[-empyre-] introducing online2004 - Australian Culture Now

["Melinda Rackham" <melindar@acmi.net.au>]

Art encompasses a multitude of faces in our networked era.

In a time where tens of millions of people work and play in online
communities and multiplayer games spaces, 4 million of these alone in the
massive South Korean world Lineage, artists are generating new forms of art
like game interventions, mods and machinima. But how do they fit into the
context of established gallery practice, or do they need to?

 When we no longer trust the mainstream media outlets to provide a true
picture of what is going on, we look to independent and tactical media,
bloggs, mailing lists, and digital images distributed via email for
information on what is happeing in other locations across the globe.  When
the FBI seize artist's work like the recent Critical Art Ensemble case,
mistaking it for bioterrorism, is the freedom of speech of the artist who
works with political issues under threat?

When terms like locative and site specific have altered their meanings, data
captured form one space is transposed or blended into another location. In
the times of GPS you can be tracked, monitored and positionally updated -
becoming bio-inputs of another's  artwork, where ever you are on the planet,
how do you define a site of practice?

When organic photo-chemical genres like film and photography are dying by
their own admission, being replaced with digital and high definition
technologies, when performance exists for a fleeting moment, document on
crunchy video, when a painting peels from its backing, when early net.art
works no longer function because the hardware to run them has disappeared in
less than a decade, how do we, or indeed do we even want to preserve the
image movement and moment in time?

Over the next month,  -empyre- is pleased to host these discussions
coinciding with the opening of the "2004 - Australian Culture Now"
exhibition at the Australian Center for the Moving Image and the National
Gallery of Victoria. Dialogue will be structured in 4 distinct weeks with 25
invited guests - artists, collectives, curators, theorists, and information
professionals, discussing diverse forms from networked art, painting,
performance, television and print media, data capture, software art,
tactical media, game modification, net.radio, machinima, mobile GPRS work,
and video:

June 3 - 9 "click for activism"
Tactical media and political art engages with issues of social change, as
artists as activists utilise their online, gallery, print and performance
and video practices to highlight current issues. Facilitated by Melinda
Rackham, with artists Scott Redford and Sue Dodd, producer Sam de Silva, and
artist teams Escape from Woomera, and boat-people.org.

June 10 -16 "in situ"
As place dissolves in an increasingly connected world what becomes of
situated practice? Artists and curators from multiple disciplines on and
offline discuss site aesthetics the transportability and specificities of
installation.  Facilitated by Alexie Glass, with artists Nat and Ali, Adam
Nash, Chris Caines, Zina Kaye and qnoors.

June 17 - 23 "game to game"
How do multi-user games, game mods and machinima fit into a gallery context?
Join this discussion of the art and theory of games and game technologies.
Facilitated by Helen Stuckey, with artists Anita Johnson, Escape from
Woomera, Troy Innocent, Rebecca Cannon, and theorist Dr Melanie Swalwell.

June 24 - 30 "media, mutation, migration and decay"
Should we preserve paintings, performance work, screen media and online
work, or let them fade away? Questions of stability, ephemerality, and
archiving are addressed by those working in the field. Facilitated by Clare
Stewart, with artists Damien Frost, Tom Nicholson and David Wadelton,
software artist Tim Plaisted and information professionals Margaret Phillips
and Paul Koerbin from the PANDORA archive.


____________________________________
http://www.acmi.net.au/2004      2004
http://www.acmi.net.au           Australian Centre for the Moving Image
http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au           National Gallery of Victoria




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