Category Archives: Avant-garde

Preliminary Announcement of the Next Event of Telematic Café

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Hello! — Telematic Café (TC) is greeting you and announcing the coming of its next event! The inaugural appearance of TC as part of Telematic Embrace – Café that took place at George Paton Gallery (University of Melbourne Union House, May 2015) – the venue famous for its radical approaches to art in Australia in the 1970s and 80s – established TC as an archaeological and reflective project seeking meanings of technology-based mediation in post-digital conditions. It is the wider motivation of TC to revisit and refresh avant-garde visions in the time of digital culture.

The next edition of Telematic Café is making its way to you by continuing explorations into old and new technologies. Its key guidelines are: to create transformative, transient and temporary “telematic communication models,” – this may take various forms including distributed spatial constructs by means of telecommunication networks but should ultimately focus on awareness and creative thinking about the Medium of our expanded connections and experiences.

The TC project is not programmatic, but rather discursive, and curious to ask a question – what can be learnt by the possibilities of the post-digital aesthetics of representation within the meta-space of networks (the data extracted from these networks) but also – the avant-gardist tradition of instigating, within an experimental art process, alternative real-time systems for communication, or even relationships? A platform of testing and “tasting” of what’s on Menu, TC occupies the field of art where it matters how it operates here and now: TC functions as an interactive environment in social, collective, possibly – collaborative contexts.

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The Dream Table

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“Disclosure and analysis require human transaction, the transfer of feelings, thoughts, and information from one to another. Reciprocity generates trust and sympathy. This is particularly appropriate when we are concerned with disclosure of the inner self, as in art. The table-top enables us to float out our intangible dreams and intimations on a secure and substantial surface.” – p 172, “Table”, Roy Ascott, 1975.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Ascott

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2) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roy_Ascott&action=edit&section=6&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro

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3) Signed up under username ‘Roytable’:

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4) At 4:45 AEST 11/05/15, added ‘Table’ link to Roy Ascott Wikipedia page, under ‘See Also.’

Link goes to disambiguation page entitled ‘Table’:

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5) At 4:50 AEST 11/05/15, added to the ‘Table’ disambiguation page:

 “Roy Ascott’s text ‘Table,’ concerning a dream of communal discourse” 

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6) Link leads to Wikipedia article, ‘Dream’:

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7) Revision histories:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roy_Ascott&action=history

 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Table&action=history

8) After 57 minutes, the changes were undone and the pages restored to their previous state:

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Is love in the Telematic Embrace only transient? 

Do today’s platforms of distributed authorship truly permit a chance to dream? 

– Jess Williams

Bush Video (1973-1975)

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” Hello … this is BUSH VIDEO transmitting some printed messages. We are people who are putting our heads into the common information space of video communication. We define video as a tool for the reception, codification, and transmission of audio/visual information, and as the technological extension of the human brain’s memory/image processing, storage, and retrieval system. After consciously and unconsciously, seeing and dreaming, video and metavideo 24 hours a day for the last four months we are now giving a brief report of “these instrumented revisits to paradise” (Bucky) and the discovered educational, social integrational, global culture participational, and simply world turning-on potentines of video communication which make the present pre-programmed, one-way broadcast TV as obsoletely relevant as the town crier.” [1]

The hippie video collective Bush Video – pioneers of democratic media in Australia – are best known for their seminal project at the student festival in Nimbin (1973). They gave out cameras to festival participants and laid a cable network for community broadcasting. The contributed material was shown on multiple monitors around the festival. Back in Sydney, these were used in the studio which was the home for a ‘collaborative anarchy’ centered around experimentation with electronic video.  Read the full story of Bush Video documented by Stephen Jones here.

Poster for Bush Video Theatre (1973). From http://scanlines.net/person/bush-video [2]

Poster for Bush Video Theatre (1973). From http://scanlines.net/person/bush-video [2]

One of the Bush Video’s founders Mick Glasheen on the ecological aesthetics of the electronic medium (from the conversation with Stephen Jones in 2005):

“I was drawn to the organic nature of it, … it seemed to me that video and electronic art is really an image of … energy! It’s live light energy! Electromagnetic fields that are made visible! And so I was just attracted to that, [and I thought] … This is amazing! That we’ve got our hands on this… that we can look at… Just like … the first time I saw a television image I couldn’t believe it. You know, there’s this glowing cathode tube with an image there that was alive. So I just felt that there’s life there, this new life-form, that could be felt – when you’re doing video effects, when you’re doing feedback, the feedback effect of video, Bush Video pursued hours and hours of this feedback… Then I was feeling drawn to that because it was this kind of… it seemed to be that that’s where the life was… in this machine. And what could be coaxed out of this? How could this be understood? What was this? And years and years later I kept on puzzling about what is this? What is the philosophy behind it? What is the scientific principle that’s going on here? I didn’t understand what it was at all. But now it seemed to come out that it’s like a Mandelbrot set, in its kind of feedback formula. Like, this simple iterative process.” [2]

[1] Quotation from article ‘Bush Video Tharunka (August 1973)’ – http://scanlines.net/object/bush-video-tharunka on Scanlines: Media Art in Australia since the 1960s (scanlines.net).

[2] Quotation from article ‘Bush Video’ by Stephen Jones – http://scanlines.net/person/bush-video on Scanlines: Media Art in Australia since the 1960, scanlines.net.

Intersecting Reality and Illusion

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Imagine being in two places at once… In quite different moments of techno-culture, these art projects – 30 years apart – interpret and challenge the same thing – link between two different cities to extend and transcend communication in public space. A play in the networked space on the intersection of reality and illusion.

Year 1980

A Hole in Space: LA-NY (1980) by artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz

For more info go to Turbulence/ Networked_Performance blog here.

 

Year 2014

Occupy the Screen (2014), a telematic public art installation by Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould, linking participants in Riga and Berlin

For more info go to Occupy the Screen site here.