Moira Corby's work 'My Memory Your Past' will premiere in a program of women working with new imaging technologies presented by MIMA and WIFT as part of Celebrating Women 1994 to be held at the National Gallery of Victoria on Saturday 26 February 1994. Lisa Logan spoke to Moira about her work.

What is your background in art practice?

What work did you do in Sydney?

I did installation based work with PC2 and Shovelhead. I also worked for Jenny Orchard, a ceramics sculptor, sharing a studio.

I worked with an improvisational theatre group, on lighting and set design. That's when I started working with the Gothic archways project. I wanted to make an installation piece that was triggered during performance. Sound would be triggered in the space to create a different space, based on Euclidian geometry and medieval philosophy. When I was first living in Sydney I discovered Hildegarde Von Bingen and have been inspired by her since.

The archways project has now become My Memory Your Past. How did that develop?

It started with an idea to try to create a space such that when people walked through, it would elicit a particular response because of the sound people were triggering and because of the actual dimensions of the space. I prepared some architectural drawings and studied electronics to learn to make triggering devices. I found it difficult working out how to position these triggering devices and made some marquettes. I wanted to make the piece out of very tall PVC piping forming archways. At about this time, I met Natalie Jeremijenko. She invited me to Melbourne to continue my work on a computer. I became totally immersed in building objects. To make something you would like to make an installation space, being able to see it, change things, move around the entire space. That was a CADCAM package. I thought, I have to learn about this. I applied to the Australian Network of Art & Technology (ANAT) summer school and was accepted. A month-long intensive.

My purpose was to make my Gothic archways in a 3D space so that I could present that as a really good package to plastics companies who would be so enamoured by the idea that they would do the extrusions for me. I actually came out with one Gothic archway. I had to learn 3D computer animation from scratch. I used Amiga 2D animation soft ware as a sketching board to develop ideas very quickly that would take six months to develop normally.

There was an open day at the end of the ANAT course. Mike Gigante from Advanced Computer Graphics Centre at CITRI, RMIT saw my work and invited me back to finish the project and to expand it into an animation.

I spent the next six months travelling between teaching terms in Sydney. Then I realised it was taking so long because I had to learn so much. So I decided that I would spend the next four years learning about the computer because I could see that it was a fantastic tool in itself. I can see myself being able to express the concepts that I want to get out to people.

Has it changed the work?

Of course. I can get in there and build things that can be twenty feet tall, can be a whole universe.

Are you still planning to physically build this installation?

No, at the moment I'm thinking it will be a virtual world, where the viewer can enter a space and in the same way trigger devices. I worked on a piece recently with people from the ACGC in collaboration with musicians Chris Coe and Jeff Pressing that was a virtual aquarium. They were using triggering devices.

The computer space actually expands what you can do in the real world. A virtual world does not have the same physical constraints. You also have a huge expansion of opportunities. You are God in this space - determining the whole world from the colour of the sun to the boundaries. So you actually have to be very clear about what your boundaries are and what your purpose is. There have been a few changes recently to the Gothic archways project. The piece will start off in 2D which immediately situates us in a Medieval perspective and then the viewer moves into 3D.

At which point did you approach the Australian Film Commission?

I was making enquiries abut how I could build this, how I could sustain myself and move to Melbourne. I eventually heard through the grapevine about the New Image Research grants and met with Gary Warner and Mark Titmarsh at the AFC. I put together a package before I moved to Melbourne and received a grant at the beginning of this year. I decided to do my Masters in that area as people were inviting me from RMIT and Swinburne. I was looking around to see who would be able to support what I was doing because getting access to new technology takes an incredible amount of energy and persistence. Also you have to be able to explain your work not only to art people but to technicians and scientists, people who are not necessarily familiar with or sympathetic to what you are trying to achieve.

Do you consider your work experimental, as work at the cutting edge?

When I first started, I did get very cyber for a while. I called myself Cyber Hybrid. Now I'm Dot Slash. It's such an accelerated learning curve when you first tap into that space and you're totally immersed in it. It is like a new world and you come into contact with a lot of people from different disciplines and with different expertise. You realise you can convey your ideas to technicians and computer programmers and that they also get things from you. For me, art is not just about product, it's about process. That is why I have always felt incredibly stymied by a still, by an artwork that is made and finished and therefore historicised. I prefer temporal mediums. Decaying mediums, something that you have to interact with.

Other than support from funding bodies, have you sought support from industry for your work?

That's the sort of thing that is happening at CITRI. It is because we are really pushing the software, probably beyond the designer's intention. That leads to a technician going away and attempting to solve your problem and that can then be applied to an engineering problem. I'm excited about being in an area of practice where I can talk with and collaborate with different disciplines. I think for too long, since the eighteenth century, there has been a gulf between rational scientific process and art. Artists have not been considered valuable, even though they are aesthetically and visually trained. It's really up to artists to convey this to society so that such collaborations can add meaning and value to work that other people are doing and to our work. I did work with plastics people in the initial stages of the archways project. They were really helpful and quite excited, giving me boxloads of plastic pieces. I had to approach them in a serious and professional way about my work and learn how to explain my ideas.

At present I am based at CITRI. I guess eventually I will be looking to software companies to support my work. It is a tradition in Europe to have artists working with industry and accepted practice Japan. Funding bodies could be helpful in supporting initial collaborations of this kind.

How have other artists responded to this area of work?

People have very different responses. lt depends on where they are and what they're doing. Scepticism I think can result from techno-fear. There is a whole Luddite section of the community who are happy to use motor cars, expresso machines, microwave ovens and automatic tellers. I find that once you can talk to people about the area you can catch their enthusiasm. Lack of access means people find it difficult to acquire a very real understanding, except through things they read.

People think you must have a brilliant mind - it's just a learning process, like other learning processes. I think some thing that is intimidating for people is that the interface is a box - a mouse with a keyboard - so there's not that hands-on interaction.

I have heard the suggestion that there is little craft to computer aided art & design (CAAD), the notion that a child could make these images (familiar to all photographers). How do respond to this suggestion?

It's just a tool. As a ceramicist, I was continually involved in the art/craft debate and I hated it and can almost not engage with it. Every medium used requires a certain acquisition of craft. It's also to do with its replicable nature, even more so with CAAD as digital copies are identical to the 'original'. I think what is wonderful about computer technology is that people have come from such a variety of backgrounds as artists. What I would like to do is work collaboratively with people in the 3D world. Each specialising in certain areas, such as lighting and textures. There are so many different areas, it's incredibly complex and takes a long time to get something done. I've been working on the Gothic archways project since 1991. That project will be finished in February 1994.

I develop textures in a 2D environment using Full Colour Publisher and then transfer these into the Soft Image environment and apply these to my 3D models. So I'm dealing with a 2D world and a 3D world. I'm learning about classic film practice at the moment. I'm reading Eisenstein's Film Sense and Lessons with Eisenstein, learning about mise en scene and mise en cadre.

I am working with a number of people on sound, including Amelia Barden for My Memory Your Past and for the labyrinth project I am working with Jacinta Le Plastrier and her poem 'Pollination'.

What artists have inspired your work?

My major inspiration is Hildegard Von Bingen, a twelfth century German abbess who was a mystic and multi-talented. She produced two encyclopaedias on the science of her day and wrote huge amounts on theology and philosophy. She painted, was a choreographer and she wrote incredible music based on Euclidian geometry. She was one of the first organic philosophers, predating Thomas Aquinas by 100 years. At the time she was hailed as the philosopher of her age. I have been studying her work for the last three years. She was a very clever woman. Her art work is quite extraordinary. It is quite modern and has a material basis. She is using a medieval system of correspondency, related to Euclidian geometry, which describes mathematically, in an abstract format, the way things actually grow and patterns that are created. Such as mnemonic growth, or spirals, in the way a shell grows. These were described by Plato.

With post-relativity theory, you're looking at non-Euclidian systems, which complexifies the real world around us, rather than reducing it. The architecture of Hildegard Von Bingen's time was tied in with mathematics in a religious, mystical, sublime sense. Things are narrowed down to the pure aesthetic of the form to create a resonance in a space. That's why you find huge vault ceilings and other features, such as the rose window facing east as a symbol of Jesus, light, and the west wall would relate to Mary. Maybe the entrance way would be in the west as well because that's the canal, the entrance to the womb, the vagina, the mother. These are the sorts of things I am bringing to my labyrinth. It's exciting because I have to go through so many layers of writing and reading about systems, like correspondence.

Are there people working with computer imagery that have inspired your work?

Yes. Yoichiro Kawaguchi, a Japanese artist, is possibly the world's foremost creator of organic shapes in a 3D world. William Latham, also tied into the idea of sacred geometry. I take in a lot of sources. I really liked Cecile Babiole's piece, Virtus, which I saw at TISEA in 1992. It was a piece that was refreshing. It didn't look like a Pepsi Cola ad. It was actually someone's personalising of a space.

© Lisa Logan. MESH #2 Summer 1993. MESH film/video/media/art is published by Experimenta Media Arts