Scorched Happiness

This ambitious survey of Australian contemporary art by ACMI and NGV covered all areas of visual cultural practice. ACMI presented six curated component projects to cover new media practice with new and recent works by leading figures and new talent. Rapid developments in digital media, particularly online Multi-user Virtual Environments (MUVE) have forced the examination of the role of these environments in audiovisual interactive art (New Media Art). While the artistic potential for these environments has been suggested there has been little practical research.
Commissioned and curated by Dr. Melinda Rackham, the project addresses the question of identity and agency within MUVE by using 'Tocatta and Fugue for the Foreigner' by Julia Kristeva as a basis for a live audiovisual performance within a custom online MUVE. By simultaneously addressing the nature of online MUVE as performative space and constructed identity space, it arrives at a new creative approach for these environments.
It suggests new potential approaches to online MUVE as collaborative digital interactive audiovisual media. It is innovative in treating avatars as non-representational performative entities constituting the experiential space itself, rather than humanoid representational figures accessing the space in an anthrocentric analog of physical space. This method built on previous concepts around avatars, affect and performativity pioneered by Melinda Rackham and Steve Guynup among others. It extended them to find a new understanding of the nature of human access to and performativity within/of virtual space. People accessing the work said it gave them a new way to perceive the relationship between the material world and virtual space via an experiential performance of the conjunction between what were previously considered separate realms. In 05 the work was also exhibited at Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, curator Melentie Pandilovski, and at the Thailand New Media Art Festival.