Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

February 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

RealTime issue #23 Feb-March 1998 pg. 34

En-Knapp in Vertigo Bird

photo Ziga Koritnik

En-Knapp in Vertigo Bird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RealTime issue #23 Feb-March 1998 pg. 37

Ros Warby and Lucy Guerin

photo Jeff Busby

Ros Warby and Lucy Guerin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

RealTime issue #23 Feb-March 1998 pg. 35

Matt Rivera, Jennifer Howard, Sandra Stanton in Tharp!

photo Jack Vartoogian

Matt Rivera, Jennifer Howard, Sandra Stanton in Tharp!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trevor Patrick in Cargo Cult

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

RealTime issue #23 Feb-March 1998 pg. 36

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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February 1998

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