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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

 

Night Rage, Embodied Media Night Rage, Embodied Media
courtesy the artists
Disoriented when I step into a small very dark room with a bright light angled back toward the curtained entrance, it takes a while to adjust. Low level sounds immersively evoke the dense sonic aura of the urban night—a mixture of the wild and the manufactured, birds, bats, traffic…At least that’s what I think I’m hearing—a familiar but simultaneously alien night music.

Finally, after peering blankly into the dark, I look up and detect a small circle of dim light—a screen? But it has depth, like a globe, and something suspended within it: silvery, glowing lightly, long (relative to the small space it inhabits), floating or swimming (it bends a little) or caught, like a plastic bag (to which it looks akin), in an air current. Is it a tiny organism, hugely magnified? Smaller, similar if less complex creatures drift by.

The background transforms, sometimes a small green liquidy phosphorescent cloud, or a wall of gnarled bark, or scattered feathers and a bird skull (I’m not sure if I saw them here or subsequently in the documentation) and a floating chunk of fur, before turning from black to deep night sky blue across which large silhouetted fruit bats fly.

Night Rage, Embodied Media Night Rage, Embodied Media
courtesy the artists
Night Rage is a mysterious work, partly because it inherently limits visual perception, as if to place us in the centre of the night with an uncertain depth of field and vague identification of objects and creatures, testing our capacity to know where we fit in the shape of things. On the other hand, for a hi-tech work involving robotics it oddly recalls 19th century pre-cinematic devices, replete with gothic eeriness—a 21st century peep show of dark purpose in a booth.

The makers of Night Rage are certain of their purpose, to “examine the many shades of 'nocturnal' threats to night biodiversity and the myriad myths and stories that have shaped our cultural understandings of life after light. Barely recognisable images float within landscapes of media, noise and sound as the work asserts a profound resistance to today's all-consuming media mesh” [website].

Night Rage does not offer the easy pleasures of much media art and digitalised mass media, but just how much resistance it offers to that “all consuming media mesh,” let alone ecological challenges, you’ll have to decide for yourself once you step out into the light, perhaps more bewildered or bemused than certain of anything. Perhaps it’s then, as your senses calm, that your thoughts will take shape. It’s that kind of work.


Embodied Media, Night Rage, Keith Armstrong (artistic director), Lawrence English (co-director), Michael Candy (robotics/rapid prototyping designer), Luke Lickfold (MaxMSP design), in ANAT’s Synapse: A Selection, Sydney Powerhouse Museum, 8 June-14 July

© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

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