<nettime> _PROBE_ explorations into Australian computational space

[linda wallace <hunger@systemx.autonomous.org>]

The PROBE exhibition of Australian new media artwork touched down at the
Australian Embassy in Beijing in mid-October for nine days and proved to be
what could only be described as an immediate and overwhelming success.

In a country renowned for tight state control of all media and information
PROBE generated (arguably) the most national media coverage of any Australian
art exhibition ever, not just in terms of the sheer size of the numbers of
people who were introduced to the concept of artists using new media (ie China
has a population of around 1.2 billion people...), but the extraordinary
number of national media stories in both print and television -- quite a feat
at a time of great unrest and tight security around the celebrations of the
50th anniversary of the People's Republic.

Maybe around 5,000 people (including lots of students) came to see the
exhibition in Beijing over the nine days, despite the problems associated with
having the show at the embassy (ie there is a soldier from the Chinese
military stationed outside every embassy in China, so people had to have an
invitation to get in).

We see the work of contemporary Chinese artists on the international circuit,
but rarely if ever does foreign contemporary art, particularly new media art,
show in China. PROBE  changed the rules.

Linda Wallace
curator


Read more about PROBE: explorations into Australian computational space
at http://www.machinehunger.com.au/probe     (go to 'exhibition' link)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-


curator's report


PROBE:  explorations into Australian computational space

an exhibition of Australian new media arts curated by Linda Wallace of the
_machine hunger_ company at the Australian Embassy, Beijing,  from October
15 -- 24, 1999.



Dr John Yu, A.M, Chancellor of UNSW, head of the New Children's' Hospital,
1996 Australian of the Year and board-member of the Australia China Council
(the primary sponsor of PROBE ) happened to be in Beijing on October 15 and
was able to open the show along with the Australian Ambassador to China, Mr
Rick Smith. Dr Yu has since said that if he hadn't have been there to see
the response with his own eyes, he never would have believed the astounding
success of the exhibition.

China correspondent with The Australian newspaper Lynne O'Donnell reported
that the embassy had been _mobbed_: "Australia's embassy in Beijing was
besieged last Friday night by hundreds of young Chinese eager to experience
the marvels of new media as presented by a handful of Aussie artists".

So how to explain the enormous success of the exhibition? It appears that
PROBE emerged in the right place at the right time.


background
I travelled to China last year as a guest of Foreign Affairs and Trade to
meet Chinese artists, curators, visit artschools, look at work and consider
an exhibition of Australian new media arts for Beijing (notes from the trip
on PROBE website).

A number of "unoffical" artists, mainly coming from painting backgrounds,
were then working with video. I met only one working with video with a film
background. I didn't meet any 'multimedia' artists during that trip, though
did hear of isolated cases...

The computer courses etc in the artschools seemed largely focussed on
design imperatives, practical, given this is where students are most likely
to get jobs. The fine art training emphasis is largely on traditional forms.

There seemed then (and is still the case) to be very little of the kinds of
links and conceptual dialogues between the arts and sciences that an
organisation like ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology)
encourages, feeding of course as it does into an entire global dialogue
(and infrastructure) around such intellectual and creative concerns.

However, the manic chaos experienced during a trip to Haidian, the computer
district of Beijing suggested another side to the city. This possible
faultline became apparent with PROBE.

So the idea of curating an exhibition of Australian new media in China was
irresistible but one fraught with difficulties. To show anything publicly
in China one has to navigate the state approval machine, a prospect I had
no fondness for. This control extends to books, magazines, television,
public speakers and of course, art exhibitions. The outcome is that there
is very little (outside) information flowing into China, particularly into
Beijing (southern China seems to be more free). The rapid spread of the
internet is one area where the government appears to have less control.

To have an exhibition in a 'public' space meant that all works would have
to be submitted to government authorities months before the exhibition,
severely curtailing curatorial choice and flexibility, and also making the
logistical viability of such an international project tenuous in the
extreme.

Therefore the idea of PROBE colonising the Australian Embassy was appealing
-- not only is it at once a sombre, imposing and soaring building by
Melbourne architects DCM, but, being on Australian territory meant that
there was no need to deal with information controls. It wasn't long before
we were calling it 'the gallery'.

PROBE's works were not overly dependent on english, they represented a
range of media and also degrees of technological sophistication, in terms
of platform, software and computational power.

PROBE: explorations into Australian computational space dropped down into
Beijing like a satellite seed carried lightly on the breeze, and then
exploded its ideas, images and technologies onto a youthful audience,
hungry for techno-stimulation. PROBE was the closest thing to a rave@the
embassy.


the exhibition
All history is the history of contingency. PROBE began cannibalising new
spaces inside the embassy soon after landing.

As you entered the building to your left is the Visa section, in the
mornings  full of Chinese people patiently waiting for their number to come
up, on the weekends screening Justine Cooper's sublime animation RAPT.
Using medical software, the artist animated -- in the high-end
supercomputing environment of Sydney Vislab -- a complete dataset of her
own body using magnetic resonance imaging technology. PROBE turned the visa
section into a wondrous theatre.

Through the foyer one entered the first of the two halls. From the plush of
the deep black leather couches you could view west/ward/bound series of
five prints by Brenda L. Croft: cool, melancholy and deeply mysterious <"I
like these the best,' one quiet girl said to me>.

On the opposite wall the two large prints of Beijing-born Australian artist
Zen Yipu -- the Ghosts in the Shell series, referenced Japanese anime
characters suspended into the gel of a chaotic Tokyo, blurring the lines of
reality and the city and also the perception of what it might mean to be an
"australian artist".

As you walked into the main room one passed two 'television towers' on
either side, an electronic doorway of monitors showing the high-end ambient
animation blue in the bluebird by architect-trained Jennifer Seevinck,
produced at ANU's supercomputer facility. The subtle bass sounds of Tim
Kreger filled the space.

Into the darkened main room visitors were confronted with the works of the
three artists who travelled to Beijing with the show: Justine Cooper,
Patricia Piccinini and Leon Cmeilewski.

The 10m long databody of Justine Cooper using 72 'slices'/MRI scans, hung
low in the space so that people could approach closely, even walk between
the slices. By the end of the exhibition, given the pollution in Beijing,
this work was covered by a thin veil of dust, giving to the 'body' a gothic
sense that it had been in place for centuries.... In fact, in a television
interview the artist described her wish to be 'just like Mao' ie preserved
for all time...

< This doco will screen on one of the six state-run national CCTV channels.
possible audience, I guess 1.2 billion? This was one of the two x half-hour
documentaries produced on PROBE by CCTV. The media response to the
exhibition was extraordinary. I would estimate that PROBE is likely to have
generated the most media attention in one country of any international
exhibition of Australian art in recent memory.>

Along one wall at floor level were five monitors featuring the tissue
engineered mouse running along in the empty and claustrophobic
lab/labyrinth, while high above on the wall perched six images of models
and rats -- this was the Protein Lattice by Patricia Piccinini.

One of these images was featured on the invitation which visitors needed to
get past the military guard stationed on a 24 watch outside the embassy,
and directed by the Chinese government to impede Chinese residents from
entering (all embassies) without the correct papers. We had over 5,000
multiple-entry, endlessly transferable invitations to start with and had
none left towards the end of the nine-day show. Patricia's image therefore
became synonymous with the exhibition, aided by its meme-like reproduction
in the popular press.

And then there was Leon Cmielewski's (produced in collaboration with
Josephine Starrs) brilliant new interactive animation, Dream Kitchen,
hovering in the space like a perverse child's game. Leon, after seeing
television images of a happy inspired couple examining their new, architect
designed 'dream kitchen' in VR, was equally inspired to show the underside
and decay of the consumer dream. Dream Kitchen was perfect for a largely
non-english speaking audience with little familiarity with interactive
artworks. It set up a series of unique narrative pathways, each visual
'story' funny and weird.

The Sunday following the opening we held a forum for artists to show their
past work and have a general discussion. Crowds appear. We all pack into
the visa hall. It is clear from these talks that the PROBE artists have a
deeply ambivalent attitude to technology. The mood of the discussion is
positive. A question is posed along the lines of  "is it the idea or the
technology which comes first?"  The artists all respond, similarly, that
the technology is an enabling mechanism, a tool to execute the ideas, and
that the idea comes first.

The artists' talks during the week built to such audience numbers that by
the final Friday we had to use a megaphone to reach people in the space.
There were many students with their teachers from various institutions --
including design, sculpture, and architecture. The artists and I were able
to discuss software and hardware issues as well as the ideas inside the
work. One 'technical' journalist published a comprehensive list of all
software and platforms used to produce every work.

PROBE also featured a computer homed to the PROBE internet links site, and
(for the first weekend, due to lack of machines) a range of CDROM artworks.
There was a also a mirror site on a local server which featured the site
translated into chinese.


outcomes
The artists I met last year were all what is known as 'unofficial' artists
-- these are the artists who circulate on the international art circuit,
biennales etc but who rarely if every show their work at home. If they do
it is largely in equally 'unofficial' shows which may only be up for a few
days, or one night.
So Chinese audiences do not see the Chinese work which we see, and rarely
(if ever) do international shows of innovative contemporary international
work appear in Beijing, and China in general.

PROBE allowed a glimpse of an outside art practice, well established in
<the west>. Not to colonise, but to exchange ideas.

With amusing irony, viewers have a better chance to see the work of
Australian new media artists in Beijing than they do at the so-called
'national' gallery <here> in Canberra dedicated more-and-more it seems to
'official' traditional artforms of which the Chinese government art
gatekeepers would no doubt approve.

Is PROBE in this sense a noun or a verb? Whether the PROBE was a instrument
examining the body of China, or whether the PROBE was in fact probing the
furthest reaches of the body of the Australian nation state (ie within the
confines <albeit in the outer reaches> of our space in foreign territories
is all open to conjecture.

PROBE was _event_ : an emergent phenomena. It articulated what could be
thought of as a faultline in contemporary China -- a hunger for that to do
with the creative uses of technology (outside of the purely pragmatic) and
a desire for a culture of critique around technology. PROBE initiated
dialogue, but only because people wanted to chat.

I would further posit that the abstract machine of the Chinese state was
more than happy for this dialogue to begin (from the mouths of 'friendly
australians') for a range or reasons, including perhaps: a richer
understanding of the value and mechanics of innovation; developing a more
sophisticated critique of the military entertainment complex of global
capitalism; and unfolding strategies/tactics for the great leap forward.....

The virtual PROBE machine fell to earth on home ground in the capital of
communist China late in the second millennium, and distributed itself from
that point. It only moved out into the ideas and media landscape because
the people's republic allowed it to do so. The event changed those of us in
Beijing as part of the project, inside that China of 1.2 billion people, so
that we could say "not to arrive at the point where one not longer says I,
but at the point where it's no longer of any importance whether one says I
or not. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been
helped, inspired, multiplied."  (1)



(1) Deleuze/Guattari, Rhizome, On the Line, Semiotexte, 1983.


Linda Wallace
November 1999







linda wallace
po box 1357  potts point
sydney australia 2011
tel/fax:  61 2 6295 6309
studio:   61 2 6279 9687
http:/www.machinehunger.com.au



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