speak in monologues, using linguistic and conceptual trickery to illuminate relationships between concrete logic and the unconscious. I feel as if I am looking at a picture box containing revelations quaintly dated by this mode of narration, and better suited to a time now gutted by two world wars and television.

Week Two. The Last Gasp directed by Rinske Ginsberg, affectionately investigates popular culture of the nineteen forties, especially the place of the cigarette. All those lovely gestures, the inhalation and the ex, the very breath, the heaving bosom and the manly chest; camp in their consummate heterosexuality. The smoke is the only fluid sign in an otherwise controlled and vertical physicality. Snippets of film dialogue and popular song move in and out of synch with the human interactions. I am happiest in the disconnected moments. The multifaceted images are perfectly observed, slipping me into some other, darker, sweating place, inside a tiny puff, a slow blow or a hooded glance (surely, straight at me).

In Holiday on Death Row by Stride, text by Roger McGough, a heterosexual theme continues in a different style. Moving fluidly between dance and word sequences, Nicky Smith has skilfully directed this tawdry evocation of sexual frustration. The confident acting of Justin Radcliffe and Emma Stend brings with it the attendant problem of the ‘is it believable?’ kind. Increasingly I struggle with the premise that these young, perfectly formed bodies are mired in a hopeless suburban scenario where husband wants a root, wife wants a life. The final sequence is like a real-time Calvin Klein ad and although a delicious spectacle, I cannot reconcile it with the text. My tentative belief that dysfunctional heterosexuality is a problem of the suburban middle class is scuppered. Or am I being asked to consider the reified sexuality of advertising as a transcendence of the old brutalities of heterosexual sex?

From het-glamour to het-horror, we swing into the home straight for Elemental. Part one, a gambolling dance about life in a group house. Probably Carlton in one of those big terraces with about forty leaking rooms. The dance is loose and weighty, choreographed sequences moving from rough coherence to pleasant and jumbly. I have lived in houses where we moved like that. In the moments of not-dancing, the performers seem shy and hesitant and I lose focus or watch the sustained concentration of musicians. I wonder why they include these moments? Perhaps the acting genie appeared in rehearsal and the performers nervously obeyed her commands?

I am struck by the role of acting in all six works, which seems to have appeared as a result of formal decisions rather than as primary mode of expression. In experienced hands, as in The Last Gasp, this can be revelatory, where acting marks a weird place between representation and the real. But elsewhere the acting genie’s henchpixies—character, narrative, and suspension of disbelief—have thrown down the gauntlet to these artists who dared to summon them in the powerful spell of blurring boundaries.

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