I donāt know why Īterrorā was chosen as a theme for the symposium, but I was glad that a literal interpretation of it didnāt dominate the atmosphere. Actually, I was impressed by the sense of diversity and crossing of borders, which produced a celebratory atmosphere. And we were impressed by the helpfulness of the technicians. It meant we could focus on the concept and feel of the presentation.
The first session I attended was Virtual Orientalism: a dialogue on technological others in media discourse given by Tapio Makela (Finland) and Toshiya Ueno (Japan). It juxtaposed the real and the virtual (cameras projected their faces onto a screen, which was also their website) with various modes of discourse. Mixing logic and anecdote, they argued that notions of orientalism (ideas of the other) were not bound to any particular national border, just as the idea of mass (western) culture wasnāt. They then related the trans-location of these notions to new media where the boundaries between viewer and artwork were in flux and where interactivity and net navigation fused these.
Anna Bonshek (USA) gave a session on transcendence and the virtual environment, incorporating the views of Vedic science. She also showed the video, Multiple Infinites, an aesthetic exploration of the sublime or the divine. She argued that digital media is more able to reflect the transcendent because this media is not confined to the material, just as spirit isnāt confined to bodies.
Taylor Nuttal (UK) followed on from this by showing his research on potentiality and the virtual sublime. He showed the results of some of his workshops using VRML (http://homepages.poptel.org.uk/taylor. nuttall/sublime.htm), and his question for us was "what could these virtual shared spaces offer in terms of the sublime?"
There was a lively discussion afterwards on the role of the spiritual or the transcendent in relationships and on the net.
At every session there was an opportunity to comment or ask questions.
Then Gaudi Hoedaya, Sarah Buist and myself presented our performance Making Salt (www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/1079/). People were ushered in to sit next to each other in a central space, while I sat in front of them typing text which was projected onto five small screens in the space in front of the large screen at the back of the lecture theatre. Video images of various hands filtering and playing with salt were projected onto the same large screen at the back of the space. The effect was that the changing words seemed to move in the space in front of the changing images and also to fuse into them. While I was typing the Īfilteredā texts, which were to do with our senses, history, politics, the spirit and science, Sarah and Gaudi asked the visitors to pass on the salt that they had just poured into their hands. We wanted to create a situation where the filtering process was something felt and passed on (the salt was literally filtered as it was passed on), on many levels. Ghandi claimed Indiaās right to define itself by extracting salt from the ocean, and this performance combined textural and visual references to the process of filtering, where everyone was left with salt on their hands.
Rebecca Cumminsā lively slide lecture, Liquid Scrutiny (Australia), was on the theme of the camera obscura. It included her own work, such as her container-bin camera obscuras, dinner party surveillance sets, and her rainbow-making sculptures.
With five simultaneous presentations, and lots of short presentations, everyone was racing from session to session aware that what they experienced was one fifth of what was available. This meant that there was no one main programme, but rather five variables.
Highlights for me were: Ellen Grimes & Annie Kneplerās presentation of Jot, the
Chicago-based Writerās group, in which the net was the extension of a community project (www.jot.org); Kuljit Chuhanās (UK) Virtual Migrants, in which he demonstrated some CDrom products that reflected aspects of Indian culture; Amanda McDonald Crowleyās presentation of the ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology) multimedia projects (www.anat.org.au); Nell Tenhaafās (UK) Īraceyā search engine and Mervinās alternative game (www.mongrel.org.uk), in which the subjectivity of search engines and computer games were revealed by clever parody; and Steve Mannās (Canada) Īwearcamā performances, in which people wore surveillance cameras (sometimes obviously on their heads and other times through holes in their clothing) in public and corporate spaces.
There were a number of exhibitions and installations situated around the city as part of the ISEA and other organizations, but I only made it to one show titled Fear and Doubt -another title that didnāt seem to relate to what I experienced. The Calm Project (http://www.uclan.ac.uk/clt/calm/ overview.htm) consisted of 22 strange self-contained 3D forms manufactured from 3D computer models. The pieces celebrated technology, but lost their appeal once you got over the thrill of how clever the technique of layer manufacture was. The Sirenās Trumpet by Helena Swatton (UK) was a 3D digital representation of the words "Come to me", in which the form had been hollowed out to symbolize a trumpet, using the technology to evoke more than just cleverness.
The Calm Project was a reminder of how technology without art or purpose was just that - technology. It was a display of a technology that didnāt yet have an artform, although Keith Brownās (UK) projection, timeforms, of constantly evolving artificial forms, certainly conveyed a sense of the aesthetic. The strangeness of the parts gently folding into and out of itself (or was the Īitselfā a mass of intertwined forms?) evoked an effect similar to watching a waterfall. It was mesmerizing. Luchazar Boyadjievās (Bulgaria) installation-performance, Revolution for all consisted of inviting the visitor to sit and have their photo taken, which was then inserted into one of the faces in a wall-size projection of a socialist-realist painting of Lenin preaching to the masses in St. Petersburg. A lighthearted dig at putting us and other temporal visitors into the picture!
The installation Stroke, by the Manchester artists Māaf Jay Alvarez and Tanya Meditzky (UK), got the viewer involved on a more subliminal level. After wandering in small cloth-lined spaces, I sat on a low stool to look at a screen through a hole in the wall. I put my hand in the lefthanded rubber glove and after a while realised that I was meant to manoeuvre a mouse: a pointer on the screen that moved in the opposite direction to the movements made by my hand. It wasnāt clear what I had to do, and the room around me was filling with people who started yelling at me. I had to do Īsomethingā on the screen correctly before the locks on the doors would open to let everyone out. A voice from behind the screen asked if I wanted help and then informed me that I had to move the letters on the screen. I had to co-ordinate my movements in opposite directions and my mouse kept getting stuck. I felt stupid, but I kept on trying. Finally I succeeded and was rewarded with the message "I love you!" written back to front. Walking out, I found the screen, now the right way round, with a microphone on a wall near the entrance. It was neat and weird. Iād assumed someone had been watching me from behind the screen but, instead, the screen was elsewhere and the instructions had come from someone watching the screen in what seemed to be a public space. Realising, then, that this piece was about the illness, Īstrokeā, tied the frustrations Iād experienced to a world many elderly share: a world beyond the artists and academics attending this symposium to a world of barriers and of fighting to overcome them - not a world of terror.
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Detail of Revolution for all 