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Merilyn Fairskye’s recent exhibition at Stills Gallery included a twenty-five minute digital video installation called ‘Connected’. Much of the video and sound material for the work was compiled during a month the artist spent in the Alice Springs area in 2002. The video contains some quite beautiful scenes of the spectacular natural settings and landmarks that draw tourists to the Alice Springs area. However, Fairskye’s video need not be viewed as a token of yet another Australian artist drawing creative inspiration from The Australian Centre. Rather, ‘Connected’ speaks to an enigmatic military complex secreted within the centre.
The video presents a constellation of images, media discourse and local people’s stories linked to the top secret Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap. As a processing site for strategic information beamed down from US satellites, Pine Gap is shadowed by a history of protest and ambivalence in Australia. It has become emblematic of a profound, and, for some, overly symbiotic connection between Australian and US defence interests. As news media excerpts spliced into the sound track remind us, this relationship has firmed up since the events of September 11, 2001. Yet, it is precisely our understanding of connections between people, places and events that Fairskye’s video puts on the line. Being connected here involves implication and detachment, the allure of insider knowledge and its withdrawal.
While ‘Connected’ contains footage of various sites in and around Alice Springs, and records the voices of local people, this is not a work of investigative or ethnographic documentary. The owners of the disembodied voices on the soundtrack are rarely named, and never appear in the visuals. Nor is there any evidence of a will to reveal... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline