Alchemy_Under_Construction
BroadSheet 2000

At the final presentations from the participants of ANAT's Alchemy Masterclass, the audience is directed to the top floor of the recently opened Brisbane Powerhouse: Centre for Live Arts. [1] There, we are huddled around a computer screen bearing witness, via 'live' link, to a still body, 'dead' on a floor below. The tour operator provides the opportunity to have a photo taken with the dead, like some morbid souvenir. However, each polaroid is thrown over the balcony into the chasm in which the body of the performer slowly starts to move.

After this initial introduction to the culmination of Alchemy, ANAT Director, Amanda McDonald Crowley advises the audience that there are ten 'stations' at which artworks are located. The works had been devised over the previous 24 hours. Our mission is to find them, descending into the depths of the Powerhouse, as if descending into Dante's ten sulphuric divisions of Hell. Furnaces once burned in this building and powered the city's tramlines as a sign of industrial and technological progress. The immediacy of the performances bears more than a hint of an impromptu 70s site-specific 'happening'.

Of course, as a 'masterclass' for curators and artists, Alchemy was not wholly focused on the production of new work. The learning curve with technologies often makes such a task fraught: work is always 'in progress'. As a masterclass, it was not geared towards technological mastery either. Rather, it was focused on the artists and their need to talk, exchange, connect, encounter and learn. It was about the 'muse', not the demure Beatrice of Dante's longing, but the process of ideas and inundation with ideas, overwhelmed by them, immersed in them. An international version of ANAT's annual Summer School, the event attracted 40 participants and tutors with varying degrees of prior involvement in technology-based arts practices from Australia, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Slovenia, Bangladesh, Mexico, Britain, Russia and Canada. Attendance was rotated so that participants spent no more than three weeks in the classes and so that no more than 20 were in attendance per week in accordance with a thematically based program. ANAT missives described Alchemy as, "five intense weeks (from 8 May to 9 June 2000) [when] artists, curators and theorists have come together to germinate and hothouse their ideas, test their hypotheses, develop new processes and create new works, within the context of an intensive learning environment."

Alchemy engaged diverse thematics: from science discourses to Indigenous practices to performance to curating. Several satellite events provided the broader community with access to the event and an opportunity to participate in a range of discussions. Often, in new media arts communities, such debates are conducted online, via listserves and email. So the opportunity to occupy physical space, to listen to a voice rather than read a hastily keyed text, or traversing the physical space of the Powerhouse rather than the point and click domain of a website, shifted the experience of the digital and corporeal. Neither is any less real, they are simply different in their phenomenology, bringing to bear an acute awareness of spatial politics. During the online writing workshop conducted by Dutch activist and academic, Geert Lovink, the opportunities availed by lists to develop writing and theses were explored through a discussion list about the ethics of new media artistic practices. In this experiment, the participants sat at their iMacs in the Alchemy computer lab and communicated via list rather than face to face. Like so many forums, there are always more questions than answers and the situation itself was not without its contradictions:

>Dream of breaking away from the alienated computer and speak
>to each other.
>Are we using computers because of the fear to communicate face
>to face as the coloniser do with the subaltern?

In the first satellite event, 'Hardspace vs Softspace', issues about space were raised by the speakers and Alchemy tutors, Mike Stubbs, Sara Diamond, Alexei Shulgin, Ross Gibson and Mongrel. For Cinemedia Creative Director, Gibson, all spaces have time in them: "we give ourselves access to spaces, inhabit them, through time." The past, present and potentials for the future exist within spaces. Together with Banff's Sara Diamond, Gibson talked through notions of living architectures, of spaces which reconfigure and generate movement through them, where "past actions have repercussions for future wishes". UK-based Mongrel make "socially engaged cultural product employing any and all technological advantage that they can lay their hands on". Among this work, produced by Mongrel's Graeme Harwood, is a web-based subversion of the Tate Gallery, interestingly commissioned by the gallery. The work plays 'underneath' the Tate's website, didactically teasing out the privilege of 'high art' and the cultural institution. Harwood has created a damning vectorial treatise on the historical elitism of such places not only "uncovering their secrets" but also by "wreaking havoc between their contradictions".

In these discussions about space, about history, about contested histories of space, new media seems to play a decisive role by renegotiating various sites and identities. Not only are the more fragile and furtive of those histories recouped, but they are reauthorised and remediated. The concern for history expressed by these speakers seems to lend a sense of urgency about the risk of 'losing' the past. It's a concern that is parodically emphasised when Alexei Shulgin's lap top delivers a SimpleText voice rendition of Anarchy in the UK. The contested histories of cultural space seem to issue warnings about not gambling what we're not prepared to lose and about remembering what we're not prepared to repeat. In Parallax, Darren Tofts observes, "we now talk of digital art, interactive fiction and virtual reality. These practices are frequently discussed as if they have emerged fully-formed from some other dimension and bear no resemblance to the cultural history of this planet. This digital orthodoxy is a kind of cultural amnesia." In arguing for history's inclusion "in the pantheon of hypermedia", Tofts claims that we can see things differently. The challenge is to find ways to talk, invent and do cyberculture in ways that do not subscribe to a normative notion of a post-historical age.

Terms like 'new media' don't readily relinquish their secrets or their genealogies. Such terms, in the translation to practice/s, require undoing, invention and reconstruction, formation, dissolution and production. As cultural practices, they can also, as Meaghan Morris states, involve wanting history. It would seem that events like Alchemy are part of that process of translation and the title of the final event, Under Construction is an acknowledgment of that. As such, it points not only to change but also to continuity. In turning to history, Morris argues

for a context prolonging the life of the ephemeral item or 'case': saturating with detail an articulated place and point in time, a critical reading can extract from its objects a parable of practice that converts them into models with a past and a potential for reuse, thus aspiring to invest them with a future.

In the context of Alchemy, a similar awareness of history, space and difference filters through Under Construction, as it had in the satellite lectures and forums. As an event, Alchemy suggests potential, a metamorphoses, a chemical compounding or composition of elements which is often notoriously unstable, becoming or making 'something else'. In this process of becoming, we cling to and want history. It's possibly because these random and strange events surrounding and/or happening under the rubric of 'new media' are history in the making. In terms of culture and cultural studies, Morris "wants history as a source of a liberating certainty that anything could happen." New media might want history for a similar reason as well as for approaching genealogy in a way that seeks historical resonance and affiliation. In Margaret Wertheim's Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, she tells us that cyberspace has a history by anchoring the work in Dante's representation of Medieval-Christian space. In a review, McKenzie Wark described the work as:

Wertheim puts the 'space' back into 'cyberspace' ... The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace is an extraordinarily broad and deep explanation of where bad ideas about cyberspace come from. It implies the need for another book, one that traces the underground history of alternative views of space, from the pre-Platonist pagans to the affirmation of this world in Nietzsche and the pantheistic heresies of Spinoza and Deleuze. For our Dante we might read William Gibson as a voodoo pantheist, rather than in the dualistic terms Wertheim proposes.

And so, as Dante once wrote, "I entered on that savage path and froward." Or perhaps as (William) Gibson might write, "I booted up and jacked in."

[2] On the floor below, a cassette recorder emitting screams is suspended in the stairwell. Instructions chalked on railings say, "play dead for 30 seconds." People are dropping to the floor like flies.
[3] Down again and there are more instructions: "record a scream". Here the audience has an opportunity to scream back into the little machine suspended in the stairwell. It's an opportunity seized, as howling and shrieking echoes through the Powerhouse, disrupting a performance in one of the theatres. Another descent, perhaps into limbo, accompanied by the ambience of a Gregorian chant, while the screams continue to bounce through the cavernous spaces.
[4] An interactive work is screened in a performance space. As a heavy bass jiggles a mouse across an amp, 'hotspots' unpredictably trigger images, video and sound.
[5] At the riverside entrance of the Powerhouse is a video projection of limbs stretching out of flowing water. Are we finally at the River Styx? Are the damned drowning in the depth of their own sin?
[6] Over the rail and follow the rope to the former pylon which once supported immense pipes. This time, it is a sprinkling of rain which adds the ambience. In the concrete hollows, bodies are huddled and still. The instructions are: "find 10 positions and hold each for 30 seconds".
[7] As a downpour commences, it's time to seek refuge indoors. In another interactive work, brightly coloured shapes are scattered across a screen. You are supposed to manipulate them until they match the arrangement of magnetic blocks on a tin tray. It turns out easier to change the magnetic blocks to make them copy their virtual counterparts.
[8] Video is served on a silver platter. On the LCD viewer of a digital camera, two performers present a work titled, Cross-Cultural Exchange. They strip and then changing places, dress in each others clothes.
[9] Nearby, virtual catering has party-goers somewhat disoriented with a video projection of party detritus is projected on a table top and the sound of party chatter swirls around.
[10] At The Shrine of Blueboy, you must remove your shoes to make an offering of lollies. At the 'shrine' a dancer pirouettes incessantly like a whirling dervish, a flickering video projection of ecstatic redemption.

A 'recombinant logic' threads through these works, as it had through the entire event. According to Tofts, new media's contribution to representation lies not in its novelty or newness but in "its reconstitution of the historical practices it re-combines." Perhaps this is why, in the events associated with this blip-in-time called Alchemy, history has been foregrounded, meshed not only in the personal histories of the participants and the sharing of those histories, but also drawing from the pluriversal cultural histories which have intersected in this unseasonally cold city in the sub-tropics.

NOTES
1. Darren Tofts, Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology, Interface, Sydney, 1999, p 9
2. Meaghan Morris, Too soon too late: history in popular culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1998, p 4
3. ibid., p 3
4. Other satellite events included the forum, 'A Digital Region?' and a performance by Alexei Shulgin and Blast Theory.
5. Morris, op.cit., p 26
6. McKenzie Wark, 'From Plato to Porno: Margaret Wertheim's Pearly Gates of Cyberspace', posting to :::recode:::, June 8, 1999
7. Tofts, op.cit., p 11