Under Score Australian New Media Arts in Next Wave Down Under Part of BAM’S 2001 Next Wave Festival, New York Introduction
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October-November 2001 FREE Under_score Australian new media arts in Next Wave Down Under part of BAM’s 2001 Next Wave Festival, New York Introduction Welcome to the third of RealTime's annual surveys of developments in Australian new media Wayne Ashley art. Working the Screen provides a rare overview of exhibited works, works-in-progress, Organizing Curator, Manager of New Media, Brooklyn Academy of Music trends and issues. In July 1999 Wayne Ashley was named the first Manager of New Media at the Brooklyn Working the Screen 2001 celebrates the Australian new media artists and works selected for the Academy of Music (BAM), hired to establish BAM's New Media Department; design, direct, and Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) Next Wave Festival. Now in its nineteenth year, Next Wave implement Arts in Multimedia (AIM), a research, art and technology project with Bell Labs; and has long had a reputation for innovative programming. This year the festival includes Next Wave begin exploring works that confront assumed ideas about performance in the context of rapidly Down Under, a month-long celebration of contemporary Australian arts. The BAM website will changing information and interactive technologies. Ashley has produced web documentaries on feature the work of nine Australian net.artists, provide links to the sites of fourteen new media choreographers David Rousséve and Ralph Lemon, and managed three collaborative projects artists, two net.sound sites, an online documentary on Chunky Move dance company and audio- involving Bell Labs researchers and artists exploring robotic cameras and live performance. He is on-demand broadcasts of works from ABC radio's The Listening Room. This online exhibition has currently directing a two-year online multidisciplinary project with Ralph Lemon. Since 1995, he been titled Under_score: Net Art, Sound, and Essays from Australia (www.bam.org/underscore). has taught digital-imaging software to designers and photographers at Ivey Seright, the largest photo-imaging establishment in the Pacific Northwest; and in 1997 became the Program Under_score has been curated by Wayne Ashley (Organising Curator, Manager of New Media, Director of Open Studio at the Seattle Art Museum. He has a Ph.D. from New York University’s BAM) who has also commissioned online essays by Allen Feldman, an American cultural and Department of Performance Studies, and has taught at the New School's Vera List Center, New medical anthropologist, and Australian new media theorist Darren Tofts and new media York University, Cal Arts East, and Seattle’s Antioch University. producer/curator Alessio Cavallaro. In developing Under_score Wayne Ashley has worked together with and received For Working the Screen, RealTime and its film and new media supplement, OnScreen, have recommendations from Australian curators, educators, media theorists, and producers: Alessio commissioned two essays and selected another that focus on significant trends in new media Cavallaro, curator, Cinemedia; Leah Grycewicz, curator, dLux media arts; Kathy Cleland, curator art, here and in the USA. New media commentators Mitchell Whitelaw and Alex Galloway and President dLux media arts; Honor Harger, curator, r a d i o q u a l i a; McKenzie Wark, (Director of Content & Technology for the USA-based site Rhizome.org) focus on net.art, while lecturer and author; Amanda McDonald-Crowley, Associate Director 2002, Adelaide Festival of new media curator and writer Kathy Cleland provides an overview of the kinds of work being Arts; Lisa Colley, Manager, New Media Arts Board, Australia Council; Robyn Ravlich, Executive created in Australia and the infrastructure fostering them. Producer, The Listening Room, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. We've also commissioned a set of critical appreciations of the nine net artists in the Online essays Under_score online exhibition. For the other featured artists we've given accounts of the selected works and, where possible, forthcoming works. BAM has commissioned two online essays in conjunction with the exhibit. Allen Feldman, an American cultural and medical anthropologist writes from the perspective of the political Next Wave Down Under has programmed, among others, Company B Belvoir's production of Tim anthropology of the body, violence, and the history of self-acting instruments. Australian new Wintons' Cloudstreet, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Chunky Move dance company, the David media theorist Darren Tofts and new media producer/curator Alessio Cavallaro discuss the Chesworth Ensemble and Killing the Koala: Australian Films of the 90s, a festival featuring more curated Under_score works in relationship to the Australian national art scene and how they than 20 films. The inclusion of new media art in a major performing arts festival is a significant intersect with, draw from, contribute to, or are overwhelmed by the global emergence of net.art event and will doubtless expose the work of many Australian artists to a wider audience. and aesthetics, information technologies and computerization. www.bam.org/underscore We congratulate BAM and Wayne Ashley, BAM's first Manager of New Media, for their timely Working the Screen 2001, a RealTime+OnScreen feature celebration of Australian art. The Australia Council has part funded Next Wave Down Under in Produced by RealTime with the Editors Keith Gallasch, Kirsten Krauth, Virginia Baxter, partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through the Australia International assistance of the Australia Council, Design i2i design, Sydney the Federal government's arts Print Harris Print, Burnie, Tasmania Cultural Council and the Australian Film Commission. We thank the Australia Council for its funding and advisory body Publisher Open City Inc. ISSN 1321-4799 generous support for this edition of Working the Screen which will be available to Next Wave audiences in print and online and to readers across Australia. Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch Kirsten Krauth Managing Editors, RealTime Editor, OnScreen RealTime Australia Council R.G. Casey Building PO Box A2246 PO Box 788 John McEwen Crescent Sydney South NSW 1235 Strawberry Hills NSW 2012 Barton, ACT 0221 Australia [email protected] 612 9215 9000 612 6261 1111 612 9283 2723 fax 612 9215 9111 fax 612 6261 3111 fax 612 9283 2724 [email protected] www.dfat.gov.au Cover image: Patricia Piccinini Protein Lattice – blue portrait 1997 (detail) 80x80cm, C type print www.realtimearts.net www.ozco.gov.au net.art: a polymorphous survivor Mitchell Whitelaw The Men Who Knew Too Much, Virtual Humanoids Image: Adam Nash Back in 1999 some internet veterans—art types included—were feeling miffed. Mainstream, One striking thing, which may sound odd, is the number of web pages here. On the web the commercial culture had got hold of the internet—their internet—and was acting as if networked page, as a technological form, is old news; the space once imagined as a hypertext—a culture was a concept invented by dot-com aspirants in a pitch to their venture capitalists. What network of interthreaded documents—now operates more like the slick front end of a giant, tasted like sour grapes, for a moment, turned into quiet schadenfreude as the whole thing largely obscure database. The page has by no means outlived its creative usefulness though, as deflated. Having been shown that the net was no place for brash commercialism, the corporates much of this work shows. Part of the reason for this is that, for all its flaws, the page remains could now go back to their offices and leave the net in the tender care of those who knew it the everyday baseline of internet experience. International net.art has been for some time best: geeks, hackers, slackers, subculturists of all varieties, and artists. That’s a caricature of preoccupied with the formal demolition of the web page, grinding it up into component pixels some of the sentiments of the time. Of course there’s no going back—not that there ever was a and code—see for example Jodi.org and Mark Napier’s Feed (http://feed.projects.sfmoma.org/). wild and free net utopia. As well as having changed materially, the net now is a very different Strangely ninemsn and f2 seem not to have noticed; in fact with the recent industrial idea, culturally speaking, than it was two, not to mention five years ago. shakedown of the web, and the dominance of the doctrine of usability, its formal and stylistic language is more rigid than ever. Cultural content, too: for better or worse, the dot-com boom Yet the net’s main asset, its strongly decentralised structure, is unchanged, as are the sustainable has left us with pop-ups, pop-unders, banner ads, portals and e-tailing. micro-economies of hosting, serving and browsing; these are the bare necessities for independent online cultural practice, including net.art. So the space remains; the questions are, All hearty fodder for satire and subversion, which seems to be a particular strength in local what does it contain, how is it supported; how is it hooked up with the cultural and institutional work—in this collection see Ian Haig’s Web Devolution, in which American cyber-icons Wired structures of RL (real life)? The waves of hype, greed and utopianism have subsided; the romance and the MIT Media Lab appear as members of an insane post-human apocalyptic webring. of the network pioneer is unsustainable; the novelty of online art is long gone. The processes and Elsewhere there’s Van Sowerine’s Girlplay (http://www.microslut.f2s.com/), which last year tools involved in making work online have stabilised, to a certain extent, in line with the wider earned the honour of a threatening letter from ninemsn, and Natasha Dwyer’s Appeal consolidation and industrialisation of the net. Where does Australian net.art go from here? (http://www.stalled.au.nu/appeal) which trashes e-commerce with an elegant minimum of fuss.