<nettime> Review of the CD-ROM/Installation Dream Kitchen (Leon Cmielewski/Josephine Starrs]

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

[see also info underneath article. there is a way to order this cd-rom
online. geert]

Dream Kitchen
by Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs
Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane August + September 2000
http://sysx.org/dreamkitchen
review © Ben Spooner 2000

I walk into the IMA's first floor gallery room. Flies are buzzing across the
screen that stands against the back wall, executing manoeuvres a
synchronised swimming team would be proud of. As four of them swoop into
view and begin chasing each other in a merry circle, a gloved hand enters
the screen, clutching a can of Domestic BlissTM . I approach the keyboard
that stands alone on a table, and, as instructed, press 's'. The projector
at my feet throws up new colour onto the screen in front of me. The flies
disappear and the tour starts.

I am inside a sparkling 3-D kitchen replete with wood paneling and mod-cons,
darting about the room from one appliance to another with insect-like speed.
The view is fly's-eye. I am beckoned to enter into appliances. I yield.
After clicking on the oven, I am taken down to the floor level and scuttle
under it a la the typical roach. Via hidden links, I navigate my way through
a world of cardboard refuse and darkness, until I come to a room with what
appear to be three small animals perched on stools. I click on the frog. It
levitates off the ground, controlled by an unseen force, and begins to spin.
There is a curious machine on my left, so I drag it over the top of the
frog. It delivers a coloured x-ray view of the animal's interior as it
continues to spin. The cicada provides the same experience. The rat is
disturbing, a hideous, crapulent beast with a glowing foetus buried under
its skin.

A small wire catches my attention, and I drag the pointer to it. It responds
to my click by revealing itself to be two small wire clips, which I attach
to the rat. A voltage meter appears. I twist the dial, and the current
begins to flow, creating shards of blue lightning that course through the
rat and a surreal scream that is the fusion of electron flow and the terror
in the charred rat's voice. There is another hidden link, the final act in
this macabre investigation. A surgical kit emerges, and I select the frog
and slice it open with the flick of a mouse. When I have finished my
dissection, a profile unexpectedly appears, presenting a breakdown of my
interaction. I have been rated as obedient, very insensitive, extremely
patient, quite obsessive and exceptionally cruel, which seem to me to be all
the qualities of the classic serial killer. Perhaps the next section will
not be quite so disturbing.
It is. The kitchen to which I have returned is now splattered with blood.
The telephone rings, so I answer it with a click, and am transported via a
mechanical eye into a world of twenty security video screens, lined up like
Big Brother's monitoring station. There seems to be a murder taking place,
broken down into different temporal portions on each screen. Some kind of
bondage ritual involving gaffer tape and brooms. This kitchen is beginning
to scare me. I remember that I am all alone on this floor, save for the hum
of the CPU and projector at my feet.

The dark themes continue - pencils exterminated by cheap ballpoint pens
armed with sharpeners, a fountain pen burnt at the stake by their shavings,
and a bizarre floating world of rubbish that arrives in the ocean via the
kitchen sink (I formed a collage-man and a mutant fish with the rubbish I
gathered). The kitchen responds after each visit to an underworld,
transformed from its original pristine state by the darkness that festers
under its gloss.

These Orpheusean dramas exemplify the underbelly of the domestic bliss we
prize, threatening to burst through to the surface like a partially
suppressed infection. The sterilised world we uphold is shown to be no more
than a thin veneer of techno-affect. Dream Kitchen seems to speak out
against the liabilities that inevitably burden progress: new waste problems,
ethical dilemmas and neophilia to the point of destroying the safe and
familiar. According to Cmielewski, the work aims to "infect the smoothness &
cleanliness which is often the product of the machine with a bit of the
dirt, vermin, accident & imperfection of the world that we inhabit". It is
more than a little ironic that Cmielewski and Starrs have chosen to utilise
(relatively) new technology as their medium. It allows the artists to dispel
any criticism of adhering to Luddite philosophy while subverting progress
itself by employing the very technology that epitomises it, making the work
instantly accessible to the new breed of digitally-literate audience.
This is a demanding work that pushes beyond the pleasure derived from
interactive art. At first, Dream Kitchen conjured up Hieronymous Bosch
scenarios in my head, with the flames of hell and my own dark nature
manifested in technology, urging me to turn away from it. However, after
talking with Cmielewski, the intended message seems to be one of humanising
progress and technology, its accidents and imperfections, rather than the
fearing it.

Ben Spooner is a freelance writer and co-editor of Text in fineArt forum.

-----

Dream Kitchen

Beneath the surface of this banal domestic world runs a parallel interior
zone populated with inspirited objects. This subterranean zone could be
interpreted in many ways: a catalogue of dread, a cabinet of memories, an
archive of fantasies. Occasionally, you stumble through a 'leaky border'
into this underworld where objects play out their base desires upon one
another. Each visit to the underworld causes the sparkling kitchen to
degrade, ultimately becoming an obscene domestic science experiment.

The Dream Kitchen CD-ROM (ISBN 0646383841) is available from Glebe Books &
Ariel Booksellers in Sydney and from Greville Street Books and Synaesthesia
in Melbourne
order online at http://www.cycle-logical.com/cf/dreamkitchen/dkorder.cfm

Price: A$30 for individuals, A$60 for institutional buyers (libraries,
teachers &tc) plus gst in Australia.

If you wish to exhibit Dream Kitchen publicly please contact the authors.

leon cmielewski: leon@autonomous.org - josephine starrs:
starrs@autonomous.org

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