Memory Flows @ the Armoury

Jacquline Gothe and Ian Gwilt

Drawing Water, 2009

Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark

Searching for the Inland Sea, 2009

Greg Shapley

Cooks River Rubbish, 2009

Memory Flows is an ongoing and distributed media art project of the CMAI, funded by the Inter-Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Starting in June 2009, it will flow into and be distributed through exhibitions, groups shows, events, spaces – building its own full flow along the way, for a full exhibition in 2010, now in development with the Newington Armoury at the Sydney Olympic Park. The first distribution of Memory Flows works and works in progress were with Image Ecologies at UTS and with Liquid Architecture (Australia's foremost Sound Art Festival) at Performance Space at the Carriageworks site.

The CMAI research group welcomes a new co-curator to oversee the installation at the Armoury, Sophia Kouyoumdjian of the Blacktown Art Centre. Welcome Sophia!

Stay tuned for updates on the exhibition's progress and for information on the live performance planned as part of the public programme!

Nauru Elegies - Int'l Biennial of Media Arts

2D barcode graphic poster

Image courtesy of the artist, Paul D. Miller

Nauru Elegies, film sketch

Image courtesy of the artist, Paul D. Miller

Hysographic Animation of Nauru

Image courtesy of the artist, Annie K. Kwon

Acrylic Sculpture of Nauru

Image Courtesy of the artist, Annie K. Kwon

Nauru Elegies: a portrait in sound and hypsographic architecture
by Annie K. Kwon and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky)

History:

The Republic of Nauru is a small island in the South Pacific Ocean. It is the world's smallest independent state and represents a place at the most remote extreme of the planet. Its utopic geography and landscape stages a dystopic economy and society. It was used as a raw resource by several of the Great Power states until there was literally, nothing left. Nauru has been mined throughout the last two centuries for its phosphate deposits, which occupied 90% of the island. In the 1980s, phosphate exports briefly gave Nauruans one of the highest per capita incomes in the Third World. It is anticipated that the phosphate reserves will be completely exhausted before 2050. Despite this, the unemployment rate currently stands at 90%. As a small territory with no exploitable resources, in the 1990’s Nauru turned to off‐shore financing, and the creation of virtual banks as a way of earning sorely needed foreign currency. In turn, it mirrors the off‐shore island economies of The Cayman Islands, and continental havens like Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Artwork:

The Nauru Elegies project looks at the combination of unique qualities that make a remote place like Nauru a core member of the 21st century global economy. It explores an island in a state of environmental collapse through a variety of mediums: film, hypsographic animation, a musical score, interactive posters, and acrylic sculpture. The music component of Nauru Elegies reflects colonial and post-colonial issues facing the digital economy of the 21st century translated into a string quartet, composed by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), while the architectural component, conceptualized by Annie K. Kwon, spatializes and formalizes an otherwise invisible economic flow and irreversible ecological devastation.

A new architecture reclaims a local hypsographic territory at a culmination of global currents. The poet Goethe once wrote: “architecture is nothing but frozen music." Nauru Elegies asks what happens if we reverse engineer that process through on‐site recordings and footage translated through the prism of music and architectural form.

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Artists' Statement:

'The Nauru Elegies: A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture' is a technical synthesis of a live string ensemble, projected high-definition video footage, digital animation and live internet feed. It is an orchestration of content retrieved and processed in multiple localities including research in New York City, documentation in Nauru and performed by local musicians. It is a statement of technology and media processes in the 21st century that is exponentially progressing to a more dematerialized and delocalized state.

Audio and video recordings have been taken with the most current and mobile digital technologies in addition to the exploration of medical isosurf modeling techniques appropriated in architectural form and rendering. Economic dynamics will be mapped using current open source satellite and geospatial technologies including NASA World Wind to map hypsometric and bathymetric contours. The Nauru Elegies is realized in multiple technical layers, a manifold performance that has identifiable localities held by a complex global structure.

- Annie K. Kwon and Paul D. Miller of KWON MILLER PRODUCTIONS.

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Curator's statement:

Nauru Elegies is a haunting homage to a displaced society.  From the refuse littered beaches, to an architecture constructed to mourn their loss of natural resources, this once nomadic culture now circles their island on motorcyles via a single looping road.  The native population has dwindled to 5%, and they join the Australian and American locals in singing Christian songs, eating Chinese fast food, and surviving on a stipend of $160/month AUD.  The fractured and empathetic rendering of this by Paul and Annie comes thorough in the disparate artworks that when displayed together, provide a overall picture of culture in danger of complete irradication. 

This exhibition was prototyped in Beta_space at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. As part of their sketch process, Paul and Annie visited the collection stores of both the Australian and Powerhouse Museums, where between 70 and 90 objects from Nauruan history reside.  From stamps, to shields, to clothing, tools and swords, it became clear to the artists that mapping and a sense of place were at the forefront of the Oceanic culture in which Nauru was previously so steeped.  Close neighbours from Fiji wore garments that showcased where they were from, serving as maps or location identifiers.  This practise is mirrored in Miller's graphic posters containing location identifiers in the form of 2-dimensional barcodes transferring the audience that interacts with them to virtual sites containing historical and controversial information about Nauru. An identity previously communicated with painted dots on bark has evolved. It is now mirrored in pixels and is being communicated not through the grainy photographs of brave explorers, but through the internet accessed by hand held devices and a curious general public.

Kwon utilised isosurf modelling technology to render both her animation and her acrylic sculpture.  In using a technology designed to scan the human body for illness, disease, and decay; Kwon lends a physicality to her mapping of what's left of the island.  This medium is not only recording what remains of a once rich deposit of phosphate, but takes us on a chilling virtual journey through the spaces that were created in the mining of this deposit. The definition of elegy is a poem or song to a deceased family member, and one gets the feeling here that they are walking through a loved one's tomb. This is especially true when Miller's achingly resonant score interrupts your experience, winding its way into your being as you take in the film, the animation, the sculpture, and the sites of this contemporary snapshot of Nauru.

Nauru Elegies was first shown as a prototype in Beta_space in the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and was produced with the support of the Powerhouse Museum, the Creativity and Cognition Studios, Cyclic Defrost, and the Interaction Consortium.  A big thank you to the colleagues affiliated with New Media Curation, who provided myself and the artists with the tools necessary to bring this work into the public consciousness.  And of course, thank you to Experimenta for recognising it's potential and value in providing us with the follow up resources to produce the polished work you will see before you at Blindside.

- Deborah Turnbull, New Media Curation (written from an interview taken on the 30 December, 2009 with the artists)