The Digital Arts Aotearoa Reader The Digital Arts Aotearoa Reader greens. For more details of this project see essay by Trudy Lane and Ian Clothier. Ian Lane and Trudy by see essay this project of details more For greens. the of sequence synaesthetically a fragrance matching perfumer usedwhich a commercial create to movie a into animated then were Theseshades landscape. surounding contaminated but the lush from 400 greens collected of a palette 1987. Turner 2,4,5-T until defoliant the dioxin-producing which manufactured Plymouth, New Paritutu, at plant chemical Dow Watkins Ivan the former of the site from and Taranaki Mount around from Turner by sampled the colours of some reproduces F Cover: ore-edge: A comprehensive anthology, The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader provides a snapshot of digital art practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Hoon Lee, Hoon Editors Stella Brennan and Su Ballard present essays, artists’ Raewyn Turner, Raewyn Turner, pageworks and personal accounts that explore the production and reception of digital art. Ranging from research into the preservation Salvation of digital artworks to the environmental impact of electronic culture, from discussions of lo-tech aesthetics to home gaming, and from sophisticated data mapping to pre-histories of new media, this , 2006, digital print, 1200 x 900mm. , 2006, digital print, Perfumes for Fear: No. 1 green No. Fear: for Perfumes book presents a screen grab of digital art in Aotearoa New Zealand. All contributors are members of Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA), New Zealand’s only digital artists’ network. With its mix of work by artists, theorists and educators, this reader presents fresh thinking about digital art in Aotearoa, reflecting the politics of location, yet highly relevant to the wider contexts of digital media art and culture. , 2008. This flip-book animation animation flip-book , 2008. This Edited by Stella Brennan and Su Ballard Edited by Stella Brennan and Su Ballard ISBN 978-095827899- 7 9 780958 278997 The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader Edited by Stella Brennan and Su Ballard Contents The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader 5 Foreword 76 Contemporary Ma ¯ or i Edited by Stella Brennan and Su Ballard Sally Jane Norman Women’s New Media Designed by Jonty Valentine Art Practice © 2008 the artists and authors. All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism 11 Introduction Maree Mills or review as permitted under the New Zealand Copyright Act no part of this publication may be Stella Brennan and Su Ballard reproduced without permission. 86 Kawhia & Kete #1, 22, "Internet; Environment" copyright © Julian Priest 2007, GNU General Public License. 15 ADA: A Web of Sites 20 and 83 ISBN: 978-0-9582789-9-7 Caroline McCaw Lisa Reihana A catalogue record for this book is available from The National Library of New Zealand 21 What is Digital? Concepts 90 Sampling Tradition: and a Chronology The Old in New Media Title: The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader Douglas Bagnall Janine Randerson Author/Contributor: Brennan, Stella (ed); Ballard, Su (ed) Publisher: Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds 28 Cloud Shape Classifier 97 Solar Circuit Aotearoa Douglas Bagnall New Zealand Trudy Lane and Ian Clothier 30 Local Knowledge and Aotearoa Digital Arts Trust Clouds New Media Theory 104 Composition for farmer, www.aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz PO Box 68-187, Newton, Auckland 1145 Danny Butt three dogs and 120 sheep Aotearoa New Zealand www.clouds.co.nz for four-channel video 36 Mushroom installation Brit Buckley Alex Monteith Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the illustrations reproduced in this book. Unfortunately, this has not been possible in all cases. The editors and publisher would be pleased to hear 38 Open Interactions 106 Why You Should Learn to from any copyright holders whom they have been unable to contact and to print due acknowledgement in Karl D.D. Willis Love Free Documentation subsequent editions. Adam Hyde Unless otherwise noted, all images are repoduced courtesy of the artists. 48 Real Time, Virtual Space, Editing a book takes a long time, and many people have helped along the way. Stella and Su would like firstly Live Theatre 112 Corticosteroid to thank the authors and artists who have contributed to this book, and the institutions and individuals who Helen Varley Jameison Marcus Williams and shared their image archives with us. We would also like to acknowledge the work and support of the following: Susan Jowsey Nova Paul, Leoni Schmidt, Col Fay, Khyla Russell, Justine Camp, Letitia Lam, Pam McKinlay, Geoff Noller, Sarah McMillan, Robert Leonard, Melinda Rackham, Mercedes Vincente, and Gwynneth Porter, 57 Centres and Peripheries Deborah Orum and Warren Olds from Clouds. And of course, Jonty Valentine for the hours spent in Vicki Smith and Adam Hyde 114 Interdisciplinary Moments: design. Thanks also to the ADA community, and especially to the other ADA trustees, Janine Randerson, A History in Glimpses Douglas Bagnall and Zita Joyce. 62 New Data: Curating and Andrew Clifford Thanks most of all to our families: Nathan, Moss and David. Archiving Digital1 Art in 136 The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader would not have been realised without the support of AUT University, New Zealand Little Boy and Fat Man Otago Polytechnic and Creative New Zealand. Lissa Mitchell Stella Brennan 69 The Digital Artist in 138 A Minor Cinema: Moving Residence Programme Images on the Internet Sean Cubitt and Bevin Yeatman Eu Jin Chua Foreword Sally Jane Norman 144 A Film of Real Time: 190 New Work for PCs and Aotearoa is marked by movement, from the tectonics that wrenched it into being A Light Sound Environment Unreal Gallery to the journeys of ocean-faring humans seeking a new land. This movement Leon Narbey Morgan Oliver continues as both geological processes and flows of people inward and outward. Art is founded and grounded in movement, in the action conveyed by terms 146 Old Noise, New Sounds: 193 1980s Home Coding: such as expression, communication, cognition, provocation, and emotion. In Sonic Explorations in The Art of Amateur turn the movements of art, those of its makers and its materials, are manifest as Gallery Spaces Programming Su Ballard Melanie Swalwell erosions and eruptions and shifts of creative volition. So-called new media are transient markers: like the tectonic processes that shape our physical environ- 160 Asleightofhandmaneuvering- 202 The Graph as Landscape: ment, digital media form a fleeting phase of our evolving cultural landscape. ofastillimageintosomething- Reflections on Making Yet we experience the movement of our own time as being fraught with the moving: Horses 2 and Sleeper Packet Garden seismic heaving that gives birth to mountains. Digital orogeny. Through the Nathan Pohio Julian Oliver compressions and folds and faults of digitised data, reproducible, transportable and infinitely malleable, we are rendering and revealing untapped topographies 161 Onsite and Online 207 Internet; Environment for the imagination. Stella Brennan and Julian Priest As a shoot or runner sprung from the soil of Aotearoa to grow elsewhere, Stephen Cleland my place in this book disseminating the creative energies of a distant homeland 220 Postcards for Garland Briggs is an uneasy honour. By virtue of what knowledge or insights does one preface 171 Untitled Aaron and Hannah Beehre Luke Duncalfe the words of others? Can I, as a Pakeha claim roots in a birthplace (Ahuriri, 222 Glossary of Ma ¯ ori Words Napier), or in the place where my parents dwelt for over fifty years—Titahi Bay? 172 The Big Idea What of the decades of being far away, including in this country that once ruled Jacquie Clarke 223 Bibliography New Zealand and spawned a large part of its population? What relevance have these personal existential questions to the arts of Aotearoa, and how can 177 A System of Drawing 231 List of Contributors experience working overseas across a range of cultural practices map to that of Kurt Adams artists of Aotearoa? This foreword stands as a necessarily, wilfully subjective 233 Index prologue, whose essentially interrogative tone attempts to open up a relational 182 Electromagnetic Dreams: field, a textual weaving (con-text) to interlace with the creative works of New Zealand Artists in Aotearoan compatriots. Radio Space Zita Joyce Whenua and the Longing to Belong Tāngata whenua: descendants of the first people to settle the land. This expres- sion conveys the uniquely earthed quality of Aotearoa’s indigenous culture. Whenua designates both the land and the afterbirth whose burial symbolises a kind of renaissance, a ritual connection to home territory instating the newborn as its custodian. After centuries of indifferent incineration of the afterbirth by Europeans and their followers, the vast therapeutic potential of cord blood stem cells, which by three-dimensional bio-engineering techniques can be grown into highly differentiated functional tissues, today opens up miraculous links between afterbirth and rebirth. Thus we encounter the intertwining of past and present inherent to Māori concepts of mua and muri, and to the fugitive sense of present that echoes through The World of the Unborn, Chapter XIX of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: The Erewhonians say that we are drawn through life backwards; or again, that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor. Time walks beside us 5 The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader Foreword and flings back shutters as we advance; but the light thus given often daz- identities. To fulfil the promises of virtuality sung by the sirens of contemporary zles us, and deepens the darkness which is in front. We can see but little at a media arts, Aotearoa’s distinctive interlacings of symbolic and physical domains time, and heed that little far less than our apprehension of what we shall see call for a novel poetics of transubstantiation.