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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

 

Interrupted (detail), Michaela Davies, Alex Jung, Lian Loke, Dagmar Reinhardt, Paul Warren Interrupted (detail), Michaela Davies, Alex Jung, Lian Loke, Dagmar Reinhardt, Paul Warren
What with several ISEA shows in which overt or covert surveillance has featured; plus this week’s revelations of mass internet surveillance (brought into especially sharp focus by Julian Assange’s ISEA keynote) – a good old alien invasion is, to be honest, almost a comforting thought. Not that an abandoned dinner table loomed over by a cloud of laser-cut figures like four-legged landing modules necessarily spells ‘alien’. But the cloned, floating pack of articulated cut-outs seems not only to be watching, but swarming. And those whose meal they’ve interrupted have presumably got out of there fast.

This first room of disSentience, titled Interrupted, smells strongly of the old pizza, stale wine and mangled pasta remnants that grace a trestle table from which neat trapezoidal sections have been sawed and snapped off. Stools are scattered around; there are smears of food on the walls and floor. It’s classic sci-fi, but those strange chunks out of the table set up an uncanny echo of the hovering figures above. They shift the landscape to one in which the assumed intruder may actually have been there all along – present before the table was laid out, and right there in it. So that the messily human meal (proteins, fats, carbs and water, just like us) is framed by the clean-cut plywood and metal, hinting at a complex dystopian household that might once upon a time have been symbiotic.

In the second room, Sleep Economy, a life-sized Henry-Moorish figure twists and reclines in a web of wires of various colours and thicknesses. They hold her captive in a loose mesh, twisting overhead into a trunk-like mega-cable which then branches out to be secured along the walls on either side. If this is sleep, it’s a sleep mediated by the network – though the figure’s mid-20th century form almost suggests she’s oblivious or impervious to whatever era she’s ended up in. Like Interrupted, Sleep Economy is a scene in which the human presence is ambiguously contained from above and below – though here, the ambiguity lies in a human presence rather than absence: it’s not clear whether she is captive or cocooned, consumed or nourished by the wires all around.

Hidden in a nook by the gallery’s street-side window is scienceFUTURE: The Cloudlife of X. The unanswered questions of the previous two works pale into insignificance as we enter a world of pure fantasy: a ‘green field’ so green that it’s the visitor who in effect creates the work.

A small stool: on one side, a blackboard and chalk, on the other, a large computer screen on a plinth in which is set a big red button. Written instructions tell you to press the red button. You watch a previous visitor on the monitor as they imagine the life of X, a woman born in 2045. Listening to the end of their fragment of story, you are asked to now contribute the next fragment – the blackboard is there in case you want to illustrate as you speak. The instructions suggest that you bear in mind your own work or concerns as you imagine X’s story.

All thought of alien invasions evaporates as I press the red button and watch a previous participant, who gives me no hard information, speaking only of what X feels: about expresion, exploration, expansion, a world in which things are infinitely open to her. The smell of pizza fades and I take my place in the chain of imaginings, slipping from dystopian mealtime to utopian dreaming – albeit somewhat self-consciously, confronted by my own image at life-size on the screen.

*

Also at Tin Sheds Gallery are Transpotage, by Spanish architectural duo SelgasCano, and The Generative Freeway Project by Matthew Sleeth. Both are, in a sense, durational works: one technologically driven, the other biological. In Sleeth’s work 3D printers work constantly to produce new segments of ‘freeway’ which gradually form a scape that seems part-toyland, but is eerily abstracted by the featureless off-white of the printed pieces. Transpotage, on the other hand, grows by the light of the sun; hundreds of seeds of varying kinds sprouting in translucent medium in petri dishes, which in turn are housed in enormous dish-like, perspex structures. The living and light-hungry quality of Transpotage and the electronically generated freeway play off neatly: the tendrils of freeway curling and meandering; the clusters of petri dishes creating an ordered, architectural display.


disSentience, Curated by Lian Loke, The Generative Freeway Project, Matthew Sleeth, Transpotage, SelgasCano, Tin Sheds Gallery, 11 June – 19 July

This article first appeared on the ISEA2013 in RealTime blog

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

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