Artrave

Experimenta Playground, an international biennial exhibition of media art, marks Experimentas 21-year commitment to innovation in both production and in promoting and exhibiting new media art throughout Australia and abroad. With artworks that engage with the creative possibilities emerging from a dynamic interaction between the moving image, art and new technologies, each artist in the exhibition creatively expands the definition of play, performance and ritual. Here the revelation of technology and spatial features create new ways of appreciating the construction of fantasy. Participating artists include : June Bum Park, Guillaume Reymond, Shu Lea Cheang, Hiraki Sawa and Tomoyuki Washio, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey and Jesse Stevens, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, Philip Worthington, Gavin Sade, Priscilla Bracks and Matthew Dwyer, Stelarc, Marina Abramovic, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Eugenio Ampudia and Robert Hughes.

Ann Finegan looks at the world of interactive media arts, in particular database content interactivity. One example Finegan uses in her discussion is Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewskis Seeker, winner of an Award for Distinction for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica 2007. Seeker belongs to an emergent genre of database works which draw from the broader media, putting the viewer into the web of connections through which the forces of politics and economics determine the fate of peoples and of persons. Other artists discussed are Josh On, Lev Manovich, Linda Dement, Troy Innocent, Doll Yoko (aka Francesca da Rimini aka Gash Girl), Stephen Honegger, Rachel Baker, John Tonkin and Barbara Campbell. Finegan proclaims that at present the future of interactives is weighed in a choice between the seductive action of computer gaming as sites for artistic intervention, and data-mapping with its deep and active connections in realworld events.

Jasmin Stephens presents a personal recollection of this years Venice Biennale and documenta 12. As Stephens states, Venice reflected the worldwide trend of artists reappraising iconic moments from Conceptual Art from the early seventies and in so doing taking up the low-tech equipment associated with them. Artists here discussed are Aernout Milk, Willie Doherty, Paolo Canevari, Sophie Whettnall, Shaun Gladwell, Yang Zhenzhong, Emily PrinceSusan Norrie, Joshua Mosley and Tabaimo, Nedko Solakov, Mario Garcia, Felix Gmelin, Steve McQueen, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ines Doujak, Lili Dujourie, Zofia Kulik, John McCracken, Harun Farocki and Artur Zmijewski.

Historically, the relation between art institutions and film has been fraught with every imaginable problem and inequality. How to truly bring cinema and art into dialogue, to create real interpenetrations and hybrid forms that move well beyond the ephemeral fireworks of yesteryears between-images? Martin proposes that the gallery needs to take its filmic pedagogy outside its lecture rooms and onto the gallery and film works need to be fully valued in themselves  by curators, audiences and the entire, increasingly dominant promotional machine attached to our major galleries  for their history, their value, their power and (yes) their art.

In this article David Broker looks selectively at the brief history and development of video art, a trying medium voluntarily lost to him around 1985. Broker uses three examples of the video grande- Francesco Vezzolis Comizi di Non Amore, Emmanuelle Antilles Angels Camp and a work by Miguel Calderon featured in the 2004 Sao Paulo Biennale. Each work exists in its own way as a continuum upon which the trajectory of the technologies they have absorbed is not only clear but also fundamental to the work. As Broker declares the video revival has in itself been a spectacle, with digital video driving its acolytes to ever-greater heights of excess.

New interactive screen spaces of the web, games and virtual worlds act as portals allowing us to become a part of the media image rather than just watching it. No longer content to just watch the action, were creating our own online identities and becoming our own screen heroes acting out our own virtual adventures. This article focuses on the new virtual world of Second Life and discusses the idea of avatar (virtual pictorial) identities via the works of a selection of new media artists: Neal Stephenson, Eva and Franco Mattes, Emil Goh, Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis, Adam Nash, Christopher Dodd, Kyal TripodiGazira Babeli and Pierre Proske.

Discovering the Other National Palace Museum, Taipei, July 7 to August 19, 2007

Merilyn Fairskye briefly discusses her journey to Taipei where she took part in an exhibition of video installations Discovering the Other, the first ever contemporary art exhibition to be held at the National Palace Museum. Curator Gertjan Zuilhofs discription of this exhibition can be seen as a metaphor for his world view shadows, spirits and ghosts seemed to be everywhere, while at the same time the works engaged with the world of people and place, and the precarious struggle to maintain individual and cultural identities. Featured artists included: Deborah Stratman, Ella Raidel and Lin Hongjohn, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Merilyn Fairskye.