in what new language will I meet with you
excerpts from the installation series (text, video and billboard)
part of the group exhibition FUEL curated by Jay Younger, 1991
Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington, Sydney
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

text from installation at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane We got into the car and drove and drove and drove. Turned the car lights off and drove silent through the Warrumbungle mountain to the Australia Observatory. In the half light the white tower rose up, closer to the stars. Walking around the deserted roads, looking for our contact astronomer. Finally located her amongst the myriad of small observatory nests in the mountainside. She was in a new type of optical observatory in which, when you wished to change the observing position, you didn't just move the telescope, but the whole building. So we went for a ride to reposition, rotating with a building at least 20 metres cubed.

She was measuring the gravity waves between galaxies. Her theorem was that gravity would play a much greater role in the formation and destruction (i.e. the life) of the universe than was currently thought - an obvious case for the interrelatedness of all things.

It was curious also that the woman in question here had lived and worked as a conceptual artist in Canada before moving to Australia to study Astronomy.

I had been liking the idea for some time that people were akin to planets, and we all acted upon each other at various levels or currents, of which we are more or less aware. Once of course one is aware of such an other reality, then one is compelled further into the realm of free choice, never 'knowing' all that there is to know, just endlessly approaching.

It seems that one has to move through ruthless phoenix-like destruction in order to reach a new plain, and that the movement itself isn't linear, but more like every which way simultaneously resulting in deep brain shifts.

To illustrate, I'm using these images, especially the ones on the video of the data creatures. They relate to observable objects in space, in as much as they are 2 or 3 dimensional constructs of 2 dimensional data - i.e. when radio telescopes observe the sky, the radio data collected is of a flat field of sky. Science has no real knowledge as to what lies beyond that curtain. We can however get some indication of how that formation is moving by the frequencies it emits, called the red and blue shift. Blue frequencies (higher) represent objects moving towards us, and red (lower) are moving away. This gives an idea of the fourth dimension - time. We cannot think of time except by spatialising it True or False?

So the radio data is collected at a number of bandwidths, and this is broken up into sections and displayed visually. Scientists used to have to roam through reams of numbers to ascertain the characteristics of stellar formations, and now they are developing a new way to see.

An early mode of visualising data was to make a 'movie' from the various layers of bandwidth, by giving each one a frame. An example of this type follows itself around the installation space frame by blue frame. Different bandwidths are coloured arbitrarily, allowing the creature to change form as it moves through the matrix.

Examples of a more recent method of visualisation are on the video. The sections of data are displayed not sequentially (as in the movies) but instead are shown in a 3 dimensional data cube. One can them skewer them with a vector and have this 3D constructed object rotate around any axis.

What is curious is that these objects bear no relation to any object outside themselves. They are nothing but arbitrary models for which the code must be known for sense to be made, and we are still alive.

Who will crack our code? I'll see you in the promised land.

Drove north from the Warrumbungles into the night, landing at the radio telescopes - The Compact Array - six receiving antennas in a straight line, five of them joined at birth by 3km of rail track. Surrounding the Array in a 3km circle of wiry dishes is a stonehenge remnant from the 50's. Called the heliograph, these metal insects, which once observed the sun now lie fallow, abandoned.

At 1 am and wide awake we walked across the scrub to the instruments, their arms raised like supplicants to the sky, oblivious.

Out there other aspects of ourselves were allowed life. Everything inside of arriving and departing had begun to feel like a trap. As in the dynamic of the dance. Not only do you forget where you are in space, but you can re-enter an interior realm where the dominant self dissolves and other selves are allowed to live, in and through the flesh.

The city collides with information. The noise here writes itself all over anyone who will listen, or within earshot. I share my dreams with millions living and dead all roaming these streets of despair. It's a frequency overload and overboard we jump.

Remembering the cages of the corporate nightmare, like nuclear winter. (Every new building being constructed now has a fibre optic spine.) The office entrapment as being akin to living in the body of a schizophrenic. The schizophrenic feels their body to have been taken over by voices, over which they have no control, likewise the corporate person, having lent themself to the electronically mediated corporate body building, feels themself taken over by the incessant ringing of the telephone, shouting orders and directions, or the fascism of the fax machine spewing out requests for immediate action.

Released from these cages, the animals are afraid of the endless matrix, and wrap their arms around their bodies. Slowly they unravel into the space. I am reminded of the first time I looked at a Francis Bacon painting at the Art Gallery of NSW, sixteen years old and trapped by suburbia. The same feeling of recognition, my life, the figure in the painting, and the animals standing alone in the early morning under the antennas, allowing their traps to become translucent and fall away, leaving only a thin despair as the final mask of love.

The future's expansive after colliding here with you all (all that you are and will be), at these new australian dreaming sites, with their fine arms raised forever - listening quietly, collecting, calibrating, translating, visualising, actualising frequencies, though nothing actualised here assists me to define the vibrant supernova that you other / wise are.

c. LINDA WALLACE 1991

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