Light Cycles, an immersive two-kilometre walk through the botanic garden … is perhaps the best example of this kind of work I’ve seen.
collaborator was Robin Fox, who is perhaps best known for his work in dance.
The keynote here was intimacy.
Sophie Rowell (violin), Matthew Tomkins (violin), Tahlia Petrosian (viola) and Simon Cobcroft (cello) performed in the round on a small stage, so no one was far from the musicians. Fox’s lighting was almost austere, with a strictly limited palette of lasers – mainly red and blue – playing above eye level, transforming the shabby ceiling into an ever-shifting field of electric geometries. Sometimes the laser rhythms accorded with the notes, sometimes they played in counterpoint, sometimes they let the music play by itself. The effect was an extra dimension that enhanced, rather than distracted from, the music.
I spent an absorbed couple of hours at Wild Dog, an immersive exhibition at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute curated by Narangga/kaurna artist Jacob Boehme that explores the cultural and ecological significance of the dingo. Originally presented as a development last year at Tarnanthi, this exhibition demonstrates the richness that emerges from cultural consultation. It’s a work of preservation that brings together stories from different Aboriginal communities across Australia, and also restores the dingo to its rightful place as an important part of Australia’s ecology.
The various works here are the result of years of consultation across many communities, and include artworks, installations and Boehme’s remarkable dance video Wild Dog Dreaming, which enacts one of the origin myths. In an unexpected touch of nostalgia – I loved this book as a child – the 1979 film Giant Devil Dingo, adapted from the classic 1973 children’s book by Lardil artist Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey, is running on an old-style cabinet television. You can sit down on the comfy lounge chairs to watch it. Which is exactly what I did.
Istanbul-based Ouchhh Studio’s Wisdom of AI Light, presented in a giant purpose-built shed, inhabits an opposite edge of experience. Accompanied by music from Ludovico Einaudi, viewers stand around in the space as digital images derived from various sets of data pulse around them.
I found this one kind of terrifying. Millions of data points, from Leonardo da Vinci’s brushstrokes to astronomical observations to Paleolithic paintings, are fed into a computer and vomited forth again via algorithms. The whole is like falling into a bottomless uncanny canyon. It reminded me of some scenes in M. John Harrison’s brilliant science fiction Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, in which human beings are possessed and consumed by a nightmarish white paste of nanomachines. Wisdom of AI Light is a vision of human culture, disembodied, atomised and agonisingly refigured. It’s certainly spectacular, but I’m not at all certain it has anything to do with wisdom.
Illuminate Adelaide runs until July 31.