:: ARCHIVE

 > EVENTS 2000

Visions of a future Australian landscape

The Orbital program is curated by Experimenta's Artistic Director, Keely Macarow, and has been designed as an interdisciplinary media arts exhibition for the Australian arts and cultural program "Heads UP" for Australia Week in London. Orbital is being held simultaneously in Melbourne and London and features five new media art works by Australian artists Nicola Loder, Megan Jones, Nigel Helyer, Margie Medlin, Brook Andrew and Raymond Peer.

These time-based media installations harness virtual, spatial and sculptural environments and examine contemporary Australia's social, political, geological and topographic landscape in a bid to reconcile a more humane and sustainable landscape for future generations of Australians.

The artworks presented in Orbital have been selected to present diverse aspirations of the Australian physical and cultural landscape and explore major environmental and cultural issues facing Australia today. By casting our eye to the future we inevitably assess the past to examine our present narratives. By imagining the future of Australia we cannot forget the past. It is by no accident that the legacy of colonisation gnaws at the core of the Australian psyche and is played out in the major debates of our times regarding the ownership and management of the land, reconciliation, immigration, multiculturalism and mandatory sentencing.

The exhibition heralds in the Australian Centenary of Federation celebrations, which commemorate the passing of legislation in the British parliament that allowed for the formation of the Australian Constitution, and comprises a major part of the overall Heads UP visual arts content.

Experimenta would like to acknowledge the generous support of our sponsors: Cinemedia, Australia Council for the Arts, Heads Up, Australian Film Commission, Arts Victoria, City of Melbourne, City of Yarra, CCP and the Lux Gallery.

Brook Andrew and Raymond Peer

BIYT/me/I - digital video projection based installation

Directed by Brook Andrew and choreographed by Raymond Peer, BIYT/me/i imagines a Sydney of the future where a landscape previously mutated by colonialism has morphed into a landscape of physical and virtual extremes. Andrew and Peer's installation speculates how people will navigate and traverse the cityscape and seaside of the future by probing the shifting and swapping of physical, psychological and virtual spaces and identities of Sydney. The city is presented as a web of cultural, spiritual and constructed identities and landscapes which are underpinned by advances in communication technologies, global media and a lingering ignorance of Sydney's indigenous identity.

Nigel Helyer

Ariel - interactive sound sculpture installation

Nigel Helyer's sound installation consists of a sensor based ecosystem of mutant jellyfish-like radio objects which respond to the physical presence of a human interface. The multi channel sound sculpture installation contains an immersive ecosphere of messages and synthesis the artist's interest in exploring the creative, cultural, and technological potetial of the sonic domain in environmental science. Ariel refers to a past and present Australian landscape which is laced with a plethora of communication systems and is described by Helyer as "a sonic-mapping of voices lost in the ether, of song long settled in the dust".

Megan Jones

Sites of Interception - multimedia interactive based installation

Megan Jones' interactive, Sites of Interception encourages viewers to traverse through satellite imagery of the Murray Darling Basin in the Sunraysia region of Victoria to reach and explore Quicktime VR 360 degree panoramic environments of the region. Cultural, ecological and industrial themes related to salinity management penetrate Megan's work which captures the diversity of the landscape, water quality, vegetation and agricultural practices of the region and provides glimpses of critical environmental and social issues that underpin contemporary Australian culture.

Nicola Loder

Untitled - monitor based digital video installation

Nicola Loder's digital video installation continues her ongoing fascination with peoplescapes and the theatre of the everyday by exploring an intimate dialogue between 5 sets of strangers. In the spontaneous interactions that comprise her work a space is created for the details of the people's personal histories to emerge, histories that belie Australia's forever mutating cultural identity. Loder's minimalist installation is humanist in its scope; articulating the artist's preoccupation with not only domestic spaces and psychic and internal landscapes but also suggesting her concern for the reconciliation of people in Australia's cultural future.

Margie Medlin

Estate - monitor based digital media installation

Margie Medlin's long term exploration of the nexus between dance, film and digital media is realised in Estate, the latest Medlin project to probe the relationship between people and cities. Situating a sole dancer in a digital environment which references Australian and Asian cities to broach issues related to rapid urban development, Medlin's installation explores the role of the individual in a post industrial information age environment.

Welcome to the future

Keely Macarow

As a child of the 1970s I dreamt of the future and wondered what the year 2000 would bring. My sociology class of 1982 put a date in their diary to meet out the front of the National Gallery of Victoria in 2000 as an effort to take stock of our collective future and our cultural imaginary. I wonder whether any of my tech school peers turned up to the future that they had been longing for. And as I fumbled for the date of my secondary school reunion, the western world launched into mass panic about the year 2000 expecting a cacophony of nightmare scenarios due to a computer generated glitch in time.

Never mind that a spate of environmental and moral crises had hit planet earth in the form of draughts and wars. And that tales of children that had been taken from their families or had been used as political scapegoats were appearing in the media on a daily basis.

We had been duped by the omniscient computer crisis of Y2K to imagine our future as one that is controlled by machines. A future driven by venture capitalists and e~commerce in which environmental and humanitarian concerns were overwhelmed by global fiscal culture.

But what of the Australian landscape of the future? What vision do Australian artists and cultural activists have of the physical, demographic and cultural landscape of future generations? Afterall, the Australian landscape has been celebrated and mutated in artworks (prior to and) since Federation by artists as diverse as Benjamin Duterreau, Fred McCubbin, Sydney Nolan, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarra, Emily Kame Kingwarreye, Tracy Moffat and Louise Hearman. The question is do our visions of the future match our aspirations and fears of the present day?

The Orbital media arts exhibition was designed in the recognition that British visions of the Australian landscape have not only shaped the physicality of Australia but have also transfixed the imagination and vision of Australian culture in the British psyche. Recognising that landscape in an Australian context is ubiquitous and can be applied to physical and virtual environments such as the beach, the bush, the desert, the cityscape, the suburbs, domestic living spaces and the computer generated environments of technoculture, the artworks presented in Orbital were selected to posit diverse aspirations of the Australian landscape.

By creating visions of a future Australian landscape, the artists represented in Orbital in turn, explore major environmental and cultural issues facing Australia today.

Issues regarding salination and land management figure in Megan Jones web and CD ROM installation, Sites of Inception which was produced in the Murray Darling Basin of the Sunraysia area at the north eastern point of Victoria. Satellite and VRML imagery of the region depict the beauty of an area that is coming to grips with the problem of salination and sustainable land management practices. Jones’ time based media project documents a rural environment which has been managed in recent times without full understanding of its semi arid ecosystem. Jones’ piece aptly documents the growing measures In Australia to curb salinity and encourages the convergence of cultural, technological and sustainable land management practices to address this major problem.

In keeping with Jones’ interest in the environment, Nigel Helyer’s sound sculptures resemble a luminous, ingenious ecosystem which twitter and respond to a human interface.

Helyer’s installation of gorgeous jellyfish like critters have a skin of sensors which will tweak at your movements and the physicality of your body. Inspired by the stark geometry and ideals of early 20th Century Constructivism, Helyer’s sound installation also acts as a referent for the dreamings and narratives underpinning the Australian landscape and the burgeoning communications industry.

And what future do we desire for the modern Australian city? Will urban development escalate in the eastern seaboard cities of Australia? Will Australian cities embrace their position as major centres in the Asia Pacific region?

In Margie Medlin’s video installation, Estate, a dancer is depicted in 3D virtual configurations of Melbourne based post industrial urban environments. By placing the dancer in a 3D virtual environment, Medlin traces the leap from post industrialisation into the information age and questions the impact of the rapid growth of urban development in Australian cities and the Asia Pacific region on local people based communities. Interestingly, Brook Andrew and Raymond Peer also question the influx of a barbed neo modern ethos and technoculture in Australian cities by positioning hyperreal narratives in surreal environments. In their projection based installation, BIYT/me/i a landscape which was previously mutated by colonialism has morphed into a landscape of physical and virtual extremes where people are represented behaving out of sync with their ‘natural’ environment.

With much attention given to a humanity spiralling into e~culture, e~commerce and e~cological crises, it is little wonder that Nicola Loder desires a common humanity for future generations of Australia. By placing sets of actors and non actors that have never met before in minimalist microscopic settings for an hour in real time, Loder’s mission focuses our attention on the authenticity of what is said and revealed in intimate social situations. Continuing her ongoing fascination for peoplescapes, Loder has brought together a diverse range of non actors and actors with the intention of capturing the negotiation of social spaces, the bridging of cultural barriers and disintegration of social prejudices. Watch the video screens that harness these intimate social interactions and listen closely.

By casting our eye to the future we inevitably assess the past to examine our present narratives. By imagining the future of Australia we cannot forget the past. It is by no accident that the legacy of colonisation gnaws at the core of the Australian psyche and is played out in the major debates of our times regarding the land, mandatory sentencing, reconciliation, immigration and multiculturalism. Australians do need to make amends and apologise for injustices played out against the indigenous people of Australia in the name of colonisation.

We do need to examine the historical and contemporary contexts of the political, cultural, ecological, socio-economic landscape of Australia to progress as a creative, wiser nation.

Only then can we collectively imagine, plan for and enter the future of Australia.

Keely Macarow is the Curator of Orbital.

: : top