The Flanagan Art Prize Exhibition in Ballarat

I have a work, Ghosts of the Anthropocene, in the Flanagan Art Prize Exhibition held at St Patrick's College, Ballarat.

Exhibition dates: Sat August 24 and Sun August 25, and Sat August 31 and Sun September 1, 11am - 4pm on these days.
Location: St Patricks College, 1451 Sturt Street, Ballarat. The exhibition is in the OCA Pavilion, to the rear of the main buildings.

Globelight Festival, Melbourne

I am one of the artists in the newly-minted GlobeLight '13 event, to be held at Anita Traverso Gallery in Richmond and at the Abbostford Convent. It includes light-based sculpture, installation, design objects and video art, curated by James Tapscott and Sam Mitchell-Fin. My work will be in Anita Traverso Gallery but I will be in the opening event at the Convent as well.


Opening (Anita Traverso Gallery): Friday 2nd August, 6-8 pm
Artist talks (Anita Traverso): Saturday 3rd August, 2.30 pm
Opening (Abbotsford Convent): Saturday 3rd August, 6-9 pm


Anita Traverso Gallery: 7 Albert Street Richmond VIC 3121, Australia
Tel: (03) 9428 7557
Web: http://www.anitatraversogallery.com.au/
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 11–5.
Exhibition dates: 30th July to 24th August 2013.

Abbotsford Convent: 1 St Heliers St Abbotsford VIC 3067, Australia
Precise exhibition locations to be advised.
Tel: (03) 9415 3600
Web: http://www.abbotsfordconvent.com.au
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 11–5.
Exhibition dates: 3rd August to 25th August 2013.


GlobeLight website: http://globelight.com.au/.

International Symposium on Electronic Art - Part 2 of 2

The ISEA  conference had more than 50 paper sessions and panel sessions, organised in five parallel streams, so I could only attend a small fraction.  It was noticeable that there were relatively few sessions purely on technological gee-whizzery as such; the emphasis was much more on the artistic and social uses of the technology and the broader implications for society and culture.  The word "post-digital" occurred, but there is nothing "post" about it: all this means is that the technology has grown up and permeated everything, so that we no longer particularly focus on it: we are all digital natives now.

Some snippets.  Christiane Paul, a curator from the Whitney Museum in New York, talked about a movement called "The New Aesthetics", inspired by the "eruption of the digital into the physical" and the idea of "seeing like digital devices".  I'm not sure how new it is: Troy Innocent in Australia has been working along these lines for a long time, but British designers have apparently recently caught onto it.  There were other sessions on aesthetics, on the supposed divide between new media art and mainstream contemporary art, on the place of interactive artworks now that the hype has died down.

Stuart Bunt, a Professor of Anatomy from Western Australia, gave a talk on "Unintelligent Design", intended to counter the way that designers talk about the wonders of design in nature.  A prime exhibit here is the human eye: there is a layer of nerve cells in front of the retina, getting in the way of incoming light, and then a whopping great hole in the retina where the nerve fibres join into the optic nerve on the way to the brain.  The sensible arrangement would be the retina in front and the nerve cells behind, which is the layout in the eye of the squid.  Stuart has been involved with the SymbioticA group in Western Australia, who use tissue cultures and the like for artistic projects, and there were a number of talks about what is now called bio-art.  One was by Tash Bates, who told us that of the 100 trillion cells in and around the human body, only 10% are actually human: the other 90% are microscopic organisms that form our "micro-biome".  Although numerous, they only form a small fraction of our body weight.  One such organism is the yeast Candida albicans, which has both good and bad effects on the human body; Tash's project involved cultivating quantities of it.

Another striking bio-art piece was by Adam Brown, who used micro-organisms (extremophilic bacteria) to produce metallic gold from gold chloride.  He then made a sort of illuminated manuscript by taking scanning electron micrographs of the bacterial films, and applying gold leaf made from the microbial gold to those areas in the micrographs that showed the bacteria depositing gold.

There were other sessions by artists using science or reacting to it.  Chris Henschke (Monash) described the artworks that came out of his residency at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne. There was an exhibition of the work in a gallery in Sydney, and I was able to see it.  Deborah Lawler-Dormer (New Zealand) described what sounds like a very ambitious project in Auckland making a computational model of the brain and the face, including things like the action of dopamine in the brain.  One of the people involved is a high-profile computer animator, and an output will be a 3D model of the face that shows emotions.   Deborah is looking at this from the point of view of a curator of new media interested in how this scientific research will inform people working across art and science.

There were also sessions on the history of electronic art, and on preservation, exhibition and curation of electronic artworks.  There was a discussion of how the pervasiveness of digital media is affecting the traditional museum.  Keir Winesmith (at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, but about to take up a post in the U.S.A) described a catalogue the MCA produced.  It was in the form of an app, in three versions.  The first version was prepared in advance, like a traditional catalogue.  The second version was made after installation, and included the (elaborate) installation procedure.  The final version was made after the show closed and contained audience interviews (some quite critical) and other material.  The app was free during the show, and after it ended they charged $3 to download it, as opposed to say $50 for a traditional catalogue.  The MCA has also done things like projecting inside the gallery photographs people took during a visit the the MCA and subsequently posted on the Internet.

Preservation is an enormous problem, though Steven Jones (who was part of the band Severed Heads) has been doing a large project on recovering Australian video art, and thought that with care and attention the preservation problem could be dealt with; nobody else seemed to agree.  I have certainly lost a performance work: I no longer have either the hardware or the software.  At the festival I attended at Osnabrück in April the artist Igor Štromajer described a ritual he was making, of deleting 37 pieces of Internet art he had made, because maintaining them was too onerous.  And he isn't just anybody: he has work in the permanent collection of the Pompidou.

There were over 30 exhibitions associated with ISEA; I only saw a few of them.  I caught the last night of the large projections on the Opera House and the Museum of Contemporary Art, part of Vivid Sydney.  There was a collection of sound-related works at the University of Technology, Sydney, though they had visual elements was well.  I particularly liked Jon Drummond's Twittering Machine (named for the work by Paul Klee).  At Conny Dietschold Gallery, Ernest Edmonds had a responsive piece that looked like colour-field painting.  It was networked with two other pieces by Josh Harle and Sean Clark, so they all affected one another.  Kudos Gallery had the work of Chris Henschke already mentioned, and other works, including a panorama by Volker Kuchelmeister that was activated by walking around it moving a lever.  It turned out to hold considerably more than 360 degrees of images.  The images were made by collaging together photographs of two very different environments, the Tasmanian wilderness and urban Hong Kong.

I saw the three ISEA-related exhibitions in the Powerhouse Museum: an exhibition of work coming from the art-science residencies under the Synapse program, which places artists in scientific organisations; an exhibition of bio-art work associated with the SymbioticA group in Perth; and the Speak to Me exhibition of electronic and computer art organised by Experimenta.  I previously saw this exhibition scattered across several venues in Melbourne; here it is all collected together.

I regret not having seen the installation Test Pattern by Ryoji Ikeda at Carriageworks; it was evidently a highlight.  But I had a very packed few days as it was.

Jon Drummond's Twittering Machine

A bioreactor containing stem cells, In Potentia by Guy Ben-Ari and Kirsten Hudson

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.

Bremen, Linz and home

The first purely abstract paintings were exhibited in 1912, just over 100 years ago.  The main reason for my trip to Europe was to attend the conference 100 Years of Abstract Art at Jacobs University in Bremen.  Jacobs University is a small private university (under 1500 students), named Jacobs University in acknowledgement of a very generous grant from the Jacobs Foundation, which in turn derived its money from Jacobs coffee.  The language of instruction is English, and about two-thirds of the students are from outside Germany.  The buildings were originally built as a military barracks in the 1930s.  There is a humanities program, and also a Visual Communication research unit, which involves psychologists as well as artists and designers.

The conference was organised by Professor Isabel Wünsche, assisted by Wiebke Gronemeyer and several students.  It was the most concentrated art history endeavour I have encountered.   There were over 25 talks, and all but three were by art historians.  The other three were by artists: Leo Bronstein from Canada and Wendy Kelly and myself from Australia.  The participants were from North America, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and a wide range of countries across Europe, from Britain to Russia and Georgia, as well as three Australians (and another Australian who now works in Scotland.)  

There were two keynote addresses, one by Christiane Paul, a curator at the Whitney Museum in New York, on digital abstract art.  She covered a range of computer-generated art, from early work by Frieder Nake in 1965 - and Frieder was in the audience! - to what amounts to a parody of abstraction by Cory Arcangel just using Photoshop's gradient tool.  The second keynote address was by Eli Bornstein, reflecting on a long career as an abstract sculptor.

A sampling of topics from the paper sessions: the influence of anarchist ideas on Kandinsky and on Kupka, the early photograms of Man Ray and others, the co-option of the forms and colours of abstract art for things like location signage in office buildings, the influence of the surrealists who emigrated to New York on American painting, the political use of art in the Cold War from both the American and the Soviet points of view, the use of abstract art by the fashion industry, "found abstraction" as a motif in contemporary photography (some of which looks like the abstract painting of 40 years ago), and a lot more besides.  There was only one stream of talks, so a conversation could develop.

Wendy Kelly talked about contemporary concerns of abstract art in this post-post-modern era, illustrating her talk with a very wide range of current Australian examples.  I talked about abstraction and representation in the context of artworks that contain or result from a constructed process, typically a computer program.

I didn't see anything of the city of Bremen, but there were two conference excursions, one to Worpswede, a village just outside Bremen that used to be an artists' colony in the Art Deco era - now it is pretty much a tourist place, but there is an interesting gallery about one of the main protagonists, and a strange round house known as the Käseglocke (cheese bell), after the glass cover placed over a plate of cheese.  The other excursion was to Hamburg, to see a big exhibition on Giacometti.  In a café in Hamburg there was a wonderful example of both the use of abstract art by fashion and "found abstraction" in photography.  I idly picked up a fashion magazine and found in it a lavish spread of swirly abstract photographs by a Japanese photographer (I don't have the name).  They turned out to be photographs of a naked dancer, not that one could tell.

A number of people stayed overnight in Hamburg, but I had already booked a train to go to Linz in Austria.  My main reason for visiting Linz was to see the Ars Electronica Center.  For many years there has been an annual festival in Linz called Ars Electronica, and there is now a permanent museum, a unique hybrid of science museum, electronic and computer art museum, and animation and computer special effects theatre.  Jon McCormack, who is my associate supervisor at Monash, recently installed a large work there - 50 prints each one metre square, showing computer-generated imaginary plants derived from oil company logos.  Among other works was the subversive Newstweek, a small device that, if plugged into an ordinary power point in an area with an open wireless Internet hotspot, allowed anyone to intercept news feeds from the BBC (for example) and edit them.  I was interested to see in the museum a detailed attack on Facebook in the context of privacy law.  It appears that Facebook collects and keeps more data than it is allowed to under European privacy laws, and an activist group (Europe versus Facebook) has been attempting to sue Facebook's Irish company.   Facebook has improved its privacy behaviour, possibly in response to this action, but there seems to be a considerable way to go.

Linz also has a more conventional contemporary art museum, the Lentos museum, and I visited it too.  Naturally there is a focus on Austrian artists, though there are a few works by well-known non-Austrians, including Josef Albers, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd.  Certainly worth a visit.

Then back to Frankfurt.  I had a day before my flight home, so I visited an exhibition at the Kunstverein (art society) exhibition space, showing current works that deal in one way or another with the weather.  The most engaging was the Basteltornado (D.I.Y. tornado) by Klaus Weber, involving a small fog machine, an open cylinder and a vacuum cleaner.  When set in motion by a foot pedal it produced a small tornado inside the cylinder, about one metre high.  A nice thing to see at the end of my trip.

Nexus, a small 3D-printed work by Bathsheba Grossman, at the Ars Electronica Center

Basteltornado (detail) by Klaus Weber