12 – 23 November 2002 :: Mechelen, Belgium
I arrived at the festival in time to see Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn event, wading through a blockade comprised of peaceful Christian Belgians comparing this festival to Ted Bundy. Half an hour later my face was nestled between Annie’s breasts as part of her audience participation. I realised this was a festival of hard thought and soft landings. Was I tripping? No, I was amongst an exciting edge of contemporary culture discussing the future of sex, technology, communication and love in a small conservative town.
A commercial porn producer was disturbed that the festival could publicly present material he would have endured months of red tape over. This was the louder of the anti-art-festival contingency who succeeded in having the police investigate and confiscate a computer & six separate artists’ work, including that of Adelaide artist Francesca da Rimini. Francesca was only slightly concerned due to the fact that her work was a CD Rom and infinitely reproducible. However, the media and police presence created a more subdued atmosphere overall and the final nights party was cancelled.
In parallel to this was an enlightening and liberating small festival experience. The theme of experimental sexuality created many opportunities for discussion about art, sex and technological practice from all over the world. With the GREAT eating and drinking on hand this was not hard to do. I managed to meet most of the festival artists and producers over four days of intense activity. My first meeting was a small dinner to help Annie Sprinkle wind up her Belgian experience at the local Greek Restaurant. Great conversation unfolded around the table.
I collaborated with Francesca da Rimini (Aus) and Agnese Trocchi (Italy) in running a three-day workshop with a fourth day of production and performance. This workshop was called Strange Packets of Desire and was conceived by Francesca, assisted by Agnese and myself. The attendees were Post-Graduate students from the University of Antwerp, ranging from Literature to Engineering, all with motivation to explore online identity and erotica. Francesca had arranged some homework for them, to explore an online erotic identity.
Students explored their own strange packets using spoken phrases, text passages and tuition in setting up and using AV software, video, IRC and web pages. Elements included poetry, online chat spaces, voice, body movement, discussion, objects, collage, drawing, animation and personal space in structured sessions. Francesca and Agnese specialised in co-creating around 11 websites, whilst I used stop motion animation experiments and audio to assist in developing content for the sites.
There were the usual technology time and facility losses but overall most things worked. In three days we developed a close knit creative community where it seemed the students had a chance to transform if they wished. There was a collage-making table with an assortment of Belgian porn, comics, posters and trash to cut up and make a porn-zine. This activity was assisted by Antwerp artist PrutPuss (who took me on a tour of the underground porn-art-media scene in Antwerp – a GREAT city for cheap old-school Euro comics).
To see the students webpage outcomes go to Francesca’s site at: www.thing.net/~dollyoko/strange/
The final hours of Strange Packets of Desire was a literal countdown, with the computer sponsor turning up to collect the gear during our final site uploading. Material was frantically uploaded, as the technical staff removed the computers one by one. This episode was immortalised on video, it made me think of dramatic software lab victories as the final one was pronounced ‘up!’
Two hours later we collaborated with four students for a live vision-mix (VJ) alongside the other final event presenters. This consisted of improvised recording of web pages to video and 15 minutes set up time on an unfamiliar vision mixer. We then taught the students to run it. This amounted to an impressive montage of image and text that explored the themes of our workshop well.
The visual content was a mixed production using Dreamweaver, Premiere, Photoshop, Sound Studio demo version with live and animated video. The stop motion content comprised spatial experiments featuring the students themselves as bodies along with pencil drawing, collage, costume and props. Shoot Concept (Sparaconcetti) was used to create live text to screen. DJ Beat Butcher accompanied on experimental turntables.
The remainder of my trip consisted of two days in Amsterdam, a week attending an online education conference called Educa Online Berlin 2002 and a week in Paris exploring. These were exciting places and I had many ideas to digest about creativity, learning in the contemporary age and also the foundation of history that underlies much of our trust in what is right.
Much of Europe for me was based on human experiences. The aged facades and dusty books were interesting but mostly I could see the rust and supports that were holding certain things up beyond their usefulness. The people were the warmth everywhere I went and the Circus in Mitte; Berlin was a great stay.
Shu Lea Chang recommended visiting the Waag Society in Amsterdam to meet English artist and software designer Graham Harwood. Getting in to see Graeme was a feat of intuition. I was told that Graham had “left for Thailand two weeks ago” by the cafŽ staff. After ignoring this and figuring I should just get in regardless, I negotiated entrance to the secure upstairs region of the building by asking for a ‘brochure or something’. After arriving in a small kitchen I found him quietly tapping away in a room full of tech-heads and piles of new iBooks and other nice devices.
The Waag Society is a public software research group housed in the oldest building in town, with a beautiful bar cafŽdownstairs. I was given a tour of the building by Graham and shown the gallery where the first human anatomies were performed in front of an audience. He also pointed out carved graffiti from hundreds of years of use, by people ranging from stonemason students to Jews housed temporarily at the Waag in WWII.
Graham has two sites worth seeing: mongrelx.org & scotoma.org. These both feature great work done in the last decade of an online and interactive nature. Check out the open-source visual database called Nine. It is based on recurring grids of nine including fragmenting the image itself into individually tag-able elements. Nine was developed in Australia, with content created by Indigenous communities. See Graham’s site mongrelx for details. Nine is being launched March 2003.
This trip lasted three weeks and I returned to Melbourne taking in amazing views of the top end of Australia through clear skies on my miniDV camera.
One thing I would mention is that if one is travelling through European urban centres it would be worthwhile to make your laptop wireless. Amsterdam had The Waag, Berlin had at least one at Starbucks and there were others in different cities but I did not find out where they were. I had to become a regular ‘Easy Everything’ user, an orange-branded European chain store offering Internet and phones. That cost between 4 and 7 Australian dollars per hour.
One last note is that each of the above people rate HIGHLY in my plan of the future. I came back inspired to go forward with my own plans and also consider moving to Europe some time to work and live.
Shout outs to PrutPuss & Michelle, ALL the Belgian students, Bill Seretta, Louise, Costanza and Mirko, ANAT for funding, Fiona Martin and RMIT for flying me over there. Working with Francesca and Agnese was great and I hope to do this with them again in the future.
www.thing.net/~dollyoko/strange/
Tags: contemporary cultures, online identites, stop motion animation, technology and communication
