1999 Acquittal Report - Australia Council for the Arts

1. Details About the Project ↑ top

nervous_objects is an ongoing experiment for ten people and an unstable media, firmly grounded in the terrain of experimental art. The new media grant we received offered us the opportunity to continue working on a very exciting set of possibilities that had revealed themselves in our prior communications and works.

The development of successful collaborative working processes can be trying and testing, regardless of the field of work the collaboration is occurring in. New Media arts is a good example where the lone individual may have to work in very different modus operandi when confronted with a collaborative environment. The original meeting of the nervous_objects 3 years ago in Tasmania put these values to the test, and since then it has been the working symbiosis between a (large) group of practitioners which has provided the most formative development for us as individuals.

Our work together has been multifaceted. We described ourselves at one time as a jumble of echoes, for we are a group fundamentally committed to process and to observing the outcome. As expressionists, the conceptual constraints we work with are mostly strategic, allowing for the maximum time, space and support for the nurturing of an improvisational modality. Undercurrent in our work is a commitment to exploring and understanding the nature and realities of collaboration.

Melbourne meet ↑ top

Our work together in the last 8 months has been important for all of us. After an extended period of working online together I think we all agree that email is the life blood of our collaboration, but we have come to realise that at a certain point in time human contact becomes imperative. As part of our planning for the greater bulk of our project, we met in Melbourne for a week in the Open Channel Digital Media lab. During this week we talked about absolutely everything. It became apparent that email is a narrow bandwidth communication and standing in the same room as our collaborators watching facial expressions and body gestures was the wide bandwidth experience.

During our stay in Melbourne we also worked on tightening up our web presences. We created an extended architecture for our site; curiously this took a shape something like a brain or a consciousness or a being in its own right. It was as if all that daily email conversation had become like the flow of an extended unconscious, and the experience of everyday reading and participating in a collective consciousness was actually a thing unto itself.

We created a password-protected area on the imago server in Perth where we placed all our stray and developmental thoughts, documentation and discussions. We tidied up the outer public space, redesigning and configuring the front end so we had a functioning public interface that we had all agreed on. We also purchased a hard drive (housed at Virtual Artists in Adelaide), to become a catecombe of all our material - and so the establishing of the nervous_objects as something of a coherent entity became complete. It now exists as an organism in its own right of sorts, communicating, thinking, remembering and changing.

Towards the end of the week in Melbourne, we also decided to meet a second time in a remote location rather than a city centre. The decision to go to the desert contains political gestures, but it is also driven by a desire to defocus ourselves from the self-referentialism of much media art. We made a deliberate decision not to work in a top of the range computer lab, instead choosing to work with the combined resources we could pool together as a collective.

terra_nova ↑ top

So the work that evolved from this began with a working title terra_nova, referring to the land, us and the generosity of the Virtual Artists. After long discussions on the list, research by all, and the meeting in Melbourne, we decided to go and work in Central South Australia in an Old Dance Hall in Pekina belonging to Malcolm McKinnon. This location seemed ideal, as it was located somewhere near the middle of Australia on the edge of the wheat belt, in the southern region of the Flinders Rangers. The dance hall would provide an excellent environment for a group of ten people to work together for three weeks - a work that would be explorative, performative, reactive and interactive, unfolding in time from far away from the city, carried down the thread of a single telephone line, connecting us in real time with our only remote collaborator, Anne Robertson in New York City.

A great deal of preliminary work was done in preparation for our three week stay in Pekina, including a reconnaissance mission by Glen to meet with a local historian and get the lay of the land. Glen returned with many photos of Pekina, which we uploaded to the website for all of us to discuss the (illusory) how, what and where of Pekina.

The overall strategy was one that would see us work for two weeks in preparation and then in the final week allow windows onto the work to be presented each night from 7.00 to 12.00. This final week of broadcast was ultimately documented in the remaining (residual) web site.

Our lo-fi network of machines of all shapes and sizes was established. It had on one end long feelers and sensors listening into the radio spectrum with antennae, wind speed and direction monitoring equipment, things generating numbers and temporal events; then it had long eyes and cameras that walked the perimeter. Long ears on legs with all manner of microphones, transmitters and things for sucking images in. All of this fed into a central extended network of hubs and cross-platform machines, connected to a 16-channel audio mixing desk, sound system, data projector, and finally a single telephone line and an internet connection with Telstra rural connect.

So the work made with this wondrous assemblage dealt with a number of modalities and ideas on how to wrap streams of local activity and thoughts into a coherent conceptual and data framework. We produced a range of live and orchestrated events including a live RealAudio event of locally-triggered sounds, an event for webcam of live and re-projected footage from the outside, an archive of collected material, and the use of the wind to trigger a range of sounds and images from a data block in real time. Improvisational and observational, the work explored reverie and contemplation - a sense of being and of flux. This was not a work of opinions, but a tear in the fabric that allowed a little more of the chaos of the world to come in.

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2. Value and Benefits ↑ top

Melbourne

The time spent at Open Channel in Melbourne consolidating the archival material from previous works and developing further conceptual frameworks proved highly beneficial given the intense working period on which the project later blossomed. The physical interaction in a lab for a week enabled succinct resolve that would not have been possible through the list. We spent time with the Open Channel community via talks and a radio interview at triple R radio station. The work in Melbourne constructed the foundation for the particular conceptual shifts in preparation for Pekina.

Pekina ↑ top

One of the main developments born out of the time spent in Melbourne was that if we were to succeed we wished no longer to be attached to a lab and felt the need to go (comparatively) lo-fi, to become an independent self-resourcing organism working with the opportunities and constraints of relative isolation and decentralisation.

The benefits to our community or audience worked on a dual level, the macro and micro. Whilst we planted ourselves in Pekina we became involved with the dynamics of the town. Locals were introduced to the work by visits to the dance hall. There was a genuine exchange that assisted both us and the community as a whole. We were involved with audience participation from Pekina and Orroroo and our unknown nebulous populace via the internet, while transmission on a global level reached an audience we were never directly aware of apart from software tracking mechanisms.

The development of a three-dimensional online framework to what is normally considered a linear network covered huge conceptual ground. The combination of metaphoric language play with ‘binary’, three-dimensional mapping of the web site and its effect proportional to environmental responses propelled the nervous_objects development to the point where much of what we achieved at that time in Pekina is still at present filtering through the group.

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3. Successes and Failures - Individual Accounts ↑ top

Glen@pekina

In addition to the previously stated collective values and benefits to nervous_objects, the fact that this was a developmental project meant that I continually reassessed the development of the group and the development of myself as an individual artist. I am the only regional nervous_object, and my learning and understanding in that area has been much greater because of the support of the nervous_objects.

However, I was greatly interested, during the Pekina project, to discover how complex nervous_objects are, how each of us contributes to make something bigger than any of us can comprehend in its entirety. To my surprise, I discovered that my contribution to the digital Pekina project was almost entirely analogue. I was initially concerned with the linear history of the area. This extended into the present, and while many in the group set up the network of computer gear and internet connection, I worked toward extending a network of Pekina people into the hall and our digital network.

Even in data collection my input was analogue. I walked in a line, about 75 km around the Pekina Hundred taking silver photos, organising their processing and quick return to the country, and only then scanning the images. The images from my walk, as well as providing data for terra_nova, will also be incorporated into my individual art work.

This is not to suggest that I am personally disenchanted with the potential of digital art. I merely was not expecting to contribute in the way I did, nor expecting to discover that nervous_objects had developed into something that went beyond the digital. terra_nova was the fullest and most successful nervous_project to date.

Damian@pekina ↑ top

My focus on this occasion at Pekina was to investigate brainwave (linked to acoustic) activity and explore the possibilities of triggering audio & image files from various cognitive unconscious/conscious states (dreaming, meditating, thought process, sleep). I wanted to use the sensor technology independently and relay the triggering process as an event (performance) which could then be exhibited online through the use of Webcam and RealAudio technologies.

Interestingly enough for me, the sensor technology (the I-Cube system) and Ensoniq sampler which were so central to the first installation, Lingua_Elettrica, were not used at all in the triggering process for these web events. My initial idea was to use a web browser partitioned into three frames: one to monitor the activity of the subject; one to monitor the brainwave analyser displaying a graph of the brain’s activity; and one to monitor the visual and audio media triggered at any one time by the subject.

Rather than consciously pointing the finger at an external trigger and suggesting that A (sensor) will result in B (media playback) on the event of C, I chose to explore an area where the brain’s interpretation and response within a psychic feedback system could sequentially and momentarily facilitate any number of events from a less obvious and stable condition or state of mind.

For the two and a half weeks we were together we experimented with two processes which at this point have not completely come together. The first triggered System 7 audio files from within the System folder of a computer. The second used a complex Max patch to trigger a series of QuickTime movies. We experimented with triggering a series of short sounds with Eye Move, Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta and Noise waves. As part of the development process I feel we’ve only just scratched the surface and look forward to a continued investigation and production of new work in this area.

FTR@pekina ↑ top

For three weeks the nervous_camp in the stone hall at Pekina was transformed into a new media experimental laboratory. The arrival from across the country over four days - the 9 of us in Australia - travelled to meet at an unknown single point represented as a dot on the maps we had looked at. For all of us that journey was about giving space to the unknown. The first arrivals at Pekina had not really arrived until all of us had completed this process. This process of arrival was fully realised on the first night of broadcast.

Our RealAudio broadcast had an amazing effect on our online audience. On that first night we took our audience into the space and process of journey - into a night space, with the silhouettes of trees hinted at by shadows of the moon. Into a night sky where the stars seem to shine brighter than ever before. The silence when we turned off the stream told me that now our audience had arrived; they would return each evening to share an experience in a new form of journey.

During the first two weeks at Pekina we set up a regime of context and content to be presented each evening for the last 5 evenings. We set up the premise of a digital window, a gateway with time limits. We would open the window each night to let the media drift out over the landscape, like a wisp of smoke across the land at night (the terra_nova). It became like tv; our online audience treated the window like a tv time slot. It was a strange realisation, learning it didn’t have to be real-time live all the time. These definitions were bent even further by the end of the five days: our wind-triggered topography was being driven by real-time weather conditions in Pekina, but the media it was selecting had been recorded and uploaded before the broadcast window was opened. So real-time weather was triggering the ‘only just that day’ prerecorded content.

In releasing our work from the stone hall onto the net, we squeezed the essence of our activity down a small pipe, producing a venturi effect. The background work outside of the broadcast window was about experimentation, failure, recelebration and refocused attempts: Cam working on the scripting for the live upload of data; Marty testing FM transmission at 3am every morning; Joyce locking in on spectrum data; Damien poking his brain with the IBVA; Ratty exploiting remote interrogation of the clan with Timbuktu; Anita capturing and exploring the vectors of video and digital data; Lisa picking off the sounds of the land; Rick catching ghosts with an instamatic camera; GOM ritualising the land by marking circumference; and Anne widening that circumference to bring her space into our myth space. All of these tasks were distilled to fit through the data window we opened on the last five nights.

Cam@pekina ↑ top

9 artists faced with an expanse that went far beyond the spatial dimension. Pekina, South Australia: wheated plains, rolling hills and ruins. Seeming emptiness inverts to an inward pressure that in turn forces an outward energy - nothingness is the real perpetual motion of our time, it just happens slower than some would like.

The tight short-sighted space of the city gave way to a long and slow sightedness and a space that could not be immediately negotiated by memory and signs. The hardware ship we built in Pekina to support our journey echoed the fragility that the hard core city dweller can feel in an open Australian country space. Scraps of found, stolen, bought cable held together an eclectic collection of machines like a model Titanic made from bamboo. By some strange magic and perhaps with the discovery of some new as yet unknown strain of network protocol, the thing would float and be in its own time and space and be connected to the world outside by a solitary modem. We had created an unstable system that interfaced our being in time and space with an internal network and another world at large; an organism not unlike skin, breathing the outside in.

Joyce@pekina ↑ top

In my mind there were great successes in this project; even at the simplest level of seeing a functioning network of assorted lo-fi cross-platform computers all collected in one place a long way away from a city successfully connect to the internet down a simple and regular telephone line and stream live data for a web/art event to the world.

The work of placing a web event in the flow of the world by building a web site that could be affected by real world events underwent a lot of experimentation and testing. The main focus was through work on a wind machine and the IBVA brain monitoring mechanism - both developments on the original Lingua_Elettrica sensor web engine. After three weeks and many hours of coding by Cam, the wind machine functioned. The mechanism is elegant and extraordinary. The wind blowing outside at Pekina was effectively navigating through a matrix of files on our server in Adelaide, forcing new images to appear on our web site.

The realisation of the wind machine also challenged us at the conceptual level: if the wind died down, could we as a group accept that nothing might happen on our online event? We were now confronted with the problem of truth in a reactive rather than interactive work. A whole new set of questions arrived with the achievement of this work.

My own focus was looking at packet radio networks, data from weather satellites and the entire radio-computer interface. It provided a great source of local data and information from the surrounding airspace but we were not able to develop this as a live interface into the larger context of triggering events in computer space. This was coupled with a realisation that the surrounding landscape was riddled with subterranean waterways - this became my other preoccupation, recording the water moving beneath this apparently barren and waterless landscape.

Violet@pekina ↑ top

95% of my working life is spent as a designer + community artist + administrator, which makes me feel uncertain about inhabiting a circle of artists. I was reluctant to go on the Pekina expedition as for the previous three gatherings (Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne) I had been working away (Darwin, Cairns, Torres Strait), at the mercy of other people’s labs; I was worried that I’d created a distance that would be too wide to cross. But I was swayed by Glen’s arguments and went, deciding to take a pragmatic approach, which is pretty much my usual response when art weirds me out.

My plan to follow a cultural mapping process was stolen by a dog the day we arrived. What to do? Chat to the people next door and make a lot of scones. When I was ready, roaming the yard, recorder in hand - flies, dogs, uncooperative sheep, turkeys, chickens. No emus, no kangaroos, just farmed animals.

In the end I made a chicken sing in an empty water tank. I liked it more than the ones that lived next door, although they shared their eggs. I went home early, and played at ghosting, filling in cracks where there shouldn’t be any. I’ve been listening and watching the archives while I write this; there are some beautiful moments, sadly most of them are too short. The real audio broadcast is my favourite: it’s wide and flat and dry, but not without life.

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4. Documentation ↑ top

The original project documentation was published at http://no.va.com.au/ and is now preserved and rebuilt at this site.

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5. Summary ↑ top

New artistic work created: 1 - experimental web event & web site for documentation (terra_nova / shed / ruin)

Artists & artsworkers:

Cam Merton	artist - code master
Glen O’Malley	artist - photo-sensor, walker
FTR	artist - network hacker, brain bender
Damian Castaldi	artist - dream seeker
Leesa Willan	artist - word cracker
Anne Robertson	artist - long distance looker
Lisa Burnett	artist - sweet order
Joyce Hinterding	artist - electro mapper
Anita Kocsis	artist - vector/flat_land interrogator
Rick Vermey	artist - infrared tracker

nervous_objects have been assisted by the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council for the Arts.

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nervous_objects - a remote collusion ↑ top

Article for Cantrills Film Notes by Sue Bisset

nervous_objects are a group of artists from diverse backgrounds and disciplines who first met in real time at the 1997 ANAT Summer School in Hobart. The ten artists originate from different parts of Australia, and have been working together for the last two years on a number of online internet-based projects.

Lisa Burnett	Brisbane
Damian Castaldi	Sydney
FTR	Adelaide
Joyce Hinterding	Sydney
Anita Kocsis	Melbourne
Cam Merton	Perth
Glen O’Malley	Woopen Creek
Anne Robertson	New York
Rick Vermey	Perth
Leesa Rats Willan	Sydney

Previous nervous works have included Lingua Elettrica (1997), which took the form of an installation at Artspace, Woollomaloo, Sydney. Here sensors within the gallery space drove an engine which reacted with a website. As visitors walked through the installation, they unknowingly triggered different “events” embedded within the gallery and a website which were also broadcast across Australia and Chicago, USA for the International Symposium of Electronic Art.

Through their involvement in FoldBack (at the Adelaide Festival, 1998) curated by ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology), it evolved that the main interest of nervous_objects is the collective process of their work, rather than a resolved product. The process becomes the product. This concept of online collaboration has taken nervous_objects out of the city and gallery environment into their latest project, terra_nova.

Earlier this year, nervous_objects presented their third online work, terra_nova, based in and around a stone dance hall in Pekina, South Australia. This project, funded by the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council, evolved as a series of web broadcasts over seven evenings, from January 24 to 31. The end product was an “environment-driven, spatial narrative.” The process involved “experimental, collaborative work developed in response to the remote location of Pekina, a small town in the wheat belt of Central South Australia.”

The terra_nova project involved several experimental filmic elements using digital and sometimes makeshift technology with the web as broadcaster: live webcam broadcasts of the Pekina surroundings; audio broadcasts of satellite noise; multi-image projections on a bed sheet in the backyard; moving images on webpages driven by the wind; and jerky QuickTime movies constructed from still images. Each night the site featured a different scrolling panorama, constructed from manipulated still images of the sparse landscape, which played across the interface as a movie.

Offbeat explorations of web video had previously featured in the installation environment of Lingua Elettrica. Each day a QuickTime movie was recorded remotely using a CU-SeeMe video conferencing camera submerged in a swimming pool. Inside a water-proof housing (crudely constructed from a large glass bottle), it recorded surreal underwater performances by fully clothed swimmers. These “flickering images” were uploaded each night onto the Lingua website and became part of the interactive elements within the gallery installation.

The Pekina project was an unusual episode for most of the nervous_objects, as it is rare for the group to be together in one physical space at the same time and not buried in a computer lab in a dense city. In previous projects much of their collective product was produced remotely and separately. When a project is on the boil, email flies from each nervous_object to a shared list, forming an ongoing electronic discourse of ideas, opinions, tangents, responses, philosophy, humour and lots of noise.

What follows is a selection of pieces of the conversation that took place between the members of the group in Pekina, to Anne in New York and later to Lisa in Brisbane, during the terra_nova timeframe. These communications became a daily online journal recording the collaboration behind the visible end product.

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Email Thread - Pekina, January 1999 ↑ top