Possum Palace

Filet électronique/island

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 03:08:30 -0000

Filet électronique/island¶

At the leafy fringe of Camperdown Park, ICAN’s newest show layers their trademark incongruity with a layer of refined anachronism. Filet électronique/island is a genteel collection of post-suburban artefacts in the very urban fringe. Either a contemporary salon apocalypticism, or some future archaeological reconstruction unstuck in time; Whatever — This shopfront stands out of the brown and imperturbable line-up of decent life like Mad Max in crinolette.

Emily Morandini’s piece is the filet one, and has the virtue of a completely self-descriptive name. Round filet laces nets threaded with copper needlework, punctuated at the ends by batteries and speakers, and emitting a treble whine.

Yep, networks, right angles, minute interconnected fibres. Craft had ‘em before mass electronics. Check, check and check. You remember the hyperbolic crochet reef, where dainty handicraft recalls raw nature? This is the yang to that yin, a stitched homage to circuitry over coral, courtly handicraft for the post-technological parlour.

Two octaves below, Peter Blamey’s “Island” also hums, and occasionally squeals. This originates in a different future, long after the anthropocene. It’s not needlepoint, or anything else from CRAFT magazine. Blamey liberates himself from the conventions of traditional handicraft by participating in the plastic, evolving genre of repurposing illegally dumped crap off the street.

A bouquet of found circuit boards open leaf-wise, with machine-drilled pores and copper-etched capillaries. This is one part robotic ikebana to two spontaneously generated silicon organism. The surface is dusted with faint fuzz of copper floss, moving in the air-currents, and it squeals as you brush it, like an electric touch-me-not.

The piece itself is embedded in the flows of that neo-ecology, the flow of mineral waste digesting in the urban metabolism. Its body is scrap accretions of once-were appliances. This assemblage of motherboards and speakers is powered parodically, circuitously: Electricity from a solar lampshade wrapping an incandescent light-bulb, a detrivore feeding off oil in travesty of photosynthesis. Conductive cilia wave in the ambient radio fields, recycling electromagnetic waste to, into mindless warbling.

Where the connectivity in Morandini’s piece is punning, verbal and personal, this is direct, physical, and inhuman, the waste fields of a million appliances made audible. The sound from those speakers is interference from the ad hoc antennae of the circuit-boards played unfiltered, it seems, for ears other than ours. The secret life of circuits, played out on an earth after us.

Here are two sardonic takes on the DIY resurgence, post-consumerist transposed into post-consumer, in a world where DIY been associated as often with fertiliser bombs as with handicraft, where survivalism and tree changing vie for fertile land. Where going back to the land may lead you back to an open-cut pit, or a strip mall, but you decide to stay there and till it yet.

Emily Morandini & Peter Blamey - filet électronique/island

ICAN

Friday, 22 July to Sunday, 7 August, 2011 15 fowler st camperdown

Project blog

Gallery blog

Filet électronique/island

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 02:55:26 -0000

Filet électronique/island¶

Published in Realtime 104.

Emily Morandini & Peter Blamey - filet électronique/island

ICAN

Friday, 22 July to Sunday, 7 August, 2011 15 fowler st camperdown

Project blog

Gallery blog

Pattern Machine

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 03:32:32 -0000

Pattern Machine¶

Pattern machine is my collective for the 2011 Underbelly fringesque festival. Check our our project blog.

Supercollider

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 03:52:12 -0000

Supercollider¶

Supercollider is a programming language oriented to audio synthesis. I’m learning it, with the fire lit under me by the fact that I’m doing an evolutionary sound art installation using it, for Pattern Machine.

It’s a quirky weird language and despite the disrepair of some parts (e.g. the ASCII-only strings, and awful compilation problems on OS X), it’s still the most elegant and powerful tool I’ve seen for music.

Here is my documentation of the process of learning my way around the fiddly bits.

Good bits¶

Crucial’s Instr classes, for all their rough patches, are gold. Smart input/output conversions that remedy every defect of, e.g. Max/MSP that has made me want to throw my computer against the wall. Finally, highly modular, runtime introspectable, repatchable DSP processing. With a bit of effort you can persuade them to be channel-agnostic even. It’s an ongoing scandal of computer music how bad we generally are at making things reusable, modular etc, especially with regard to reflection and spatialisation.

Gotchas¶

Obtrusive optimisation. Try this:
```
Saw.ar(200).debug;
```
response:
```
a Saw
```
This is an audio-rate oscillator at 200Hz with an amplitude of 1. However, if you try:
```
Saw.ar(200, 0).debug;
```
the response is:
```
0
```
You just got back a float, with a value of zero, which will sometimes cast to the same thing as a zero amplitude oscillator, and sometimes throw a ghastly and confusing exception when you plug it in to other oscillators. Gross.
Keyword arguments are second-class citizens.
No step debugger, so you have to debug your complex nests of client and server-side code with print statements. No, really.
Awful scope management in interactive use. Try running these two lines, both at once:
```
var foo="bar";
foo;
```
You should get back, as you'd expect, bar. Now, run them one at a time. Result:
```
• ERROR: Variable 'foo' not defined.
   in file 'selected text'
   line 1 char 3:
  foo•;
```
You can work around this by using "environments", that is, creating variable as entries in a near-transparent hash-table. To do this, all you need do is given them names prepended with a tilde, as, e.g. ~foo. However, this is a pretty rubbish solution- If, say, you wanted to copy a troublesome method from a class into the interactive document window to step through it and work out where it's gone wrong (since, as mentioned above, there is no step debugger, this is as good as it gets), your variables will have no tildes in. You'll have to do a regex search-and-replace on every variable name to debug the method, and then again when you copy them back in again. By which time you may have made a typo and introduced a new bug into your method. So you'll want to copy the method body out again to debug... and so the pain develops from a nagging irritation to a skull-grinding cluster headache.
Server-client concurrency hell. If you code the way that the help files do things, i.e. small numbers of lines of code, each executed manually, you will end up writing code that looks like it works but explodes the moment you try to up the speed or parallelism with which it is executed. The correct way to do anything at all is to execute it inside a Routine and use server synchronisation to make sure that nothing arrives out of order. If you don't do this, sometimes you will get nice, plain errors. Most perniciously, sometimes, though, with with patches involving complicated wiring such as Instr and FFTs and such, you put yourself at risk of having things wired together entirely incorrectly, and having hard-to-trace examples of Bus objects full of crosstalk and garbage.
Despite a sophisticated constructor infrastructure, and a garbage collector, and despite the fact that SuperCollider has to be aware of many, many potentially leaky resources (GUI objects, DSP graphs, event listeners...), there is no general destructor infrastructure. So while you can rely on garbage collection cleaning up your variable assignments, when it comes to the things that use far more resources than an entry on the heap, and which are thus far more constrained, you are on your own to manage their lifecycle. A variety of hand-rolled solutions to this proliferate, from onClose destructors on some GUI objects, to reference-counting instances in class variables (e.g. NodeWatcher), to periodically restarting everything. (My favoured option, in the fine tradition of C++.)

Sydney Dorkbot group show.

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 05:59:18 -0000

Sydney Dorkbot group show.¶

Published on http://das500.com/ (direct link )

Have you been to Serial Space? It’s some 80s Polish scifi film-set of a gallery, I swear, all smears and patina. You can’t go wrong exhibiting there, not for shows that have the hybrid robustness to survive outside the sterile white box.

My pick:

Ross Manning’s installations are the follies of a Questacon interactive designer in a meth comedown, scratchy broken assemblages of wire and household matériel, designed to inform the youth of some educational message lost in a haze of tweaky atavism. This time he has wrapped a blank computer monitor with polarized film to viscerally compelling result called Trapped Universe. Currents of iridescence surge down bas-relief contours of distressed plastic, hidden worlds spilling out from between the pixels.

You remember this from Questacon[#]_, yes? Some improving exhibit about the effect of polarising filters upon light? The rainbows that come and go with the twist of a lense? The whole show is strewn along this line in spectacle space between high school science fair and Carnival of Souls, of industrial detritus pressed parody of science education.

[1]	For my non-Australian readers - `Questacon

<http://www.questacon.edu.au/#canberra>`_ is one of those children’s science-education museums.

A generation has passed since red-bloodied school children tried to build lasers in the shed to vaporise the Soviet threat, and kept books called 101 Science Projects, and the cold war curriculum die-casting ICBM engineers has long since switched to stock brokers.

Now these technomads colonise the abandoned space, gleaners from the techno-industrial dump. Where once the science museum exhibits served to inculcate fluency in the physical universals that would feed the western ascendancy in the wars, these odd scraps lifted from the military industrial dumpster after lights-out, these are anything but universal; personal, oddball, unique, serendipitous.

Ross’s work is near-unphotographable, rooted in the resolution of the retina and the foibles of binocular vision. Through my camera’s glassy eye it is insentient obsolescent hardware on the way to its fate in a scuffed plastic slip cover. A refutation the instant mediated locality of the digital with embodied, hi-resolution lo-fi.

Luke Pasquale Calarco’s Human Theremin compounds the insulting invisibility of sound art with the injurious transience of performance. His comically unwieldy backback theremin, bulging to rupture with speaker boxes and electronic project kits and coathanger wire turns him, and whomever he touches, into the antenna of a giant theremin, to the sound of a gritty warbling squeal from that iconic by-product of cold-war electronics. Within moments of his turning the device on, and stumping over his umbilical extension cord into the throng, strangers are holding his hand, perturbing his electric field and, well, interfering with one another.

And so on: Michael Petchovsky fishes his components from council hard-rubbish day, Wade Marynowsky has a whole upended electric organ glitching out in the corner. Everywhere you turn, the cut-n-solder techno-collage in the face of the finished, seamless moulded surface of corporate standardisation that the previous generation’s universalism conjured, haruspicy of our from the entrails of felled white goods. With a sausage sizzle on the last day.

Feral (An Rjdj scene)

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 04:31:02 -0000

Feral (An Rjdj scene)¶

I’ve just created my first major scene for Rjdj [1] under my Parking Sun moniker. That scene is called , called “Feral”. It’s a birthday present for Miriam Lyons. You can download it from the Rjdj site. It’s free.

The blurb¶

Even in your basement office, spores seep in from the outside. Boards warp, microscopic creatures breed in the carpet, and vines strive toward the warmth of your skin. The city evolves too.

In the distance the mating cry of the automobile, and beneath the pavement, the swamp.

The responsible¶

Thanks to the following artists for providing the samples used, Creative Commons licensed or public domain:

This was inspired by the following resources:

Dezhe Z. Jin and Alexay A. Kozhevnikov’s A compact statistical model of the song syntax in Bengalese finch which opened my mind to the Markovian language of birdsong
Andy Farnell’s birdsong for puredata tutorial

How (and why) it works¶

Taman Negara is an ancient and eldritch rainforest.

After I last came back from the jungle in Malaysia last year, I was amazed by the constant thrum of noise in the jungle. (Radiolab did a cute show about this, by the way) When I looked at the spectrogram of what was going on there it was even more crazy.

The sounds the birds were making at midnight in visual form

Different creatures - birds, insects, people - colonise different frequencies in the audible spectrum, calling out to each other in warning, mating cries, hunting cries. I couldn’t help comparing it to the radically different soundscapes of the cities that I’d been staying in recently - Bandung, Berlin, Sydney, Santa Fe - and the different creatures that filled up the spectrum there. Motorbikes, brakes, fruit vendors. The predators and prey in the urban ecology have such a similar tenor. I wanted to create and experience that would bridge the gap between them.

Drink vendors and motorbikes at the local park in Jakarta.

The simpler part, the background sounds, are basic granular resynthesis of field recordings. I’m pretty proud with the detailed tweaks to make it sound good, but it’s not too complicated a way of generating endlessly shifting landscape of sounds generated from simple reshuffling of the sounds. A lot of these are from my travels in South East Asia, so if there is any secrete here, it is that one should carry a decent digital recorder when in the mountains of Java. (If you like the rebab recordings, you can thank the amazing Sundanese multi-instrumentalist Zimbot, whom i recorded in Bandung, West Java. He and I have done other collaborations. Book this guy for a touring show. He’s bloody amazing.)

The more complex thing is the “birdsong”. That’s in part real birds, but also cows and bees and people and other things, shuffled using a dynamically-generated Markov chain. This is the subtler and more complicated thing, but I think it’s what makes this work. Markov processes are closely related to Finite State Machines and thus Type-3 languages in the Chomsky hierarchy- the so called “Regular languages”. This is a family of languages a couple of rungs below what you and I, as humans, speak.

One of the elegant birdsong models from the Zin paper.

If you browse that Jin and Kozhevnikov article above, you’ll see that they have successfully represented even the most complex birdsong to a Markovian process. This is suggestive of birds having “languages” but of a more pared-back variety than hours. Best of all, it’s a variety of language that’s easy to generate in real time, unlike human conversation. So that is what this app does. When it hears passing birds, or car horns, voices, whistles, whatever, it will record them and then try to respond, by playing a custom Markovian “mating call” straight back, resynthesized and warped a little. Carry it around for a while and you’ll here people’s voices in the mix too, warbling and stuttering at you, stripped back from human language into something a little more primal.

Predator, prey, or mate?

[1]	Rjdj is an awesome app for iPhone, iPad and Android that makes hallucinatory music in interaction with the sounds in your environment, and which adapts in response to you jiggling and jabbing your phone. It’s like a little psychotic break in a box.

The after party for the American Century (SXSW 2010)

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0000

The after party for the American Century (SXSW 2010)¶

Published in Realtime issue 97

South By South West is a window into what’s happening next, according to the whispers of the social media hype machine. Hoping to get a look through that window, I follow the whispers to Austin, Texas.

First, some terminology. “South By Southwest” is more usually written “SXSW” and pronounced “South By”. It’s a 23 year old umbrella event encompassing several specialist media sub-events. It attracts, they say, 25 thousand people every year. It has an enormous program, comprising exhibitions, film screenings, panels, yet-to-be-classified online happenings and a huge number of showcase concerts.

In some art forms — music, film and interactive media — SXSW has a serious global profile. I’m here for the latter. SXSW has become the favoured venue for turning your latest networked interaction venture into an instant fad using the power of champagne and a well-spruiked launch. It’s where you go to meet up with Big Names, to make it clear that this season’s innovations include you. It’s here the myopic vision of the American public just might snap into focus on your new idea. If you work in locative and networked worlds you might, like me, recall it as the place where Twitter debuted; where geosocial networks hold treasure hunts; a hotbed of geocaching where augmented reality layers quilt the city. A place where cyberpunk technoaesthetic fantasies precipitate from the hyperbole-supersaturated air. An embassy of the American future towering in the present.

In Australia, where we have our own special kind of myopia, it isn’t on the map. SXSW may tower in the US, but it is invisible over the Pacific horizon. Sheer geographical accident plants me in the path of the wagon train to Texas in the lead-up to the festival. I don’t resist, head spinning with half-remembered buzz and rumour, and futuristic hype. I fire up the browser and see what’s scheduled. There are endorsements from the Cocteau Twins, Village Studios, and a half-dozen Silicon Valley startups on their web-page, dammit! What could go wrong?

The first SXSW project to engage me can be found without joining the throng in Austin. London-based Reality Jockey have packaged up a custom mobile app for the occasion called Hijack SXSW. Their piece uses your phone’s microphone input to create indecipherable algorithmic remixes of the audio content of your environment. An accompanying website helps attendees share generative remixes of the sounds of festival events. The soundscape algorithm is painstakingly produced, incorporating every conceivable input from motion sensor to GPS harmoniously. It’s beautiful, mysterious, and transgresses intellectual property rights; in short, everything that would make it a viral hit at the kind of festival that I wish I were at. It’s a promising start - and incidentally, just the latest in a long line of interactive pieces from the mobile interactive music startup, which freely distributes tools to assist reactive music composers.

Unfortunately, while RJDJ makes SXSW look good from afar, the experience of actually walking through the door is less alluring. The dizzying hype of SXSW is matched by the vertiginous expense of its tickets which are closer to the price of a high-level professional conference than an arts event at $US1350 for a full ticket. It’s either a sign of arrogance or a promise of excellence to charge as much for a week-long event as the Sri Lankan per-capita GDP. It’s also a pretty steep rate for Americans in the midst of severe recession. Coming overland to Austin, my train rolls across a landscape of alienation and poverty. Trailer parks, bail-bond loan offices and abandoned strip malls, sun-baked and silent desert prisons, public toilet queues clogged by doped out drug users. I’m no expert in the political economy of the USA but I cannot help see the abysmal income divide here.

My first few physical encounters with the festival are unexciting; performances that are ‘innovative’ because they play music with synthesisers as well as guitars; a ‘game art’ exhibition is nothing but framed concept sketches for a manga-themed shoot ‘em up and fliers telling you to sell your music in Guitar Hero.

Soon enough, I gravitate to the fringes, where the interesting things are hiding - like Plutopia, a one-night anarchic, psychedelic counterculture celebration. The whole thing is cloistered away from the Convention Centre crowd at the Mexican American Cultural courtyard by the river. One one side, a local produce shop and on the other, microbreweries and distilleries. In the middle, roving troupes of steampunk designers, circus performers and dorkbot delegates showcase their wares. A bustled Victorian grandmother hawks interstellar neutrino machines made from washing machine parts. Geeks in labcoats are tending a giant glowing brain. On the main stage sits Chinese artist Xiao He in a straw hat, working up a variegated soundscape of custom digital delays and reprocessed vocals in one of my favourite performances of the whole program.

Futurist Bruce Sterling delivers a curious and rambling keynote speech for Plutopia, surveying digital fabrication, internet-facilitated regional co-operation and the potential for social media in sustainability. One statement crystallises the concerns that have driven me to the periphery of SXSW.

Tomorrow I’m speaking at SXSW, which is sponsored by Pepsi and Chevy. Tonight I’m speaking at Plutopia, which is sponsored by steampunk fairy godmothers who make cool stuff out of junk.

Outside, the logos of those particular corporations are tessellated into ambient infomercial wallpaper across every surface. Branding saturates everything. The presentation screens. The festival guidebook. Social network sites. The pavement, passing cars, the electrical outlets. It is a preview of a dystopian future of complete advertising domination, which is to say: something like living on the present-day internet. I feel like I have entered the world’s largest corporate marketing focus group. It is so suffocatingly intense that it’s hard to notice space for anything not strictly commercial.

Back at the convention centre, stuff does manage to happen in the gaps between gimcrack promotions - panels featuring various Web 2.0 luminaries, trade shows, screenings. Queues for the overbooked sessions are long, and entry is uncertain. When I manage to get into something it tends to be a presentation by a harried refugee from some shaky startup whose primary concern is not innovation in form or content, but how to market their existing content in the middle of an economic downturn. Making your projects profitable is nothing to sneer at, of course, but as one panel after another turns into a group counselling session to allay fear of falling into the poverty chasm, I begin to wonder if there are any messages here other than boom year nostalgia.

The Austin Museum of Digital Art at least has harnessed the power of nostalgia for good. Their entry into SXSW is themed around naïve video art, 8 bit animation and digital primitivism hearkening back to the Reagan administration. A multi-headed video setup displays shifting mixes of single channel video works by Gangpol & MIT and Mato Atom There are a number of excellent live performances, including a rhythmic aural streetscape by Pierce Warnecke. The stand-out is Austin local Party Time! Hexcellent!, who generates live visuals using custom software on an original Nintendo Entertainment system. Her minimalist algorithms and grimy television colour palette eclipses the hypersaturated phosphor colours of her peers as she patiently details her pictographic language in blocky squares and arrows. Compelling.

Eventually I wind up at a launch for the new book by Virtual Reality and reactive gaming pioneer Jaron Lanier, where the man himself eulogises the media business models of the past. Occasionally he punctuates an argument about the vacuity of modern digital arts by playing nameless woodwind instruments and challenging people to google them. I don’t wholly agree with Lanier’s thesis - his book supposes that the digital status quo reifies and depersonalises creative labour, and that Web 2.0 practice is wiping out the potential for dignity in artistic life or individually expressive aesthetics. After 5 days of SXSW however, I can’t remember why I disagree.

Lanier eloquently sums up the insecurities of his audience of digital creatives. Here we sit, self-identified digerati, at a festival made for people like us, and yet the day’s highlights included the chance to shove our business cards at a dwindling crop of future employers and mourning for lost security. We are here looking for the future, many of us feel we have been pivotal in building it, and yet we seem to have done ourselves out of dividends. But if Lanier makes these regrets and fears explicit, the festival feels reactionary in many other implicit ways - the perennial dominance of good old fashioned rock music, the retro technology, the frenetic commercialism crowding out the art. This party might rock like it’s the height of boom of half a decade ago, but its grip on that vanished past is fearfully white-knuckled.

Reality Jockey: http://www.rjdj.me/
Hijack SXSW: http://more.rjdj.me/2010/03/18/rjdj-are-hijacking-sxsw/
Plutopia: http://plutopia.org/
Xiao He: http://maybemars.org/index.php/artists/xiao-he/
Mato Atom: http://matoatom.net/
Gangpol & MIT: http://gangpol.free.fr/
The Austin Museum of Digital Art: http://www.amoda.org/
Party Time! Hexcellent!: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Party-Time-Hexcellent/95415745963
Pierce Warnecke: http://www.myspace.com/piercewarnecke
You are not a gadget: http://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.html

Dan MacKinlay nipped over to Europe for Transmediale only to find he had no job to return to. He is currently looking for excuses to stay away.

SXSW from the gutter

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0000

SXSW from the gutter¶

Financial cockup aside, the US dollar is trading pretty OK against most of the world’s currencies. Your cash ain’t worth much here, and you, the out-of-towner, have to make your bucks stretch a little further. Or maybe you just don’t want to spend money you don’t have to? Don’t worry, even the planet’s largest corporations are happy to use that excuse. Come in, come in. Don’t worry, outsider, I’m in your boat, probably pocketing the little packets of hot sauce as much as you are.

You should also know that neither of us is alone. This entire country is broke. You might be beset by more beggars than you are used to, unless you come from Jakarta. Actually, more than there. Maybe Delhi? I’ve not spent so much time in India, but it seems like a fair bet. But anyway, everyone here is poor, and as the Avenue des Champs-Élysées is lined with horse-chestnut trees so is every street here lined with broke people who want cash. People who not quite as broke work the bars. They expect a socially sanctioned form of alms known as “tipping”. And we are all of us a thousand miles from a social welfare system we can call our own, so get ready to skive.

Gig admission¶

First up, the most obvious expense is a festival pass. Now, I can’t say this enough.

Don’t. Buy. One.

What?, you might say, and risk not getting in to gigs?

Don’t try me. Your pass doesn’t guarantee you getting in to gigs. You can have all the passes in the world, plus a diplomatic passport and a pair of Barack Obama’s autographed underwear and it won’t get you in to gigs. Standing in lines will, or watching out for the artists you want who are inevitably appearing in some weird unofficial sideshow a 3 minute walk from the rest of the festival with a lot more grimy street cred than the teletubby sterility of the festival itself.

True, there are some things that are off limits to non-attendees. Might you not want to get a pass for that? Well, the things that are off limits include such things as the right to stand in a queue to watch a CCTV rendition of Danah Boyd talking about privacy in a different room that you couldn’t fit in either. You could possibly fit 10 events this dull in your schedule for the week, but if that’s your idea of a good use of your time, why not just stream the entire festival off the internet? Or read the eminent speaker’s blogs? (they ain’t saying much new here.) Or, how about it, headbutt chipboard blocks into powder?

Pro tip: if it’s under-publicised enough not to have a queue it also has few enough door staff that they can’t be bothered checking your credentials. You know, I do have a festival pass (bless the sponsors of my freelance lifestyle, Realtime magazine), but I left it in my bag all of yesterday and no-one stopped me. I later got into a gig carrying a random and unrelated lanyard I found on the ground. Maybe you could do that. Possibly advising you to go so far as to do the trivially easy job of forging one of these passes is crossing a line that would turn the massive legal siege engines of SXSW upon me, but I’d never advise you to do that since it’s overkill to go to so much effort to pierce such a permeable barrier as the SXSW own door staff. Those staff are penniless student volunteers, by the way. Just so you know. See above, regarding how we are all broke together here.

On that note, bear in mind that not everyone who can dispense you favours identifies as a member of that student category. You might be forced to claim kinship with the upper crust, or the lower. Dress accordingly in something that readily traverse the boundaries between riding high:

and getting ridden:

One final time I hear, you, my imaginary naïve reader, claim that surely the pass gets you something? After all, how much can it cost? What does your thousand-plus dollars buy you? Dear reader, I can answer that: A lanyard with some shiny stickers on. A tax writedown. A bag of advertising leaflets. An elite glow. The right to stand in some of the most exclusive mass queues possible. If any of those things are particularly attractive, dive in. Especially if you like queues. Venues are sharply constrained and the massively oversold event precludes a certain entry for anyone except the presenters.

It might surprise some that the avaricious ticket price clearly fails to cover running costs, because a every surface that you, the special attendee, are exposed to will extract additional value from you by saturating your visual and auditory environment with advertising. Blew all your money already? An adroit sort could build a nest from discarded promotional t-shirts and save on the hotel.

Next, transport. No, food. Actually, transport.¶

There is a bike shop in town on Nueces which sponsors the festival and rents out bikes. Don’t go there; they charge as much per day as the rest of the town’s bike shop does for a week. Instead, head north upon Guadalupe Ave and check out the many bike shops that you will pass as you head thorugh the University precinct. Also, remember this route; along here are many excellent cafes that have real espresso machines and food apart from pizzas by the slice.

There are places here selling slices of pizza piecewise. I’m not so familiar with these places, as in Sydney there are enough food options that you can avoid the disquieting cheese taxidermy that is the cold pizza slice. No longer; I am now intimately acquainted. You will notice that the slices in Austin are uncommonly large. This is not a selling point; if you are eating shit, smaller is better. You slice will arrived badly microwaved, spottily warm and wholly unsavoury. I’m told they go well with beer, but they go yet better after so much beer that you can’t taste anything.

Yes, some kind of culinary bomb has descended on the convention centre wreaking devastation on all foodstuffs within a kilometre, leaving nothing edible bar those slices and sundry permutations of bacon and tortillas, which, at this point in your journey, you have had enough of.

Get a Go Local Austin card. Honestly, every business that sells lunch that doesn’t suck within commuting distance of downtown is part, and you will repay your paltry investment with the stream of 10% discounts. Their list of participating stores does double duty of lists of lunches that don’t suck. recommended..

Sorry, that was supposed to be about transport. Yes.

So, they shut off the centre of the city, roads are blocked, if they weren’t blocked by the cops the 12000 festival attendees would do it with their bodies and, ultimately, ambulances fetching said bodies. Cars sit idly on the roads, gently emitting organic particulates like a reef in spawning season and precisely as sessile. Taxis and buses just about move, but walking is faster, and if you are able-bodied, by catching a taxi you are denying transport to those that need it, such as bands trying to get to their gig with heavy amps and record crates, and the wheelchair-bound. So, bikes.

Texas Connectivity¶

No-one hates public laptop users more than other public laptop users who feel their own public laptop use is more legitimate. The supply of wifi is plentiful at coffeeshops and no-one thinks twice about buying a $1 cup of something and leeching their power and network for 13 hours. But all the venues are crowded to the point of madness, and the network router is emitting sparks from the load and there are bands in the front AND back bars and that kind of behaviour will make you grow to hate your fellow human. Maybe, I dunno, give the computer a rest for a bit. Or hop on your bike and do it somewhere where they are missing the custom that the festival has sucked away.

Accomodation¶

If you are disorganised enough to be even reading this then you’re too late. the hotels are already booked. Maybe you couldn’t afford them anyway; maybe they are too dull. A thousand reasons therefore that you should stay with friends in town. Here are my friends in town, Diz and Greg. You can’t have them; they are taken.

(Thank Greg for hosting me by going to see his band Opposite Day and then buying loads of CDs. Thank Diz by, uh, being nice and appreciating good urban design.)

You might find some other likeable sorts though, on couchsurfing, where I have met many good and noble people who have helped me out. (= got me drunk)

Berlin 2010- Transmediale

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0000

Berlin 2010- Transmediale¶

Like every process in the universe, we are all going to end up as background noise in the end; the trick is to make the journey there an interesting one.

So I sped myself on a blaze of entropy to Berlin for Transmediale; did the universe benefit thereby with a scintilla of net extra fascination?

I dunno; it was OK, I guess. Coming from the backblocks of the galaxy as I do, one thing that I was disappointed by was how insane the festival wasn’t. When Australian cousin festival TINA happens in tiny little Newcastle, NSW, three thousand revellers choke the city like a tropical parasite chokes your brainstem. Mad artists rule the streets, and family weekends in the park are oranmented with bizarre papier mâché poetry sculpture and people dressed as furry robots. In Berlin it’s more like: ‘Oh, Another Weird Art Event. At least it’s not as annoying as the perpetual blizzard that passes for climate around these parts. Pass the quirky local wheat beer.’ Put another way, I’ve just realised that not only do double glazed windows reduce noise complaints from your neighbours, they also make it possible that your neighbours won’t even notice there is something interesting going on. Or yet another way: I am relishing the comparative biodiversity of Australia’s small pool when contrasted with the bleakly vibrant oceans against whose vastness the detail is lost.

Small pond relish aside, Berlin rocks. You crazy 24/7 party people, I shall return.

How to discover new media art on the web.

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0000

How to discover new media art on the web.¶

First published in Realtime magazine.

“New media art” is a tricky creature to track. If that shred of description “new” implies anything, it is constant obsolescence, for the content of art with this designation changes as the whimsy of the arts scene reclassifies media as “established”. This definitional problem is an old and tedious one.

Staying abreast of the new media dialogue is a more tractable challenge, and the most important tip for doing so is pleasingly recursive: use tools from the (broadly-defined) new media toolbox to stay abreast of the new media. As the networked arts often make their homes on the web, so do techniques for the analysis and dissemination of the undefinable, the faddish and the ephemeral. The art of wrapping your head around it is in collaborative networked discovery.

First step, for the time deprived, acquaint yourself with some of the excellent rebloggers and commentators out there. The new media field is blessed with some excellent choices. Skynoise, by sometime Realtime contributor Jean Poole, is one, and you could do worse than check Mitchell Whitelaw’s (teeming void) for a theoretical take on the algorithmic end of the spectrum, or perhaps the digital musings of serial consign by Greg J. Smith, or just maybe Chris O’Shea’s pixelsumo for a game-oriented take. Eyebeam‘s series of guest rebloggers is varied and excellent, as is Régine Debatty’s terrifyingly informed we make money not art. Peter Kirn’s staunchly practical Create Digital Motion pushes the boundary between this format and a full-blown magazine. Let’s cast this net wider, though. What is a new medium? River valleys as grooves for a giant record stylus? Satellites as sculpture? For the media so new it may never get around to existing, the surreal technospeculative architecture of Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG (“building blog”) is essential.

That’s already a lot of sites to check, so the next trick is to make sure to use that primordial blogging trick: the syndicated newsfeed. If you’ve not encountered it before, newsfeed syndication is well-documented - My favourite introduction to newsfeeds is by the aforementioned Jean Poole, but there are others out there. To summarise those sources - Newsfeeds let you “subscribe” to news - that is, you get automatically notified about news updates. Almost every site mentioned in this article has a “feed” button, which you should click to subscribe to it in your newsreader of choice. Google reader is the most popular one, but there are many alternatives, including basic versions build into most browsers. Fire up that reader, then, and and follow our mayfly media as they hatch into being.

Of course, a thriving scene is not merely promethean individual bloggers but requires a network of supporting institutions. turbulence.org‘s posts are good value, and their collaborative new media documentation project, the networked book is particularly intriguing for its walking of the collaborative talk. If you are inclined to create the works yourself, the global dorkbot network can help you out. (Not to play favourites, but Pia van Gelder’s Sydney dorkbot site does a good job of linking to its peers in other cities.) NeMe’s organisational reblog is also a neat hybrid of institutional and personal news. On a local front, ANAT is doing an increasingly good job of making something of their web presence a useful aggregation of pertinent stories. And there are the festivals wherein the works are premiered and the interpersonal networking happens - most festivals however are not blessed with the same dedication to an excellent web presence as the bloggers who attend them. One exception is GAMA, whose service aggregates the content of multiple new-media festivals into one less-tiresome search.

Or you might wish to engage with the world of the edited journals and e-magazines... the field here is large, but stalwarts include digicult, neural.it, rhizome, _newmediafix_, mute, aminima and the full-blown academic journals like Digital Creativity and Leonardo. The locally produced fibreculture journal is going strong despite the neglect of their mailing list.

Increasingly, though, the new media action is shifting to, well, newer media. Not just blogs, but facebook or mobile phone applications, twitter streams and embedded applets. The truly up-to-the-minute art stalker doesn’t wait around for the news to percolate through the blogger gatekeepers, but uses their tools to discover things as they happen. Infamous micro-blogging service twitter is an obvious candidate - did you know that you can search all of twitter for new media arts news? (and subscribe to the results in your feed reader?) Likewise with bookmark sharing site delicious. (for bonus points, you might want to hunt out the various bloggers mentioned above who generally use delcious for their bookmarking.) Or get automatic recommendation services like lazyfeed to help you find new articles. Case in point: an intriguing recent entrant to the news aggregation field, spezify was sent to me over delicious last night, and has already shown me things I’d not heard of before.

Dan MacKinlay shares his feeds on google reader and his links on delicious. He is currently on leave from Australia for transmediale.

Sofa surfing Electrofringe 2009

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0000

Sofa surfing Electrofringe 2009¶

First published in Realtime magazine.

A kind of diluted casual urban intervention, or a performance installation for the Sunday arvo barbeque set. This festival is obstreperous, yes, but it is other than the adolescent agitation I remember when it tested the constraints of its home town a few years ago. It is as if the troublesome son of the Newcastle has mellowed, maybe returned home for a week of camping out in the living room, and scabbing lunch from the freezer. It even feels like we might be even welcome here, for once, as long as we don’t leave a mess in the kitchen. We’ve both moved on since the old days, after all.

Elke Reinhuber’s domestic performance installation is the crowning hair bun atop the domestic festive domestic spirit. Dressed in the white salon uniform of her “Urban Beautician” persona, she dusts and preens Civic Park as one prepared to lift the corner of the public fountain to dust beneath. Her ultimate intervention is pointedly humble; amidst the plaques to sundry wars and dead local soldiers, she plants flowers, parsley, and a memorial plate dedicated to the honour of the Unknown Housewife. Pointed, and anything but the belligerence of the camp of cyberpunk squatters whose stand occupied that same spot in my very first Electrofringe.

The centre of gravity of the festival is not Civic Park this year, mind. Rather, the locus has shifted east to the Renew Newcastle project. There, in the Hunter St pedestrian mall, an assortment of otherwise disused restaurants and shopfronts have been fished from the jetsam of the shopping strip’s economic shipwreck, and converted into art spaces. This arts-space-brokering project has been getting reasonable coverage for their year-round urban revitalisation, and have serious momentum by festival time. Their spaces are not all at the service of the festival by any means, mind. Indeed, in this diversity of projects there are several that sit below the line of acceptable minimum irony for us Electrofringe crowd. Nonetheless, a goodly proportion are venues - it is Renew Newcastle that provides the wealth of spaces for the festival, and that, perhaps lends it this entire event part of this homely air, with the selection of hand-decorated, informal, idiosyncratic galleries, cafes, boutiques and craft stalls.

Vinyl Arcade (Lucas Abela and Frederick Rodrigues), is one such wedged between the souvenir and trouser shops. The basement floor of this crypto installation is covered with discarded records, traversed by a toy truck with a record stylus in its undercarriage. Some ingenious sytem of cabling or radio transmitters relay amplified cracks and squeals from the abused needle to the sound system. From the showroom above, the device is remotely operated by boisterously hoonish punters made instantly puerile by that most dangerous of lures, and artistically validated children’s toy. The thumps and clicks of abused records provide a ludic, tactile experience of noise art your grandmother would queue to have a go at. As far as engagement goes, it trounces Abela’s older sit-quiet-while-I-smash-some-glass-on-my-face thing.

Across the way, dlux’s new exhibition, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, also repays the investment of some playtime. It’s a simple show, computer-game-based art, spanning significant works from the last few decades. Such pieces are featured as Jaron Lanier’s 1983 Commodore 64 work “Moondust”, and a 1995 Laurie Anderson interactive CD - from that primordial time when terms like “virtual reality” and “multimedia” seemed to denote intrinsically interesting concepts to entities apart from Australian arts funding bodies. But in context, what may once have seemed grand utopian futurism takes on unassuming playfulness. To my over-stimulated eye, the second instalment of Anita Fontaine & Mike Pelletier’s hallucinatory CuteXDoom game is a addictive, although a more restrained piece, “The Path”, by Belgian team Tale of Tales, might have weathered a less hung-over morning better. Nick Jenkin’s curatorion here creates an exuberant and unitary experience from the DIY psychedelia of Electrofringe and the commercial world of name-brand art, and ties it all together with comfy chairs.

In other mall venues, the space itself is remarkable enough as to be an work in its own right. The most prominent examples are the conversion of two levels of the King St carpark into an ad hoc zine fair, and the wildly popular op-shop-chic “Tortoro’s Tea House” in the mall, created by Maddy Phelan.

My favourite, though, is the ‘Renew Church’, a remarkable, hidden paragon of 70s architecture just off the main drag that now houses the Renew Newcastle project headquarters. It transpires that a good performance venue transcends both decades and denominations, and the suburban-sacred backdrop is an intriguingly apposite setting for Christian Haines and Paul Gough’s performances. Haines’ delicious spacious tonescape for multiple mobile phones in a darkened room is worth a listen anywhere, but there is something deeply satisfying about a work based on other people’s phones going off in this most hushed of places. The audio visual works that follow are lovely enough, but none of them elicit, as this one, a shared sigh from the audience at the end.

Just down the way, perched above the discount store, is that remarkable venue, the China Club. Of the various shows therein, the most unmissable, and the hardest to miss, is is Let’s Paint TV: part performance installation, part public sanitation disaster. This show, curated by Tim Dwyer, pits Los Angeles cable TV sensation John Kilduff against a succession of local artists, a selection of exercise equipment and oil paints. The performer splashes some portion of his ill-mixed pigment on the canvas from an walking treadmill, and the rest ends up pooling in a puddle of public liability risk. Professing to instruct in cocktail mixing, oil painting and life-coaching simultaneously, Kilduff’s performances are unrelenting to the edge of cringemaking. He persona, a multitasking agony aunt, intercuts his painting with trite life advice, re-inventing platitudes of the ‘everyone is an artist’ DIY ethos as the daytime television infotainment. With cameo appearances from a reasonable sampling of every performance artist who has ever been inappropriately naked or messy in a Sydney venue of late, the show is possibly the boldest example of the promiscuous collaboration that Electrofringe has made its name facilitating, at the instant that it mocks what the whole thing stands for.

Oh, and there’s also some obligatory twitter-based artwork, and video installations, and enough firewire leads to span the continent. It is Electrofringe here. But that old focus on technology, and on the strident politics of participation, are backgrounded, uncontroversial. We’re in a society which mainstreams the debauched participation of Burning Man, where culture jamming is repackaged as community cultural development, and where flashmobs and programmable GPS devices are ubiquitous recreations of the middle class. Newcastle itself doesn’t seem to feel obliged to muster up the objections it might once have in the face of such a spectacle. I’m hard put to explain whether the festival has it lost its edge to an advanceing society, or is simply representing a more acceptable, even attainable, vision of change than its earlier utopianism. Or whether I’m calling truce too early.

On the final night, the neo-tribalism of New Weird Australia takes over the festival club, in a gentle reassurance that this last possibility is in the race. This is a new music project curated by Stuart Buchanan and Danny Jumpertz, defiantly audio-focussed, refreshingly free from video projectors. NWA’s hand-picked miscellany of musical outsiders are essays in low-fidelity technopunk, and there is no-one out of townsfolk or festival managers, who is safe from the generalised wantonness. It’s hard to say in the mayhem, but I think I catch Alps, Moonmilk and Brutal Hate Mosh performances. Second-hand effects units and broken samplers abound, pumping distorted audio through an overdriven sound system in the old Masonic Hall, and obliterating any compering that might bring order to the mess. This is an ‘experimental’ evening in the older sense I still expect form this festival, not as a category in the iTunes store, but in the sense of trying something raw enough that it might not work. It doesn’t, sometimes, and does at others, and the frenetic crowd loves the lot. As the licensing police descend on the venue for the 10pm crackdown, and drunken, intoxicated freaks are disgorged onto the streets, as the cascading parties are evicted from corner after corner and squat party after squat party is quashed by noise complains, the festival finally discovers the limits of this city’s tolerance. There is still, I see, tension enough between the forces of the centre and the fringe to keep the interaction entertaining.

Dan MacKinlay teaches web interactives at UTS.

Elke Reinhuber http://www.eer.de/
John Kilduff http://www.letspainttv.com/
Renew Newcastle http://renewnewcastle.org/
The Garden of Forking Paths http://www.dlux.org.au/cms/index.php?/dTour/the-garden-of-forking-paths.html
Tale of Tales http://tale-of-tales.com/ThePath/
Anita Fontaine http://anitafontaine.com/index/
Tortoro’s Teahouse http://totoroteahouse.wordpress.com/
New Weird Australia http://newweirdaustralia.com/
Electrofringe http://www.electrofringe.net/

Electrofringe Directors: Somaya Langley and Daniel Green

Second-life eco-management

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0000

Second-life eco-management¶

This article appeared in realtime 91.

Mellifera’s ([1]) launch has to be the only occasion that an exhibition has been opened by releasing bees in a crowded room. Well, almost bees. Creators Trish Adams and Andrew Burrell call the virtual lifeforms they have created “mellifera”, after apis mellifera, the European honey bee, but the creatures themselves share at most a family resemblance with their physical cousins. The creatures are, in fact, just one species in the synthetic ecosystem of terra.mellifera set up in the multi-user online world, Second Life

The gallery walls are taken up with projections from what appears to be CCTV surveillance footage; but the terrain the apparent cameras survey is from anywhere but the gallery surrounds. The valley outside is enclosed by precipitous cliffs and filled with strange polygonal flora in various states of growth and decay. A silent humanoid avatar flounces its antennae as it tends to the swarm of varicoloured insects the size of a human head- and across the gallery, a computer terminal invite you to pilot a virtual persona, an ‘’avatar’‘, through the imaginary valley. If you come hearing only of the bee-connection this is both more garish and more immersive than the average ecological simulation.

In my email interview with them, the artists are quick to differentiate their synthesis of life from replication thereof:

What we are creating is not a simulation but a space in its own right that has its own logic, in part inspired by some physical world ecosystems and the behaviour of Apis Mellifera (European honey bees), but also very much its own space. A ‘simulation’ is replicating something else. This is something else.

Be that as it may, the project claims multiple points of engagement with the physical honey bee - Firstly, the artists have researched “cognition, navigation and communications in the honey bee” at the Queensland Brain Institute, and mention it as an inspiration for the behaviour of their simulacra. More overt is the contemporary theme of ecological fragility evoked by bees, who are notoriously threatened worldwide.

It’s not apparent in the show at gaffa, but disaster looms for the mellifera as well. In the artists’ words: “The actual ‘terra mellifera’ in Second Life appears at first to be a pastoral paradise; ... however, whilst some [simulation states] will have an Elysian theme, others will involve dangerous invasions of pests which our virtual honeybees... will be unable to resist without the attention of ecologically aware Avatars.” The artists certainly intend to subject their creatures to some analogue of the blight afflicting their real kindred.

terra.mellifera is far from the first ecosystem in Second life- and bees in perticular seem common, occurring in two high profile ones: Laukosargas Svarog’s famed “Svarga” simulation, and “Luciftias Neurocam“‘s Terminus.

What’s different here, (beside an unspecified arsenal of gizmos and doohickeys which the artists hope to deploy in the later Brisbane show) is narrative. I’m reminded of Mitchell Whitelaw’s ([2]) consideration of “critical generative systems”, and the potential implicit in these generative simulations to communicate ‘system stories’ that explore possible worlds, systems whose underlying construction can create alternative perspectives on physical reality.

For the Burrell and Adams, indeed, narrative and exploration are both critical. They are happy to disclose that their simulation is based largely around the venerable artificial life technique of agent based modelling, that it contains birth, feeding and death and so on. But they are coy about the detail of the emergent foodweb. That, they wish to leave to the experience of the visitor. At least for now. There is, they say, a synthetic nature documentary in progress about the project which will explain all to the faithful.

For now, the tribulations, and the gradual evolution and curation of the algorithms and interrelations of the mellifera are only visible to those spectators to the virtual component of the show, the denizens of Second life. And it’s not just invasive pests, but the progress of the artwork itself: “As we introduce further code / behaviour /elements to the system, balance is lost, and sometimes it can take quite a while for equilibrium to return. Tiny changes to one piece of code can and do affect the whole system”. The experience of Mellifera, then, approximates a real eco-tourism project in a bona fide ecosystem, with all the responsibility and uncertainty that implies. This critical generative system, then, explores the transience and delicacy of living systems. Noble sentiments.

If this is so, i have a qualm with the choice of medium - if we can extract a detailed experience of the fragility of living systems from such a simulation it is a lopsided fragility in that we are excluded. Second life invites us to participate intimately as virtual avatars, and that participation is asymmetric; second-life avatars are solipsistically prime in the simulated world. These immortal, self-contained souls can create a balance of synthetic “nature” but cannot be themselves destroyed by it. Whereas, the demise of the bees in reality seems likely to cost real human lives as our crops lose a key pollenating process. For us, the bees’ value is, tragically, far more than purely aesthetic, and organising to save the arbitrary danger to an artwork in the stead of a real ecosystem is quixotic.

The destinies of both real and virtual bees, however, and the artists’ handling of these difficulties, are all similarly undecided, and I recommend checking in on the progress of each. terra.mellifera is ongoing in Second Life and will re-open in real life in Brisbane in August 2009 at ‘the block’, QUT. Bee extinctions are continuing worldwide.

Dan MacKinlay is a writer, musician and coder from way back, and is just as coy about his own guiding algorithms

16th-21st April gaffa gallery 1/7 Randle Street, Surry Hills Sydney, Australia

In Second Life

On the web

[1]	first mentioned in RealTime issue 87 Oct-Nov 2008 pg. 36

[2]	“System Stories and Model Worlds : A Critical Approach to Generative Art” in Olga Goriunova (ed), Readme 100: Temporary Software Art Factory (Norderstedt: BoD) 135-154. (Dec 2005)

Review: Wade Marynowsky, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie robot

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0000

Review: Wade Marynowsky, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie robot¶

It’s worth going in to see The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Robot completely unprejudiced, but better yet to bring someone else uninformed along.

The scene is this: both side walls are lined with gramophone horns that hiss gentle static; a robot spins around the floorboards at the arrival of each new guest. Human height, its mechanism is hidden by a lace-trimmed black bustle; a single (also lace-trimmed) video camera eye beneath a plastic dome is all that ties this machine to the twenty first century. At a glance it resembles the autonomous robotics experiments of Velonaki’s Fish-bird, minus the research council support: the machine’s erratic trajectory and myopic focus speaks of the buggy algorithms of artificial intelligence on an arts-grant budget, and the tinny, canned voice sounds the routine synthesised knell of another “new” media interactive.

But the apparent autonomy is a ruse. The “programmed” conversation progresses from “how are you, sir?” to discussion of its dance moves, the gallery’s interior design, to suspiciously well-informed digs about your personality. At least, well-informed if you are personally known to the wizard behind the curtain, a role played during my visit by Wade Marynowsky himself.

Wade has taken pains to situate his show at the juncture of several respectable cybernetics and performance theories, and sophisticated technical design. For all this attention to the machine, though, the real exhibit is the interplay with gallery-goers who wander in unawares from the leafy Newtown back-street.

My unbriefed friend, a counsellor from out of town, questions the bourgeoisie robot as she would any other client. Immediately, their conversation invokes and inverts that old new-media parody, the ELIZA psychoanalysis program. Buying into the performance with an analyst’s unabashed comfort with the personal, she leaves the robot scrabbling for consistency as she dissects its absurd motivations and fashion sense. And, eventually, dresses it in her scarf. The robot bursts out of its conversation, trundles towards me crying plaintively. “You sir, with the hat! Tell me, are you enjoying the show?”.

Wade’s willingness to be no less ludicrous than us, his supposed patsies, is what charms me in this one. And what seduces me into further collusion. Rumour has it that the next iteration of the project will see multiple such robots unleashed on the public. If it is still intimate enough a scene for complicity in the absurdity, I recommend you attend. And bring a friend.

Wade Marynowsky; The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie robot. Electrical engineering: Aras Vaichas, Software design: Mr.Snow, Dress maker: Susan Marynowsky, Supported by the University of Western Sydney.

The Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (I.C.A.N). 5th - 21st of December, Thursday to Sunday 12 - 5 pm.

Dan MacKinlay is on leave to Indonesia for the Jakarta Biennale; he thanks you for your patience

Jakarta Biennale 2009 - “Arena”

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0000

Jakarta Biennale 2009 - “Arena”¶

First published in Realtime magazine.

I’m well-disposed toward any festival that lets fresh ideas steep into the starchy conservatism of national institutions. I also a have a soft spot for any event whose launch party has people dancing with their underpants on the outside. Thus I was helplessly infatuated by the biennale launch at the National Gallery of Indonesia. Seconds after the dignitaries had left, a ramshackle truck loaded with speakers was blaring music from the side courtyard, and a rentacrowd of overstimulated ravers materialised to thrust and jiggle under the video projections in day-glo plastic costumes. Apparently the genre of hectic Hi-NRG techno on display was called “Pantura”. It’s a truckstop disco genre, I’m told, with extra glowsticks. The thronging crowds sporting pool floaters and coloured goggles, I don’t know where they fit into the biennale picture, nor did I get the overall message of that performance – except that it would supposedly be to my benefit me if I shook my “pantat”. Nonetheless I’m convinced that every exhibition launch should have one of these as antidote to launch-speech bombast. And I can’t imagine a launch for any public event lasting long if it were shy of raucousness.

Jakarta seethes and steams, and frankly, stinks its way into the air of every event that takes place in its messy, corrupt, crowded confines. You can’t for a moment forget where you are, as you fight through traffic to reach the venue, as your accommodation floods, as the toxic traffic pollution settles in a thin, carcinogenic layer on the roof of your mouth. The Jakarta Biennale, that is, has a pervasive sense of place that some other cities lack the sloppy public health standards to provide. The Jakarta’s Biennale then, is possibly the only thing that could succeed in that environment - a messy, ambitious event that revels in, riffs upon, and constantly interrogates the intrusive urban morass it calls home. Oh, and did I mention how big it is? Depending where you draw the boundary, Jakarta contains between seven and thirty million people in continuous urban agglomeration. It’s a whole, inescapable, world.

This year’s biennale (titled “Arena”) has been much anticipated due to the rogue’s gallery of cult art scene figures pulling the levers: Artistic direction by Ade Darmawan, curators from Ade’s notorious Jakarta arts collective Ruang Rupa, and Bandung’s Selasar Sunaryo gallery - a crew that traverses the spectrum between high end commercial gallery society, and ratbag media activism. It’s something like an arts A-team. I’m not sure if the festival’s belligerent naming stems from the inevitable themes of art in a city such as this, or perhaps, if it was named in resignation to the combative stances of the curators and artists themselves. Whatever the causal link, the result is a festival that fits its title singularly well: an engaged, aggressive, and sometimes clashing tumult.

Of the three sub-programs, just two are active while I am in town: Zona Pertaraungan/”the Conflict Zone”, and Zona Cair/”the Fluid Zone”. I’m not sure which of those sponsored the gallery rave, but in general they are both less underpants-driven. The launch kicks off a good, though variable, exhibition.

The fluid zone makes more conventional use of gallery space. Most prominently, Jompet’s elaborate, grandiloquent, installation, keeps me captivated fro a good half an hour. He has filled an entire hall with ranks of robotically animated historical indonesian army band, uniforms, complete with drums, playing an eldritch military tattoo intercut with multiple channels of video on miscellaneous screens, depicting the artist recreating the ancient Javanese dances of dedication performed amongst the machines at an old dutch sugar refinery. The proud and problematic icons of Javanese culture re-invented as empty poltergeists reads to me like an essay in the revisionist cultural iconography implicated in the ANZAC legend here, but with a different kind of colonial angst.

Around the main hall I’m grabbed by the emergent theme of re-appropriation of mundane objects: Tintin Wulia (Denpasar/Melbourne) has created a muted rainbow of forged passports. Roslisham Ismail (“Ise” to those who caught his residency at Sydney’s Artspace) has collaged loanshark handbills into a lurid wall banner spelling out “NEP”, the euphemistic acronym of the Malaysian affirmative action economic regime. The most eyeball-searing work in the category is David Grigg’s photo documentary of Philippine slum gang tattoos. I can’t tell if I like its inarticulate bloodiness, but I can’t look away, which comes to the same thing.

And the show goes on, a rush-hour pile-up of works in this crossroads of southeast Asia. The Fluid Zone has the lion’s share of international artists, with attendees from across Australia and ASEA. This regional focus is, we are told by curator Agung Hujatnikajennong, not to be mistaken for a global one, less an attempt to leap into the globalised Biennale circuit than a logical outgrowth of Jakarta’s cosmopolitan history. He presents the event as something of a an exchange between neighbouring peers, as opposed to, I suppose, marketing for the entrenched oligarchs of a global art market to which Indonesia is peripheral. It’s a noble sentiment every bit as much as it is a great way to save on airfares.

Across the Gallery courtyard from the slick internationalism of the Fluid Zone, there is the gallery component of Zona Pertarungan/the Conflict Zone. This program is curated by Ardi Yunanto, editor of the bilinigual Indonesian contemporary art magazine Karbon. At Ruang Rupa, Ardi has also manged the Jakarta 32ºC program of urban interventions - in fact, Sydneysiders may recall him presenting a retrospective of that project at the recent Sydney Biennalé event - Constellations 3: Extra/Ordinary Cities: The Cultural Dynamics of Urban Intervention. It’s clearly a core passion for him - urban intervention is everywhere in the program Ardi has assembled. And where the fluid zone is regional, Zona Pertarungan is consciously parochial, and relentlessly political. This program is also more physically dispersed, colonising an exhausting inventory of public sites across the city. Works are anything from murals to subverted advertising on billboards, to outright illegal fake street signage. The gallery show, then, is less the works themselves than a convenient digest of pieces scattered throughout the city, for those too lazy to sift through the chaos of Jakarta slums trying to pick out which bits might be art. The show’s role is not solely documentary - some works are too ephemeral to find, such at the Carterpaper collective’s hilarious culture jams, and some are entirely imaginary, such as Ari Dina Krestyawan’s attempt to insert surreal stream-of-consciousness “public announcements” into the LED displays above the city’s main road. That latter work exists only as a composited video, not the only work whose installation was cancelled in last-minute failures in negotiations with the sign’s owners.

As heated as the debate about Australia’s diminishing supply of art spaces can get, Jakarta’s space is so constrained in comparison that it seems a cautionary fable. Every inch of streetscape is the subject of multiple conflicting regimes of ownership, of corrupt regulation, of protection rackets, and so on. Curator Ardi recounted me an example of a large mural of chess pieces on the pylons of a freeway flyover. The work, by designers Saleh Husein and Kudaponi is a painted tribute to the impromptu chess playing tables that set up in their shade. Between the council fees, the bribes, and outright protection rackets the cost of keeping it there is comparable to renting commercial billboard space. The chess mural treads little close to faux-folksy celebration of the poor by richer artists for my taste, although Ardi is quick to itemise the exhaustive community consultations that the artists had gone into spanning months - not to mention an ignominious defeat in a chess tournament for the artists.

By contrast, where the Fluid Zone program escapes the national gallery it is not to the streets, but to the shopping malls. Most prominent is Indonesia’s richest mall, the Grand Indonesia Shopping Town, which is a Biennale sponsor, and has artworks nestled between their Gucci outlet and their Moulin Rouge-themed foodhall. The show here is not light on politics nor social critique, both implicit and blatant. On the former side, Australia’s Craig Walsh has installed the latest in his series //Incursions//, where a video projection conjures an apparent flood destroying the contents of the shopfront. It’s strangely effective here, in this city of flash floods and broken plumbing, compared to regulated, risk-assessed Australia.

Other works are on the didactically anti-consumerist side. Manila-based Poklong Anading’s work “caskets” is a climbing wall up the sides of the mall atrium, whose holds are resin casts of consumer ephemera. It’s a defiantly ugly, uncollectable work that seems strangely at home amidst the cacophony of advertising that is the mall. Eko Nugroho brings his photocopy-based, polemical zine aesthetic, with a brash critique of the corruption of politics and religion told through the medium of giant model elephants and graffiti robots. The quieter satire of Wiyoga Muhardranto’s erogenous shopping bag sculptures, with their breasts and voluptuous curves, mock the empty seduction of advertising, even as they themselves function as exquisite, exquisitely acquirable objects of consumption.

This last work crystallises a contradiction in the biennale progam. It’s not just that, matter, between the commercial festival sponsor branding and Indonesian mall-kitsch backdrops it’s hard to pick the faint critical signals from the noise of shopping. Agung argues it is is a pragmatic necessity if the biennale is to be relevant. Jakarta has no public space, as the as Ardi has discovered, and if one does wish to be engaged with all the middle class public and not just the poor, where else should the work be hung? Fot me, it’s a rude shock - in Australia, I explain, we demurely conceal this conflict with a polite separation between the consumerism of the art market, and the romantic purity the artists.

The problem that perturbs me more is the distinction in venues, and media, and subject matter between the Conflict and Fluid Zones. If it is a concession to the necessities of engaging with diverse audiences then it seems unfortunate to sequester the subject matter and the audiences both, leaving the urban elites to dally in sophisticated self critique and the poor to celebrate their tribulations in best-practice community development projects.

But, on the other hand, I also wonder where else I could find a festival that is so thorough in an attempt to engage with a whole city, from the wealthiest to the poorest, all on their own terms. It’s a vindication of the Biennale’s boldness that i can even make these criticisms, that they have been so thoroughly engaged with their city that i may muse at the small failings in their presentation. This Biennale has been one of the most thought-provoking events I have witnessed, a bold dive into the the details of a city that is larger than my entire country. I’m coming back.

Dan MacKinlay is a sound artist and all-round new media nice guy based in Sydney

Jakarta Biennale 2009 (Sentap! Magazine)

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0000

Jakarta Biennale 2009 (Sentap! Magazine)¶

Jakarta’s Bienniale sprawls.

The evidence is at the National Gallery of Indonesia, where one of the Biennale’s exhibitions is set up. In the temporary art lounge they have set up out the back, the Secret Agents collective (Indra Ameng, Keke Tumbuan) has set up a map of Jabodetabek, of greater Jakarta. Visitors are invited to place stickers, a coloured dot for where you have come from and a different colour to show where you are going. (As a visitor from Sydney I’m not quite sure where to place my dot: I choose Bogor. Close enough.) A polychromatic rhizome of dots is growing on that giant map, vast subterranean seepage of complicit art appreciation that spans the length and breadth of the map and from my own experience, considerably beyond it borders.

This is not a Biennale in the usual mode, where one city runs a high-flying festival to advertise, essentially, its arts funding and networks to the global art mafia, but rather, something both narrower and broader. It is narrower in the sense of being regionally focussed - the intended target audience feels like perhaps the people of ASEAN area, and particularly the people of Jakarta itself, and it frankly doesn’t have the budget or profile of a Venice Biennale, which would be what it would take to get wider exposure. But it is broader in the sense that it seems to do its utmost to engage with all the audiences of Jakarta, not only the self-identified art elite. There is not a single festival precinct, but a series of shows surfacing across galleries and malls, and public street works, across wealthy and poor suburbs. This festival sprawls because it pervades a sprawling city. (That is, as best a quixotic, small budget art event can pervade a city that is, by some counts, more populous than all of Malaysia.)

The Biennale’s title is “Arena”; the overwhelming theme seems to be “space”; the location of Jakarta in space; but also the distribution and usage of space within Jakarta itself. The program Zona Pertarungan (“Conflict Zone”), under the curation of Ardi Yunanto, concerns itself especially with the latter. Indeed, The Conflict Zone not only takes ‘space’ as its subject matter, but is comprised largely of works that subvert space as part of their very structure. Daniel Kampua’s photo essay, for example, of tourists at the Indonesian National Monument, plays with distortions of perspective, making tourists at the monument appear as giants beside the dwarfed monolith. The photo essay, it transpires, is not in fact his alone, but a collaboration with the itinerant photographers who roam around the national monument itself, and its presentation at the National Gallery is a reprise of a group exhibition of those pictures at the monument itself - and in elevating these disposable tourist shots to the status of gallery art Daniel is participating in yet another distortion of perspective, not to mention transgressing the social boundaries around gallery space. (Interestingly, though, the names of the collaborating photographers are not nearly so prominent as Daniel’s own...)

Meanwhile, across town, artists Ami and Popo (Syahrul Amami and Ryan Riayadi) have created an iconography of giant posters warning against motorcycle hijackings in risk areas in Jakarta, much like the symbols on tourist maps transposed onto the actual concrete. On a similar scale, an enormous sign: “Awas Begal!” (“Beware thieves”) has been inscribed in front of Cilandok town square by Bujangan Urban (Aditya Nugroho). Or: Saleh Husein and Kudaponi have marked out an informal chess garden at the down-at-heel suburb of Tebet with gigantic chess piece murals on the pylons of the freeway flyover beside it. These works seem grandiose enough to rewrite the map of the city, the representation of urban life dictated from above, with experiences of the reality of life on the street. You almost expect to see Ami and Popo’s posters recurring in miniature as symbols on the next edition of the Jakarta pocket map.

Zona Pertarungan is rife with examples of these intensely socially engaged, politically loaded works. In its use of these themes and even of participating artists the Jakarta 32ºC urban intervention program is a significant predecessor to Zona Pertarungan - to the point that there is a Jakarta 32ºC retrospective show at a mall as part of the program. I’m not claiming that the Conflict Zone interventions are tired or derivative, mind. I’d argue that the productivity of their Jakarta-specific take on urban intervention and culture jamming reveals an unexpected type of vitality of this city, where through some combination of enlightened laws and plain old official corruption, the Jakarta Biennale can exhibit fascinating, edgy works that a Biennale in another city might not or - for example, with the project by CarterPaper, exhibit the installation of fake street signs. The street art flavour has event inveigled its way into Zona Cair (“The Fluid Zone”), curated by Agung Hujatnikajennong. Vincent Leong’s work Tropical paradise, has transposed street stencil art into the gallery space, with an endearingly kitsch wallpaper pattern made from icons of the Jakarta city in hot pink and acid green. The Videobabes (Ariani Darmewan and Prilla Tania) piece might also fit that category, transposing the interior of an Indonesian suburban house into the gallery with video simulation.

In general, however, the works in Zona Cair turn their eyes outward to the space of cultural and economic exchange of which Jakarta is (has always been) part: So Tintin Wulia has created a slew of fake passports from every nation across the Gallery floor. Herself an expatriate artist, her work describes a muted rainbow trajectory past the works of several others - the potent photo documentaries, for example, of David Griggs (Melbourne/Manila) and Sherman Ong (Melacca/Singapore). Ong’s series, HanoiHaiku is fascinating, a series of photo vignettes, each a minutely composed snapshot of a Vietnamese home - each filled with a fascinating array of household bric-a-brac which plots the tumultuous course of that nation’s history, an outsider’s insider perspective...

And where the artists themselves are not expatriates, the works are still meditations upon the artists’ position in the regional cultural spaces: Reza Afisina (“Asung”) has exhibited private exchanges between himself and various curators in a downright uncomfortable way. An artist? Exhibiting the work of curators? As Asung parodies the stereotypes of an inarticulate developing-world artist approaching the powerbrokers at the cultural “centre”, and turns the curators themselves those fashionable obejcts, ‘outsider’ artists, he mocks the navel-gazing network of art trading of which the global biennale circuit has emerged from.

This festival, it seems, in the course of being something so official-sounding as a “Biennale”, is still edgy enough to be, well, naughty. Is it just that they are so far from Europe that the feel they will not be found out? Or is Jakarta such a centre now in its own right, that it is too big to fear offending the old league? Or does everyone simply have other jobs to pay the bills so they don’t need to fear arts traders?

No matter how you answer, the fact remains that Jakarta is airing work that is too controversial, too site-specific or too unknown for many of its richer siblings. If you are looking for a budget version of a big-ticket European biennale embedded in the contextless environment of global airport culture you will be disappointed. Instead it’s a smart, relevant event that takes on art in its own messy terms, that reflects on local and our shared regional history. Worthwhile.

Electrofringe will eat itself.

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0000

Electrofringe will eat itself.¶

First published in Realtime magazine.

Once, this was a festival whose name summarised it neatly, at least in my rapidly decaying memory. Electrofringe was the crook between the burgeoning branches of fringe doof culture, and the emerging electronic arts. Flocks of darkwave cyberpunk fashionistas and squat activists gathered there. The coin in trade was esoteric skills learned on the knee of expensive and time-consuming experience beyond the reach of the owners manual. But these days everyone totes subscriptions to MAKE magazine and workshops in the ubiquitous Arduino microcontroller are regular in every major city... Locative art projects are a consumer commodity and major companies compete in elaborate excursions into augmented and virtual realities, and dance music seems to have fallen out of vague as a vector of revolution since Australian Idol. The idea of turning up in person to learn how to get into the esoteric new media seems about as timely as taking a bachelor degree in alchemical transmutation of elements.

The directors seem ready to ride the zeitgeist. The festival this year is exhaustingly diverse, with a line-up examining hybrid arts and fringe culture from all manner of unexpected angle. Technological art is no longer something held together with string scavenged from the dumpster and japanese mail order - although Aras Vaichas gave an impressive workshop in building his Wävrüta digital effect unit from little more than that. Rather, the new media skillset is a commercially valuable commodity. Where electrofringe is still fringey is the collaborative, defiantly independent atmosphere it fosters.

I’m betting that by most plausible measures the technical sophistication of technology on display has decreased over time. The exception might be the online works - my favourite example of this is Pip Shea’s amusing interactive Neoconfessional, a hybrid online/video installation piece. Online, a social video sharing network collects uploaded footage of TINA’s compulsively boundary-testing punters admitting their trespasses into conservatism; offline, projectors and speakers in the performance venue toilets play those clips, and stalls echo with an novel variety of public obscenity: “I don’t even like new media art”...

In general, though, the shows this year have steered away from competing with the staunchly funded technological extravaganzas of your ISEAs and Biennales. Most of the successful works cluster around the ideas of the collaborative, the interactive, the site specific, and the low-budget.

The Tape Projects show certainly looks to an op-shop kind of electronics for their display, filling a gallery with flip book animations and turntables playing copiers of a single locked-groove record through second-hand stereos, speakers arranged at random. The spartan presentation hides some sophisticated production; tracks on the disc include dozens of micro-compositions from as many luminary composers jumbled together with little to identify them to the listener (although the flip books have front-page credits). Punters lower the tone arm at whim and find themselves participants in a centreless, endless performance of phasing sound. I’ll admit I am unnecessarily fond of multi-speaker installations, but this is quite something. The gallery space sports a handful of listeners seated on the floor transfixed - I can’t recall the last time i saw that outside of a performance.

The League of Imaginary Scientists have handmade aesthetic, but with a chaotic flavour; in labcoats and glasses they distribute parodical school kid activity packs filled with the bits of simple cardboard and lenses and invite your to stake out real estate space with the telescope you make from the parts. There’s some dance and a bit of live video too, so that we can call it new media art, but it hinges upon the engaging personalities of the performance more than any technology. Indeed, at their artist talk at DORKBOT/Sydney the preceding week, they left the audience dumbfounded by the absence of technological obscurity behind the presentation. Their subject matter is inversions of space and time; riding a bike back into your childhood, passing objects through a video camera, colonising the stars with cardboard and plastic because the planet is doomed. It’s the most cheerful investigations of our dire planetary circumstances that I can imagine, pulling at least a wry utopianism out of our scientifically projected apocalypse.

At the other end of the technological spectrum, the intricate algorithmic stylings of the Advanced Beauty show were one component of the festival that have been getting a lot of media anticipation. This is a series of algorithmic single-channel video pieces exploring ideas of synaesthesia, and the algorithmic cogeneration of sound and visuals, and were projected on the wall of the John Paynter gallery for a 2 week season overlapping the festival proper. But if that experience is to even start to approach the totality that synaesthesia implies, it is worth sticking to the surround-sound cinema screening (which i sadly missed). Otherwise, you may as well watch it at your leisure on the web.

By contrast, across the hallway from the John Paynter Gallery in the old gaol museum, Fiona McGregor stages you Have The Body, a site-specific one-on-one durational performance. It’s a didactic endurance piece, which is to say: precisely what I would avoid seeing if I had read about it. In the flesh, totally engrossing. You are led into the venue bound with a bag over your head, and drawn through a weird transmutation of the gallery-going experience into an Orwellian abduction. Her attention to detail makes this a formidable piece, a pastiche of totalitarian horror and Australian bureaucratic mundanity. I won’t divulge the whole piece, mind, since that’s half the point of the experience and performances are ongoing.

Back in the Paynter Gallery, Sengewald’s interactive video works arrests a few of us - an interactive video projection on the gallery appends shadow tails to gallery visitors and places them amidst a swarm of rats that flee from their outline. However, the simplest and most interactive for all, by my statistically questionable 10 minutes survey of the space. German collective TheGreenEyl has covered a gallery wall with removable orange stickers and invited the public to do what they will with them in a work they call Appeel. The name is a low point, but the work is better - the negative space left by the absent stickers leave a fascinating trace as much as do the orange dots that soon adorn every sufficiently slow-moving dry surface in the city. The evolving, democratic negative image in the gallery is satisfying; but so is the sporulation of dots across the city as the gallery-goers become willing dispersers to the day-glo seed- and later on, new orange sticker walls germinate across the city, until my sleeves come away fluorescent from the table at the festival club.

Between Birchville Cat Motel (NZ), KK NULL (Japan) and Maruosa (Japan) there is a bouquet of noise musics, worth hearing indeed but less interesting to write about. (“Loud!”) RAVENATION, though is a performance worth detailing - worth, even getting thrown out of for disorderly behaviour and sneaking back in over the beergarden fence. Curated by Melbourne performance collective Gooey On the Inside, the show assembles a kind of mocking electro cabaret that veers between deft satire and simple mockery but mostly hangs out in the vicinity of general mayhem. Half a generation since the festival was founded, electrofringe’s early days are already fodder for (re)appropriation by the young turks as much as the pop culture canon; everything from breakcore to cabaret is compressed into a parodical 3 hour hyper-rave, smoke machine, lasers, and fake MDMA included, not to mention an animatronic latex penis mask, all broadcast in animated GIF art on Myspace. These folks are not just staking out claiming their area of practice on the fringes of the mainstream, but wresting that back from the aging cohort who now run the flagship, and producing an impressively slick show while they are at it. Touring international artists is fantastic for electrofringe’s profile; but it’s this ability to invite the cream of troublemakers into the halls of marginally-more-power that keep it alive and relevant. I can’t wait until Gooey on the Inside get their comeuppance in turn in a few years’ time.

Dan MacKinlay was co-manager of the National Young Writers Festival back in 2001, and despite the intervening 6 years, has only just enough detachment at that remove to cover TINA.

Electrofringe was directed by Alex White, Somaya Trefz and Somaya Langley

Dancing Machine

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0000

Dancing Machine¶

First published in Realtime magazine.

That huge foyer in the front of Carriageworks: commodious enough to play jump-rope in, and wholesome enough too. It’s a chunk of light cut from the atmosphere in a heavy industry sized serving, populated in work hours by those expert occupiers of knee-grazing surfaces, small running children.

Then, you enter the show in bay 21, and nothing could be more distant than the memory of that air and light.

When the double door thumps shut I can see only the stippled patterns on my retina in the dark. A beam of light pins me from above, radiating from a transparent dome two armspans above my head, just over ... there. It stirs, glides toward me, revealed as the crowning cupola atop a towering robot. Wearing a gigantic bustled dress.

The scale of the creature makes the theatrical dimensions of the space seem domestic, even claustrophobic; I’m the one built on the wrong scale, an interloper in another’s intimate space. My illuminated host makes me welcome nonetheless, stopping an alarming few centimetres away for a curtsy. It (she?) mumbles some indecipherable pleasantry, and as the lights and the sound swell, I can see the room throngs with these enormous things, marking out the sporadic steps of a disjointed dance that I seem to be the only one not to know.

If these creatures owe something to the Victorian automata to whom their creator claims a debt, then it is the Victorian fashion. Their clothes are a pastiche of dress gowns, corsets, lace and military paraphernalia, an alien forensic anthropologist’s reconstruction of a Southern plantation ball demolished by stay cannon shot, familiar but dissonant.

Their performance, lacks the endless repetition of those parlour automata. These are unsettlingly interactive, personal, provoking, narrative. Each robot approaches in turn, offers some vocal non-sequitur (“Do you love me?”) and then pirouettes, inviting me hopelessly to some dance you would surely need prostheses to participate in. I intuit with unease that my faculties are inadequate for the social world of these creatures, and find my ears trying to demodulate the drones that fill the room as a modem decodes signals from a telephone line. Have I stumbled onto a mechanical rehearsal for some obtuse celebration? Are these machines taken aback to find a human among them half way through their private training in the finer points of the graces of the fleshed? Or is that what they want from me? This performance doesn’t feel like spectacle - rather it fills me with the suspicion that I am the spectacle. As the indecipherable noise spilling from the gramophone horns crescendos, it becomes so close in there that that it feels an effort to breathe. I go.

It’s not only the lace trimming that links this show to Wade’s earlier robotics experiment, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Robot. In both, Wade plumbs the crevices of the shifting contemporary anthropology of robotics, and it is we punters who are on display, with the grating awareness of self that uncertainty about our observers provides. What are these beings? If the society of the 1800s was taken in by Wolfgang von Kempelen’s notorious hoax Mechanical Turk, are we perhaps more vulnerable to that same hoax today? How much looser might the criteria be now for an entity to merit social pleasantries, in this age of digitally mediated conversation, public surveillance, machine learning? There is a kind of inversion of the panopticon here. I know I am watched, but I do not know truly by what. Is it another of Wade’s telepresence hoaxes, or some automated trickery, or perhaps something more unnaturally intelligent? Is the moment at hand when we reprise out ancient animism, when we catch ourselves being polite to our appliances, just in case there is an intelligent mind of any sort peering back at us through their lenses that we might offend? Are we anticipating the time that our contraptions will accuse us of being mere imitations? In my case, I am startled and sheepish at the faint Frankenstein paranoia that characterise my bit part in this gothic techno social comedy of manners.

I do have to say, though, those preschoolers from the foyer love it.

Dan MacKinlay teaches web interactives at UTS, and should know better than to succumb to this kind of superstition

The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons 14 August - 12 September Media artist/artistic director; Wade Marynowsky, Electrical engineer; Aras Vaichas, Programmer; Jeremy Apthorp, Lighting; Mirabelle Wouters Costume; Sally Jackson, Camera; John Douglas, Edit; Sumugan Sivanesan.

Possum Palace

Filet électronique/island

Filet électronique/island¶

Filet électronique/island

Filet électronique/island¶

Pattern Machine

Pattern Machine¶

Supercollider

Supercollider¶

Good bits¶

Gotchas¶

Sydney Dorkbot group show.

Sydney Dorkbot group show.¶

Further reading¶

Feral (An Rjdj scene)

Feral (An Rjdj scene)¶

The blurb¶

The responsible¶

How (and why) it works¶

The after party for the American Century (SXSW 2010)

The after party for the American Century (SXSW 2010)¶

SXSW from the gutter

SXSW from the gutter¶

Gig admission¶

Next, transport. No, food. Actually, transport.¶

Texas Connectivity¶

Accomodation¶

Berlin 2010- Transmediale

Berlin 2010- Transmediale¶

How to discover new media art on the web.

How to discover new media art on the web.¶

Sofa surfing Electrofringe 2009

Sofa surfing Electrofringe 2009¶

Second-life eco-management

Second-life eco-management¶

Review: Wade Marynowsky, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie robot

Review: Wade Marynowsky, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie robot¶

Jakarta Biennale 2009 - “Arena”

Jakarta Biennale 2009 - “Arena”¶

Jakarta Biennale 2009 (Sentap! Magazine)

Jakarta Biennale 2009 (Sentap! Magazine)¶

Electrofringe will eat itself.

Electrofringe will eat itself.¶

Dancing Machine

Dancing Machine¶