Kit Wise, Xanadu, 2009 (animation still) showing at Experimenta Utopia Now.  

Experimenta is an organisation which works tirelessly to discover, promote, exhibit and tour all-media art works.

Aware more than anyone that Australia has an unusually healthy and growing body of all-media artists and also aware that beyond Australia there is a world of all-media art, artists and conferences and symposia, Experimenta is determined to give Australians direct access to the artistic global developments.

As a result, for the last eight years, Experimenta has showcased a whole range of international all-media artists in a biennial exhibition which provides an invaluable glimpse of what the rest of the world’s artists are exploring in the virtual domain.

This year's biennial by the organisation is called Experimenta Utopia Now. The exhibition contains more than 35 works from countries including Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan and the UK. In addition to showing at the Black Box, there are a number of other screenings, forums, workshops and artist talks taking place at central venues in Melbourne throughout the month.

Experimenta Utopia Now's curator is Amy Barclay, the charismatic and vibrant once curator of the international art exhibitions at at the NGV, who joined with the organisation in August. She is determined to drag the most traditional art gallery loiterer into the 21st century by means of interactive buttons and screens and far more imaginative interfaces than have been previously seen and is keen to stress that the technology is “not scary, actually it is really fun”:

“The computer-phobe is on the back foot now with so many interfaces that try to channel normal human gesture rather than push a button and this happens so that computers respond to something that is more natural. I think that a lot of the artworks that Experimenta have to tap into that development of an interface that makes people comfortable and have a heap of fun: it is enjoyable, accessible, joyous. I would like to think people when they leave the show they feel they have had a fun day and an experience more enriching than they might have expected in an art gallery environment.”

Interactive art is a dimension of the all-media art that Experimenta has found itself championing; a work called TouchMe by the Dutch Blendid Interaction Design invites the viewer to press their body against a huge glass panel and then press a button to be scanned by a machine.

Barclay describes the new interactive capabilities of art work with her typical contagious enthusiasm:

“There are some extraordinary interactive art practices happening around the world and there is a growing surge and passion for it in Australia. We like to exhibit that as much as we possibly can and support the people who are interested in making interactive art.”

The nature of the interactivity that all-media art demands from the gallery visitor is new to the history of art and in some sense unique to the medium.

Arguably, the viewer of art has always been active; in that the experiencing of an art work requires an effort of imagination, or of a personal brand of readership which makes each art work unique to the viewer of it.

It is new, however, for the viewer be directly asked to leave their physically passive role and become obliged to do things to an art work if they are to experience the work to its fullest.

“You can sit on a sculpture [in reference to thinking about Henry Moore]....but there is a difference between being able to touch something and the work being able to respond to you,” Barclay comments, “the interactive works in this exhibition do actually require the visitor to complete them…”

In her experience as a curator, such a repositioning of the viewer leads to an engagement with the art works and the artist’s ideas which is stimulating and rewarding, and historically unprecedented. The visitor is repositioned in a way that means they contribute something vital to the realisation of the art which cannot be realised without their interaction.

Experimenta’s approach is to humanise their interactive art as much as possible, with the hope that they can finally dispel the associative fears that digital technology arouses in the visitor: fears of not knowing “how to do it”, of experiencing oneself as incompetent, or facing frustration in handling a new interface, however simple.

Thus Experimenta have organised their exhibition visitors to be well-supported by trained staff and invigilators to help the most unsure art lover to have the most comfortable and welcoming experience as possible. Barclay comments:

“I think interactive art’s popularity will grow in the art context once people become comfortable and used to touching and interacting. This is something that standing inside an art gallery has taught people not to do. So it does test people.

"There are many works which are screen-based and others where there is nothing to touch but there are some others which if they aren’t touched and interacted with then it wont be possible to understand the full meaning or capacity of the art work”.

Having probed for a deep political messages or a unified vision latent in the theme “utopia”, I gathered by the end of my conversation with Barclay, that the exhibition hopes primarily to provide “a fun experience in which people enjoy moments of utopian happiness” through an exhibition designed for that outcome.

“I think any of the artworks in this exhibition to some extent examine a world in which things might or might not happen whether it be terrifying, hideous, absolutely wonderful or be it people looking back critically at history at failed visions of utopia.

“Utopia cannot be defined as one thing by a large group of people. A society that can exist where everyone is happy perhaps can’t exist because people’s ideas and sources of happiness differ vastly. What makes an individual content is elusive. The utopia as a place of happiness and contentment is perhaps defined by the individual.”

Interestingly Barclay comments that she perceives a “pervading disquiet in the artworks; a sense of searching, nervousness about the future and longing for the past” underpinning many of the works. This glimpse of a global state of mind is perhaps a secondary, but profounder, theme that this international collection of the most recent art work affords us.

Dates: 12th February to 14th March
Venue: The Arts Centre, Blackbox
For more information and other events visit www.experimenta.org