Issues

Issue 30:2 | June 2010 | The Underground
The Underground
Issue 30:2 | June 2010
Issue 21:3 | September 2001 | E-volution of New Media
E-volution of New Media
Issue 21:3 | September 2001

Articles

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Editorial
What we talk about when we talk about ‘the underground’
Thirteen paragraphs on the underground

Artist/ writer, curator/designer at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation Teri Hoskin's thirteen paragraphs sum up facts, apprehensions and suspicions about the underground.

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Adapt or die
“An underground artist? Me?” Ian Milliss on maintaining the rage to avoid extinction
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Hiding in plain sight: regionalism and the underground
Margie Borschke was in Canada in the mid 1980s when she discovered the Underground.
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1. Muffled sounds 2. The ear trumpet of the artworld has been struck by lightning
Emeritus Flinders University Professor and philosopher Donald Brook writes about his 'new theory' and why it has never been taken up. He wonders: 'Could it be that he is wrong?'
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Stop the press: the allure of ink
Caren Florance is Ampersand Duck, a blog and nom de press for activities including letterpress printing. Florance has breathed the ink and describes the history of moveable type focusing on the recent past and the present and how something magical happens to text when it is printed.
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When zines meet archives: above - and below - ground collections
Marmalade-maker and Phd candidate at the University of Technology in Sydney Jessie Lymn's writing focuses on her research into unconventional archival spaces that hold collections of zines, those idiosyncratic sites of memory.
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Conquest for country: Rockhole or mine
Anthropologist Eve Vincent has done fieldwork in mining towns in South Australia. She writes about Ali Russell's documentary Keeper about mining on Kokatha land near Ceduna.
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Dig it! The hole in Australian contemporary art
Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney Glenn Barkley surveys the hole in contemporary Australian art starting at the 1973 Mildura Sculpturescape.
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How to make trouble and influence people: Pranks, hoaxes, graffiti and political mischef-making from across Australia
Iain McIntyre's book How To Make Trouble And Influence People describes the secret ludic history of creative troublemaking in Australia over two centuries. It began as a series of zines and is now published by Breakdown Press to impress new readers and inspire new acts of defiance.
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Underground film in Australia
Writer and curator of the moving image Danni Zuvela examines underground film in Australia to draw out its spirit it from the pre-Seventies to now - 'profane, collective, improvised, transgressive, convivial, illegitimate'.
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Seed bomb
Farmer, artist, writer Kirsten Bradley who works from Milkwood Permaculture Farm near Mudgee in the high country of NSW spills the beans on how to make a seedball or seedbomb to revegetate or vegetate urban spaces around you. Like guerilla gardening, it's quick, it's quiet and it creeps up on you.
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Street dreams
Peter Drew knows the street art of Adelaide like you know the back of your hand.
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Underground networks in the age of web 2.0
Media Theorist, nethead, activist and founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures Geert Lovink reports on the erotica of touching between 'weak links' and the importance of experimenting with new forms of organisation both on and offline.
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Steampunk: gunpowder and cups of tea
Between 13 October 2009 and 21 February 2010, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford held the world's first museum exhibition of Steampunk art. Writer, artist, emerging, networked and distributed culture geek Melinda Rackham was there.
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Renew Adelaide pilot: 2 wheels good
Zine publisher and educator Dr Ianto Ware is the Project Manager of Renew Adelaide, an urban renewal clone of Marcus Westbury's Renew Newcastle, in which the 'definition of creativity has to be broad enough to encompass the wide fields of socially innovative activity that simply doesn't fit elsewhere.'
Remembering Judith Hoffberg 1934-2009

Expert on Len Lye, editor of Umbrella Magazine Judith Hoffberg died on January 16, 2009. Tributes to her life and work continue with a memorial exhibition planned for late 2010. Judith Hoffberg wrote of her last visit to Adelaide in 2002 as one of ‘’Paradise regained’...

Remembering Judith Hoffberg BA, MA, MLS, 1934-2009

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Before and After Science: 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art
Curators: Charlotte Day and Sarah Tutton Art Gallery of South Australia 27 February – 2 May 2010
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Adelaide International 2010: Apart, We are Together
Raeda Saadeh, Praneet Soi Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Rosella Biscotti Australian Experimental Art Foundation Nina Fisher & Maroan el Sani, Donghee Koo, Li Mu, Tara Donovan, Imma Issa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul Anne & Gordon Samstag Art Museum Lucy and Jorge Orta JamFactory Gallery Julian Hooper Flinders University Art Museum Curator: Victoria Lynn 26 February – 14 March 2010
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Local Studies: Fiona MacDonald
Curator: Jo Holder Artspace Mackay 18 December 2009 – 31 January 2010
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Warm Up: Mike Singe
Gallery 6a, Hobart 9 April - 1 May 2010
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Hall of Mirrors: Anne Zahalka Portraits 1987-2007; Aehee Park: Caring for Aehee
Hall of Mirrors: Anne Zahalka Portraits 1987 – 2007 Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale Curator: Karra Rees 30 January - 28 February 2010 Aehee Park: Caring for Aehee Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale 6 February - 14 March 2010
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The City of Fremantle Festival of Photography: FotoFreo 2010
The City of Fremantle Festival of Photography: FotoFreo 2010 Silence – The West Australian Wheatbelt : Brad Rimmer Fremantle Prison 20 March – 16 May 2010 The Clubs: David Dare Parker The Fremantle Club 20 March – 18 April 2010 FotoFreo 2010 Fringe Festival Paradise Lost: Rebecca Dagnall Studio Red Dust, Mount Hawthorn 20 March – 10 April 2010
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Cubism and Australian Art
Curators: Leslie Harding, Sue Cramer Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne 24 November 2009 – 8 April 2010
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Sylvie Blocher: What is Missing?
Penrith Regional Gallery and The Lewers Bequest 13 February 2010 - 4 April 2010 Museum of Contemporary Art 17 February 2010 - 25 April 2010
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Feminism Never Happened
Del Kathryn Barton, Pat Brassington, Kirsty Bruce, Jacqueline Fraser, Anastasia Klose, Fiona Lowry, Fiona Pardington, Yvonne Todd, Jemima Wyman Curator: Robert Leonard IMA (Institute of Modern Art), Brisbane 30 January - 20 March 2010
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Ruth Waller: A 30 Year Survey
Curator: Deborah Clark Canberra Museum and Gallery 6 February - 6 June 2010
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Everything's Alright: Hossein Ghaemi, Andrew Liversidge, Yasmin Smith
Curator: Amanda Rowell Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney March 4 - 27 2010
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Sue Lovegrove: The Shape of Wind
Bett Gallery, Hobart 3 March – 6 April 2010
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Dykes to Watch Out For

A selection of 4 strips produced between 1987 - 2005, courtesy the author.

Polemic: An Allergic Reaction - The eminence grise in our Art Schools

Artist/academic Pat Hoffie has been brooding on the rise and rise of the éminence grise in our teaching institutions and warns of the perils of giving in and being swept along by the current of the times. She is not the only commentator to observe that the visual arts created an irritating skin condition for itself in the eighties when, in search of institutional support, it mimicked the language of professionalism and thus unwittingly exposed itself to the corrosive influence of bureaucracy. This is here discussed.

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Australian New Media: An Active Circuit
Through a process of active lobbying by various people around the country in the mid-eighties, the funding and institutional support for art and technology practice in Australia began to materialise. Some key figures in this push were Stephanie Britton, Louise Dauth and Gary Warner who saw the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) come into existence. The progress of the Australian new media arts scene is here documented from these early years and the various initiatives and supportive programs and events through to what is now the fundamental arts and cultural practice of the twentieth century. Artists Maria Miranda, Norie Neumark and Mari Velonaki are featured.
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Interfacing Art, Science and New Media
Among the current metaphors used to describe the unfolding relations between art and science, the two ascriptions that have held sway most recently have been those of collaboration and/or intersection. Both art and science have sent out sets of feelers towards each others cultures which has in turn produced an overlapping sphere of cultural and intellectual activity. Following Lisa Jardine's argument, Munster tentatively proposes that we think through these connections as a process of hybridisation performed by the work of the technical-aesthetic objects themselves rather than to declare a glorious new age of harmony, unity and productivity between the two. Artists Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Guy Ben-Ary, Justine Cooper, Michele Barker and Patricia Piccinini are in reference.
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Melinda Rackham's Online Installations
Time is the key. They say that the only law of physics that absolutely requires time is the second law of thermodynamics, the law that says systems tend towards entropy. That tendency is time's arrow, the ineluctable winding down of the universe. Except, of course, for life.
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Jon McCormack's Evolving Ethics
Most readers would probably have noticed that talk about A-life technology (or any technology for that matter) has a definite shelf life. Liminal Product [LP] quizzed internationally acclaimed computer artist Jon McCormack, whose paper [Re]Designing Nature given at dLux media arts FutureScreen symposium on Artificial Life in October 2000, and recent piece, Eden exhibited at Cyber Cultures, Casula Powerhouse, in the same year, articulate many of the concerns about A-Life that Australian artists grapple with.
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Is Any Body Really There? Hybrid/Performance Arts
In a work that refuses language and conventional psychologising, Mary Moores production Exile, which opened at the Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music at The Studio, Sydney Opera House in 2000, the ascribed meaning is an experience rich in identification. This is pleasurably disorienting theatre that says it all about the immersive experience from 3D to Cinemascope to TODD-AO to Cinema to VR. Other new media performance and installation works are brought into focus such as the Melbourne-based Company in Space work Trial by Video (1997), Liquid Gold by Lisa O'Neill, that of Queensland media artist Keith Armstrong and the Melbourne performance company The Men Who Knew Too Much.
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Digital Drawing: The Same But Different
Drawing - the use of line and tone - is at the other end of a technology timeline currently unravelling in the digital age of information. The theory and practice of drawing ranges from a tool for honing perceptual disciplines to one that permits the free-flow of the obsessive-compulsive component of our personalities. Leggett looks at the works of artists Paul Thomas, Maria Miranda, Harriet Birks, Alyssa Rothwell, Mr Snow, Peter Callas, Simon Biggs and Damien Everett and the various digital tools they employ to assist in the documenting and drawing out of their individual ideas.
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Fresh Portals for the Caravanserai: art and new media in India and Australia
In Delhi early in 2001, a new media research and development program Sarai: The New Media Initiative was launched carrying the energy and quality of intellectual exchange embedded within the history of the caravanserai, translated through the colourful codes, cants and images of public urban life within India's cities. Sarai is a bold initiative facilitating formal and informal partnerships within India and internationally between the likes of hackers, philosophers, artists, media theorists, graphic designers, anthropologists, filmmakers and software developers. Some of the names which appear in this article include Meena Nanji, Rehan Ansari, Graham Harwood, Monica Narula, Sarah Neville, Mari Velonaki and Mukhul Kesevan.
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The A-gender of Cute Capital
One the one hand the notion of the cute is seemingly universal and yet it is marked by specific cultural indices and contextual factors. The possible modes of employing the cute is evidenced by the practices of Australian artists Martine Corompt and Kate Beynon. Both artists have a strong interest in character culture (ie. comics, cartoons) and their associated vernaculars; in turn they explore and outline different types of cute landscapes. Both artists use ambiguity in the case of gender representation and utilise aspects of eastern and western contexts and character traits to create works which reinforce and subvert the constructions of gender, class and culture within the universal graphic language.
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Do Art-droids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
Peter Robinson and Jacqueline Fraser were the first two New Zealand artists ever to be included in the Venice Biennale. Both were chosen as a result of their work, rich in conceptual layering and with roots in Maori culture, but wrapped in appealingly conventional presentation styles with plenty of hooks for an international audience. This fact leads Butt to the discussion surrounding the support for New Zealand's arts and culture sectors, pointing to a few examples such as Cuckoo, The Physics Room web project series and artists such as Sean Kerr and Warren Olds.
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An Ecology of OZ Mutant Media
Wade Marynowsky, aka Spanky is a software engineer who has coded a new program which allows audio-video samples to be collated for the live performance of a particular song, triggered live through a preferably loud sound system and video projector. This innovation marks a step forward in the realm of audio-video intersection and hybridisation. The recent emergence of VJ's (Vidi-yo Jockeys), artists who combine computer and VHS source materials to play with visual rhythms, create atmospheres, tell stories, respond to the music and provide visual stimulus also play a crucial role in this new media arena. Other new media collectives such as Shut up & Shop, Kraftwerk, the Distributed Audio Sequencer Environment crew and Labrat are here discussed.
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Inframedia Audio: Glitches and Tape Hiss
This article focuses on that which is known as sound art, new media art or if a label is required the best might be simply audio. It is not so much a sound as a transparent substrate for organised expression but rather sound being mediated, synthesised, generated, collaged. Furthermore this article looks at the in-between sounds - the glitches, clicks, pops, and CD-skips - with many artists drawing on these entropic internal workings of audio processing systems. Artists include Nam June Paik, Minit, David Haines, Vicky Browne, Andrew Gadow and Netochka Nezvanova.
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Out of Australia: International Exposure
This article poses the question of what new media art exhibitions, as international exports, can offer to us as a nation, as a new media community and as individual artists, and of how they can function in terms of the transmission and propagation of certain ideas and images into what might be called the world brain. To discuss this Wallace looks at the structure and outcomes of PROBE, the first large-scale exhibition of contemporary, new media art ever held in Beijing which featured the work of Patricia Piccinini, Justine Cooper, Leon Cmielewski/Josephine Starrs, Brenda L. Croft, Zen Yipu and Jen Seevink, as well as including a range of internet sites.
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Storming the Reality Studio
Tofts attempts to redefine that which is commonly known as new media art, as he believes it is out of touch with what's actually going on in digital culture. He refers to a range of contemporary Australian artists utilising digital media to explore some of the ways old material is appropriated and remediated to present works that are new and unique. Amongst those are Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, Murray McKeich, Ian Haig, Nicholas Negroponte, David Carson, James Widdowson, Gregory Baldwin, Elena Popa, Greg O'Connor, Troy Innocent, Rebecca Young, Andrew Trevillian and Tina Gonsalvas.
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Writing on the Net: Nodes and Hypertext
Many new media works contribute to the field of hypertext despite not being concerned with the literary. Corroli refers to Adrian Miles who likes to 'think of hypertext as being primarily about links and nodes and their relations, which may or may not privilege words'. This topic is examined using examples where hypertext has become a primary focus such as the partnering of eWRe, trAce Online Writing Centre and ANAT who developed a series of online writing residencies in the late 1990s. Artists also discussed: Anne Walton, Francesca da Rimini, Sally Pryor, Diane Caney and Robin Petterd.
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Digital Luggage and Meaningful Relationships
Machan turns the light on and examines the fears associated with technology - mystical secret language, complex software, indecipherable code - and furthermore those associated when art is involved. She proposes that the use of technology in everyday life be an experimental process, more aligned to the ways it is used in an art-based contexts. She states that:  through risk taking with fragile technologies we not only accelerate our knowledge but also accelerate relationships formed from the very human experience with technology.
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Howard Taylor
Howard Taylor 1918 – 2001 WA
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A Studio in Paris
5 May - 1 July S H Ervin Gallery Sydney
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Genius of Place: The Work of Kathleen Petyarre
9 May - 22 July 2001 Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
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Between Phenomena
curated by Raymond Arnold Plimsoll Gallery Centre for the Arts Hobart 30 March - 22 April 2001
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Stephen Wickham/Stefan Weisz: Photographs
Stephen McLaughlan Gallery Melbourne 6 - 30 June 2001
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The Shed
Contemporary Art Services Tasmania April 6 - 29 2001
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Winterbodies
Agnieska Golda, Zofia Sleziak, Stephanie Radok, Frances Phoenix, India Flint, Lisa Harms, Julie Robinson Wayville Showgrounds Adelaide 17-24 June 2001
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Hossein Valamanesh: a survey
Art Gallery of South Australia Adelaide 29 June - 26 August 2001
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Rosella Namok: mepla sarbie paint
Andrew Baker Art Dealer Brisbane 8 June - 4 July 2001
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Robin Best
Fleurieu Marine Forms: Engraved Porcelain JamFactory Craft & Design Centre Adelaide 19 May - 8 July 2001
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Allure: The Feminine in Print and Memoryware
Allure: the Feminine in Print: Wendy Hutchison, Deborah Klein, Marion Manifold, Heather Shimmen

Memoryware: Ceramics by Pamela Irving Maroondah Art Gallery, Ringwood, Vic 29 March - 13 May 2001
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