Craig Walsh
Digital artworks are conventionally reserved for the hallowed halls of the contemporary art space, a highly controlled sound-audioscape where visual narratives are digested largely in bites, fractured and often demanding upon the viewer. Digital Odyssey is the antithesis of that experience.
A Museum of Contemporary Art Touring Project, it was launched on the murky banks of the Murray River, an hour out of Adelaide on a cold March evening in 2010. A face peered into the night from a tree’s foliage, caught in stasis between living and imagined, and then it blinked. Local Murray Bridge resident Jacqui Merckenschlager was the first of many such visages that would define this tour over the ensuing two years, in digital interventions that acted upon, and were enacted by, the residents of rural and remote Australian communities.
In a digitally-fitted Coachman Australia Motorhome, Queensland artist Craig Walsh has etched the bitumen visiting eleven communities across six States, with Western Australia on the cards for 2012. While Walsh has built a reputation internationally for his computer-manipulated imagery projected onto, and in response to, public spaces ranging from historic buildings to shopping malls, this project strikes at the core of the Australian ethos: bush narratives, mateship, and the tyranny of distance.
The constant weight of that mythology places our very identity central to the land we inhabit and by which we frame ourselves. Through Digital Odyssey Walsh ‘lives out’ that mythology like a contemporary drover corralling communities, but he also challenges it and enlivens it, re-writing that socio-historic frame within a contemporary context.
Arguably, Digital Odyssey has taken on a performative aspect in terms of its orientations towards site, process, temporality and, most importantly, endurance. Performance