Subverting America's masculinist global hologram
Queensland now has its own Virtual Reality Pty. Ltd. The company's publicity states that you can join its cyberclub for only $50 a year, meet competitors, and "duck, dodge, punch, stab, crouch, spin, climb, shoot, pick up, turn, throw, slash, push, etcetera" for just $5.00 every three minutes. If an analysis of player data that concludes "women need a reason to be aggressive; men only need a place"2 is any guide, however, they'll have to provide more than just virtual venue and arbitrary virtual adversary. In Sydney last November, the curatorial emphasis of the Third International Symposium on Electronic Art (TISEA) was the human/machine interface. Videoplace, the 1970's Artificial Reality 'brainchild' of American artist Myron W. Krueger, which was exhibited at the Powerhouse Museum, marked the American origins of human/machine art practice. Continuing the focus of previous electronic art symposia on critically evaluating the implications of the "most exciting and controversial mutations emerging from the intersections of art, science, mathematics, technology and culture", the context for this symposium hosted by the Australian Network for Art and Technology was Cultural Diversity in the Global Village.
Some of the works at TISEA were shown at Ars Electronica, the annual festival of art, technology and society held at Linz (Austria), earlier in the year. The concept for Ars Electronica for 1992 was the world from within. Presentations foregrounded the perceptions of scientists, philosophers and artists in relation to endophysics and nanotechnology. As endo (from within)-physics and nano (very small)-technology have radically transformed our world image and the new image worlds accompanying it, this international event was a forum for 'world image' and ' image world' practitioners. 'Image worlds ' exhibited during that... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline