editorial - rt82

Hamish Michael in publicity still for Marius von Mayenburg’s Moving Target
photo Garth Oriander

This edition of RealTime is, above all, musical. In a cluster of OnScreen articles you can read about the impact of vintage popular musics on artists working in film, theatre and installation. In our festival section, you’ll discover the potent music programming evident in the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals. Consonant with this, the issue of hybridity constantly rises to the surface of this edition—whether in expanded notions of media arts evident at Ars Electronica, Videobrasil and Zero One or in numerous individual artworks and performance festivals, like OzAsia. Cross- fertilisation, multilinearity and media convergences continue to yield emergent possibilities, not fixities. It’s a fecund time offering a creativity to counter the multitude of fundamentalisms that have beset us in recent decades. The Labor Party’s victory in the 2007 Australian federal government election and the prospect of the Senate becoming once again a house of review offer hope for a revival of the democratic impulse in our culture, for the promotion of empathy and active compassion. But let’s not think it’s going to be easy. Leonard Cohen writes in his Book of Longing (see page 5), “We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of what Authority is will arise in every mind. The family will appear again as the Foundation, much honoured, much praised, but those of us who have been pierced by other possibilities, we will merely go through the motions, albeit the motions of love. The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society” (Book of Longing, Penguin Books, 2007). We prefer to look forward, cautiously, to happier times, wish you good reading, a joyous holiday season and hope to share a richly creative 2008 with you. At least you don’t have to hide under the couch any more. Keith, Virginia & Gail

RealTime issue #82 Dec-Jan 2007 pg. 1

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editorial - rt82

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