MR SPENCE:
The vision for this conference and everything the SA Unions Arts Programme does, is attributed to Lylie Fisher and for the last 6 years she has been ploughing that vision through an organisation that, while it has a very progressive wing, has also got fairly conservative feet when it comes to finding its place on the earth. The arts programme has been evolving over the last 6 years - this conference is in some ways the height of the work we've been doing over that period - is totally due to her vision, totally due to her effort, totally due to her work. She has asked me to thank Matti Spellacy her assistant.

So when she talks to you now about this symposium and Realm of the Hungry, I just wanted to be really clear that everything that we're going through today and seeing and hearing and talking about is due to this woman here and nobody else - Lylie Fisher.

MS FISHER:

I would like to discuss and present to this Symposium the cutting edge creative practice that has operating over 3 years through Trades Hall, South Australia. It was called Realm of the Hungry and it was the culmination of 6 years of grinding away in possibly the most patriarchal environment that I've ever worked in my life. Getting to the point of self confrontation, knowing I'm a trained artist and I'm excited by new media and experimenting with multi disciplinary creativity, it was time to start pushing the boundaries into form and practice that is far more in keeping with what I see as what's happening in contemporary art and contemporary community practice.

(On that note I should say that the artists that have worked on projects up until that point were some of South Australia's most credible community-based artists, and the work that they did with us was also of an outstanding nature.)

The point of departure was the show called Realm of the Hungry and it was an experiment. We decided that we'd take the risk in the arts committee and we'd seek funds through this new fund called Hybrid Arts in the Australia Council, and we basically just asked for money to experiment.

The plan was to collaborate with a range of artists, who were mostly emerging artists, and put them together with a range of artists in Adelaide who had a strong arts practice or who worked in organisations who had a lot of resources, and we would see what happened. Development happened over a 3-year period and from a scratchy origin a performance work emerged that was very ambitious and brave.

Primarily the artists came from a background of being on the edge, working with no money, doing stuff in collectives. They worked very much from gut reaction and their practice was very contemporary, very influenced by a lot of the cyberculture and feminist analysis that is coming out of both art analysis and American political practice. Primarily what we did, we put together a project that gave them 3 years to experiment.

It's very hard to really clearly talk about a 3-year project. The performance-based work is obviously something more tangible. A powerful visual element of the Realm of the Hungry was the large projected images created by the Adelaide artist Lynn Sanderson, who is particularly interested in exploring the notions of the created body. Lynn's slides were a powerful reminder of the sensual yet ugly elements of our glossy digital world.

That was one of the main things that this project and the artists were interested in, both the notion of new communities and new culture within those communities; also how multimedia and new technologies is both allowing us as artists and us as community members to really morph into something that isn't what is reality and it isn't what isn't reality. It's something that is a whole genre which is both corruptible and corrupt.

Some of the main elements that were happening in the project were issues of desire and issues of power-based politics that are being exploited both within multimedia, within the artists that are using it, but also the corporations that are using it. It was a need to look at that power and experiment and explore how surveillance and invasion is used but also how that it is invading into our community practice. The notion of desire was most strong, particularly how the artists felt, they as artists were keen to work in the art form, but they were also aware of how multimedia, being so seductive, is able to corrupt and feed into the insatiable nature of humankind.

The experiment became Realm of the Hungry and we found unconventional venue to premiere it, the Royal Showgrounds of South Australia in a cattle shed. We designed the space from scratch and decided to create a virtual space that allowed a group of dancers appear as figurines within a highly visual arena. This staging allowed the multimedia and the multimedia content to interact with both the performance and with the audience.

There were approximately 30 artists working on the project with 20 mentors. Those artists included film and video, video-animators, computer image manipulators, designers, musicians, costume designers, a tech crew of about 10, photographers, writers. We had four dancers who - those that know dance in Australia - also worked freelance with Lee Warren Dancers and Meryl Tankard. We had actors. We also had support through, would you believe, channel 10, who did a lot of our filming. Our generous sponsor was Adelaide's Multi Vision.

The Realm of the Hungry was controversial and Stephen Spence the chair of the arts community and I had to defend our right and remind the committee that 3 years ago they had decided to go down this course and do stuff that was quite experimental. We also then got strong criticism and enthusiastic praise for doing work that was trying to push the boundaries of both who has right to actually access work that is about community and also who has the right to actually do work anyway.

I think in the wash of it the project was well received even though, as I said, there was considerable debate. What we found is that that debate then caused massive change and that's what the whole objective was. Community Arts in South Australia started to embrace new media. We wanted to be the catalyst- in our position of being at Trades Hall and having spent 4 years doing fairly safe and successful work, then 5 years previously building up a really strong track record of success, we felt that we wanted to use that to then push the boundaries.

I would like to share a behind the scenes story, involving one of our sponsors. Vicari Bros Painters, who are a respected conservative Italian family, I thought they were going to bring a few of their friends along to the opening night, . Rather than bring their friends, they brought all their relatives, so I was there knowing that we were going to be having quite strong images, plus some of the video work was quite powerful, this show was R rated. In walked grandma, grandpa, auntie, everyone, and the next day I went around to return some paint to them, thinking I was going to get slaughtered.

Instead they actually sat down and we had this amazing dissection of the project and they knew what it was about. I had a discussion with this 50-year-old painter who knew the Internet because his son is on it. He knew about cybersex, he knew about sexploitation and he knew the work that we were showing and what the artists were trying to show was a fantasy but it was a fantasy based on reality. I realised then that in the "real community" a healthy understanding and interest in new media exists and art again is crossing the boundaries of sensibilities.

The artists that we worked with on Realm of the Hungry, mostly came from, as I said, a far more on-the-edge independent arts practice. Most of the musicians and artists had basically worked on dance parties, and their own individual work. A lot of them are very involved with the environmental movement. Primarily they aren't what would traditionally be called community-based artists but for 3 years they had this incredibly strong passion and commitment through some of the most heaviest times of working in group dynamics and trying to sort out the politics of what they were trying to do.

I think that the community that they work in, and the community that they bought into - the organisation, the SA Unions, the trade union movement and community cultural development - was the most valid part of the project. The performance was mind-blowing and I can still see and hear images from it, and I'm sure there are people who also were involved in it who have that same reaction. I feel passionate about this work, and where we're up to in this practice, it's all about experimentation and this thing about the final outcome, the 5-night show which yes, happened during the Festival of Arts, that is only an outcome. That is only something that comes from it. It isn't a process.

Realm of the Hungry was a live performance which had four strong dancers adorned in amazing costumes, performing choreography that had been designed by cutting edge artists. They were working in a performance piece that was all about desire and their environment was saturated in sensual gratification. There was the ringleader character who was almost like the Bill Gates slut of CD-ROM marketing, whose objective within the production was to seduce you into selling your soul and getting into this thing called new technology.

The notion of cyber-sleeze was a central statement of the show along with the potential of losing realtime intimacy and respect. The show played upon on-line cultures, where you can get through the Internet live sex and all levels of porn. The artists were interested in exploring - the insatiable nature of human imagination. Realm of the Hungry pushed the edges of current on-line content and created a virtual reality that would instantaneously morph itself constantly and give us both live and static images of anything we want. Particularly as young artists and young feminist women they were interested in the sexploitation and the way our community is once again using women and using the body to satisfy.