Broken but not broke

So the first time I walked onto the second level at Queensland's Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) I was met by Kirsty Boyle's Tree Ceremony, a small Japanese doll and a bonsai tree that, unfortunately, was not working at the time.

So much for technology.

I was assured that the doll, when working, carries out it's habitual tea-carrying in mimicry of an age-old custom in Japan of having a clockwork/mechanical doll carry tea across the room to guests. Apparently this is a high-level art form in Japan, and Kirsty studied for ten years before making the doll that graces the balcony above the foyer at GoMAⁱ. She didn't make most of the components for the doll, (obviously she's not a microchip engineer), and it is a recurring and inescapable fact that work in new media means the artist's hands become ever more distant from the object that they create. I never did see the doll working, even on my second visit, but it looked nice next to the wise old bonsai tree, both unmoving, reminding the viewer of the Japanese propensity for zen-like expressiveness.

I passed George Poonkhin Khut's somewhat hypnotic winning entry Distillery: Waveforming, in the foyer of the exhibition, impressed by the glossy images that showed meditative participants engaged in lowering their heart beats in order to gain a more rewarding visual display of the heart beat's rhythm, the lower the better. This technology was used in hospitals to calm children, and now it's being used to win art competitions, only a great artist could be so flexible, ... or only a great technician could be so artistic, one of the two. It was difficult to ascertain from the work what role the artist actually had in making the art, whether he was only the concept creator, or designer, or constructor. But what is apparent is that the new media artist is becoming more and more like a curator, able to detect opportunities where mere scientists or programmers do not, and able to package an experience that is at once interactive, contemporary and can be slotted into a greater cultural narrative suggestive of more than its primary function.

Within the exhibition space itself I was confronted with a highly realistic huge fleshy bone with a heart beat, with one patron summing it up very well when he said “gross!” and kept walking.

Unsettling? Yes.

Significant? Only for the unsettling few moments before one moves onto the pretty lights further in the exhibition.

There was a wall full of ragged holes made from within by a group of robots programmed to learn and gradually open their experience through the panel that obscured them from the public. Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders created this work in order to “highlight society's evolving relationship with increasingly intelligent machinery”ⁱⁱ, and how robots are becoming part of society itself. It also seemed to me to be a clever parallel of the life of a human, as the world is revealed to them in small amounts until they are fully exposed to existence and their integration is complete. The idea is compelling, just as the emergence and interaction with robots is compelling for all alike, but on my second visit the robots had stopped putting holes in the walls, and the guard told me that the machinery had partially broken, and that the robots weren't able to open the wall as yet and participate with the viewers as planned. This is also, however ironically, part of society's interaction with technology... its propensity to fail, as evidenced by the tea-ceremony doll and now the furby-robots in the wall.

I was then drawn into a room where I was hypnotised for some unknown amount of time by Karen Casey's Dream Zone, a fractal-like ”kaleidoscopic celebration of symmetry” based on a visual program of the artists brain wavesⁱⁱⁱ. After experiencing the infinity of Dream Zone I began to feel giddy and a little lost, so I wandered briefly into Robin Fox's room full of staticky televisions that reacted to movement, catching viewers unawares and acting semi-conscious in its limited audio and visual output. Annoying, but precocious in its presence.

Leah Heiss's Polarity reminded me of sea anenomes with their waving iron tentacles in liquid. And Ross Manning's coloured fluorescent tubes rounded out the exhibition, twirled by cooling fans, projecting artful Modern abstract forms onto a dark wall through three 'pin-holes', a veritable child's mobile of light and colour.

I emerged from the exhibition and gathered my bearings that had been lost within. The technology had mesmerised my vision and bemused my consciousness with it's variations and forms, I had been perplexed and intrigued by some of the works, disappointed at the inoperative pieces, and a little scornful at the Artistic significance of some works despite their complexity, such as the winning entry. But questions had been raised and thoughts had been stirred, and although these new media works lose most of the warm aura of the hand made, they gain a wide and deep playground of emerging techno-gear and software that is blurring purposes and freeing the objects, and the viewers, from mundane functions.

iContemporary Studio Practice Class (Interviewer), & Slack-Smith, A. (Interviewee). (2012, August 10), Floor talk, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia

ii Zwischenräume, [Didactic] National new Media Art Prize 2012, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia

iiiDream Zone, [Didactic] National new Media Art Prize 2012, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia