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Works in progress: pt2 (H-M)

Haig, Heyward, Hobbs with Xavier, Beames & Glaser, Lunney, Madigan, MacDonald, McLaughlin

Ian Haig
Anti ergonomic hump machine

An installation designed to produce bad posture and humps in the backs of its users with continual use, this work looks at the inverse of ergonomics, where the adverse effects of computers on the human body can be seen as desirable body modifications.

The challenge is to deliberately produce a work that is regressive and self consciously wrong in its thinking—an alternative orthopaedic device for reshaping the human body, which explores the theme of devolution and rethinks our relationship with technology as something which is not always intrinsically ‘progressive.’

Ian Haig is a media artist working across video, installation and animation media. Recently his work has been seen in The New York Digital Salon, Visual Arts Museum, New York; Transmediale Festival, Berlin; and FILE, Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Recent works include The Super Human Factory Online, Psycho Samba and Web Devolution.

Completion November 2000.

Megan Heyward
Of Day Of Night

Megan Heyward, Of Day Of Night

Megan Heyward, Of Day Of Night

A person has lost the ability to dream. Through a series of creative tasks, they attempt to spark their unconscious into dreaming again. This experiment in new media narrative is a hybrid of cinematic, textual and interactive elements, exploring intersections between oneiric experience and the fragmentations, multiplicities and juxtapositions of new media form. The challenge is to animate a text through sound and image with room for uncertainty, indecision, wandering and chance.

With video, sound, text and interactivity, Megan Heyward writes in new media. She developed I Am A Singer (1997) with the support of the Australian Film Commission, acting as writer, artist, programmer, sound designer and director. I Am A Singer has been widely exhibited internationally and has won several Australian and international new media awards. Megan lectures in new media in the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, UTS. Collaborators: Graham Cheney, Suheil Dahdal, Phil Kakulas.

Completion February/March 2001. Australian Film Commission and University of Technology, Sydney.

Hobbs, Xavier, Beames & Glaser
Doctor Pancoast’s Cabinet de Curiosités

Hobbs, Xavier, Beames & Glaser, Doctor Pancoast’s Cabinet de Curiosités

Hobbs, Xavier, Beames & Glaser, Doctor Pancoast’s Cabinet de Curiosités

Anatomically accurate computer graphics and original celluloid vignettes recreate Doctor Pancoast’s prurient misadventures. Locked inside his Cabinet are clues to fascinating and vile perversions. In here, monsters live, hidden behind rules of genteel etiquette, concealed inside quaint notions of scientific discovery.

Doctor Pancoast’s Cabinet de Curiosités is a narrative with 2 intended distribution outcomes: release as an interactive multimedia and self contained linear short. Managing the narrative structure of each whilst making best use of common graphic content has posed a great challenge. Also, providing a satisfying story experience in the interactive has been a key issue for ongoing discussion.

Collaborators: Amelia Lalanne Hobbs, Marie-Louise Xavier, Nic Beames and Michelle Glaser. Past collaborations between Xavier and Glaser (with Robyn Marais) include tetragenia, a net based artwork exhibited in the 1999 Festival of Perth and Juvenate (with Andrew Hutchison), an interactive narrative selected for exhibition in the interactive program of the 2000 Melbourne Film Festival. Lalanne Hobbs is a freelancer accomplished in both screen and print design. Featured in Doctor Pancoast are drawings by WA artists Gina Moore and Richard Giblet.

Completion December 2000. Australian Film Commission; ScreenWest.

ART ORIENTE Objet & Maria Lunney

This as yet untitled work involves a 4 month collaboration-residency in Paris with contemporary art duo ART ORIENTE Objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin) to create a multimedia installation for an exhibition in September 2000 at Galerie des Archives, Paris. The project will explore the connections between visual culture, technology, science and philosophy via the concept of the “ready thought” in opposition to the “open work.” The project contends that if Dadaism pondered the questions of the machine age, and the International Situationists questioned the urban capitalist environment, then today’s question would be to find the place of artistic production in an excessively image saturated world.

Maria Lunney completed a Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts at the VCA in printmaking/film/video and has exhibited recently at the Melbourne International Biennial and the New York Drawing Marathon.

Completion September 2000; online December 2000. Also planned for CD-ROM. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council.

Kaz Madigan
Feast

Kaz Madigan, Feast

Kaz Madigan, Feast

This project is my contribution to an exhibition by ArtAngels (a group of regional women artists). The collective focus is on the interpretation of feast imagery and its meaning in reference to food, indulgence, body image and food justice.

I am interested in technical platforms which create artistic, fluid works. Like my arts practice, handweaving, the internet presents strict protocols which can be reworked with innovation to create new types of communication and imagery.

I am an artist/handweaver/writer and teacher currently transferring these skills and ideas to internet projects. I am the author of The Australian Weaving Book and was publisher/editor of Curious Weaver, a journal for Australasian weavers. I also serve as a mentor at trAce International Online Writing Community.

Completion, September 2000. www.geocities.com/curiousweaver [expired]

Fiona MacDonald
Museum Emotions

Fiona MacDonald, Museum of Emotions

Fiona MacDonald, Museum of Emotions

This project brings together the disciplines and conventions of narrative script writing, video and digital imagery, dance performance, composed music and digital sound design to develop a participatory and experiential concept of narrative using a spatial framework of video and sound installation.

The challenge of this work is to develop a form of narrative writing that is created as much through a spatial dimension as a time-based one. Using televisual conventions and rendering them in a purely imagistic way while sustaining a narrative through boundaries of sound and movement is a central idea. Narrative meaning develops from the audience’s movement. This could occur in ways that are quite dramatic and confronting for the audience while remaining ‘invisible.’

Fiona Macdonald is an artist working in photography, video and installation. Her work has been directed towards showing in public places and she has exhibited in contemporary art spaces and state galleries. Collaborators: Shelley Lasica (choreographer), Francois Tetaz (composer), Jo Lloyd, Deanne Butterworth, Kylie Walters (performers).

New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council.

Second Nature

This non-narrative, 12 minute digital video work develops from abstract fast-moving colour and graphic sequences into tightly edited footage shot in a heavy industrial workplace. The soundtrack, a series of escalating noise intensities, uses the audio recorded onsite as a pure industrial sound element with no mixing down. The script, part translated into Japanese, is rendered in text as subtitles and as a graphic element.

The work is structured partly as a (computer) game, although without clear protagonists. The concept is a meditation on capitalism, commodification and the global economy. The graphic/animated sequences underline this by presenting the human element as interchangeable with a cartoon like or virtual presence.

Fiona Macdonald’s video work has been shown in Australia at Experimenta and the St Kilda Film Festival, overseas at Ars Electronica and ISEA, and film festivals in Italy, Canada, USA and Germany.

Completion July 2000. Work made during tenure as artist-in-residence in the Department of Visual Culture at Monash University.

Sally McLaughlin
Real: a digital installation

Sally McLaughlin, Real: a digital installation

Sally McLaughlin, Real: a digital installation

In this exploration of the dynamics of interpreting experience, images drawn from contemporary environments are juxtaposed with terms such as ‘nature’, ‘prosthesis’ and ‘body.’ Shifts occur in understanding both the images and the terms. Assumptions about the authenticity of practices, modes and readings of experience are brought into play. The work was created over a period of 2 years, the collaborating artists working initially in different cities and ultimately in different countries.

Sydney-based Sally McLaughlin is an educator and interface designer who has developed commercial software, written on theoretical issues in interface design, and developed programmes of study in media arts. Aaron Fry is a New Zealand artist currently in the USA where he teaches art and digital media.

Completion October 2000. The Waikato Polytechnic and Massey University, New Zealand; equipment and facilities provided by Massachusetts College of Art, USA.

mez
Dataface Babee

mez, Dataface Babee

mez, Dataface Babee

Dataface Babee is a collaborative net.wurk that mezanders into the real wurld via a sculptural statement of virtual worth. This project is concerned with exploring the hackneyed notions of the ‘interface’ and developing alternative perspectives through a net.wurk reworking of this accepted paradigm.

Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze) is a widely exhibited net.wurk artist, avataristic author of the networked polysemic language system termed “mezangelle” and regular on and off-line journalist. Walter Brecely is an Australian-based visual artist with a fetish for metal who has exhibited and been involved in artistic-commissioned work for the last 7 years.

Completion December 2000. http://wollongong.starway.net.au/~mezandwalt [expired]

RealTime issue #38 Aug-Sept 2000 pg. 5, 8

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1 August 2000