Search
You searched for articles ...
Love Your Work: Fremantle Arts Centre 30th Birthday
Artists together again for Fremantle Arts Centre's 30th Birthday celebrations
Matthew Collings Comes to Town
Introducting the final episode of 'This is Modern Art', his six-part television series which screened in Australia in 2000, Matthew Collings seemed ridden with apocalyptic feelings about the whole thing wrapping up. For five weeks he had come into our homes at night like kind of groovy art dad to deliver his version of the story of art from Picasso to the young British artists.
Patronage and Corporate Collections in Western Australia
While only a small percentage of national enterprises are based in the west, business leaders have a tradition of serious interest in the visual arts, with a number owning fine collections which they are prepared to share with the public. The three collections featured here all include contemporary Western Australian art - a form of patronage local artists can instantly appreciate. The associated catalogues and books produced are an enduring form of patronage which provide a much needed record of art in Western Australia.
Border Zones: An Eye on the World from Sydney
According to Chapman, the contemporary understanding of a globalised world is the result of the understanding that we all share a finite physical realm: this planet. The world is no longer understood purely in terms of geographic boundaries, but cultural ones. This article looks at some of the utopian values imparted upon some of the major cities in the western world and discusses concepts of globalism and localism as they contribute to a new perception of the world around us.
A contested place: Film and land
The importance of place depends on what it means to us, what we make of it and our understanding of how it shapes us. In 2001 in the Australian film industry there was an avalanche of films, both documentaries and features, addressing issues surrounding place in the context of the relationship between black and white Australians. Six features which Hann values for their portrayal of this relationship are One Night the Moon, Rabbit Proof Fence, The Tracker, Beneath Clouds, Kabbarli-A Film About Daisy Bates and Australian Rules.
Places Not Forgotten: In Rural South Australia
The Flinders Ranges in South Australia where Malcolm McKinnon lives is a place of diminishing population, sparse landscapes and resilient social memory. It's a place that reveals itself only over time, as the stories, names and explanations for particular places and people become gradually apparent. It's a place where most of the people of the land carry memories and maps of special places around in their heads. McKinnon's aim in writing this article is to use these places and the claims attached to them by many non-indigenous people to show that they are just as legitimate as those of indigenous people.
Postcards from Victoria: Fertility from the Air
To celebrate the Centenary of Federation, Regional Arts Victoria undertook a series of art projects across Victoria. '...such fertile ground...' unfolded in two stages during the years 1999-2000, involved twelve different locations, fourteen different artists and produced some stunning images which reflected unique aspects of the places which inspired them. Participation was open to anyone going through the local affiliate Arts Council and a local artist would be appointed the task of creating an image. Artists included Maxine Salvatore, Mark Selkrip, Jenny Munday, Ken Raff and Anton Vardy.
Float or Sink: A New Direction for Art in Regional Australia
When it comes to the interpretation of place, whether it be through the language of art, economy or social relations, we are always doing so through a culturally constructed lens and at a culturally constructed moment in time. The way we represent the land affects how we use the land and our land use in terms affects the way we represent it. Wilson looks at art that is made outside the context of the art gallery or computer screen and the ongoing categorisation and separation of institutionalised art from public art. The Artists Working in Nature movement and The Floating Land project are here used in reference.
Place Works: India Flint
India Flint's textile practice seeks to articulate the cyclical connection between human existence and the patterns of nature. She researches traditional dye practices with old approaches being re-examined to generate more ecologically sustainable methods of production and uses indigenous plant forms and declared noxious weed. As the cloth absorbs colour from materials extracted from the landscape, so it becomes steeped in the landscape itself.
Place Works: Martin Walch
Over the last five years Martin Walch has been working on the Mt Lyell Project as an artist in residence with Copper Mines of Tasmania. The project is ongoing, and now consists of a number of sound recordings, animations in 2D and 3D, stereoscopic pairs in travelling cases, as well as large re-photographic works based on J.W.Beatties' Mt Lyell photographs from 1893-6.
Place Works: Tim Maslen and Jennifer Mehra
Tim Maslen and Jennifer Mehra are Australians who live and work in the UK and have appropriately developed their body of work based on the experiences of disjunction one feels when removed from their familiar physical environment. Their artificial landscapes act as metaphors for the difficulty humans have in overcoming epistemological delusion and acknowledging the fact that life in the world is a unitary experience. We can see Maslen and Mehra's work as a kind of ritual to help us reconcile ourselves with our origins.
Place Works: Bette Mifsud
The body of work shown as The Living Room (RMIT Gallery 2001) continues Bette Misfud's studies of the emotive and emblematic power of landscape imagery. The Living Room represents, in part, the cultural segregation and physical isolation Misfud experiences in rural life as a second-generation migrant. The land is continually transformed by the marking and scarring of our habitation. Thus both land and identity are in a continual state of flux.
Place Works: Bronwyn Wright
Bronwyn Wright's work has closer links to the stealth associated with graffiti artists and the flamboyant play of the theatre than to large scale earthworks. It is based on intimacy with the site, daily visits, observations of seasonal variations and an anonymous interaction of dialogue with a young sub-culture. The ruined cars which adorn the site of 'The Swamp' where Wright works are symbolic mediators between earth and technological man. The car bodies wear away, crumple and disintegrate as the land itself is torn and worn and as our own bodies tire and retire.
International Artists Space Kellerberrin Australia: WA Wheatbelt Artzone
Two hours drive from Perth is the small regional town of Kellerberrin. With a population of nine hundred people and appearing just like many other municipalities in the region, the incongruity of this town lies in the presence of the grandly named International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA), a gallery and residency centre for international contemporary artists. IASKA was established in 1998, developing from a collaboration between two wheatbelt farmers, Tony York and Donna Dransfield, and two art professionals from Perth, artist Rodney Glick and Marco Marcon. The intention behind this double displacement is to offer both artist and communities a kind of shock treatment that will force them out of their respective comfort zones and encourage the development of new ways of approaching both art practice and notions of local identity. Visiting artists have included Salvatore Falci and Cathy Barber.
Terror Australis: Fear and Loathing in Open Spaces
When European explorers first discovered Australia, it was generally referred to as Terra Australia Incognita literally translated as Unknown Southern Land. Marshall looks at the physical terrain of this equally beautiful and dramatic region of the world via a selection of prolific Australian films which give shocking portrayals of our lifestyle here in the lucky country. Terror based films such as Dead Calm, Razorback, The Cars that ate Paris and Kiss or Kill.
Making Place in an Urban Sense
Our sense of who and where we are is continually mediated by images of the wilderness and the outback, but the real home of our species is the city. Downton is an architect determined to work through processes of ecology and community and is excited by the challenges of the city. He here examines the connections between humans and nature within the domain of a civic built environment.
Material Difference
Chandler looks at the practice of Paul Johnson and Elizabeth Frith Poole, two artists who both live in the same regional area, but convey contrasting views concerning the significance of place. For Frith Poole, time spent investigating her immediate environment has led to a more profound understanding of it, while Johnson utilises materials that are claimed as belonging to specific sites or cultures to confront assumptions concerning landscape and identity.
Spirit and Place Revisited
Spirit + Place, Art in Australia 1861 to 1996, an exhibition curated by Nick Waterlow and Ross Mellick at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996 in Sydney, is widely referred to as a landmark exhibition. The exhibition placed Indigenous Australian Art together with non-Indigenous Australian Art, as well as making honorary Australian artists of Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, Christo and others. The exhibition encompassed ideas that were linked to issues involving the environment, ethnicity and human pain and pleasure, with relevance both locally and beyond these shores.
Living the Lie (of the land)
Due to the concentric nature of its revelations the exhibition The Lie of the Land deserved particular consideration in terms of the resonances that placement, grounding and the physical experience of the Australian landscape and environment can have on the issue of current art practice. Curator Carmen Grostal felt a personal and philosophical urgency behind the idea for the exhibition, with the title of the show responding to Paul Carter's text of the same name and was used as a way to enter into dialogue with the ideas raised in it.
Six Days in Boyd Country
When Arthur Boyd gifted his large Bundanon property to the nation in 1993, he imagined the creation of a place that would become a living arts centre where artists of all persuasions would come to find refreshment and renewed inspiration in the landscape. The Bundanon Artists Centre is housed in former farm buildings and has hosted writers, visual artists, musicians, choreographers and film-makers. Among the most celebrated are J.M. Coetzee, South African novelist, Peter Mumme, environmental composer and Dorothy Porter, Australian poet. Kronenberg also discusses the work of artist John R. Walker who was invited to participate as a senior-artist-in-residence in 2000.
Tjukurpa Wangapai - Story-Telling Place
In 1998 Margaret Worth was invited by a small group of Pitjantjatjara women to visit the Tjilbruke Gateway installation at Warriparinga on the banks of the Sturt River in Adelaide. Months later Worth visited the women to talk about making a place like the Tjilbruke Gateway. This article looks at Worth's role in helping to develop a built site which would signify as much as its natural environment did. In the process she learnt what was important to know about the land and developed her own understanding of place.
Traces of a Shared Memory
Julie Blyfield's recent work explores her family history and her own sense of place and identity through the objects that have been handed down to her from her grandparents. Her grandmothers embroidery was a specific reference point for this work, as she metaphorically 'unpicked' her designs and reinvented them through her own medium.
River Systems
The work in River Systems responds to the region Ian Tully lives in, the south western Riverina of New South Wales and the surrounding country. The intention of his work is to question the whole notion of sustainability. Tully is continually torn between the design and aesthetics of industry, and the fragility, beauty and sensitivity of our diminishing natural systems.
Your city is so ugly: Adelaide and the truth
'Your City is Ugly' was a 2002 Adelaide Fringe production devised by John Adley, Chris Barker, Julianne Pierce, Katrina Sedgwick and Daryl Watson. Page layout by Daryl Watson with text by Julianne Pierce. Architectural photographs by Daryl Watson assisted by Tim Fenton. Photographs of Madame Ivana, Vladimir and Sergei by Annette Tripodi.
On Humans and Other Animals 'Becoming' Each Other
The metaphor of becoming animal till there is no longer man or animal is becoming real with the advances in genetic tissue technology and stem cell research. Artists dealing with hands-on wet biology art practice are exploring the tangibility of such an idea. Zurr looks at issues surrounding such new technology, at the experiment which saw an ear grafted onto a mouses back, constructed in vitro (outside of the body) and the possible future for the human and animal kingdoms.
The Extra Ear (or an ear on an arm)
What characterises all of Stelarc's projects and performances is the notion of the prosthetic. The EXTRA EAR is a project Stelarc has been fostering since 1997 and the problems lie in finding the appropriate medical assistance to realise it. Constructing the EXTRA EAR would involve a number of procedures, over approximately 8-10 months. Techniques from Cosmetic, Re-constructive and Orthopaedic surgery are necessary. Here Stelarc outlines some of the essential steps in constructing the EXTRA EAR and discusses the nature of this radical project.
Michele Barker
Michele Barker is a Sydney-based artist working in the area of new media. Conceptually, her work has concerned itself with notions of bodily identity, difference and in more recent times, the relationship between science, medicine and corporeality.
Ray Cook
Ray Cook is a Brisbane-based photographic artist who has exhibited for 13 years with 20 solo shows to his credit. Cooks work has been primarily concerned with mortality, loss of control and the way gender and sexuality have been perceived in the media. His images are highly theatrical, staged scenarios, a hybrid of performance and still photography.
The Surgical Fix: Physical Capital, Self-Improvement and the Body Beautiful
Historical studies have shown that an improved physical appearance had profoundly beneficial psychological effects and behavioural outcomes. Plastic surgery became a vital tool in the 1930s, holding out the promise of removing the traces of war and eliminating prominent markers of ethnicity. In recent years the cosmetic surgery industry has grown in Australia, and as with all countries the common goal is the production of a narrowly defined culture of bodily beauty. Ryan looks at the cosmetic surgery industry and some of the artistic responses to such ideas and ideals, particularly those of artist Annabelle Collett.
Monika Tichacek
Monika Tichacek is an installation artist based in Sydney. Her performance installations exist as a space within fiction, dreamlike. In both of Tichacek's works I Wanna Be Loved By Youand Romancethe view of the human is mediated by a surveillance camera, echoing the receding of the surgically enhanced body from human towards post-human.
Tiffany Parbs
Tiffany Parbs reinterprets 18th century medical tools to create works of small objects which carry with them an implication of an intimate relationship with the body. Parbs is based in South Australia at the JamFactory Contemporary Craft & Design; her project has been assisted by Arts SA and the Australia Council.
Sex in the Cyborg: Julie Rrap's Overstepping
This article follows in the footsteps of Julie Rrap's Overstepping, the digital print that won the 2001 Hermann's Art Award, at a time when geneticists are close to patenting a hybrid body. This image is a snapshot merging of the developed and the evolved, it can trigger a complex mix of fear and desire at a time when flesh has become protean and everything else morphologically dubious.
Lynne Roberts-Goodwin
Lynne Roberts-Goodwins work with birds is the latest chapter in her 20-year practice using digital photography. Her current work involves the research and image capture/production of animal habitat and migration using infrared and supplementary daylight fibre-optic lighting with digital image and video capture technologies.
Steven Holland
Steven Hollands pests/pets, DEED and being are a part of an ongoing series of ephemeral investigations into the representation of animal life. Underlining this is an exploration into the act of looking and the dominance of human vision. Holland was born in Dwellingup, WA, and studied at Curtin University, Canberra School of Art and at the Royal College of Art.
Similarities, Gen-et(h)ic Boundaries, and Respect for Otherness
This article discusses a specific aspect of the human/ animal relationship and of communication in and between species. It points to a few specific experiments which have been conducted to try and bridge the gap between human and animal connectivity and relatedness. Furthermore it recognises the different ways animals and humans relate to and view the world around them, whether it be via visual, tactile, olfactory, auditory or other sensory devices.
Jane Trengove
Jane Trengoves new paintings of monkey faces are the latest work in her long investigation into the human/animal interface. Trengoves intention with her series Looking Back is to grasp the moment of recognition from the human point of view and reverse the subject and object positions of the gaze. Trengove was born in Melbourne and studied at East Sydney Tech and at the Victorian College of the Arts.
The Theatrics of Cloning: The Recent Paintings of Juan Ford
Juan Ford's recent exhibition Clone is a series of portraits of doppelgangers trapped within neo-realistic hallucinatory environments that are rich in attributes taken from technological culture. The juxtaposition of traditional painterly portraiture with objects taken from recent technologies uncovers the sense of mystery that these new technologies provide for us. Trotter looks at Ford's practice within the context of our post-modern society, discussing relevant issues of capitalist culture as 'narcissistic' and the breakdown of a consistent personal identity within it.
Carnophilia
This text is concerned with the notion of animal and human hybridity, as examined in a historical and contemporary context through the myth of King Minos of Crete and more recently the work of artists such as Damien Hirst and John Kelly. From the shadowy overlap between species that the minotaur depicts to such contemporary models of animal/ human formation as the fictitious Spiderman, such figures of the imagination remind us of the diminishing gap between science fact and science fiction.
John Kelly
John Kelly paints cows and horses, in particular, the legendary Phar Lap and Dobell's camouflaged bovines. Through using these narratives and adding new elements Kelly has created a multi-layered structure of ideas. This evolution works on a slow time scale that is at odds with today's fast consumer culture where products need to be refreshed and changed on a continual basis.
Sympathetic Magic: Skin and Canvas
The skin, the membrane, the corporeal envelope, the shroud, the veil - all those things that tend to separate and define appearances from either the being inside, or from the beingness outside - have provided a source of some of the most rich and persistent metaphors for Western culture. With the 20th century bringing a re-emergence of the idea of the skin as an organ rather than a boundary, notions and representations of the physical body dominated the work of last century and painting returned as an important medium for such depictions. This article looks at the metaphoric and literal relationship between skin and its various representations in contemporary art.
Animal Magnetism: Sharon Goodwin and the Eternal Romance of the Bestial
The work of Sharon Goodwin is directly influenced by the Coles Funny Picture Books which create a bizarre Victorian world where human and animal promiscuously cross over. Here people are frequently turned into animals, and the qualities of animals emerge in humans through vices of personality. Goodwin's exhibition which was held at Uplands Gallery in Melbourne, Victoria in November 2001 presented a series of portraits of bestial humans or humanised animals repainted from Cole's woodcuts. Goodwin has introduced crude lines and stitching and patching in the images to represent the frequent actualisation of plastic surgery in contemporary society.
Uglielands: The Fremantle Festival 2001
At Fremantle Arts Centre, as part of the annual Fremantle Festival in 2001, selected artists addressed the notion of fascination by and in the freak, geek and grotesque in relation to carnivals and circuses. Artists included Susan Flavell, Emma Margetts, Clare McFarlane and Nein Schwarz.
Polemic: The Undoing of Art History (Part II)
In Part I (Artlink, December 2001) the subject called Art History was challenged, using the terms art and work of art in a conventional way. Here in Part II it is argued that some of the woes of art theory can be alleviated by understanding these terms in a different way. Brook discusses the role of cultural memes in creating different kinds of historiesand the doctrine of creativity. He here concludes that it is perfectly understandable that, as metaphysical explorers, we may address works of art with little or no respect for the author's intentions. In the end, he states, it depends upon the regularities of the real world.
Improving Their Bodies, Improving Our Bodies
Anne Quain is a veterinary student living in Sydney and through this text explores the notion of animal/human relationships and the cloning of adult animals. This idea is discussed in the context of contemporary consumer society, and the question is raised: Might replacing a body become an economically more feasible alternative to treating an existing body? Would animals become disposable? Although she is here referring to a process having only been explored through fiction, she makes the point that it may not be far off.
Light Years: William Robinson and the Creation Story
Art for William Robinson has always been an intensely personal exercise, from the early domestic interiors, suffused with love for his family, to the hard-won intimacy of his relationship with the wilderness in which he now lives. Yet the animating principle of his work in its ever changing fashion is its expression of faith. Robinsons landscape is unquestionably a God-revealed world; what is in question is the relation of man to that universe. As much as Robinson's art is a faithful reflection of his immediate environment, it is drawn from the memory of an experience in a landscape .
Post Natural Nature: Rosemary Laing
Brisbane born Rosemary Laing is one artist who is fully up to speed with the photographic and technological changes in supermodernity. Her work conveys better than most the strange double life we lead today: one half viscerally embodied, the other half immaterial and virtual. Like an aviation physicist Laing tries to push the envelope of what can be represented in photography. Works such as Natural Disasters (1988), Flight Research (2000) and Groundspeed are here examined.
Gordon Bennett's Art: The Aura of Origin
With a directness and clarity born from genuine insight, Gordon Bennetts art gives form to the structure of an invisible repetitive history haunting the psyches of non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians alike. This text gives rise to Bennett's fierce artistic practice - including an examination of the works Outsider, Am I scared? and the Notes to Basquiat and Home Decor series. These works are looked at to reveal his recent concerns with the mechanisms of doubling, moving beyond the fatal powers of representation and indeed beyond a primary concern with Australian heritage to take on the world.
Ginger Riley Munduwalawala: A Seeing Artist
Ginger Rileys superlative colour sense sets him apart from other Indigenous Australian artists. His unique landscape manner, studded with icons of identity and place, is instantly recognisable yet it has attracted both passionate acclaim and vitriolic criticism. Riley has forged his own way of encapsulating and celebrating the grand sweep and detailed minutiae of a particular tract of land in Southeast Arnhem Land, over which he now holds native title through his role as djungkayi (caretaker). In order to understand why Riley stands alone as an Indigenous painter, Ryan looks at his personal life history and the wellsprings of his art: his intimate connection to his mother's country.
Imants Tillers and Positive Value
Artlink asked Ian North to interview Imants Tillers for this issue, in view of North's longstanding interest in both Tiller's work and the landscape genre generally. North introduces the artist from his early recognition as a leading conceptual artist in the 1970's and pre-eminent postmodernist thereafter, working consistently according to strategies he evolved during the 1980's. This interview examines some of the key works and local concerns of Tiller's ongoing artistic practice.
Rosslynd Piggott: Perfect/Sense
In the context of Melbourne art, Rosslynd Piggott could be linked to a significant movement of young artists who emerged in the 1980's. Her earlier works were figurative compositions which presented painterly/philosophical essays upon the nature of water, clouds and impermanence through surrealistic juxtapositions. This article follows her career from the early painting days through to her current concerns with mediums such as sculpture, installation and more recently performance.
Fiona Foley: Knowing Where to Look
Fiona Foley's career as an artist has resulted in a diverse practice united by a dedication to indigenous issues that are of relevance to all Australians. Her presence as an artist, advocate, activist and identity in the Australian cultural scene has remained poised and proud for over two decades. From her involvement in the formation of the Boomalli Ko-operative to her often hard-hitting presence as a public speaker and the lyrical and enchanting nature of her images, Foley has continued to disturb assumptions and challenge clichés about the way Australians think of themselves and the place we inhabit. Ephemeral Landscapes (1990), Ya Kari - speak for (2001), Kunmarin - wooden shield (2001) and other works are here discussed.
Polemic: The Undoing of Art History (Part I)
In this part 1, the viability of the subject called Art History is challenged, using the terms art and work of art in a conventional way. The nature of histories as they are ascribed to kinds, especially art as a kindcultural kinds, the problems associated with generalisations and the dilemma for the Macho art historianare ideas addressed through this text.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
