blackBOX : Painting A Digital Picture of Documented Memory

BlackBOX[1a]: Painting A Digital Picture of Documented Memory: Digital Identities – The City, Composition & Migration is an experimental interactive disc based & online work authored for delivery on the Internet and site specific installation. This immersive digital story emerges from protagonist Russian/Greek girl’s movement through the metropolis. The objective for the player/participant is to explore the interactive Metropolis, through the digital experiences and sensations of the girl, and to discover three metaphoric ‘Chinese Boxes’ that contain three symbolic performances. The girl is documented making a digital journey from the interior of her urban apartment into the city. The cityscape becoming haunted by traces of her past, the memories projected onto the surfaces of her city. What is the girl searching for and what does she discover in the metropolis? – performances from three ‘imagined’ Australian diasporic communities, resonating for the girl & making sense of her cultural identity and identification with the culture in which she is immersed. The participant/player is provoked to discover & experiences performances from (i) Rembetika – the Greek blues; (ii) classical Indian dance & music (Odissi & Kuchipudi traditions); (iii) fragments of Australian jazz performed by musicians from Russian origins. The work is simultaneously a digital archive and a critically reflective documentation of the metamorphosis of traditional cultural and musical forms, given the creative potentials opened up for cultural producers in the digitally manipulated performance, sound, image, and text environment of interactive multimedia. This research project examines the ways in which discrete (traditional) musical & dance forms are transmuting in the current multicultural Australian context, creating a hybrid of different cultural forms. 1. EXPERIMENTAL ONLINE PROJECT OBJECTIVES blackBOX will offer the viewer fragments of re-playable sound & image (with the potential to download, archive & re-play area of the program content). Moving between narrative & documentary forms, the performances are divulged through the exploration of four interactive ‘compositions’ choreographed for the player/participant to explore and move in and out of inside the electronic text. These ‘compositions’ providing perspectives on the emergence of a uniquely Australian contemporary sound/ culture that is an amalgam & integration of three diasporic genres of music. The work is inspired by the music brought to Australia after the second World War by (a) Greek economic migrants/ refugees – Rembetika the Greek blues; (b) a form of Jazz music that traveled to Australia with the Russian refugees from China; & (c) more recently the dance music culture that has emerged from the Indian communities in Australia via Fiji, Singapore, Malaysia & immigration from the Indian Sub-continent. This interactive project traces and creates a cultural dialogue between Rembetika, Hindustani & Jazz music culture in Australia. In the contemporary technological environment convergence has delivered new possibilities for the creation of non-linear programs, in their production, distribution, and reception. The internet as a site for the broadcast of digitally produced interactive media has transformed the ways in which programs are being conceptualised, and the production non-linear narrative experience, where the participant/player is engaged to explore and participate with screen events. The interface design metaphor for blackBOX: Painting A Digital Picture of Documented Memory is an electronic stage/screen surface where performances appear as if conjured from a dream. The participant/player can explore the digital surface of the stage to reveal musical & dramatic performances; interact with a dynamic interface revealing interviews with the musicians and dancers, documentary fragments of performances; statements by artists and uncover hyper-text documents, newsprint articles, radio archives, televisual material, and other archives of related material. This is achieved through the device of iconic symbols & hotspots exposing layers of material beneath the surface of the experimental documentary. Traditional modes of story-telling & music are challenged in the interface design, where the user is provoked engage with the music and performances. 2. METHODOLOGICAL CONCERNS & RATIONALE 2.1 THE COLONIZING GAZE: Diaspora dance/music culture THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY THE BOOK Topography of typology 1923 ...the new book demands the new writer. Inkstand and goose-quill are dead...The printed sheet transcends space and time. The printed sheet, the infinity of the book, must be transcended... EL LISSITZKY From Merz, No.4, Hanover, July 1923.[1b] This writing documents the production, methodology, and theoretical concerns involved in creating an interactive multimedia work – that articulates the negotiations involved in representation of ethnicity. There is the implication with this project of image-making, an ideological agenda to interrogate the “... colonial constructions of racial, cultural, and geographic difference... (examined) ...through the channels of photographic production and consumption.” [2] The parallel discourse weaving its thread through this creative work and writing is to make visible the construction of identity as a fragile relationship between observer and observed, the colonizing/dominant gaze and the marginalized ethnicity, the subject envisioned as both “racial inferior” and object of fascination. [2] In taking up new media to represent my own subjective ethno-cultural identity, as image-maker I am necessarily playfully disrupting the subject/object dichotomy, and simultaneously by articulating my own ethno-cultural hybrid (masala1 mix) [3], I am attempting to reveal the social contract (collusion) of racial stereotypes as a cultural, social and political fabrication. Inside this intertextual work, fascination with the ‘spectacle’ of Other is manipulated – through fetishisation and repetition where “...the image of the colonial Other becomes a trope of desire for the Western viewer...Through repetitive, fetishistic dissemination of stereotypes, the colonized subject becomes “mummified”. [4] The creation of an artful game, the player/participant is motivated to engage with a program that makes visible the artifice of representation. Historically, the representation of the marginal can be traced back to essentializing ‘scientific” recording methods of physical anthropology, especially the hierarchical categorization of human specimens, to the popular commercial formats of collection and display: cartes-de-visite, tourist postcards, photograph albums, photographically illustrated books, and magazine advertisements... [pervasively used for the] symbolic and scientific uses of photography for the verification and justification of colonial rule, [addressing] the complex ways in which photographs assist in the construction of a colonial culture.” [5] blackBOX does this by reflecting on non-Western (Indian) musical and cultural forms and contemporary jazz music, including the incorporation & appropriation of Hindustani music as a model for improvisation, and Australian “Rembetika” music – coined the