Do you remember the exhilaration of the early internet, a realm where gender would become irrelevant and we would have the opportunity to reinvent an ideal space for humanity? Pre Google, pre Ask Jeeves and on the cusp of IRC? Pre rabid online porn and pre email scams. Blackscreen email and anonymity. Motherlode and VNS Matrix. Cyberfeminism.
Networked Artforms and Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits, on now at CAST Gallery, is a ‘durational event including symposia, exhibition, performances, workshops and social gatherings that will take place in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia 31 May – 30 June 2013 at Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania (CAST) and on the Internet.’ It is about demystifying, re-energising cyberspace and, from where I sit, it is also about hacking off the shackles that distort our bodies as we spend our lives engaged with screens.
The show is hosted by Miss Despoinas Critical Engineering Space, in conjunction with CAST. I spoke to some of the participants before the launch about their work for the show/symposia/exhibition, starting with Francesca da Rimini, with whom I had to fight off a groupy urge, having lived through the time of VNS Matrix. We still live in cyberfeminist times. Da Rimini’s work for the show is a wonderful merging of nature into cyber – and you can listen to her describe her work here.
Danja Vasiliev, from Russia via the Nederlands, finds it amusing that the word magick has found its way into an exhibition that looks to demystify and re-imagine cyberspace. His work looks at building networks for cities that exist outside of the corporate internet. Listen to Danja describe his work.
Anne Goldenberg (France) and Karine Rathle (UK) spoke together about their work in dance and their former inability to reconcile the body with time spent at a computer – and the marvellous realisations they have made about how the body IS involved when we are seemingly inert, screen side. Listen here.
And lastly for an overview of the symposia, show, activity, lecture and exhibition you can listen to artist and producer, Pip Stafford, discuss some of the background and expectations of Tac here.
Networked Artforms and Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits
A Series of events inspired by computer culture
Until 30th June
Twitter Pip Stafford @dotdash7
Instagram at dot_dash