Future Suture, which was curated by Derek Kreckler as part of the Festival of Perth, was a joint initiative between IMAGO Multimedia and the Fremantle Film and Television Institute. Four teams of artists using the new digital technologies presented their works online and in a series of room installations in PICA's galleries. Under the headings of Horizons, Project Otto, Tetragenia and Harvesting the Afterlife, these Perth based artists scuffled with the formal and the metaphorical, the real and virtual, and the legacy of commodity culture.
The positioning of the new digital media technologies, and their ambiguous relationship to modernity and industrialisation was well illustrated by this show. Despite the information explosion that the new technologies have caused across select sections of the global economy, the content of art which uses such technologies is still dealing with the issues of a previous communication age. The rhetoric applied to the 'miraculous powers of the microchip-the celebrated symbiosis of information technology, ecology and democracy' 1, is not really in evidence in this show, though Tetragenia dealt with the ambiguity of decontextualised information in a droll enough way. The relationship of technological form and its content is always a problem in the development of new media. Far from a vision of a reconstructed world of information emerging from the breaking down of old industrial certainties, it was modernity's concern with the city, and industrialisation's artefacts and imagery that emerged most strongly from this show. This was perhaps only to be expected given that post-industrial societies are still constituted and governed by their industrial origins; but the lure of the alliterative title of this show promised more ...
Then again