Against 'Neofuturism': Women Artists in Technological Media
In matters of technology, as in matters of sex, it is easy to assume one's own preferences are universal and normal, and to regard other's tastes as somehow debased or improper.
The Third International symposium on Electronic Art (TISEA) which took place in 16 venues in Sydney from 9 -13 November 1992 converted the whole city into a massive hologram event.
In the incredible shrinking space between 1984 and 2001 the distinction between social-issue documentary and surreal fiction is collapsing - almost as fast as Australian capitalism or Soviet communism.
In his discussion of male sexuality, it was Freud who asserted that men customarily distribute their libido with expedience. What psychical energies a man 'employs for cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws from women and sexual life'. But not so in the love story, a genre which disavows this predicament.
Despite my distrust of the postmodern, the possibility of disruption, the disturbance of vision that postmodernity is capable of providing within the cultural framework needs to be investigated. That such disturbances fail to deliver the most popular short films may be because they unsettle the comfortable fictions with which we seek to live....
Independent cinema may have been diverse in form, but its practitioners had in common a position of difference and marginality, working outside the mainstream and in opposition to it.
Aleksi Vellis announced his arrival in the turmoil of early 90s Australian cinema with his debut feature 'Nirvana Street Murder' a restlessly energetic film with cavalier camera moves that are almost as swish as the director himself.
Surely one of the powers of cinema is the aesthetic redemption of everyday reality, a poetics in motion that can distill and energise mundane objects, be they tiles on a kitchen wall, the fluorescent facade of an airport terminal, a luminously white T-shirt being twisted and tugged or the compact shapeliness of Y-fronts on a young body emerging from bed.
It is diversity, and the celebration of the marginal which makes Australian film innovative. Diversity provides the opportunity for people in Australia to enjoy and reflect on the cultural heterogeneity rather than on the alienating myth with which we are so familiar.