Curatorial Essay

For the longest time, one of our recurrent topics of discussion has been the fate of new media artworks from the 1990s.

One of us was deeply involved in exhibiting the artwork of this period and was based in Melbourne; the other wrote their PhD on aesthetics and technology while the scene was at its height, based in Sydney. In 2016 when we were cooking up the idea, we had worked together for the last six or seven years on game history and preservation. We could see the similarities in the challenges faced by videogames and 1990s media art: obsolescence of storage media, computers, and software. There was clear potential for applying the same tools and techniques used to preserve and emulate games to image disks of digital art and make them accessible again. Not only that, but no one seemed to be doing much about artists’ disks and just like games, we knew they were at risk. The pieces had been coming together for a while but then a project suddenly started to take shape. Cultural institutions prepared to steward the archives of key Australian media arts organisations – ANAT, dLux MediaArts and Experimenta Media Art – came forward and there was a new platform called Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) that our collaborator, Computer Scientist Dr Denise de Vries, had had some experience of, during a sabbatical spent in Freiburg (Swalwell et al. 2022). She thought it had good potential for use in the GLAM sector. We were particularly encouraged when Rhizome put Theresa Duncan’s CD-ROMs online using EaaS and Corie Arcangel and the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club imaged Andy Warhol’s Amiga disks. Finally, digital art was starting to get some bitstream preservation and emulation love.

The project we proposed, “Archiving Australian Media Art: Towards a method and a national collection,” was successfully funded in late 2017. It would be almost another 18 months before we were able to officially start work. But gradually, despite the repeated disruptions of Melbourne’s Covid-19 lockdowns, we located the artworks in the case studies we’d selected, imaged them, and were able to emulate all 32 for which emulation was deemed a viable strategy (Swalwell et al. 2023).

This exhibition features ten artworks on CD-ROM made in 1990s Australia. Six of the ten are works drawn from those we have worked on in the context of this project: Megan Heyward’s “I Am A Singer”, Brad Miller and McKenzie Wark’s “Planet of Noise”, Sally Pryor’s “Postcard from Tunis”, Paul Brown’s “Sand Lines”, Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda’s “Shock in the Ear”, and Martine Corompt’s “The Cute Machine”. The other four are works that we have long admired and wanted to feature in a revisiting of Australian CD-ROM Art of the 1990s: Troy Innocent’s “IDEA_ON>!”, Michael Glaser, Andrew Hutchison, and Marie-Louise Xavier’s “Juvenate”, the Lycette Bros’ “Paper Machine” here as part of their CD-ROM sampler Carbon.1.0 , and Michael Buckley’s “The Swear Club”.

CD-ROM is often viewed as a provisional technology along the route to the Internet’s ability to support rich media. This is certainly how it is framed in the 1994 “Creative Nation” statement. Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating’s cultural policy was designed to embrace information technology and ensure that when broadband internet arrived in Australia the nation would be ready as a producer of digital content rather than just a consumer. In Australia’s information highway roadmap, CD-ROM was the format that the nation was to train its nascent multimedia industry on. To bring this about, Creative Nation was to invest $84 million over four years into facilitating new sites, markets and products for Australia’s rapid entry into a post-broadcast world of global media. Whilst the majority of the monies for CD-ROM creation were channelled off to the more commercial interests and didactic compilations from traditional organisations like the ballet and the opera a small percentage of the Creative Nation money ($5.25 million) was provided to the Australian Film Commission to develop experimental multimedia projects (Department of Communications and the Arts (Australia) 1994).¹ Some of this money found its way to artists.

CD-ROM (Compact Disc Read Only Memory) is a digital optical storage device. Originally launched as CD or Compact Disc for storing music, it evolved to support memory intensive data in the form of images, sound and videos. As Read Only, that data could not be overwritten or changed. CD technology was not only able to store large amounts of data but could instantly access non sequential data from different parts of the disk allowing for non-linear recall. It was, explained curator Mike Leggett, an ideal medium for artists to make ‘art-on-disc’ being robust, self-contained, unable to be tampered with and able to be easily distributed and even sold (Leggett 1996).

In the 1990s when CD-ROM technology became readily available, everyday computing had shifted from the idiosyncrasies and incompatibility of the microcomputer era to a more streamlined and standardised, bifurcated world of Mac and PC. CD-ROMs could be outputted to be readable on both – still incompatible – systems. The new suites of authoring tools available to artists and designers were also cross platform, including Macromedia's “Director,” a multimedia application with a GUI interface that used an object-oriented scripting language, Lingo, to create interactive experiences. These tools meant that artists no longer had to be technologists to make electronic art; although programming skills were desirable, they were not required. Creatives from diverse backgrounds experimented with the possibilities of building interactive experiences using image, text, audio and video.

Disks were inexpensive, and artists could produce multiple copies themselves. The portability of the CD-ROM allowed Australian artists to circulate their work beyond the shores for the cost of postage. No longer so isolated by the tyranny of distance, Australian artists sent their work off to international festivals and competitions, becoming part of the new global electronic arts community who communicated via internet mailing lists and the burgeoning web.

Also significant was CD-ROM’s potential to circulate beyond the gallery. The Lycette Bros produced “Carbon Sampler” when they founded their company, Carbon. It was designed to showcase their work and performed as an introduction for both gallerist and commercial options. In the creation of “The Cute Machine” Martine Corompt recalls how she was excited by the idea of her work being accessed by people in their homes. Now her elaborate interactive installations had another life on the CD-ROM in a more domestic environment, where people were free to take their time. In 1996, this was a quality Wark felt was transformative, stating “The freedom of the viewer to contemplate artwork in their own time and on their own terms is the glimpse of a free culture that the visual arts hold on trust for the future” (Wark 1996).

CD-ROM’s status as a transitional media perhaps befits its contemporary disappearance from the landscape of Australian art. In the catalogue of the seminal 1996 exhibition of CD-ROMs, “Burning the Interface,” art historian Douglas Kahn asks what self-respecting artist would bother to invest the time in crafting CD-ROMs, for how can an artist build a respectable body of work in a medium which was introduced with its obsolescence built in (Kahn 1996). The “Creative Nation” funding, however, meant that many artists embraced the opportunity to explore the new medium, leaving a significant experimental body of work from this transformative time. As Kahn foresaw, of course, the lack of ongoing access to these works has locked them out of exhibition and constrained research.

In the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2017 exhibition “Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s,” curators Jane Devery and Pip Wallis (2017) express as a core curatorial ambition the desire to examine the impacts of new technologies and globalisation on Australian Art of the era. Sadly, no CD-ROM art was included in the exhibition despite many of the artists featured having created important work in the medium. In light of the extraordinary amount of experimental work created in this era for the medium, it is a curious absence, particularly as in this decade critical examination of the impact of this new technology on the arts blistered on the pages of journals such as ArtLink, Continuum, and Real Time. Australia’s public intellectuals debated where media arts fell in the future of arts and media and what would be the impact of these transformative technologies on Australian creative culture, questioning what becomes of art that is situated within consumer electronic culture. And asking – as Walter Benjamin asked of photography at the end of the previous century – how the new technology changes our understanding of the nature of art (Benjamin 1969).

Happily, the obsolescence of these artworks has been arrested and they are now able to be accessed once again, over the Australian Emulation Network, an EaaSI instance we affectionately call ‘AusEaaSI’ (Swalwell 2022). Now, curators and researchers can return to these questions within a historical framework unravelling the network of inquiry laid down at the time by critics such as John Conomos who, in response to the “Creative Nation” agenda, proffered a litany of critical questions:

"How do we make critical sense of the vertiginous growth of the 'unspeakable' in-between images, spaces and forms that are taking place in the digitised alchemy of old and new media forms of late capitalist culture? (Bellour,1990:7-9) Are the new electronic art forms helping us, in the words of Robert Wilson, 'to destroy our codes, to find new languages, and to rediscover the classics?' (cited in Zurbrugg, 1995: 87) Do they represent new forms of cognitive mapping allowing us, as Fredric Jameson contends, to interpret the volatile cultural, rhetorical and technological contours of 'the present'? (Bukatman, 1993:6) Or do they represent 'new modes of consciousness' (William Burroughs) or, in a similar vein, 'new technological modes of "being in the world'" (Larry McCaffery)?" (Conomos 1996)

This exhibition is but a tiny taster of the exciting experimental artwork of the period. There are many more to be rediscovered in the collections of our Partner Organisations, the Griffith University Art Museum, ACMI (which is stewarding the Experimenta Archive), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (which is stewarding the dLux Archive), and the State Library of South Australia (which is stewarding the ANAT Archive). ACMI has made selected artworks available for visitors to access on their own devices when inside the building and connected to their wifi. Griffith University Art Museum has a dedicated archive display portal in the museum foyer featuring artworks from its collection. The Art Gallery of New South Wales is planning to make selected artworks available in their National Art Archive. Contact the institutions concerned for details.

Researchers and curators will be interested to explore the searchable database we have also compiled, “Media Arts in Australian Collections,” which aims to address a gap in knowledge about Australian institutional holdings of media art and enrich understanding of the diversity and depth of archival holdings, across institutions.