Hi everyone, Just thought that I'd highlight an article written about this year's 080808 UpStage Festival 'Australian Stage Online'. I know that the whole thing was was a mammoth task. 'curated by Helen Varley Jamieson, Vicki Smith and Dan Agnihotri-Clark featured more than a dozen performances from new media artists in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East.'
marc ---------------------------------> 080808 UpStage Festival. Written by Bree Hadley Visit this link for full article: http://tinyurl.com/62gpsy There were performances from artists working in multimedia labs around the world, which present complex examinations of identity, presence, absence and power inflected through the lens of the strange discontinuities of cyberspace. In RxEgo-Go, by Tara Rebele (USA), Miljana Peric (Serbia), and Suzon Fuks (Australia/Belgium), we were taken into the wonderfully well-realised story of a woman who takes a pill, and with a psychedelic swirl of colour and sound falls into UpStage as an avatar, wondering how to get out, while a Teleprompt robot tries to cure her of the interdisciplinarity and erraticitis thats causing her ideosyncracies via a digital lobotomy. In Noir Night, by Kristin Carlson and Sheila Page (USA), a pair of disembodied dresses told the story of a body image stolen Frump feels ugly when she looks in the mirror, covets the image of the slim and sexy Red Dress, and the two get caught in a search for a missing self chased by Mr Big with his Gangster hat and guns, the audience provoked by questions about whether theyre in sync with their own body image. In Calling Home The Big Get Together, by Active Layers, including Cherry Truluck (UK), Liz Bryce (New Zealand), Suzon Fuks (Australia/Belgium) and James Cunningham (Australia), Grand Uncle was on the air at FAQ Radio, fielding calls from people on the trail of missing relatives, including the missing Micheal Finch, who may have run off to Australia to meet with Kathy, or may have been holed up by ex-wife Jenny who wants to declare him dead and claim the insurance. The radio show unfolded, together with songs for each of the callers, and line drawings the signified each of the callers, and sometimes started sliding into each other. Some of the performances addressed more political or personal themes, including intimate stories of how human beings are positioned in their culture and history. In Veni! ????! Dodji! to the Zapata Private/Pirate Birthday Party. And, Vice Versa , by Miljana Peric, Teodora Peric, Jelena Milosavljevic-Rubil, Julijana Protic and Goran Rubil, drawings of faces in balaclavas were set against the story of the emergence of Zapatista parties in Mexico in the twentieth century, and electronic music, issuing a call to the audience to aestheticise what is breaking you, and invoking the political theatre theory of Augusto Boal. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
