Until recently, artists and musicians have had to leave New Zealand to reach wider audiences and connect with key decision-makers, opinion-shapers and the latest developments. While most bands take root in Sydney or Melbourne, more and more artists are choosing to work from the cultural hubs of America or Europe.
Along with Honor Harger, Adam Hyde is part of the experimental broadcasting and sound-art duo radioqualia, who left for Australia in 1998 before moving on to Europe.
"It was essential to be outside New Zealand for a while,'' Hyde says.
"There's a rolling economy in Europe, where we've been based for six or seven years. There are a lot of festivals and media labs who know who we are and have invited us to do various things, which leads us also to commissions.''
"In New Zealand, there's not that opportunity. In fact, it's very difficult to get any invitations outside these shores because international curators are very wary of inviting New Zealand digital-media practitioners to come to festivals and events because they just can't afford to fly them there.''
Before leaving New Zealand, Hyde had been manager of both Hamilton and Auckland student stations Contact 89FM and 95bFM, and established New Zealand's first community television station, StaticTV. radioqualia went on to experiment with the then-new format of internet radio and have now become involved in radio astronomy, working with a restored former Soviet military radio telescope in Latvia to produce webcasts of the sound of outerspace.
"If you start thinking very broadly about the idea of broadcasting, it can become very poetic and very metaphorical,'' Hyde says.
"We could see immediately, once we started thinking about [radio astronomy], the kind of interesting things that you could comment on in terms of what broadcasting is. And the idea of having communications that have been here since the beginning of the universe but we've had no opportunity to understand them until recently, or even to receive them, until recently; it's quite an interesting idea and quite poetic in itself,'' says Hyde.
Like many people who left New Zealand in the 1990s, Hyde has recently returned. Although he isn't sure how long he'll stay on, he says the local community is growing and it's becoming increasingly viable to lead a digital artistic career here.
Currently, while Harger is consultant director to an audio-visual festival in Newcastle, UK, Hyde is digital artist in residence at Waikato University. His main project here has been to help establish the re:mote Festival, which took place on March 19. As its name suggests, re:mote explores the implications of being in remote areas. It featured an international panel of participants, many whom beamed their contributions in live via the internet from other countries.
Hyde says the Auckland festival is a prototype for experimenting with new formats of communication and, if successful, plans to take it to Canada, where radioqualia have a residency in April.
Wellington-based artist Douglas Bagnell was Waikato University's digital artist in Residence in 2003. While there, he developed what he refers to as a "songwriting machine''.
The resulting internet-based music machine is a digital parody of music industry behaviour. Fictional virtual musicians generate chart hits, are assigned virtual producers by virtual managers and unexpectedly die in scandalous circumstances. The only human involvement is by voting for the songs randomly generated by the programme's algorithms according to the virtual artist's characteristics.
Surprisingly, some of the songs are quite good; perhaps even better than what can be found on real charts.
Bagnell's background is in experimental film-making and, although he tinkered with a Commodore VIC20 computer as a kid and tried writing his own chess program on an IBM in the 1990s, he only recently combined his programming and art skills when he designed a robot that could make its own films. With its eyes mounted on Wellington buses, the roaming robot would capture images and send them by wireless internet to its gallery-based body for editing and display.
Like the Music Industry Simulator, the robot is programmed to make aesthetic decisions, changing its style if it gets bored.
"I think what I'm working with is artificial intelligence as a medium,'' Bagnell says.
"It's what I'm interested in _ just trying to get the computer to do things that it wants to do that are pointless but outside of being predictable and outside of serving any particular purpose other than curiousity.''
For his next project he's working on a television that can create its own programming.
"It watches all the channels and learns the patterns of TV and makes its own pictures,'' he says.
"So you turn it on and you change channels and when you turn it to Channel One, it will show you a perfect imitation of Channel One, according to its formula. So it emulates the real thing.''
As well as the coming and going of local artists, New Zealand has long been subject to the tidal influence of immigration. Previously, inbound artists have mostly arrived from Europe, such as Petrus Van der Velden or Gottfried Lindauer.
More recently, New Zealand's artists are increasingly claiming cultural roots in Asia, such as Korean-born video artist Jae Hoon Lee. Lee considers himself a cultural wanderer, travelling to different countries and documenting his experiences. He gathers material on camera or with a scanner and then processes it on computer to create videos and light-boxes. Not necessarily radical techniques anymore, but interesting for his conceptual motivations, which explore the multiplicity of existence.
Lee's particular perspective draws from the Eastern philosophies of Tao-ism, Buddhism and Korean folk beliefs as well as Western philosophy and modern physics, bringing new, hybrid ideas to New Zealand's culture.
As interesting multi-cultural combinations congeal into unique communities in New Zealand, resulting in distinctly new ways to think about the world around us, our geographic placement could become an advantage.
Douglas Bagnell:http://halo.gen.nz
Radio Astronomy:www.radio-astronomy.net
Jae Hoon Lee:www.starkwhite.co.nz
Until recently, artists and musicians have had to leave New Zealand to reach wider audiences and connect with key decision-makers, opinion-shapers and the latest developments. While most bands take root in Sydney or Melbourne, more and more artists are choosing to work from the cultural hubs of America or Europe.
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.