International Symposium on Electronic Art - Part 1 of 2

I recently visited Sydney to attend the International Symposium on Electronic Art.  This is an annual event that moves around the world.  In Sydney the slogan was "Resistance is Futile" (to electronic media), with a sub-slogan "Resistance is Fertile".  The events for ISEA went on for ten days but I only had five days there, spent mainly attending the three-day conference at the centre of the program.  The conference was quite a big affair with at least 400 people attending and a very large number of presentations.

There were three keynote addresses.  The first was by Michael Naimark, a digital pioneer who has worked at the MIT Media Lab, Apple, Lucasfilm and other organisations breaking new ground with media research.  He talked about his own practice and also about how an art/technology practice can be sustained financially.  The answer seems to be that there is no one way; different individuals and groups have managed by selling works, by providing services, by licensing intellectual property, and so on.

The second keynote address was by Brian Rogers, a distinguished vision researcher at Oxford University.  His topic was "Perception, art and illusion" and he spent quite a bit of time discussing how we see three-dimensional scenes.  He raised the question "Does perspective have to be learned?"  His answer was no: animals can make use of perspective.  What we do have to do is learn how to draw in perspective.  We see a rectangular table as rectangular, even if we are viewing it at an oblique angle and the image on our retinas is an irregular  quadrilateral.  Brian argued that there are no true visual illusions, only properties of our perceptual apparatus.

Brian was also present at the only workshop I attended, organised by Paula Dawson (from the College of Fine Art, UNSW) on holograms.  A number of her holograms were on display, together with the locally developed 3D drawing software called Holoshop, controlled by a "pen" on a jointed arm.  The pen had force feedback, so that it was possible to feel a virtual surface and draw on it; the pen resisted passing through the surface.  There was a test where the aim was to discover the shape of such a surface by feel alone.    My surface was quite simple, but I got a pronounced tactile illusion: it felt to me as though there was a vertical cliff, which wasn't there in the virtual surface at all.  Brian Rogers saw an analogy with the visual phenomenon called "Mach bands".

The last keynote address was by Julian Assange, delivered by Skype (a good connection) from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.  This was quite remarkable.  Assange is a good speaker, and his talk came just after the revelations by Edward Snowden of the enormous volume of electronic spying that the U.S.A. carries out.  Furthermore the U.S., British and Australian security services all share information, so this is a first-class means for all these governments to spy on their own citizens, as well as everyone else.  Assange referred to the term "turn-key totalitarianism":  all the means for a system of political control that would make the East German Stasi look like rank amateurs are in place already, just waiting to be turned on.  Assange has formed the WikiLeaks party that is running in the upcoming Australian Federal election, and he himself is a Senate candidate in Victoria.