The annual gathering of international electronic artists occurred this year in Montreal, Quebec province, that part of the North American which resolutely reminds the rest of the continent that its roots are European secondarily, and French primarily. The community of artists and organisations committed to the sane development of the creative potential of computer-based media throughout Canada is centred on this French-speaking city in the north-east corner of the continent. In an island park of the St Lawrence River stands the Biosphere, a massive geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller for Expo 67 and it was inside this, appropriately, that ISEA95 was formally opened.

The event (International Symposium on Electronic Art 1995) doubled its usual attendance figure to a thousand participants from around the world, including some forty-odd from Australia - indeed it was the 1992 ISEA held in Sydney that inspired the visitors from Montreal to take on ISEA95, with exhibitions and events running for the week plus four days of talkfest. As ever with such events, far too much to see, hear and contribute in too little time.

In the planning stage the theme Emergent Senses was used but eventually it was a visual icon that alone remained - two tin cans joined by a string, the right hand one in the shape of a megaphone! Many issues straddled a program interlinked in a way that was often difficult to maintain and was confounded completely by a cumbersome Program catalogue - the cyborg, interactivity, gender, performance, sound, the Media, the Net and sculpture were the recurring themes.

Cyborg, machine-being, was described from various angles: Stripped by Australian artist Stelarc of failing organs gazing fondly with laser-based vision upon an entire cosmos of optimistic opportunity for all mankind; flayed by a Canadian double act with a difference, the Krokers, their recombinant culture was "the body hollowed out, dried up, and hardened for fast travel into the virtual future", powered it seemed, by substances designed to eliminate the pleasure and amplify the guilt - the 21st century answer to curbing the evils of the flesh? Others examined the body in reciprocal relation to the more sober issue of diverse cultural spaces across a range of cyberspace art forms, or sought "new viewports to the previously invisible, inaccessible and private subjective domains of sensation, emotion and thought".

Gender was at issue, in cyberspace, and in specific panels aiming to "increase awareness of the intricate relationship" and the "late entry of gender studies" in sound based art.

Sound was well represented in a series of electro-acoustic concerts, several panels and individual presentations. Besides being one of the artforms to have a long association with computers, the discipline was well represented by Canadian artists who have developed a strong practical tradition. A group of Australians presented papers examining sound's historical and contemporary ideological usage.

Interactivity presentations and discussions concentrated on the ethics of freedom, choice, motivation and pleasure and other metaphors associated with narrative. Forms that are being developed were outlined by several artists whose current projects addressed the core issue of the "rituals" of participation, engagement and the "tension of expectation". Here issues addressing "serial procedures, learning and the adaptation of users to non-narrative structures" were raised together with the notion of the "re-embodied intelligence, as distinct from artificial intelligence, as a component of interactivity". A delightful quote from a Japanese sage summed up these proceedings: "the way is not difficult, but there is no choosing..."

Performance occurred nightly but was not discussed much in spite of a stirring keynote address by the dance and martial arts trained New Zealander, Sally Jane Norman. Based in Paris for the past ten years where she had acquired a couple of Doctorates in Theatre Studies, she delivered her paper (appropriately enough in aux barricades manner), exploring contemporary issues within the electronic arts of immersion and interface through a description of a history of theatre. Reference to the different kinds of performance (clown, mime, actor, acrobat, etc), and the interface of the stage ("footlights", or in French rampe which implies a slope or gradient), and the notion of the containing balustrade, vividly described the considerable body of research that could aid interface designers and artists today.

Live performances from Canadian performers ranged from the intriguing virtuoso version of Hamlet performed solo by Robert Leplage utilising a multimedia installation to enable him to articulate Shakespeare.

The late-evening performance venue for the Symposium, the cabaret nightclub Spectrum, demonstrated that the hybrid artform can occasionally deliver a real surprise. Not the predictable L'Apres-midi d'un Faune which utilised the technology to reproduce a Nijinski inspired dance piece, nor the embarrassing cavortings of the Krokers company, but a powerful piece from Granular=Synthesis called "Modell 5 Motion Control". In developing an audio-visual synthesiser this Austrian group, without the strain and tenuity of desperately-seeking-hybridity, has re-presented the downbeat minimalism of 70s filmmakers using laserdisc technology in multiscreen format, combined it with a computer-controlled program and overlayed some technobeat sound channels. Played out into the ersatz smoke filled arcade and - hey-presto - a real art experience! The technobeat soared and reverberated massively - the light-fittings above seriously threatened to fall. The four images on the 5 by 30 metre screen of an Asian woman with close-cut hair reverberated, the constantly altering relationship between each image and within each image maintained a non-hypnotic, reflexive attention - the staccato changes to the sync track of her voice making words, making music, depending on where your attention had taken you - the synthesis keeping the piece, like a ball, gently bouncing to and from the space - and the spectator - and the other spectators. Spectacle it was (after all this was a cabaret space), but a spectacle not the making of a Machiavellian oppressor but Artists intent on loosening the senses and the intellect. Remove the technobeat tracks, place into an expanded cinema or gallery venue, and this would become an object of contemplation. With the beat tracks and use of a megawatt bass system, the physical presence of the work, the space of the venue, the other people within the space become the synthesis that turned the personal response into a public celebration. The massive cheers and applause that followed this 40-minute assault seemed to concur and signalled a highspot for ISEA95.

The Media featured in the keynote address by cyberchic superstar Bruce Sterling, a journo with a lot of words, chillingly vapid and mostly out there and up himself. In contrast the European angst of Geert Lovink reminded us that the media manipulation of events in the old Yugoslavia was creating crisis amongst the youth of Belgrade, the Serbian capital, who nonetheless expressed themselves through an "underground" radio group B92 and ran an on-line alternative news service!

This keynote speaker, like others, had an obsession with the intractable image - whether it was the Krokers' verbal images of The Redundant Body, or Geert Lovink's images of Despairing Youth in War-Torn Europe. Images grabbed from mediaspace, out of context, are "one-dimensional". Constant repetition of such images vapourise their origin. The process confronts us with the intractable image where narrative convention ascribes meaning as immutible, secure, contained and closed-off. The active, mobile, dynamic image, that cannot be fixed through compulsive interpretation, for instance through interaction at the computer, enables access to the process of the formation of meaning by the perceiver. I would suggest the work of the Australian artist Linda Dement in, for instance, Cyberflesh Girlmonster (part of the exhibition component of ISEA95), enables the intractable images and the social realities she raises to be successfully interrogated through a process of interaction with them.

Other artists discussing and exhibiting work grappled with the intractable, most notably the UK artist Graham Harwood whose work "A Rehearsal of Memory" re-records the life experiences of a group of people detained in a maximum security mental hospital, in the harrowing detail that works of imagination do not avoid, augmented by a visual presentation of the tattooed and scarred skin of the individuals who we hear speaking. Thrown up to huge boiler-plate dimensions by projection onto the painted rough block wall of the school building being utilised as the exhibition space for the Symposium, there was the uncanny feeling of standing before immense virtual giants hidden in the darkness.

Australian Dennis Wilcox presented sequential cross-sections of the human skull re-animated in an electronic zenotrope spinning precariously from the rafters of the roof. "The Frenchman's Lake" by the Canadian artists Demers and Vorn gathers other machine contraptions in the school gym in a noisy and flashing cacophony of light and sound triggered by the spectator's approach. Somehow in the darkened space I felt as though I had slipped back in time to a pre-computer era - works connected to the ubiquitous black box ..... echoed, as it were, by another, this time a wall of spring supported wooden boxes assembled across the room by the Dutch artists Bosch and Simons. Power supplied according to a sequence, the motors contained within the boxes caused them to vibrate and shake around like a phalanx of demonic washing-machines - droll, and making tractable the complacency of inanimate objects.

The Net was ubiquitous, as it has been everywhere else on the planet this year. An excellent Cyberport facility was available for accessing the Internet and cruising the Web sites, a model for what I imagine the Commonwealth government would wish to see in every public library, the users in tranquil surroundings going quietly about their scopophilic business, oblivious to the "transient identity, anonymity and collective practice" meanwhile being debated upstairs. Ontos, Eros, Noos and Logos were also invoked in a bizarre return to 60s mysticism, a natural I suppose for the developing esotericism of Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML)!


Future events need to take advantage of the technology and get away from the 19th century notion of the orator performing words of wisdom to the gawping masses. The quality of the event will be judged by the new heights discourse is raised to as an active (dare I say interactive), component of the symposium, rather than it becoming a showcase for various agendas and personalities.

© Mike Leggett
m.leggett@unsw.edu.au

Proceedings will be published, all enquiries to eMail: isea95@er.uqam.ca

The writer attended ISEA95 with the assistance of a travel grant from the Australian Film Commission.

MESH#7 Summer, 1995. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts