Goodbye Privacy, Ars Electronica, Linz…Entering the ivy shrouded “Aktienkeller”, a series of abandoned, dark, damp caverns cut into the Linz hillside, I agree to sign a disclaimer saying I have never been anxious or had a headache, so that the orange coated security staff will allow me to view Kurt Hentslarger’s FEED.
roma-pavillion-daniel-baker
Hentslarger works with the intimate relationship between human beings and their machine extensions, and this abstract spectacle of light and sound I am waiting to experience is the culmination of his impressive oeuvre.
I am told by a stranger that 7 people had to be assisted out of the previous performance, explaining why prolific security staff are within close reach of each audience member. Tension and claustrophobia build as we wait silently in the centuries-old bunkers that were used previously as cooling rooms for a brewery, and during WW2 as an extension of the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Finally the lights drop and a naked male body appears, suspended and cradled in viscous game engine gravity. There are no horizons and no boundaries as the faceless flaccid white male body spasms – perhaps in virtual orgasm or from torturous pain. The body morphs – two, then three, then multiple bodies appear in frenzied spasm, as deafening guttural growling penetrates my body.
After 15 minutes of rhythmic intensity the bunker fills with dense fog. Visibility is zero..… minus zero. I can’t see my hands. The strobe starts. My brain kicks in… I enter white light kaleidoscopic heaven. Melt to blues, orange, intricate patterns, intense red morphs, peaks and consciousness shifts. Transfixed and wide-eyed I never want this to end, but after around 30 minutes the fog recedes and we are told to leave. I can only see faint orange-ness and vague torchlight as we fumble blindly with arms extended encountering other strangers in the mist. We emerge - altered, calm, serene, contented.
Hugely popular was a fitness rating and training regime to close the gap between your actual body and the physique of your Second Life avatar. At Justine Cooper’s HAVIDOL shop, I was prescribed a large quantity of delicious blue pills that promised to fix my “Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder.” Serious art historical remediation penetrated the web2 fun with Eva and Franco Mattes avatars re-enacting in Second Life performances by Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Joseph Bueys and Vallie Export.
feed
UN SPACE - Paraflows07, Vienna.
The second iteration of Paraflows explores the spaces of the in-between — inaccessible, invisible, theoretical and immaterial space. Its venue, MAK Depot of Contemporary Art Gefechtsturm Arenbergpark is housed in a Flakturm or Flak Tower, a monumentally imposing 8 storey, windowless, claustrophobic and creepy architectural relic from WWII. From 1942, six of these towers (in three pairs) were built of six-meter thick raw formed concrete, to guard munitions factories in Vienna from air attack. They remain today, incongruously looking for new uses, as engineers determined that the explosives necessary to destroy them would severely damage the surrounding buildings. One houses an aquarium.
The remarkable architectural space of these highly sophisticated, environmentally controlled, above ground labyrinths with endless rooms, lift wells and staircases generated as many dialogues on art and philosophy as did the artworks contained within. Jacob Kirkegaard’s Aion – a sonically time layered video documenting spaces inside the decaying Chernobyl Exclusion Zone resonated within a semicircular room on Level 8. His sonic time layering refers back to Alvin Lucier’s 1970 work “I am sitting in a room” – however there is no voice. After sitting for 30 minutes of video and sound disintegrating and reverberating I felt as though I had been irradiated and needed to get out…
AION by Jacob Kirkegaard
Trying to leave the upper levels, quickly I was caught by the light of Grübl & Grübl’s computer controlled laser scanner work O.T. This ritualistic and elegantly simple installation comprises of red laser line deliberately scanning the brutality of an 18 ft raw concrete wall. When the piercing laser light reaches the pillar it quietly resets to scan the space again. The lift descends to ground and I rush past perfect 4:3 ratio bunker rooms alive with projections, only to be confronted by Leon Peschta’s Der Zermessa, an autonomous robotic tetrahedron, blocking intersecting passages of the building. It articulates its own form, expanding and contracting to fill rooms and to capture space, however here it trapped itself in a concrete cage, and was making tiny frustrated movements accompanied by a feeble motorised whine, like a small animal in a trap attempting to break free.
A quick flight south… think with the senses, feel with the mind, 42nd Venice Biennale, Venice.
Bridges measure everything in Venice. “Go 4 bridges then turn left” were the directions to Susan Norrie’s video essay on the boiling muddy eruptions in Porong, Indonesia. Confused by a torrential Venetian downpour and saddened after reading a notice for somone’s lost cat, I completely lost my way. The only thing to do was to take off my shoes and stride though sodden piazzas, then shelter from the gushing wetness by lighting candles in cathedrals for myself, my friends and the cat.
This journey ended by meeting a beautiful tortoise with a red striped neck and yellow body decorations in the foyer of the Mexican Pavilion, where with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s retrospective, was both the critics and peoples choice. How could I not swoon in the deliciously crumbling venue where baroque rooms hung with light bulbs pulsing to my heart beat, where headless statues merged with subtle surveillance works, sinewy shadow people stretched across acres of terrazzo and marble.
Down the alley was Venice’s hidden gem, Paradise Lost the first Roma Pavilion – presenting a diaspora of Gypsy artists. Climbing tiny stairways, navigating interlacing rooms of art brut, with silent dark eyed men seemingly watching my every movement; I am startled by my own reflection in Daniel Baker’s illuminated mirrored surfaces of painted, etched and gilded glass. Baker explores the marginal space occupied by the Gypsy – outside of, yet surrounded by, connected, yet dislocated from a society that they have existed within for hundreds of years.
last-riot
Back at the Russin Pavilion in the Giardini, I marvelled at AES+F’s spectacular Last Riot a three screen immersive animation of war and cross contential destruction. This poetic response to the video game Americas Army with tableaux’s of deliciously beautiful, unbelievably thin Slavic, Asian and African youth playing at killing each other. The global landscapes are filled with oddly sanitised icy plane crashes, trains derailing from bridges, desert tanks wrecking destruction. It is impossible to adequately describe its mesmerising effect with subtle body morphing and the accompanying grandeur of Wagner. DO NOT miss this work when it premiers in Australia at the Adelaide Festival in March 2008.
My journey will continue in our March 2008 Filter -meandering:
south west to…Simply Beautiful, Laboral, Gijon, Spain
north east to…Opening, iMAL (interactive Media Art Lab) Brussels
north west to…Outside the Box, Cornerhouse, Manchester
Melinda Rackham
Melinda was the Executive Director at ANAT from 2005 to 2009.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia.