CREATIVITY MEETS SCIENCE
EXPERIMENTA MAKE SENSE: International Triennial of media art
Plimsoll Gallery, School of Creative Arts, Hunter St, Hobart Until May 27
W ondering about the future can be daunting, but consider it we must: there’s a lot going on, and how we meet the inevitable changes and challenges of whatever it is that comes next is something everyone has a stake in. Art will not rescue us, but it does have something to offer in such conversations.
Experimenta Make Sense is not explicitly asking us to prepare for the future, but it is examining our world in new ways. There’s art here that seeks to visualise complex concepts and share new ideas — and it’s heady, engaging work that covers a lot of ground.
Experimenta is an organisation that’s been showcasing the best of new media art in Australia since 1986. Strong and established, Experimenta commissions remarkable work from the best artists working in new ways with digital technology, science, video and more. Some of the results are breathtaking, others are subtle, and some are rather funny, but overall the standard is very high. This is some of the best work of its kind anyone can engage with.
Particularly engaging is The Thought Leader by US artist Liz Magic Lazer. This video work takes the well-known internet video format of a TED talk and imitates it with great accuracy, except the speaker is a young actor reciting a monologue from [Russian novelist] Fyodor Dostoevsky. This clever work is laced with satire but the strength of the classic text itself shines through and has wisdom aplenty that’s deeply relevant to right now. Like any really good joke, The Thought Leader is funny because its message is true. Striking in a different way is Andrew Styan’s
Life Support System, a massive moving sculpture of vessels that stand for nature and humanity enclosed in a sphere that symbolises the economy. The work breathes in natural rhythms, but has controls with which the viewer can create a crisis of breath. It’s a spectacular work that makes a complex interaction visible and emotionally engaging.
Emotion is central to the most vital work in the show, In My Shoes: Intimacy by Jane Gauntlett. This virtual-reality artwork places you inside the body of a character during three different intimate interactions. It’s a wellcrafted experience that’s totally immersive and oddly disconcerting. Human interaction can be awkward and In My Shoes: Intimacy captures this reality with great skill. This work feels like the beginnings of a new kind of performance art that has its roots in theatre more than cinema, and while the technology is new, the question it examines is familiar: how do we talk to other people? The future will be filled with amazing technology, but among it all, we will still be human.