in what new language will I meet with you
excerpts from the installation series (text, video and billboard)

part of the group exhibition FUEL curated by Jay Younger, 1991
Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington, Sydney
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne



image from fuel text from installation at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

We got into the car and drove and drove and drove. Turned the car lights off and drove silent through the Warrumbungle mountain to the Australia Observatory. In the half light the white tower rose up, closer to the stars.

Walking around the deserted roads, looking for our contact astronomer. Finally located her amongst the myriad of small observatory nests in the mountainside. She was in a new type of optical observatory in which, when you wished to change the observing position, you didn't just move the telescope, but the whole building. So we went for a ride to reposition, rotating with a building at least 20 metres cubed.

She was measuring the gravity waves between galaxies. Her theorem was that gravity would play a much greater role in the formation and destruction (i.e. the life) of the universe than was currently thought - an obvious case for the interrelatedness of all things.

It was curious also that the woman in question here had lived and worked as a conceptual artist in Canada before moving to Australia to study Astronomy.

I had been liking the idea for some time that people were akin to planets, and we all acted upon each other at various levels or currents, of which we are more or less aware. Once of course one is aware of such an other reality, then one is compelled further into the realm of free choice, never 'knowing' all that there is to know, just endlessly approaching.

It seems that one has to move through ruthless phoenix-like destruction in order to reach a new plain, and that the movement itself isn't linear, but more like every which way simultaneously resulting in deep brain shifts.

image from fuel To illustrate, I'm using these images, especially the ones on the video of the data creatures. They relate to observable objects in space, in as much as they are 2 or 3 dimensional constructs of 2 dimensional data - i.e. when radio telescopes observe the sky, the radio data collected is of a flat field of sky. Science has no real knowledge as to what lies beyond that curtain.

We can however get some indication of how that formation is moving by the frequencies it emits, called the red and blue shift. Blue frequencies (higher) represent objects moving towards us, and red (lower) are moving away. This gives an idea of the fourth dimension - time.

We cannot think of time except by spatialising it True or False?

So the radio data is collected at a number of bandwidths, and this is broken up into sections and displayed visually. Scientists used to have to roam through reams of numbers to ascertain the characteristics of stellar formations, and now they are developing a new way to see.

An early mode of visualising data was to make a 'movie' from the various layers of bandwidth, by giving each one a frame. An example of this type follows itself around the installation space frame by blue frame. Different bandwidths are coloured arbitrarily, allowing the creature to change form as it moves through the matrix.

Examples of a more recent method of visualisation are on the video. The sections of data are displayed not sequentially (as in the movies) but instead are shown in a 3 dimensional data cube. One can them skewer them with a vector and have this 3D constructed object rotate around any axis.

What is curious is that these objects bear no relation to any object outside themselves. They are nothing but arbitrary models for which the code must be known for sense to be made, and we are still alive.

Who will crack our code? I'll see you in the promised land.

Drove north from the Warrumbungles into the night, landing at the radio telescopes - The Compact Array - six receiving antennas in a straight line, five of them joined at birth by 3km of rail track. Surrounding the Array in a 3km circle of wiry dishes is a stonehenge remnant from the 50's. Called the heliograph, these metal insects, which once observed the sun now lie fallow, abandoned.

At 1 am and wide awake we walked across the scrub to the instruments, their arms raised like supplicants to the sky, oblivious.

Out there other aspects of ourselves were allowed life. Everything inside of arriving and departing had begun to feel like a trap. As in the dynamic of the dance. Not only do you forget where you are in space, but you can re-enter an interior realm where the dominant self dissolves and other selves are allowed to live, in and through the flesh.

The city collides with information. The noise here writes itself all over anyone who will listen, or within earshot. I share my dreams with millions living and dead all roaming these streets of despair. It's a frequency overload and overboard we jump.

Remembering the cages of the corporate nightmare, like nuclear winter. (Every new building being constructed now has a fibre optic spine.) The office entrapment as being akin to living in the body of a schizophrenic. The schizophrenic feels their body to have been taken over by voices, over which they have no control, likewise the corporate person, having lent themself to the electronically mediated corporate body building, feels themself taken over by the incessant ringing of the telephone, shouting orders and directions, or the fascism of the fax machine spewing out requests for immediate action.

Released from these cages, the animals are afraid of the endless matrix, and wrap their arms around their bodies. Slowly they unravel into the space. I am reminded of the first time I looked at a Francis Bacon painting at the Art Gallery of NSW, sixteen years old and trapped by suburbia. The same feeling of recognition, my life, the figure in the painting, and the animals standing alone in the early morning under the antennas, allowing their traps to become translucent and fall away, leaving only a thin despair as the final mask of love.

The future's expansive after colliding here with you all (all that you are and will be), at these new australian dreaming sites, with their fine arms raised forever - listening quietly, collecting, calibrating, translating, visualising, actualising frequencies, though nothing actualised here assists me to define the vibrant supernova that you other / wise are.

c. LINDA WALLACE 1991


billboard outside the Australian Centre for Photography

text from installation at the Australian Centre for Photography

and nothing here defines the insusbstantial supernova I AM burning

will to live/live to will: NOVAzoo

We can call up extra-terrestrial phenomena by pointing our radio antennas at them, as I can call you up on your universal personal telecommunications number. Objects in the sky do not as yet have answering machines.

Once they are on-line, we translate their personal configuration into data structures - pictures which make them easier for us to see and understand. This is how they come to spin like trophies in the matrix of our SUN workstation I name NOVAzoo.

NOVAzoo creatures are still out there in the big picture, free to burn up and transform at will, and we are still free to chase them across the skies with our flimsy yet elegant antenna nets.

At a recent astronomers conference on the formation of stars, at the close of the first day, it was said "we know this, this, this and that, but we still have no idea as to what stars are". stars are like women

BUT NOT FOR LONG. I am tired of this earthbound gravity. Aren't you also? He is my sister. She is my brother. There isn't much time.

(a last shriek from the remaining vestige of the wide-eyed feminine: Men dance on the outskirts of my life, flapping hysterical, absurd, full of bombast saying nothing with an excess of authority and a disapproving gaze.)

(Post-shriek: those women fully engaged in the parody of the feminine, Marilyns who from their distance like to wind men around their ring finger. And how easy it is to do! And how pleasurable! And how much you despise them for it.)

Aren't we (la homme and le femme) just floating in different packages, different hardwares? Isn't this just the difference between NEC and SONY receiver/transmitters, or some such thing? Was the creator schizo not polyphrenic? Surely Universal Compatibility at all levels is the key to the future. Lock in and fly babe

We aeronauts of the spirit! All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance - it is certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch down on a mast or a bare cliff-face - and they will even be thankful for this miserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have at last come to a stop...; it will be the same with you and me! But what does that matter to you and me! Other birds will fly farther! This insight and faith of ours vies with them in potence into the heights and from there surveys the distance and sees before it the flocks of birds which, far stronger than we, still strive where we have striven, and where everything is sea, sea, sea! - And whither then would we go? Would we cross the sea? Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the suns of humanity have hitherto gone down? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India - but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers, Or? - (from Dawn)

Project: To re(de)fine the space of the body so one lives as an information flow (verb/ie transformative) which cannot be defined or captured by the Law, undermining the bleak property landscape. To be disembodied and hovering in and around the body.

Quote: 'it might be that the physical commingling of genital sensations will come to be regarded as a less intimate act than the sharing of the data structures of your innermost self-representations'.

"I just don't want to lose the connection" said

"keep broadcasting" replied

in what new language will I meet with you

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