electrofringe 2003

Newcastle, Australia. The traditional country of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples. A city in transition, creeping out of the heavy metal layer of soot and dust into a bath of gossamer virtual particles? A knowledge or service economy built or retrained from the ruins of defunct industry? With the closure of the steel mill and other major employers, the demographics are on the move: the university is now the largest employer in the city and significantly more women professionals are employed than male citywide. Inviting surf beaches, historic architecture, shopping and café precincts and bushland cut against the expanse of suburbs, empty shops and the busy port - tourism and retiree living only two hours from Sydney and a gateway to the grape growing Hunter Valley. Every Novocastrian I speak to, including some relatives, loves this city.

Electrofringe, one of a complex of arts and cultural events happening in Newcastle simultaneously under the rubric of This Is Not Art, provides another inflection to the swathe of renewal agendas: there's no social or economic renewal without culture, technology and knowledge. This is a city that either wants or needs to be associated with such shifts.

This Is Not Art began in 1998 and as an umbrella for six media events and its name is adopted from some graffiti on a disused building in the city heart: a building also earmarked for 'renewal'. It includes Electrofringe, National Young Writers Festival, Sound Summit, National Student Media Conference, Critical Animals and Radioactive. For the first time this year, TINA.ORG published a printed program and initiated a temporary radio station, TINAFM, a project which provided training for young locals in radio presentation and production. Having been around for a few years, the festival like the city is undergoing some rethinking and redirecting in the face of unpredictable economic tides. It faces the questions that so many arts and cultural organisations encounter at present:

This Is Not Art, as a whole, is moving in directions that keep in mind that the event needs to be viable and sustainable for the long term. Although the events in This Is Not Art receive Federal, State and Local government funding, the political winds are unreliable and prone to sudden change. As the festival has grown it have become a major event that still has no properly paid, year-round staff, and is run by a dedicated team of volunteers kept alive by multivitamins, caffeine and sugar.

The festival offered more than 50 workshops, panels, presentations and masterclasses involving over 100 artists from around the world sharing ideas on how, why and with what they make new media art. It's rather a full program and I only skimmed the surface of what was an effusively informative and collaboratively infused event. There's nothing forced here and the gearing is *alternative* (with an indymedia, radical inflection) rather than academic or institutional and the ethos is hinged by info, tech and skills sharing, risk-taking and 'creative naughtiness'. I'm actually attending the festival for only two of its five days to participate in the 'Text' strand of the Electrofringe, three panels which featured the-phone-book.com, James Stuart, Lisa Gye, Richard Tipping, Anne Walton and Darren Tofts. Text was one of six strands forming the framework for this year's Electrofringe:

:: Game Art - pushing game interfaces and game culture into new areas of aesthetics, content and interactivity
:: Sound - focussing on surround sound audio spatialisation and patching, from scratch to advanced
:: AudioVisual - integrations of sound and visuals utilising multiple methods ranging from lo-fi to hyper-hi-tech
:: Culture Talk - interrogating screen and new media culture for growth and sustainability
:: Text in New Media - integration and tensions between text and tech
:: Installation - manifesting virtual worlds

4pm :: 3 October

FraGGed, a game art exhibition featuring work by Anita Johnston, Cory Arcangel, Josephine Starrs + Leon Cmielewski, Richard Allen + Kris Jasper and Kipper, was curated by Thea Bauman. The exhibition presented hacks of Nintendo Entertainment Systems, subversive/activist games, modified game engines and screenings of visual excerpts by Australian and International artists. I am sorry to admit that 'game culture' isn't my thing but I note that artists, writers and academics are increasingly engaging the aesthetics and technologies of gaming for subversive, discursive and narrative ends. Because I am not wholly familiar with games platforms, I found many of the works were not initially 'readable' or particularly available and required deciphering. So, after some random button pressing, conferring with my companion and clumsy interaction, 'playing' took on more challenging overtones in several of these 'interventions' and 'reinventions' of games. Games have rules which these artworks seem to flaunt and that's unnervingly displacing - reflexively, I was wondering about my role as a 'player/user/viewer'.

Disorientation either within the game or by the user was integral to several of the works including Anita Johnson's Underland and Mike Paget's Thee Long Walk of a Questing Knight Striken Wot With Thee Zombie Plague. In the latter, a medieval knight suffering the affliction described in the title is lost in contemporary suburban North America and users can attempt to provide some guidance. It was the only work that overtly referenced the 'medieval imaginary' that was so common in gaming worlds.

Richard Allen and Kris Jasper's installation, One Vs Many provided a platform for more bodily and physical interaction. It has a large scale interface which seems to function best when more than one person is playing because no single body can operate or access its parts simultaneously. I watched a couple of people working together to effect changes on the screen, stretching and reaching with all their limbs. It's an inelegant type of performance but an effective one which emphasises the necessity for collaboration and strategy among the players.

In Cory Arcangel's I Shot Andy Warhol, a reprogrammed Nintendo Entertainment System video game cartridge and light gun, users take aim at Andy Warhol in an adaptation of Hogan's Alley. In shooting gallery style, I'm presented with 8-bit images of Warhol, The Pope, Colonel Sanders and others and supposed to shoot at the Warhol image. Personally, I'd rather not be shooting at anyone but of the choices available for target practice, Warhol is the least offensive by my standards. Perhaps that's the point. Arcangel also produced Video Ravings, a hacked version of Mario 2 where the user wins the game simply by inserting the cartridge. With rave-style graphics and music, there's an air of celebration about this work because everyone's a winner.

Histories converge in the John Paynter Gallery which is a former Police Station and now Newcastle's police museum. In Johan Brucker-Cohen's installation, PoliceState, remote controlled toy police cars respond to information sent via FBI surveillance software, Carnivore. Brucker-Cohen seeks to 'reverse the surveillance role of law enforcement, rendering it subservient to the data being gathered'. Carnivore is the most recent generation of FBI surveillance software which accesses data (such as email, urls, Instant Messages, etc...) sent through ISPs. When 'sensitive information' is sourced, it is translated into binary code and triggers particular movements and reactions from the 20 toy police cars. Accordingly, 'the police become puppets of their own surveillance' at the hands of an external party which appropriates information to control the police and the ways in which that information is used. This work emerges from those very frightening repercussions of the 'war on terror', specifically the information war that governments are declaring on their citizens by curtailing and infringing a range of 'rights' such as rights of association and religion, free speech and privacy. It's the stuff of fear and disenfranchisement as well as paranoia and hysteria. In that vein, I would have liked to hear an exchange between Brucker-Cohen and another Electrofringe guest, David Cox whose Lost Spaces Part 2 - Spaces of Command and Control featured in the program.

6.30pm :: 3 October

Further drawing on these themes, Big City Paranoia was part of the screening program, ElectroProjections, three programs by young and emerging Australian artists curated by festival directors Gail Priest and Vicky Clare. The works present those moments in urban living which are resplendent with tense uncertainty, nightmarish visions and hidden threats. Cat Hope hones in on the minutiae of domestic space in her HomeFear series. These vignettes show in frightening detail, the terrors of domesticity - extreme close ups of a pixellated screen and plumbing coupled with exaggerated sounds make for confusion. The work reveals those things we prefer to keep concealed like bodily waste, filth and radiation. Antonia Fredman's The Amateur Developer's Handbook is a hilarious and graphically stylish guide to property development. It's astute appropriation of lifestyle marketing and DIY media highlights inequities within major cities. It's an insidiously vapid lifestyle dream which lacks conscience as recent news reports attest - the NSW state government is being pressured to sell off housing commission (public housing) on the Harbour because low income earners shouldn't be entitled to those million dollar views in the inner city at such low rents. A couple of decades ago, the NSW government was commended for having the foresight of housing policies which encouraged a social mix.

Where there's real estate and urbanisation, there's graffiti. An experimental documentary, Political Graffitti by Brianna Lory and Duncan Freedman explores underground art forms and political expression. It's an enlightening look at this practice of 'urban anarchy' told primarily from the perspective of a man who's identity is hidden, frequently cutting to a showcase of stencilled and sprayed political and artistic graffiti. It provides insights into the heterogeneity of graffiti subcultures and practices, although I find the narrator/interviewee's passing references to gallery based artistic practices as 'artwank' jarring. In a more freeform documentary/documentation style, Tim Parish's Spaceship Earth, 2002 provides a passenger's-eye-view of the 'critical path' of spaceship Earth, a reference to Buckminster Fuller's idea that 'Earthians' must work as a crew if we are to survive on "spaceship Earth." It's an uncertain, cataclysmic future in which the excesses of environmental degradation and urbanisation are spectacularly stunning and stifling. Said Buckminster Fuller: "Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to make it economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do."

10am :: 4 October

One of the highlights, for me, was meeting and talking with Fee Plumley and Ben Jones from the UK-based the-phone-book-ltd in a session called Text Vs Technology. Joined by Melbourne writer Lisa Gye and Sydney DJ and writer James Stuart [c-side], the session generated some strong discussion and ideas on the ways in which the crossings of text and technology provide new opportunities for writing and writers.

As a company the-phone-book-ltd examines emerging technologies ('convergence' technologies, but specifically mobile phones and wireless devices) and establish innovative creative projects and workshops for both non-technical and technical people, so they can explore the opportunities these technologies offer. "Our angle is essentially a 'call to arms'," Plumley said. "'Wireless' is a new form of data space and should be as accessible as the internet has become, otherwise it'll just be filled with adverts and corporate rubbish."

Their key projects have been the-phone-book.com comprised of 150 word short stories for mobiles, artones.net examining artist designed ringtones and logos and the-sketch-book.com focusing on moving image media for mobiles. Prior to the session Jones whips out his mobile to show a short video - there are limitations and you need to download a player but a mobile phone can store three minutes of video. It's a Punch and Judy remake of the shower scene from Psycho: if the scene changes are too fast, the image goes 'crunchy' so this remake isn't as rapidly cut as the Hitchcock original.

Both Jones and Plumley advocate that new technologies require content. "If you haven't got the content, then you haven't got the technology," said Jones. Unless phone and wireless users make their own content, they will be the recipients of lashings of commercial content - sport and Playboy are the biggest content providers for the '3' mobiles. Even though some knowledge of code is required, Plumley and Jones assure us that it's relatively easy to make your own mobile and wireless content (if you know HTML then you will get a handle on the syntax of Wireless Markup Language). According to Plumley, the-phone-book-ltd is all about empowerment and making the technology work harder for them.

Noon :: 4 October

[ill]uminations was one of two programs also curated by Priest and Clare of screen works presented at Newcastle Regional Art Gallery. It's a compelling program, featuring works by Aaron Taylor, Anne-Maree Taranto, Kirsten Packham, Paul Mosig, Qing Huang and Sumugan Sivanesan, which promises 'mind alteration' in their explorations of light, texture, sound and sense. These predominantly minimal video and animations works each explore subtleties in meditative and compelling ways using such devices as repetition and pattern. I'm often astounded by the ways in which simplicity (or its allusion) and detail (or its absence) is so involving. Anne-Maree Taranto's Quantum Dreamtime opens with a solarised extreme close-up of the middle of a face, cropped on the brow, pupils and below nostrils. The image is grey and white - it's not until the eyes blink that I realise it's a face - and then it dissolves into a series of music accompanied mathematically configured patterns, particles and movements.

The Way is a breathtaking work by Qing Huang exploring and adapting ancient Chinese principles in 3D animation. Each 'brushstroke' pours across the screen in a way that makes them seem both fluid and physical (in the sense that they are being simultaneously brushed, shaped and moulded). I do feel like I am inside the strokes as they flow and reform from branch to fish to bridge to flower to water. Both Taranto's and Huang's works offer a liminal effect which confuses and complicates the relationship between interior and exterior. While this transport is potentially unsettling, the effect of these works is blissful gentleness. In Sumugan Sivansen's The Bedroom a fluorescent light is repeatedly switched on and each frame is remapped to a sequence of construction sounds. It has a surprisingly poetic edge as the flickering light dances to the tune of jackhammers and other 'heavy' sounds. The artist has choreographed and composed light and weight out of opposition into intertwined communion.

As I said earlier, I only scratched the surface of Electrofringe having spent a mere two of its five days in town. I missed some works that I was keen to see such as the Portasonde site specific sound installation at Shepherds Hill and the Archimedia presentation which I also happened to miss in Brisbane. The organisation of the festival into strands made it possible for practitioners to focus on and develop skills specific to their artforms and interests as well as engage other practices for a little interdisciplinary exposure: I'd heard a few people say they were following particular strands. With so much free, funky and relevant stuff to see, hear and do, it's definitely worth the train fare to get in on everything that this event and this city will have to offer in their future incarnations. I returned home recharged and enthused - although wishing I'd done more and stayed longer - after being immersed in new and radical works and approaches from people who, as artists, were really *into* technology and what we can do with it aesthetically and politically. So, congratulations and thank you to all involved ...

Related Sites

Electrofringe
http://www.electrofringe.org

This Is Not Art
http://www.thisisnotart.org

the-phone-book-ltd
http://www.the-phone-book.ltd.uk
http://www.the-phone-book.com
http://www.artones.net
http://www.the-sketch-book.com

Octapod
http://www.octapod.org

Johan Brucker-Cohen
http://www.coin-operated.com/projects/policestate.html

Archimedia
http://dcox.customer.netspace.net.au/archimedia.html

c-side
http://www.c-side.com.au

dualpLOVER
http://www.dualplover.com

small worlds : a romance
http://www.smallworldsexhibition.com

Ø YES
http://www.makeworlds.org
http://www.kein.org/blog

Cornerfold
http://www.sbs.com.au/cornerfold

Vibewire
http://www.vibewire.net