Working the Screen 1999

Works in progress: pt1 (A-L)

Barker, Benson, Carroli & Wilson, Cmielewski, geniwate, Glaser, Hutchinson & Xavier, Hoskin, Johnston, Kaye, Kocsis, Kreckler, Le Cappellaine, Leggett, Lerner

Michele Barker, Præternatural

Præternatural
Michele Barker

Præternatural aims to present a genealogical exploration of the cultural, medical, and scientific role of the monster in Western culture from the 17th century to the 20th century. Further, it questions contemporary contextualisations of the monstrous due to developments in the area of biomedical and genetic research.

Originally, Præternatural was designed to be a DVD-ROM work, a platform that would have allowed me to produce the piece without compromising on video and audio quality. Unfortunately, DVD-ROM is not so widely developed for the Mac platform, forcing me back to CD-ROM and all of its constraints.

Michele Barker works as an artist within the area of new media and her recent work on the monstrous will form part of a PhD. Exhibitions include Specimens at Artspace and State of the Heart at The Australian Centre for Photography. A former Digital Media Coordinator for the Museum of Sydney, she currently lectures in Photomedia at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW.

Completion October 1999. Australian Film Commission.

Cooking with Carmen
Tracey Benson

Tracey Benson, Cooking with Carmen

Cooking with Carmen is the latest in an ongoing project titled Big Banana Time Inc. which focuses on notions of identity and the role of tourism in promoting national and cultural archetypes. Cooking with Carmen intersects the relation of identity to self via the act of cooking, by analysing the act of consumption. This is an interactive web-based work aimed at broadening ideas around participation and collaboration by engaging responses from the audience.

There have been many challenges surrounding this project, on a conceptual and technical level. Primarily, I need to present a product which inspires participation. This is a general issue to all web developers, as is defining your audience, let alone getting them to your site.

Tracey Benson is a Brisbane based multimedia artist and curator. She has exhibited her work from the Big Banana Time Inc. project extensively to a national and international audience through exhibitions, performances and conference papers. Her new web-based work titled Bananarama2000 is currently being hosted at the new Experimenta Media Arts online gallery www.experimenta.org.

Completion September.

cipher
Linda Carroli, Josephine Wilson

cipher is a work of hypertext fiction which explores the thriller genre. The enigmatic M receives a series of mysterious emails from the equally enigmatic C over a period of ten days. With each message, M is further drawn into a web of political intrigue.

Challenges of producing online work include keeping it simple and relatively easy to negotiate; maintaining a focus on written text; ensuring that you hang on to your audience, create a readerly flow by constructing pages which download in a reasonable amount of time. Technical challenges include keeping up with what’s possible, trying to blend skills with creative development and decision-making.

Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson collaborated online to produce the award-winning *water always writes in *plural. Carroli’s writing background is critical and non-fiction, while Wilson writes primarily narrative fiction and performance.

Completion, September 1999. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council

Dream Kitchen
Leon Cmielewski

Leon Cmielewski, Josephine Starrts, Dream Kitchen

Dream Kitchen is an interactive installation. The interactive animation incorporates both 3D and stop motion techniques. It starts in an antiseptically clean “Mr Sheen” kitchen and then takes us to those areas where the moral cleansers can’t reach. Beneath the surface runs a parallel interior zone populated with inspirited objects. This subterranean zone could be interpreted in many ways: a catalogue of dread, a cabinet of memories, an archive of fantasies.

The challenge in this project has been to keep the freedom and directness of stop motion film animation while working within a computer interactive framework. Director/animator, Leon Cmielewski; producer: Josephine Starrs; programmer, Adam Hinshaw; sound designer, Panos Couros.
Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs are artists whose work includes the new media installations User Unfriendly Interface and Diagnostic Tools for the New Millennium. Both separately and together they have produced work in various media which has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Co-production with the Banff Centre, Canada. Australian Film Commission. Completion October 1999.

Los Dias Y Las Noches De Los Muertos
Francesca da Rimini with Los Fantasmos

Francesca da Rimini with Los Fantasmos, Los Dias Y Las Noches De Los Muertos

we were a cipher in the big accounts of capital...the gigantic market of maximum irrationality that trades in dignities Zapatista text Los Dias Y Las Noches De Los Muertos (The Days And Nights Of The Dead); a collaborative online project—Adelaide/New York/Rome/Chiapas. A ghost work of counter-memories, opening thresholds of impossibilities outside of pan-capitalism. A drifting carnival of souls which gathers together the spectres of late capitalism, soft conspiracies, forgotten phantoms and digital Zapatismo.

More cultural and aesthetic than technical, as the technology is relatively simple—HTML code, framesets, streaming audio, CUseeme. Cultural—developing and looking after relationships amongst participating ghosts scattered over 3 continents. Aesthetic—striving towards the creation of a new genre, neither a poem nor a film but something inbetween.

Most of my work happens online—negotiated email relationships, online communities, ghost girls and riverboys, narrative architectures. With Marco Dereriis, recently completed a commissioned work acid test for the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg, Germany. Received a Fellowship from the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council for soft accidents, an exploration of some relationships between quantum physics and Indigenous knowledge systems.

All online projects linked to autonomous.org/~gashgirl [expired]
www.thing.net/~dollyoko/LOSDIAS/INDEX.HTML
VACF (Visual Arts/Craft Fund), Australia Council.

empiricosis
geniwate

empiricosis is a net-based cycle of text, image and audio which takes as its theme some of the ways in which science and art collide, and how science is visualised in popular culture.

empiricosis is a complex amalgam of text and other media. I am starting to create multiple outcome hyperlinked poetry mainly using Flash. I experience challenges concerning download time and streaming, especially since I am keen to incorporate audio tracks into the poetry, to be played concurrently with other media. A further challenge is presented by my extremely limited programming skills.

I started writing conventional poetry in the early 90s. This soon metamorphosed into performance poetry, and then to electronic ‘poetry.’ This journey has always been about amalgamating different media.
Ambitions for the future include developing a concept of installation poetry. I recently won the trAce/Alt-x International Hypertext Competition for my project rice. www.idaspoetics.com.au/rice [ex[ire]. I work as an editor at the University of South Australia.

www.adelaide.net.au/~slick/sitefrite/emindex.html [expired] Completion September 1999. Commenced during the 1999 ANAT Summer School. Further development facilitated via an online workshop: thanks Christy Sheffield Sanford and trAce (UK).

Joovin8
Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchinson, Marie-Louise Xavier

Joovin8, Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchinson, Marie-Louise Xavier

The Joovin8 CD-ROM is an interactive narrative featuring a series of hyperreal scenes which echo the intense sensory perception experienced by the dying. The thread of one life is depicted in a series of emotionally rich moments which explore the ever present duality of decay and rejuvenation. The episodic structure imitates the selective and non linear nature of memory. This gift of perception is bestowed upon the dying.

After double clicking on the icon to launch Joovin8, the mouse need never be clicked again. Narrative development is achieved by moving the mouse only. In Joovin8 feedback is incremental, not boolean. This means that the closer the cursor is moved to an image’s focus the higher the degree of reaction and feedback.

www.imago.com.au/tetragenia [expired] Completion September 1999. ArtsWA and the Australian Film Commission.

meme_shift#0
Teri Hoskin

meme_shift#0

meme_shift#0 is an interactive website. It’s to do with an obsession with all things Japanese, as a site of the ultimate Western Other. The sources are historical, literary, philosophical, social and personal, and this environment, playing with the way we read a text, the way one can write. I’m still (always) working on and with this in the hope that a pattern will emerge. The work continues-in-process. I don’t have a deadline.

The challenge is to use the technology simply and elegantly, in such a way that tests the limits of language and meaning in a digital writing space: to push what I already know. To keep files as small as possible and to utilise all the writing spaces. Next step for meme_shift#0 is sound, simple. I want to make an atmosphere, a cinematic engagement.

Teri Hoskin is a visual artist/writer. She works with text, paper, Adobe Illustrator and a text editor (BBEdit) in contemporary gallery spaces and online. She is Editor for the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble, Adelaide.

http://ensemble.va.com.au/meme_shift An Adelaide Festival 2000 project in conjunction with ANAT, CACSA (Contemporary Arts Centre, South Australia), EWRE (Electronic Writing Ensemble).

Untitled
Matthew Johnston

The two CD-ROM projects are an interactive narrative and an interactive that depends on sound frequency and modulation. The first is a series of short scenes composed in a similar manner to a 3D crossword puzzle that allows the user to jump in-between tracks of video. The second uses frequency modulation to effect a 3D object in its environment.

The development of hierarchical structure needs to be a strong point of these projects to overcome a myopic time-line, but the most challenging aspect of both is the design of a 3D engine for the narrative’s platform and 3D modelling for the other. The programming is the most exciting aspect because of the foreign nature of V-B scripting.

Matthew Johnston originally trained in painting/drawing and sculpture at Newcastle Art School between 1994-5; over these two years he showed in a number of small collective exhibitions. He enrolled at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, completing a BFA majoring in time-based art (film and multimedia), and was part of the AFC/ABC Stuff-art initiative for 1999.

Completion November 1999.

Observatine
Zina Kaye

Zina Kaye, Observatine

Observatine is a flying machine that gives a viewer the experience and control of flying, via a bird’s eye view of the landscape. A pilot navigates by a projection on the floor. Since it is managed by a web-server, web-based viewers may be pilots and viewers.

This is an unmanned autonomous flying vehicle, and developing a completely untried system to manage it using the internet requires an enormous amount of team work from people with a great range of skills. Building a “roll your own” aircraft with respected members of the hobby community is humbling. One retired gentleman is the world’s most accomplished forager and has turned his unit into a tooled-up workshop for “greazys” and gliders. It’s like stepping into Chew’s cold room in Blade Runner.

Zina Kaye is a new media artist who uses sound composition, video and communications technologies to muse on the nature of metaphysical boundaries and the secret life of the inside. Integral to her practice is research into spatial interface and transport systems architecture. While broadcasting over terrestrial and internet radio, Kaye maintains a popular net.sound.art website with her partner mr. snow, http://laudanum.net/, housing a large collection of Australian and New Zealand sound content amongst online works and theory presentations.

observatine.net [ex[ired]will come online in August. Completion September 30, 1999. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council and the Commission for European Communities.

Neonverte
Anita Kocsis

Anita Kocsis, Neonverte

Neonverte is a web based installation built as a garden—sometimes a neon evergreen, a fluorescent terrarium or a thorny ‘K-Mart meets Las Vegas’ undergrowth sewn with an organic structure. Stuff grows and dies, gets used and discarded. I tend to weed, restore, defrag, reload, plant and graft. Neonverte is perishable. A compost of interconnections has begun through working online.

Neonverte is built predominantly utilising Macromedia Flash 4. A combination of animations, sound, and Javascripts are used. QTVR and VRML animations initially for the site have resulted in video format utilised in installation rather than sitting in the ‘plug-in’ dependent corner of the web garden.

Anita Kocsis has worked in installation and painting within a digital context. She investigates “immersion environments” with emphasis on the collisions between spatial constructs in painting and virtual environments. Her own work and collaborations as a nervous_object have furthered her interest in the prismic modality of an online practice.

Neonverte is part of the Login series of residencies at 200 Gertrude Street gallery in Melbourne. Login is supported by the Visual Arts/Craft Fund of the Australia Council and ANAT. It aims to assist visual artists in the development of web based projects.

The Neonverte residency commences August. www.anat.org.au/projects/login/anat_anita/neonverte [expired]

Mr. White’s Diary
Derek Kreckler

“Mr. White’s Diary: an incomplete view of the end interplays text and image in an engrossing unfolding of the last hours/words of Mr White: a bleakly entertaining suicide trip through diary, crumpled notes and screen messages that in another time, other media, might have been scored by a Peter Handke or Thomas Bernhard.” (Ed.)

Mr. White’s Diary is a work in progress in the traditional humanist sense. And…oh…yeh we are still working on it! We have to somehow get it to work on Internet Explorer I am sure the Netscape users will catch up but I.E. users will have to wait because these two browsers are now quite different. This work is impossible to view without Flash 3, QT3 and QT3VR plug-ins; the browser should only be Netscape 4.5+. The site uses mainly Flash and is indicative of where the web will go in the future. The site is experimental, of poor temperament, but delicious.

Derek Kreckler is Co-ordinator Electronic Arts and Information Technology Management; Chairman, Academy Research and Development Committee, WA Academy of Performing Arts. Edith Cowan University.

www.working.com/spaceinvaders/white [expired] Opened June 99, Artspace, Space Invaders. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council.

Fan Girl
Dooley Le Cappellaine

Dooley Le Cappellaine, Fan Girl

Fan Girl is a CD-ROM work. In January 1995 I began to take a photograph each day at a different time of the progress of a building going up across the street. I was waiting for something to happen. Finally it did. The building was complete, destroying half my view of the New York skyline and I began to consider moving. I noticed that due to the remarkably shallow architectural plan of the apartments across the street, the occupants were almost on permanent public display. The building took on the fascinating aspect of an antfarm and I soon had names for my favourite characters. (I don’t watch TV.) My favourite was the “fan girl.” I first noticed her on a bright early afternoon performing spectacular sex almost on the window ledge. This went on with amazing regularity always with a new partner. Eventually she found a boyfriend and gradually the performances tapered off; it must have just been a phase in her life; things change.

One of the things I had been thinking of while working on some interactive projects was how passive and ingratiating most art for walls is and also how “interactivity” is generally just click/reward/click/reward. I began to study programming in Director earnestly for a way to make the “fan girl” an artwork which would operate according to its subject matter, voyeurism. After about a year I was able to write the program: at specific times (day/month) uncontrollable by the viewer the work will change to show a different episode in the life I observed for a time.

Dooley Le Cappellaine is an artist who has exhibited internationally and curated Technophobia, the first independently produced interactive exhibition of original multimedia works on CD-ROM. She is currently curating a program of web art works at http://www.thing.net/dooley [expired]

SonteL
Mike Leggett

Mike Leggett, SonteL

SonteL (working title) is an interactive multimedia work, a prototype CD-ROM. Landscape is the mediated image, a representation central to beliefs and identity within Australian culture both Indigenous and non-indigenous. Through a dynamic and interactive process of presentation, intersections are made with interpretations and mediations about The Land. In collaboration with Brad Miller, Adam Hinshaw, Alex Davies, Bruno Koenig and Kathryn Wells.

The navigational precept involves the technically complex intersection of four Quicktime movies at any one time—sequenced images which take the user forward through the landscape, or back through the route just travelled. Or a 360 degree view visible from various key zones, panning either to left or right. This continuous pan is a morphed image of landscape which enables, as an option, access to various series of short narratives (topographies of knowledge), associated with the land, its many appearances, its many histories.

Mike Leggett has been working across the institutions of art, education, cinema and television with media since the early 70s. He has film and video work in archives and collections in Europe, Australia, North and South America and practises professionally as an artist, curator, writer, director, producer, editor, photographer, teacher, manager, administrator and computer consultant.

Prototype completed with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission in June 1999, project completion 2000.

The Glass Bell
Sophea Lerner

Sophea Lerner, The Glass Bell

The Glass Bell is a gesture-driven, audiographic installation. It comes out of stories which resonate through the lives of three generations of women in the artist’s family. It is a fictional poetic construct, an underwater archaeology which explores the role of stories as placeholders for the unutterable, for what falls between languages and places when we leave. It will comprise a large ‘touchscreen’ (about 1m x 1.5m) with water running across it. Diverse gestures on this surface will effect various changes in the audio, narrative and visual elements. The audio was developed first during a residency with The Listening Room in 1998.

There is no such thing as a touch screen that big so we have to start from scratch designing and building the hardware and the interfaces. Another challenge has been designing the software component to be flexible and modular enough to use as a compositional tool for flexible duration work, not just to stick everything together after decisions have been finalised. To be operated from a Powermac 7300 with a PC running part of the interface to the screen hardware and a K2000 carrying a fair chunk of the audio processing.

Sophea Lerner, an artist and broadcaster with a special interest in flexible duration audio works, has spoken internationally on sound design for new media and was last year’s Australia Council New Media Arts Fund artist in residence with The Listening Room. Collaborators for The Glass Bell include artist/engineer David Bartolo and programmer Ryan Sabir.

Completion early 2000. New Media Arts Fund, Australia Council

RealTime issue #32 Aug-Sept 1999 pg. 8

© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

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