Busytown was exhibited as part of a group show at the Physics Room, a significant venue for the display and cultivation of experimental work in New Zealand where Thompson has also performed as a musician. In investigating the notion of ‘stopped media’ Thompson says, “What I am aiming at is the isolation of a moment or simple action with sound.” Thompson developed this idea in the video projection Naesby (2004). In Naesby a handheld camera runs around a snow covered rural caravan park at night accompanied by a tense audioscape constructed from a combination of sounds taken from the original footage and played back at different speeds. The image movement is jerky, as if the camera is on accidentally. Sounds of running footsteps are sometimes aligned with the camera movement and at other times seem to rush forward, or stall, destabilising a clear sense of narrative time. This closely maps Thompson’s work as a musician where the neat resolution of a classical cadence is always postponed.  Works like Naesby operate within a sonic and visual cul-de-sac. A moment of tension is equally present in each scene with no resolution. In these works sound and image work symbiotically, each informing and generating the other.

Adam Willetts, Robocups Dance to Baking Tin Beats (2005) installation
George Fraser Gallery, Auckland. Copyright and courtesy of the artist

Although the robots do not employ digital technologies they are clearly informed by an awareness of recent developments in bio-tech, emergent technologies and Artificial Life.  Willetts employs what I would term ‘a digital sensibility’, the result of working in opposition or conversation with the digital. Willetts describes the work as follows:

        
Two robots crawl around in aluminum cake tins making clanking, clicking and scraping sounds, while a number of other robots inside upturned polystyrene cups move these cups around the floor producing squeaks and scrapes, and a couple of other robots inside clear plastic balls roll around creating occasional taps and clicks. All of the sounds are very quiet and unamplified and the robots move quite slowly and infrequently.

The robot musicians do not so much dance as perform seemingly everyday activities, their sounds a consequence of action like the noise of my fingers tapping on these keys.

Adam Willetts, Grazing on the Washtub Hills (2005), installation. Courtesy of Window Gallery, Auckland

The video looks up at the underside of the robots and bells, rendering an image of small cell-like structures which appear as if viewed through a rather degraded microscope. At first the installation is redolent of a lazy group of animals grazing. However, the shifting of scales between the projection and the window diorama makes for a deeper questioning of the generative assumptions of emergent technologies. Emergent technologies such as those based on artificial language and artificial intelligence are generative. They assume that lower order behaviours, will generate higher order changes [2]. These robots may behave as if they constitute an emergent society but all they can do is make noise. The next step of self-organisation is denied them, first by the restraint of their plastic casing and secondly by their very reliance on outside influences such as the ‘sun’ of the halogen light and the surface of the plastic bucket, to make any sound at all.

Discussions of definition and terminology play an important role in the way we are expected to approach these works. Willetts says that, “both of these works emerged from my efforts to create sound installations that in someway suggested simple, organic, living systems by using the simplest possible technology.” The construction of the symets mimics and resonates with high-tech digital evolutionary systems. Willetts engages directly with the operations of media systems, highlighting the constraints of a singular approach to media.

Aaron and Hannah Beehre, Alnico (2006), interactive installation
Vavasour Godkin Gallery, Auckland. Copyright and courtesy of the artists

Beehre describes Alnico as:

a series of flower/anemone buds that grow in silence and then shrink when startled by sound. Each bud then regrows at a different size in a different space and a slightly different shade in order to bloom. Each bud also regrows with a new sensitivity to the sound in the space … The result is a floating garden-like scene full of shy buds hoping to fill the screen with their bloom. The internal workings of the computer also play a key part in the work, the more buds that appear on the screen the slower the processing power, which also slows the computers ability to measure the sound levels – making the buds less shy when blooming in groups.

In listening carefully they appear to have learnt something about their environment. Sound operates as an interactive determinant as well as audience contribution.

In the Beehre’s artwork SF.11.05 (2005), SOFA Gallery, Christchurch, there is movement away from sound as a feedback device and towards an exploration of ‘noise’ as a programming device. SF.11.05 travels across three large monochrome projection screens as a computer plays a game of swingball that has been manipulated to mimic the aesthetics of Pong. Usually Pong is interactive yet in this version there is no interaction, the viewer can see the ‘ball’ and its traces moving across the enormous screen but cannot see either player and cannot intervene in the game, which has no beginning or ending point.

Aaron and Hannah Beehre, SF.11.05 (2005) live digital projection
Courtesy of SOFA Gallery Christchurch

As a result this version of Pong is blind to the viewer who watches while holding his/her breath to maintain the silence of an unpredictable rally. Because the game will not end the “players” themselves are also replaceable or potentially unnecessary. Like the sender and receiver at either end of Shannon’s neat model of communication [3] the players, like the viewer, are rendered redundant by the packets of noise and information that appear to flow smoothly between them. Aaron Beehre says that:

The work’s noise element is created through an engagement with a random function in the programming discerning whether one player has swung and hit or swung and missed. The silence (bar the projector hum) is more about an extended tension or anticipation 

In exposing the game as determined by its software and played internally by hardware devices Beehre reminds us that the specifics of digital sound are intimately tied to the digital manifestation of information transmission.

In discussing these selected works, sound and image have moved from Thompson’s approach to sound being a preliminary force generating digital video, through Willetts’ self-generating robocups and cooperative tools actively participating in the manufacture of noise, to the Beehre’s programmed questioning of the necessary contribution a viewer makes. It should be said that although these works represent only one small strand of new media arts practice in New Zealand, they do reflect a particular attitude which does not respect established media boundaries and instead approaches digital or new media practice as a series of engagements across material, visual and sonic forces.

New Zealand has a very strong new media artist diaspora but the practice within the country has until recently been relatively underrecognised compared to that of our closest neighbours. Now artists such as Kentaro Yamada, Caroline McCaw, Hye Rim Lee, Stella Brennan, Lisa Rehana, Rachael Rakena and Sean Kerr are gaining international exposure, and exhibition spaces such as Window, The Physics Room, Artspace, Adam Art Gallery and the Govett Brewster, the Moving Image Centre and various artist-run-spaces throughout the country are playing an essential role in providing exhibition and performance venues. This individual success is marred by New Zealand’s lack of a specialist media hub or for that matter, funding structure. A lack of dedicated infrastructure has plusses and minuses. On the one hand, the work being created, which might be classified as new media, draws on existing resources, communities and practices and thus is well integrated with other arts practices. However, on the other hand, this means that a particular or distinctive strand of new media practice from within New Zealand is difficult to package. The lively online debate of ADA and Audio Foundation provides essential support structures for these artists and a cultural place within which debate and criticism can reflect and motivate, offering both distraction and feedback for the task at hand.

Biography

Su is an artist, writer and musician from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her research focuses on noise and materiality in new media art with an emphasis on contemporary digital and time-based installation. She is currently completing a PhD in Art History and Theory and the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and is currently working as a senior lecturer and Head of the Art Theory section at the School of Art in Dunedin, New Zealand. Su is also a co-convenor of Aotearoa Digital Arts Network and Deputy Board Chair of the Physics Room contemporary art space in Christchurch, NZ.

Links
Aotearoa Digital Arts
Audio Foundation
Adam Willetts
The Physics Room
SCANZ

References
[1] Since 2004 Window has been an important addition to the New Zealand gallery scene. The gallery curators pair shows both online and onsite, allowing artists to explore physical and virtual spaces simultaneously.
[2] Steven Johnson, Emergence: the connected lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, Penguin, NY 2001.
[3] Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1949, republished in paperback 1963.