ANAT Brings Australia Virogenesis
ANAT Brings Australia Virogenesis: letting loose the multimedia rogue codes
Francesca da Rimini
ANAT received assistance from the International Visitors to Australia
Program of the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council to co-ordinate an extensive national tour for Harwood spanning 5 cities in late September - October.
Hosting the tour were:
Around 500 people attended the various presentations and workshops surrounding Rehearsal of Memory. The Perth gig attracted an audience of 200, including artists, filmmakers, government policy makers and 'commercial' CD-ROM producers, highlighting the diverse interests embedded in the realm of the digital. Judging from feedback along the digital rhizomes extending out beyond the tour trajectory,
Harwood's irreverence for the social status quo, his compassion and integrity and the compelling quality of his work, has inspired many who met him. His work captured the attention of the media also, with a number of radio and print media interviews and a feature spot on SBS's Imagine series screened in November.
For local artists the benefits of cultural exchange are two-fold:
exposure to innovative and subversive electronic art, and the chance to
promote their own work to key nodes in the international new media scene.
A tangible outcome from the Harwood tour is the potential to establish a
residency program for Australian artists at ARTEC, a unique digital media
education / social intervention organisation in the London borough of
Islington. ANAT and the Australia Council are currently doing the
groundwork for this exciting opportunity.
While the exponential growth of the internet does breakdown tyrannies of
distance in the transmission of new ideas, much new work is about
immanence and immersion in streams of hypermedia and at some point there
is no escaping the flesh, and 'flesh meets'. Digitized flesh forms the
core of Harwood's Rehearsal of Memory.
In collaboration with residents of Ashworth Maximum Security Mental Hospital, he has created an interactive program embodying the life experience of those involved. By scanning the skin of the group the physical marks of a life lived around notions of
insanity then form an interface through which the user can make close
contact with significant events in those lives. The computer personality
takes the form of an anonymous individual made up of the collective
experience.
Its hygienic procedures contaminated with the effluent of excluded human
relations. For a long time we have assigned machines our dirty laundry
whilst maintaining the image of their enamelled white veneers.
This artwork is about recording the lives of the patient/staff group that
acts as a mirror to ourselves ("normal society") and our amnesia when
confronted with the excesses of our society. This forgetting is a dark
shadow cast by plenty, a nightmare for some that constructs
misinformation and fear about insanity.
In an time of confusion about how technology sits within society, whether
we are conspiring to create dystopias or technotopias, info elites or
techno orphans, the role of the artist / agent to provoke, challenge and
unnerve becomes increasingly critical.
A sense of urgency permeates Harwood's injunction:
The hype about the glorious economic future springing from multimedia and
the information super hogtrak fails to mention that the actual content of new media is often banal and the interfaces cliched, failing to entice users to get their keyboard fingers wet. The broken promises of multimedia seem unnervingly similar to those of their sad predecessor Virtual Reality. Not so the work of outstanding UK multimedia artist Graham Harwood whose prototype CD-ROM Rehearsal of Memory disturbs assumptions of normality whilst confronting with a clean comfortable machine filled with filth, the forbidden and the demented.
(Thank you to all these organisations who did such a
great job at short notice!)
Graham Harwood's tour was the first download from ANAT's Virogenesis
project, conceived as 'a viral collision of some of the most extreme UK,
European and Australian new media practitioners, curators, publishers and
theorists'. There are many Australian artists, students and cultural
consumers who do not have the opportunity to tap into the developing new
media discourses and practices. Electronic art conferences are generally
northern-hemisphere based, expensive, elitist and often burdened by an
over-abundance of presentations. Virogenesis consigns the 19th century
academic model to the data trash pile, as it conceptualizes 3rd millennia
means for sparking discourse and linking bio mindframes. Small, lean,
flexible strategic interventions networked across cities and 'remotes'.
Feral rather than domesticated takes on the new media. Six such
interventions are planned over the next 24 months. Access ANAT for
further data as Virogenesis mutates and replicates over time.
Note: the completed CD-ROM of Rehearsal of Memory will be available
through Bookworks.
Graham Harwood
This tour received funding from the Australia Council, the Federal Government's arts funding and advisory body.
Virogenesis2
Curated by Francesca da Rimini
The common link amongst these artists is philosophical
and political, rather than aesthetic. These are people who challenge the
existing assumptions and conventions of the technological tools, the power
relations of convergent technologies, and the emerging artforms of the third
millenium. Each of the three artists selected for Virogenesis 2 has a history
of working with various 'disenfranchised' groups and communities, with a
view to disrupting existing social inequities through the creation of new
contexts for the transmission of 'marginalised' perspectives.
An extensive national itinerary for viral agents Scanner,
Matthew Fuller and Gomma will achieve the project's aim of provoking dialogue,
broadly disseminating ideas and information, establishing networks and human
hyperlinks, and challenging existing preconceptions of what constitutes
'art' in the information age.
Agent
Gomma will inspire mutatation of existing cultural forms via his
analysis of the Italian counter-cultural scene from the history of the squatted
social centers to the post-modern media tactics.
Our intentions for the future are to create through editorial
activity the conditions and the countercultural humus, because the movement
can regenerate, this is how it happened at the end of the sixties. We want
to intervene into what could be called the "crisis of the social center",
a valid model of resistance during the eighties, but it must necessarily
mutate and evolve in the view of the year 2000. In a paradoxical epoch where
the maximum of the diffusion of technology for the distribution of information,
corresponds with the minimum of real communication between social subject,
the only prospect is to reason around a hypothesis of upturning this relation
of dominion.
Agent
Fuller will transmit his viral ideas of cultural sovereignty/autonomy
via the vectors: readings : street interventions
Interrogating relationships between the device of perpetually
footnoted, perpetually appended 'windows into information', of the contemporary
computer interface; the development of dysfunctional bureaucracy in the
ruins of the welfare state; and in neobiological representations of the
market as entering a new 'heroic' phase, against which no borders must be
allowed to stand. Whilst the war of subjectivity ratchets up a couple of
points, from pimp states to the production of the freelance unemployed,
Eating Disorder gets it on with the most abandoned and licentious wretches
on earth and fully advocates such brutality, and insolence, such debauchery
and extravagance, such idleness, irreligion, cursing and swearing and contempt
of all rule and authority, human and divine as is necessary to bring it
down.
Agent
Scanner will infiltrate the cultural body via the vectors: radio
transmissions : club subliminals : surveillence technologies workshop
Video cameras survey our every movement in the streets,
the Underground, the buses, the shops. We are all featured on countless
home videos without consent. There is this paradox of privacy and invasion.
I use what is simply available on open access in the shops, but what else
exists? What do higher authorities have access to? How much are we being
watched without our knowledge?
Addressing the need for the cultural production and consumption of new media
and emerging artforms to occur within a critical context beyond the government
and corporate driven techno-evangelistic hype, The Australian Network for
Art and Technology (ANAT) is running a 24 month cultural exchange project,
Virogenesis
