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ISEA2013

7-16 June 2013


 Da Contents H2

July 24 2013
Past-present tensions
Keith Gallasch, Naala-Ba (Look Future), Carriageworks and ISEA2013

July 3 2013
Data noise & the limits of dance
Keith Gallasch, Myriam Gourfink & Kaspar Toeplitz, Breathing Monster

June 26 2013
Nailing the virtual
Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch, The Portals

Night work
Keith Gallasch, Embodied Media, Night Rage

Palpable virtualities
Keith Gallasch, Paula Dawson, Holoshop: Drawing and Perceiving in Depth

The big connect
Somaya Langley, The Portals

Transformational walking
Anne Phillips, Long Time, No See?

June 18 2013
Musical multiverses
Gail Priest, Polysonics

Rainbow over ISEA
Keith Gallasch, Electric Nights

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: Zydnei, Troy Innocent

June 17 2013
If a system fails in a forest, is anybody listening?
Urszula Dawkins, If a system fails in a forest…, 107 Projects

June 16 2013
In the digital age, love your stationery obsession
Urszula Dawkins, Durational Book

Painting by algorithms
Keith Gallasch, Ernest Edmonds: Light Logic

June 15 2013
Home, sweet home
Urszula Dawkins, disSentience, Sleeth, SelgasCano, Tin Sheds

Pop up pleasure zones
Gail Priest, Electronic Art Pop-Ups, The Rocks

June 14 2013
Aural ecologies, mechanical and musical
Urszula Dawkins, EchoSonics, UTS Gallery

June 14 2013
Heck, baby, I shoulda seen it comin…
Urszula Dawkins, The Very Near Future, Alex Davies

More than meets the eye
Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch, Point of View

New tools and old skool grammars
Gail Priest, Macrophonics II

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: The very near future, Alex Davies

Start by leaping off a small stool
Urszula Dawkins, ISEA Closing Keynote Address: Julian Assange

June 13 2013
A curative dose of spontaneity
Lauren Carroll Harris, pvi collective, Deviator

M e d i a a r t t h e n a n d n o w
Darren Tofts, Catching Light, Campbelltown Arts Centre

Olfaction, decay & speculation
Gail Priest, Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris, Ian Haig, Nandita Kumar, Verge Gallery

ART, WELLNESS & DEATH
Riding the theta waves
Urszula Dawkins, Theta Lab, George Poonkhin Khut and James Brown


Run for your lives [2]
Keith Gallasch, Running the City, COFA, UNSW

To re-map and reclaim
Lisa Gye, Mapping Culture [panel]

Turning the media back on itself
Lisa Gye, Mark Hosler, Adventures in Illegal Art

June 12 2013
Outside the labyrinth…looking in at someone waving
Urszula Dawkins, SoundLabyrinth, Mark Pedersen and Roger Alsop

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: semipermeable (+), SymbioticA

Run for your lives [1]
Keith Gallasch, Marnix de Nijs, Run Motherfucker Run

June 12 2013
The uncanny in the gallery
Keith Gallasch, Mari Velonaki, Simon Ingram, Petra Gemeinboeck & Rob Saunders, Artspace

June 11 2013
realtime tv @ ISEA2013: EchoSonics, UTS Gallery

The science and art of tangible things
Urszula Dawkins, Synapse: A Selection, Powerhouse

Touch me there
Gail Priest, ISEA Artist talks: Siu, Baumann, Velonaki

June 10 2013
Being Stelarc
Gail Priest, Stelarc: Meat, Metal, Code: Engineering affect and aliveness

Life and death, and the membranes inbetween
Urszula Dawkins, semipermeable (+), SymbioticA

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: Catching Light, Campbelltown Arts Centre

June 9 2013
'Pure' experience, in the round
Urszula Dawkins, Pure Land, iCinema

Data lives
Gail Priest, Genevieve Bell, Mark Hosler, Paolo Cirio & Alessandro Ludovico

realtime tv @ ISEA2013: Velonaki, Ingram, Gemeinboeck & Saunders, Artspace

June 8 2013
Knowing your place in Cartesian space
Gail Priest, Ryoji Ikeda, datamatics [ver 2.0]

Stars and starlings, pixels and picknickers
Urszula Dawkins, Ryoji Ikeda, datamatics [ver 2.0] & test pattern

 

Heck, baby, I shoulda seen it comin…

Urszula Dawkins, The Very Near Future, Alex Davies


Alex Davies, The very near future Alex Davies, The very near future
photo Gail Priest
What do a femme fatale with a smoking gun, a fake Hokusai ‘waves’ print with tumbling bunnies drawn into the whitecaps, and a bank of monochrome CCTV monitors have in common? You may well ask.

There’s an answer, but I’m not going to tell you. To find out you’ll have to sign in at Track 8, Carriageworks, where these and a range of other tricks and props await, along with a ‘virtual reality’ experience that’s probably unique at ISEA13.

But first, potted palms and locked doors. No, surveillance. Surveillance, disorientation and parallel realities. All are themes of Alex Davies’ previous work, and The Very Near Future continues the thread. It’s a sort of ‘choose your own adventure’, a flexing narrative that might be yours to control, or might not; where the characters you encounter might be real or illusory. Where someone is always watching (often that someone is you), and where the the room you most want to visit is almost sure to elude you. Almost.

Alex Davies, The very near future Alex Davies, The very near future
photo Gail Priest
From film noir to fairytales, humans seem to love narrative uncertainty – it can be fearful or pleasurable, and in The Very Near Future the pleasure is visceral. A smile in the gut as you wonder where to go next, or size up your companions; the ‘ah’ moment when you think you’ve won the game. The use of CCTV – a fuzzy grey peep-around-corners on the one hand, and insidious tool of surveillance on the other – both gives us insight and highlights our lack of insight. It raises questions: how do we know what’s real, honest? Is deception necessarily a bad thing? Is fun and confusion – for this is the classic fun-fair setup – devoid of content? We love this feeling in our bodies of not knowing, and Davies plays on this deftly. It’s a risky work, demanding the visitor’s naïvety and sleuthing in equal parts. It capitalises on curiosity and, oddly but tellingly, reflects a digital world where we accept both constant surveillance and continuous psychological manipulation – as players, consumers, citizens. A box of handguns or a box of wigs – what’s more fun, what’s more real, what would you choose?


The Very Near Future, Alex Davies, Carriageworks, 8–15 June; http://www.isea2013.org/

This article first appeared on the ISEA2013 in RealTime blog

© Urszula Dawkins; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

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