A lot has happened since the groundbreaking TISEA (the third ISEA), hosted by Sydney in 1992. Electronic art and digital media have gone from the esoteric to the mainstream. The then nascent World Wide Web is now the backbone for media, communication and global culture, and provides a powerful platform for creativity and connectivity around the world. New media and digital technologies have become increasingly powerful and accessible and have infiltrated all aspects of society and culture. The pervasive nature of electronic technologies and digital media in 21st century life, work and culture is reflected in the theme for ISEA2013 – electronic art: resistance is futile. There is no escape, we’re all living it and breathing it. Artists play an important role in creatively investigating the possibilities and pushing the limits of these new technologies, and helping us imaginatively experience and critically reflect on their implications for life in the 21st century.
Australian artists have consistently been at the international forefront of the new media art scene, pushing the aesthetic and technological boundaries of new technologies including virtual reality, bio-art, robotics, mobile and locative media, games, artificial intelligence, artificial life, online work, performance, virtual and augmented realities, and hybrid art/science practices.
ISEA2013 will provide an important opportunity to reflect on and celebrate the past, present and future of electronic art. The ISEA2013 exhibition program will showcase work from Australian and international artists engaging with the theme resistance is futile. This engagement may be a celebration, a critique or a challenge. Will the online realm of digital technologies and the web supplant reality as we know it? Will we become immersed in a mixed reality where the online and the offline (the real and the virtual) intermingle? Is a posthuman future of cyborgian extensions, robotic partners and genetic engineering inevitable? What is the impact of the digital on the physical world of built and natural environments? Does the participatory nature of the Web and social media encourage us all to be creative producers? Is privacy dead in a world of ubiquitous surveillance, digital databases and social media? Is resistance truly futile? Perhaps resistance is fertile—what types of political and tactical resistance do new technologies enable?
ISEA2013 is being held alongside Vivid Sydney–a festival of light, music and ideas–providing a unique opportunity to showcase and celebrate the work of Australian and international artists working with new and emerging media technologies. Including gallery and museum exhibitions, public installations, projections, performances and interventions, the ISEA2013 exhibition program will animate Sydney creating a dynamic and immersive playground of art and ideas…resistance is futile.
Kathy Cleland
Kathy Cleland is the chair of the ISEA2013 Curatorial Advisory Committee, and is a curator, writer and lecturer specialising in new media art and digital culture. She has lectured in the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney since 2001. Her curatorial projects include: the Cyber Cultures exhibition series, which toured to over 20 venues in Australia and New Zealand from 2000 – 2003; Mirror States (co-curated with Lizzie Muller in 2008) which has shown at MIC Toi Rerehiko, Auckland, NZ and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney: and Face to Face: Portraiture in a Digital Age, produced by d/Lux/MediaArts which toured throughout Australia between 2008-2011.
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