TypeSlowly
for fineArt forum, October 2002

I recently spent an evening with a 100-strong crowd of the hippest, techno-evangelist writers and artists in town. Remember what the 8-track did for the Beats? This group of artists are plugged into PCs for similar dramatic, textual effect. It's not all monotonously slick Flash, Dreamweaver and Premier production-values either. It's grungy and collaborative, loud and stylish, sexy and hungry work with a political edge that sends a shiver across your skin. It's self-taught 'cut and paste' - telling us that young artists are politically savvy and recreating techno-textual aesthetics in reflexive, fugitive and feral ways.

Programmed as part of the Brisbane Writers Festival, the evening repertoire of film, performance and writing aimed to provide audiences with the opportunity to witness the 'future of the writing industries'. It's entirely a collaborative effort and the volunteer organisers - Clare Murphy, Moya Baldry, Jaymis Loveday, Lorelei Vashti Waite, Luke Beesley and Kelly Ventress - have big plans, promising that within three years the newly launched website - http://www.typeslowly.org - 'will be a (self)sustaining venture, creating new artforms and attracting global participation'. The website has already attracted a global community with text-based contributions from the four corners.

Back on terra firma, the evening kicked off with Brizbane Youth Artz Orchestra, comprised of Sebastian Moody and Craig Ward, performing their media sampled and remixed works, +Samplink. Entranced and medi(a)tative in a dimly lit classroom, the artists were poised over what I think are turntables, lost to the dronal repetitions of their techno compositions. Songlines are redrawn along the vectors of information flows and virtual geographies. Sitting in on Sarah-Mace Dennis' magical mystery tour of hypertext, I could hear sounds and performances from a nearby room. As the lab of hypertext acolytes clicked along to Dennis's list of Favourites - including Mark Amerika's FilmText, Melinda Rackham's carrier and Teri Hoskin's meme_shift - spoken word performances permeate the Conservatorium of Music halls with their own staccato sonority. Dennis has just finished a flying visit to Newcastle's Electrofringe where she presented a paper about her own media practice: there and back in 10 hours so that she could present her session at TypeSlowly. I also caught Jane Fenton Keane's Organelle Machine, a multimedia, collaborative performance in which she uses electromagnetic motion capture technology. The work emerges from her ongoing research into 3D poetic structures and teases themes of embodiment and corporeality into a series of cyberfeminist narratives. Throughout the performance, Keane's heart rate is monitored and projected onto a screen: at 110 bpm, she's pumped. I only managed to fit a small amount of the program into my evening and missed several key performances - Benjamin Woodward's radio play, The Space Priest and performances by Nicola Motion, Harriet Rent, Gary Newton and others.

Later, I adjourn for an online chat addressing 'how technology has changed writing'. I am supposed to lead this discussion but with an intimate group of five chatters, we let ourselves loose on an collectively improvised action-writing experiment:

[20:12] <moya> the writer as an individual should be respected for their contribution to the collective and its consumption?

[20:12] <linda_c> i think the collective construction of work is wonderful - one of the utopian claims of hypertext is that writers and reader collaborate int he production of works

[20:13] <linda_c> while it's a bit far-fetched, and really being link-drunk does not a hypertext make, it puts a possibility out there.

[20:14] <jmj> communitarianism says that we all have rights and resposibilities to the community to be the best we possibly can be at what we do - how does that fit with aq and ozco?

[20:14] <moya> is this what we need to communicate? should we focus on this contribution rather than how the online environment affects readers etc?

[20:15] <moya> audience and PC quality seem to be their benchmarks. where do the arts/innovation fit in?

[20:15] <jmj> where does the reader sit now - is the reader really the writer in online work?

[20:16] <clare> the reader always was

[20:16] <linda_c> alot of electronic writers still see the reader as a participant and some hypertexts are very adept at defining the interactivity in elaborate and immersive ways

[20:16] <jmj> are we looking at a major shift so that a reader is really a collagist?

[20:16] <linda_c> sarah was talking about melinda's piece carrier before - and how convincing that is.

[20:17] <clare> couldn't you argue that cultural 'orientation'would affect interpretation and thus contirubtion to text

[20:17] <linda_c> i think collage is a useful way to conceptualist this. the theorist george landow talks about electronic writing as collage. I like that collage translates as 'glued' - it means that there's something inherently adhesive and connecting and binding about our collaged/electronic writing ...

[20:17] <jmj> and therefore an aspect of the visual arts has become available to an larger group of people

[20:17] <linda_c> for sure clare. as they say, context is everything :-)

[20:17] <moya> what's the new utopia?

[20:17] <clare> it seems tho that there is a realinterest in touching each other online

[20:18] <moya> what can we achieve?

[20:18] <sarah> i think the reader was always a collagist in some senses... but with hypertext sometimes it is a differnet type of collage... with some works its almost like seeing the film before you read the book

[20:18] <linda_c> i like that idea of the tactile online - of being in touch. it's so beautiful.

[20:18] <clare> it seems to provide the safest way to explore other and how they interpet you

[20:18] <linda_c> there is something very connective about our fingertips in ways our ears and eyes and mouths aren't

[20:19] <clare> wiht a book, unless you join a book club the interpetation ends somewhat ...a bit too quickly

[20:19] <moya> it gives definition to an expression

[20:20] <linda_c> moya. i am not sure what can be achieved in a utopian sense. i have seen some fabulous activist work manifest through the net, like s11 and genoa. i realise it's not utopian but it's certainly resistance.

[20:20] <moya> and gives definition to temporality

[20:20] <moya> resistance seems harder these days

[20:20] <clare> online writing provides an instant connection but allowsa safedistance

[20:21] <jmj> but I reckon we have to be aware that it is the enhanced version of the roneo machine in the basement

[20:21] <linda_c> it's safe and uncertain at the same time. i recently came to a realisation that readers new to online environments and hypertext actually feel a degree of anxiety about clicking through them because they can't control it and they can't negotiate it as they would a book or film

[20:21] <clare> that's what the funding bodies don't like

[20:21] <moya> we are directing their thought process and i like that

[20:22] <jmj> but everyone reads ahead don't they - in books I mean

[20:22] <moya> never

[20:22] <linda_c> always

Having attracted a minimal amount of funding support, barely tolerated by the book-minded, celebrity-mentality of the reading public, TypeSlowly arrived as an important new media event. To the BWF's credit, they gave this mini-festival a home in its first incarnation: though it's perhaps not the best site for this type of 'e-vent'. The BWF is well and truly entrenched in more mainstream tropes of publishing and electronic writing has rated only a cursory and somewhat pejorative mention in past festivals. TypeSlowly endeavoured to broach new ground for the BWF, attracting marginalised, cross-disciplinary artists as well as seeking to re-situate those practitioners in a mainstream writers festival.

It's possible that the institutional context of the Con wasn't the most ambient or sympathetic - perhaps either a more underground or more public venue like a bar, warehouse or club would achieve an appropriate atmosphere. But this is Brisbane and, generally speaking, artists tend to make do. Here, while there are few loci for new media practitioners, younger artists are increasingly making demands of the infrastructure rather than settling for their bureaucratised, specialised programs. Project Manager, Clare Murphy, tells me that she doesn't want to have to relocate the event and she is tired of worthwhile things and people having to leave the city in order to develop. It's a sentiment that was echoed by Co-organiser Moya Baldry during the chat: "the community is so important. I forgot I had a community in Brisbane." It's apparent that there is a need for some concerted and continuous effort and activity to keep new media artists engaged and thriving in this city, to sustain their interest in this environment as a nodal point for innovative and experimental practice.