[NetBehaviour] Article of 080808 UpStage Festival.

[marc garrett]

Hi everyone,

Just thought that I'd highlight an article written about this year's 
080808 UpStage Festival 'Australian Stage Online'. I know that the whole 
thing was was a mammoth task. 'curated by Helen Varley Jamieson, Vicki 
Smith and Dan Agnihotri-Clark featured more than a dozen performances 
from new media artists in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, 
Canada, Europe and the Middle East.'

marc

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080808 UpStage Festival.

Written by Bree Hadley

Visit this link for full article:
http://tinyurl.com/62gpsy


There were performances from artists working in multimedia labs around 
the world, which present complex examinations of identity, presence, 
absence and power inflected through the lens of the strange 
discontinuities of cyberspace. In RxEgo-Go, by Tara Rebele (USA), 
Miljana Peric (Serbia), and Suzon Fuks (Australia/Belgium), we were 
taken into the wonderfully well-realised story of a woman who takes a 
pill, and with a psychedelic swirl of colour and sound falls into 
UpStage as an avatar, wondering how to get out, while a Teleprompt robot 
tries to cure her of the interdisciplinarity and erraticitis that’s 
causing her ideosyncracies via a digital lobotomy. In Noir Night, by 
Kristin Carlson and Sheila Page (USA), a pair of disembodied dresses 
told the story of a body image stolen – Frump feels ugly when she looks 
in the mirror, covets the image of the slim and sexy Red Dress, and the 
two get caught in a search for a missing self chased by Mr Big with his 
Gangster hat and guns, the audience provoked by questions about 
whether they’re in sync with their own body image.

In Calling Home – The Big Get Together, by Active Layers, including 
Cherry Truluck (UK), Liz Bryce (New Zealand), Suzon Fuks 
(Australia/Belgium) and James Cunningham (Australia), Grand Uncle was on 
the air at FAQ Radio, fielding calls from people on the trail of missing 
relatives, including the missing Micheal Finch, who may have run off to 
Australia to meet with Kathy, or may have been holed up by ex-wife Jenny 
who wants to declare him dead and claim the insurance. The radio show 
unfolded, together with songs for each of the callers, and line drawings 
the signified each of the callers, and sometimes started sliding into 
each other.

Some of the performances addressed more political or personal themes, 
including intimate stories of how human beings are positioned in their 
culture and history. In Veni! ????! Dodji! to the Zapata Private/Pirate 
Birthday Party. And, Vice Versa
, by Miljana Peric, Teodora Peric, 
Jelena Milosavljevic-Rubil, Julijana Protic and Goran Rubil, drawings of 
faces in balaclavas were set against the story of the emergence of 
Zapatista parties in Mexico in the twentieth century, and electronic 
music, issuing a call to the audience to “aestheticise what is 
breaking you”, and invoking the political theatre theory of Augusto Boal.