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2112: Imagining the Future

RMIT Gallery2 December 2011— 28 January 2012 Curator: Linda Williams

Low-Res catalogue pdf84 pages plus covers

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s This exhibition entitled 2112 Imagining the Future follows several of the distinctive features of RMIT Gallery exhibitions—meticulous presentation of curatorial outcomes arising from the exploration and development of the practice-led research interests of academics and artists in an international context. Where this is the generative process, the creative capacity of the gallery is to collaboratively shape the research into a compelling, visceral experience, enabling a global and local integration of interests relevant to a range of academic disciplines in the public domain of the gallery.

In 2008 Associate Professor Linda Williams worked with RMIT Gallery to present Heat: Art and Climate Change. Like Heat, 2112 draws on the practice-led research of artists and architects to create an inclusive conduit for their research outcomes into the public realm. In 2010 celebrated US author Kim Stanley Robinson gave a keynote address at a conference titled Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe at Monash University. Williams also gave a keynote at the conference on science fiction film, and following this began to reconsider the role of images of the future in contemporary art.

Research undertaken by Williams and RMIT Gallery revealed that most visual artists who were thinking about the future were considering it in the context of climate change. While science fiction was a strong force for imaging the future in literature, philosophy and film, it was relatively marginal in the field of contemporary art. Nonetheless, several artists whose work is presented in 2112, cross the generic boundaries between science fiction and contemporary reflection. That said, we are aware that any selection of artworks cannot be definitive.

This catalogue invites reflections on the future through two brief essays designed to provide a conceptual framework. Professor Andrew Milner focuses on the relativity and history in Western European thought of the notion of utopias as “‘social dreaming’ about better ways to live” in this world or another. Dr Jane Mullett cites Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy The Science Chronicles, conjuring future worlds “with a climate run amok” through human agency—the proliferation of nuclear weaponry and greenhouse gases. Mullett grounds her account in the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change making clear that the future lies solely and unequivocally in the hands of humankind in this decade.

Curator Linda Williams then engages incisively with each of the artworks, acknowledging that, while the future is unknown, the featured artists “speculate on how conditions in our time may prove to be the conduits of unintended consequences for how things might look in 2112” in all manner of permutations of the broad thematic of utopia and dystopia.

Accompanying the exhibition and catalogue is a substantial public programme providing opportunities for further public engagement with the artists, including our international guests Kenji Yanobe (Japan) and Lyndal Osborne (Canada), the work of Evelyn Tsitas, Media, Education and Public Programmes Coordinator at RMIT Gallery. We thank the artists, architects and their representatives, the Australian Institute of Architects, Japan Foundation, and Vanessa Gerrans, Exhibition Coordinator who assisted with exhibition research along with Jen Rae a member of the Art and Sustainability Research Group led by Linda Williams in the School of Art. Peter Wilson, Installation Manager has ensured that a complex installation appears seamless. We also acknowledge the intellectual leadership of Professor Paul James, director of the Global Studies Research Institute who opens this most prescient exhibition.

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er The term ‘Utopia’ was coined in 1516 by Thomas More—later Sir Thomas More, later still Saint Thomas More—as the shortened title of his literary fiction, Utopia, and the name of the fictional island it depicted. Originally published in Latin, the book was translated into English by Ralph Robinson in 1551, sixteen years after More’s martyrdom.

The word is actually a Greek pun in Latin between ‘ou topos’, meaning no place, and ‘eu topos’, meaning good place. This alerts us to the fact that More himself was clear it was indeed a fiction, rather than a political proposal or a philosophical treatise. Although the term dates only from the 16th century, it is clear that there are earlier examples of similar kinds of writing. More himself explicitly mentions Plato’s Republic, which was written in the fourth century BC, but as a work of philosophy rather than of fiction.

It can be argued that all human cultures produce Utopias, in the sense of ‘social dreaming’ about better ways to live. But many are supernatural, rather than this-worldly. These are not strictly Utopias in More’s sense, but rather Heavens of one kind or another. Others are situated in this world, but in the good time before time. These too are not Utopias proper, but rather Dreamtimes or Edens.

Utopias are often described as perfect societies, but this is certainly not true of More’s Utopia, which depicts only a better world not a perfect one. He was devoutly Catholic and so, presumably, would have been his own version of the perfect society. Yet his Utopia is not Christian, for the very obvious reason that news of Christianity has only recently reached it. Rather, it practices toleration of many religions, including moon-worship and sun-worship.

Whether Utopias are understood as perfect or merely better, the obvious question arises: perfect or better in whose opinion? The only practical answer is that of the writer or other artist who creates it. So one person’s Utopia might well be another’s anti-Utopia. If More’s Utopia is determinedly humanist, Francis Bacon’s Nova Atlantis, first published in Latin in 1624 and in English translation as New Atlantis in 1627, is correspondingly scientific. It is not always easy, however, to understand the intended meaning of any given Utopia. There is still much debate, for example, about what exactly More intended by his Utopia. Some Utopias seem to be written primarily for fun, as kinds of ‘thought experiment’; others as serious political recommendations; yet others as satires on different aspects of the real world.

Well before the European invasion of Australia, this continent had already become a site for European Utopian imaginings. The earliest example is Peter Heglin’s An Appendix To the Former Work, first published in 1656. More influential, however, was Denis Veiras’s L’histoire des Sévarambes, first published in part in English in 1675, in whole in French in 1679. Veiras’s Captain Siden is en route to Batavia, when he is shipwrecked on the coast of Sevarambia, somewhere in what we would now call Western

Australia. He lives amongst the camel-riding Sevarambians for nearly fifteen years, studies their language, constitution and religion, takes three wives and fathers sixteen children before eventually being given permission to return to Europe.

Such imaginings became less plausible when European explorers brought back detailed accounts of Australia’s climate, topography and people. Utopias were therefore progressively relocated further into the interior, but the realities of inland exploration soon proved equally disappointing. The subgenre of ‘lost world’ stories of ancient communities hidden in the desert nonetheless attained high popularity in the 1890s.

The earliest Utopias were almost always set in this world, in this time, but in an as yet unexplored country, very often an island, as in both More and Bacon. In 1771, Louis Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440 took the original step of relocating Utopia away from geography and into future history, thus anticipating one of the most common strategies in contemporary science fiction.

The device did not become general, however, until well into the nineteenth century, when the Europeans’ successful mapping of the world rendered the older Utopian islands implausible. Topos means place, rather than time. Strictly speaking, then, these future-Utopias might be called ‘Uchronias’ —from the Greek ‘ou chronos’—rather than Utopias. The vast majority of these have been science fictional in character.

Many late nineteenth century Utopias combined different versions of socialism or feminism with science fiction. Important examples included, in the United States, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 and, in England, William Morris’s 1890 News from Nowhere, which is set in 2003. In Australia, too, Utopias increasingly became future-fictional. Catherine Helen Spence’s A Week in the Future and Joseph Fraser’s Melbourne and Mars, both published in 1889, are good early examples.

The most famous early twentieth century Utopian writer was almost certainly the English Fabian Socialist, H.G. Wells, who wrote three: A Modern Utopia in 1905, In the Days of the Comet in 1906, and The Shape of Things to Come in 1933. The latter was adapted for the cinema in 1936 as Things to Come, produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies, and became one of the most successful inter-war science fiction films.

Utopian themes continued intermittently throughout Australian literary history, from Barnard Eldershaw’s 1947 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to contemporary science-fictional Utopias, such as Terry Dowling’s 1993 Twilight Beach and Greg Egan’s 1997 Diaspora.

The 1970s and ’80s witnessed the emergence of new Utopian science fictions in the United States. These included Ursual K. Le Guin’s 1974 The Dispossessed, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, both published in 1975, Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton

dr andrew Milner is Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University.

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and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, both published in 1976, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 Pacific Edge. The second version of the Star Trek television franchise, The Next Generation, which ran from 1987 to 1994, also presented the most consistently Utopian version of its future ‘United Federation of Planets’.

The best known early twenty-first century Utopian writer is probably the Scottish SF novelist, Iain M. Banks, whose ‘Culture’ novels—the most recent is the 2010 Surface Detail—depict a technologically hyper-advanced, pan-galactic, anarcho-communist, stateless society. Banks describes the Culture as ‘my personal ideal for a Utopian society’. His early Culture novella, The State of the Art was dramatised by Paul Cornell for BBC Radio 4 in 2009. A Gift From The Culture, another story from the same collection, is currently being adapted for film by Dominic Murphy for Mass Productions.

Utopia is in principle representable in almost any art form, but in practice it has been a mainly literary and philosophical genre, to a lesser extent cinematic. The challenge of how to save a warming world for Utopia is perhaps the most immediately pressing in our century. Whether science fiction writing or cinema – or some other art form altogether—will rise to that challenge remains to be seen.

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tt Humans have always speculated about the future, about their own potential for good and evil and their place in the universe. These often take the form of diatribes against the way things are or fearful imaginings about what may be in store. There are many examples in popular culture, from Mary Shelley’s famous novel Frankenstein – a constructed human created by science and turned brutal as a result of inhumane treatment—to films of the last few decades that invoke dystopian futures or fearful post-apocalyptic worlds. Water wars, sudden ice ages, post-disaster urban environments where the hero, and occasionally the heroine, is left to battle with chaos, are a few of the well-known storylines. Science fiction writing is full of end-of-the-world battles, and while many are set in the future, this type of story has a history that goes back at least as far as the Bible. Most people are familiar with images of the four apocalyptic horsemen riding before the storm that signifies the end of the world as we know it, a judgement on humankind’s ‘wickedness’ and a deeply significant and meaningful story for many people.

The future worlds of science fiction are speculative but draw on our understanding of ourselves, and are firmly rooted in our own cultural, political, psychological attitudes—of course, how else could it be? The best works are metaphors for exposing inequalities or paradoxes within our own world. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a classic, as is Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove or his A Clockwork Orange (based on the book by Anthony Burgess). Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy The Science Chronicles which imagines a possible future with a climate run amok may well become a classic. These stories include worlds that deal with two tangible manufactured global conditions that have the potential to seriously disrupt our climate: firstly, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which if exploded in large numbers could lead to a ‘nuclear winter’, and secondly the proliferation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which if left unchecked could lead to major changes in the Earth’s climate. These two threats are represented on the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic device originally created by the ‘Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ to help communicate the threat from nuclear weapons which has now been expanded to include other threats including ‘global warming’. It is currently ‘6 minutes to midnight’ and the clock reads: “The dangers posed by climate change are still great, but there are pockets of progress.”1 This clock is one way of talking about possible futures.

But the way that the world’s climate scientists talk about the future is different. It is a type of imagining that has changed the way we are able to think about the future: a paradigm shift. The projections for a changing climate that have been published every four years since 1990 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2, come from computer-based global circulation models of the Earth’s climate. It is only fairly recently that there has been enough computing power to create and run viable mathematical models of the world’s weather systems to develop plausible projections of future climates. While there is never going to be certainty about the future, there are now powerful methods of modelling what the climate might be like given certain conditions. These are implied in six scenarios of future conditions created by the IPCC. They are not

dr Jane Mullett is a Research Fellow in the Climate Change Adaptation Program, Global Cities Research Institute, RMIT University.

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often discussed, but include alternative development pathways that will influence what is in the atmosphere in the future, how large the worlds’ human population may grow, how quickly new ways of generating electricity can be created and how fast the worlds’ economies grow. For example, the IPCC indicates that, “the A1 storyline assumes a world of very rapid economic growth, a global population that peaks in mid-century and rapid introduction of new and more efficient technologies … B2 describes a world with intermediate population and economic growth, emphasising local solutions to economic, social, and environmental sustainability. A2 describes a very heterogeneous world with high population growth, slow economic development and slow technological change.”3

We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but the knowledge we do have has changed our ability to think about the future. The scientific mechanisms that have been created to investigate the long-term future shine a spotlight on the implications of what is happening now. Mike Hulme says, “climate change demands that we focus on the long-term implications of short-term choices.”4 We need to talk together about what sort of world we would like to live in and to investigate the worlds in the IPCC scenarios, imagining our possible futures so we have the best information from which to make decisions about what to do today. Art is a vital part of this discussion and deep imagining. Is not much of dystopian art a lament for the lost utopia, a complaint that we have got it wrong and a beginning to imagine how it could be?

So welcome to the ‘Age of the Humans’, the dawning of the Anthropocene —a time when the Earth is dominated by the actions of one species.5 Welcome to ‘the critical decade’ 6 —a time when collectively we make decisions that will affect the Earth’s climate for hundreds of thousands of years to come. Welcome to the epoch when authoritative scientific consensus about the physical transformation of the world’s climate has changed ... well, everything. Welcome to a new way of thinking about the future. Welcome to your everyday world, a time of rapid change, radical uncertainty, and technological transformation. Things haven’t been this unsettling since Galileo’s era, when humans were ousted from the centre of the universe and instead sent hurtling into space, speeding around the sun, just one planet among many. Now, ironically, we are firmly back to centre-stage, the main actor on the Earth. It is up to us to determine whether our future becomes a dystopia or utopia.

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1—The Doomsday Clock http://www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/timeline 2—The IPCC Reports http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml3—The IPCC Synthesis Report 2007 http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_ assessment_report_synthesis_report.htm p.44.4—Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, p.363.5— Curt Sager, Deep Future: The next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 20116— The Climate Commission, The Critical Decade http://climatecommission.gov.au/topics/the-critical-decade/

Reproduced above is a work from 2112: Imagining the future, by the Melbourne-based painter Tony Lloyd: All That is Solid Melts Into Air (2011). This title is a well-known phrase from the Communist Manifesto (1848) in which Marx and Engels wrote of a modern world not so dissimilar from our own, a world where: everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind… The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

On this view, our contemporary sense of uncertainty is something that has been gathering momentum for some time, at the very least from the 19th century when the social and environmental impacts of the European industrial revolution had begun to take effect, rather than a more recent product of a putative post-modern condition.1

Along with the doubts and insecurities of late modernity, one of the major themes explored in this exhibition arises from the question of why imagining the future through science fiction thrives in literature and film, yet appears to be a genre that is fairly marginal to the field of contemporary art. While research for the exhibition largely affirmed the view that relatively few artists cross paths with the visions of future worlds conveyed by science fiction, those who do, or whose works explore the idea of the future, generally appear to imagine fairly somber, dystopian scenarios.

Essentially the future remains unknown to us, and if we extend our everyday thinking about time beyond the immediate range of short-term interests, then the future, as they say of the past, becomes a foreign country.2 Few contemporary artists seem to respond to these foreign realms, or to consider a model of time as conceived for example by the historians of the Annales School as a longue durée.3 Fewer artists explore deep time as it is described in evolutionary theory or in the long genealogies of the earth,4 and those who might imagine a world several centuries or millennia into the future appear to be very rare.5

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dr linda williams is Associate Professor of Art, Environment & Cultural Studies in the School of Art, RMIT University.

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Contemporary artists then, appear to be well grounded in their own time. Yet this exhibition draws on the way artists speculate on how conditions in our time may prove to be the conduits of unintended consequences for how things might look by 2112, or a century away, when in particular the question of an ecological ‘tipping point’ is likely to have become much clearer to everyone.

A contemporary sense of unease about the future is evinced by the many sites on the web proclaiming 2012 as a year of global Armageddon. Or, if not 2012, perhaps another time when various prophecies can be adapted for a forthcoming catastrophe that will blast us all to kingdom come. Some will be elected to arrive in the kingdom in one piece, while the rest of us, and all other species,6 are to burn in a hell that the biblical prophesies suggest the world will become. Alternatively, new age believers may yet be transported in UFOs to the Sirius binary star system, or wherever else in the galaxy harbours enlightened aliens. These scenarios are, to be sure, dreadful – and not least for their poverty of imagination. Yet they do tend to recur as a kind of resistant B-Grade cultural virus at the level of emotional affects, and like the conspiracy theories with which they are semiotically connected, they are, as such, worthy of scrutiny.

The global endgame is alive and well on the internet. And like many conspiracy theories, at its core is a vehicle for individual anxiety in the face of overwhelming odds. It is, in short, a gauge of political helplessness in the context of the kind of inexorable global changes that the individual feels powerless to change.

In the hands of artists, however, scenarios for global change are rehearsed in ways that engage the imagination in complicity with an imagined worldview, or, conversely, present dystopian scenarios that clearly invite us to find imaginative forms of resistance to the images they evoke. In either case, there is an imaginative process of adaptation to possible future scenarios that enable engagement and also reflection on what it might mean to inherit that kind of future.

In Lloyd’s painting, snow-peaked mountains are rendered vulnerable as snow and glaciers retreat into higher altitudes due to the effects of global warming, and where even the solidity of mountains or the earth itself appears to melt into air. The theme of climate change recurs in many, if not most of the works in this exhibition. There are, however, one or two subsidiary themes that could be described as in some way coming under the general aegis of an interest in the capacity of science in an age of risk. Hence underscoring all the works there are two major concerns about how the world might look to us in a hundred years’ time and they pivot on the question of potential global ecological destruction and the potential of science. A third, more inchoate theme is the question of the role of art and its capacity for conveying more complex scenarios, even if only by dint of negation through the imagery of dystopian catastrophe. Hence the artworks should not be read literally as pictures of the future, but rather as a means of reflecting on a range of ideas and responses to possible futures.

There are three other works by Lloyd in the exhibition. In one, Sometimes You Have to Leave Without Saying Goodbye (2010), a rocket blasts up into the sky away from an unpopulated, pristine landscape. This appears to be an image of people making a last departure into space from a familiar world. Yet it is imbued with a great deal of nostalgic irony since the rocket is more reminiscent of Cape Canaveral in the sixties than a starship, and the landscape itself is an image of Nature with a capital N, or nature, as it were, “over there” as the ecocritical writer Tim Morton might say.7 The irony of this work is emphasised by its title, which is more reminiscent of a sentimental sixties pop song rather than a departure from the Earth. The question of to which place the rocket might be heading only creates further ambiguity, since Nature in this work is as lovely as a picture on a chocolate box, and the whole scenario suggests that rocket science as an escape route from the Earth’s problems was a half-baked idea even in its own time. Lloyd’s other works The Shape of Eternal Vigilance (2009) and Why Do We Remember the Past and Not the Future? (2010) propose imaginary worlds of a more distant future, where isolated clusters of buildings and domes appear against an unfamiliar moon, or as fragile outposts on massive cliffs of ice suggestive of a future terrestrial ice age.

Several artists in 2112 speculate on urban futures, yet in the photographs of French artists Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre a version of urban dystopia seems to have already arrived in contemporary Detroit. From 2006 to 2008 the artists photographed various deserted and decaying buildings in Detroit, in this once dynamic heart of Fordist automobile manufacturing and capitalist progress. Home to many thousands of factory workers, the port of Detroit was known as Motor City, and also as ‘Motown’: the city of up beat African-American soul music in the sixties and seventies, (if not unprocessed Mississippi soul, then at least soul lite). Since then however, as Marchand and Meffre’s photographs attest, parts of the urban infrastructure started to crumble as factories, school rooms, apartments, theatres and churches were abandoned and began to fall apart. In some ways these images of decay were prophetic, since by 2010 Detroit was hit particularly hard by the crises in subprime mortgages and the car industry, when a third of the population was unemployed and mortgage foreclosures led to a drop in property prices of 80%.8

If from Melbourne the lives of Americans in Detroit seems a long way ‘over there’, and perhaps even the Global Financial Crisis seems relatively distant in a country in the midst of an extractive mining and mineral export boom, this has not prevented artists from articulating a sense of anxiety that a more general collapse of the global economy, or other possible disasters might impact on cities in our own region. The Japanese artist Hisaharu Motoda for example, has tapped into this sense of unease about the future in a series of lithographs called Indications in which Australian icons such as the Melbourne Cricket Ground, or the Sydney Opera House look as if they have been through the same processes of decline and decay as the dilapidated buildings of Detroit. Similarly in Indication—Shibuya Center Town (2005) Motoda reconfigures central Tokyo as a post-apocalyptic ruin.

lloyd [pp40–41]

MarChand & Meffre [pp42–43]

Motoda [pp46–47]

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These bleak future visions are of course, not in any way prophetic, but like the best works of science fiction are a means of symbolic critique of contradictions in the conditions of the present.

Philip Brophy’s Northern Void (2007) (in collaboration with sound work by Philip Samartzis) takes this critique a step further in his video of a drab Melbourne suburb, Preston, which was also inspired by real conditions in America where the artist witnessed people who needed a hospital staggering around the streets of San Francisco in their pyjamas. This was during the Reagan years of the early eighties, when California, one of the wealthiest regions on the planet, had such an inadequate public health system that when the poor became ill they had nowhere to go other than the street. Of all the works in this exhibition, Brophy’s video deliberately refutes the seamless, hi-tech aesthetic common to sci-fi cinema with a low key, grim sense of humour about the slow atrophy of the suburbs of his childhood which held the potential for a future more banal than we could ever imagine. Preston High Street, it should be noted, was for Brophy already something a cultural vacuum before its decline was exacerbated by the opening of a vast American style shopping mall Northlands in 1970. So Brophy’s focus on the slow death of ‘the high street’ in 2013 is not nostalgic since very little appears to have preceded the sense that the buildings look like tombstones bereft of people or social life. In 2085 not much else has changed in ghost town Preston other than the appearance of the ailing, medicated zombies of a vaguely Western underclass waiting for trams that will never arrive, or simply staring vacantly into space. By 3079AD, however, time has eroded the forlorn shopfronts and the inhabitants have quite literally become ghosts, the spectral shadows of whatever could be described as life forms from 2013. Thus from prosaic beginnings, ever more banal things may flourish.

Like Brophy, Melbourne-based painter Darren Wardle also has aspects of the suburban dreams of modernity in his sights with Faultline (2008). Like the special effects in Roland Emmerich’s recent film 2012 when the entire San-Andreas faultline breaks open and the freeways, suburbs and shopping malls of California sink so spectacularly into the Pacific Ocean, the sleek modern building in Wardle’s painting appears to be pulled apart from some unseen force. The building could be one of many in LA, with its bland corporate façade, advertising signage and street-level graffiti. It appears to be a building made of signs almost entirely empty of meaning other than the concept of money as an idealised abstraction. And similarly, in Stephen Haley’s video GameOverGame (2004) we enter a virtual future city comprised entirely of signs. This is a truly repellent, claustrophobic world and in many ways like a hyper-idealised, futuristic version of a shopping mall where escape from one level merely leads into ever more complicated mazes of more signs, and more advertising. In Wardle and Haley’s work, we see the increasing globalization of corporate governance exaggerated and expanded as a way of seeing one possible conduit into the future.

brophy [pp22–23]

wardle [pp62–63]

If Haley presents a world swallowed up by sites of capital, consumption and leisure, these aspects of our world meet a more ignominious future as they are themselves swallowed up by the forces of nature in a work by the Danish art collective Superflex Flooded McDonald’s (2009). In this video the ubiquitous fast-food outlet McDonald’s is inundated by water so that trays of shakes, burgers and fries float and then sink, and even the customer’s friend Ronald McDonald floats off across the shop to meet his end in the deluge. As one of many works in 2112 that speculate on the ways in the future we may be required to adapt to climate change, Flooded McDonalds is as much about the unintended consequences of choices and practices of consumption that we engage in right now, rather than more distant outcomes. The notion that the ways we think about water in a global context may be one of the most salient questions we might raise over the next century is implicit in how Superflex speculate on connections between the inchoate environmental problems of industrialised and delocalised food production and the rise in sea levels.

In Australia, as in many other places, water is a contested resource and the Sydney-based artists Ken and Julia Yonetani draw attention to threats to the viability of the Murray-Darling River system in the semi-arid region of the Mallee through drought, inefficient agricultural practices, and salinity. Despite the aridity of the region, the Mallee and the Murray-Darling Basin are still among the most significant agricultural regions in Australia and its main ‘food basket’. While a huge amount of water is still lost through inefficient methods of irrigation, some food products require a significantly more intensive use of water than others. Beef and livestock, for example, are financially highly profitable products that nonetheless require massive amounts of water for the least efficient yields, while vegetables and fruit deliver the most efficient return for the use of water. It is these last that Ken and Julia Yonetani array in their large scale sculpture Still Life—The Food Bowl (2011) as a still life cornucopia of fruit, wine, vegetables—and a dead fish—all made entirely of salt. While traditional still life painting often aimed to seduce the viewer with sensuous surfaces, the surface of this work (though technically impressive) works counter-intuitively so that by making grapes or peaches from brittle salt the artists render them too fragile to touch and subvert the anticipation of eating them. It is as if we have moved forward in time so the gradual processes of salinification in the region have now become so complete that food is transformed into salt, and hence though water is not visible in this work, it is essentially its main focus. Water is also the subject of Wasserstiefel (1986) by the Swiss artist Roman Signer, an imaginary ‘action-sculpture’ captured in a surreal digital photographic image of a man disappearing in an explosion of water. Consered in the context of the work in salt by the Yonetanis, Signer’s artwork conveys an imagery of the uncanny similar to the imagery of sci-fi film, whilst attesting to the more mundane fact that over 60% of the weight of a human body is made up of water in one form or another.

superflex [pp56–57]

yonetani [pp60–61]

signer [pp54–55]

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The Sydney-based artist Stephanie Valentin also explores the future of water as a precious resource in the arid regions of Australia in a series of photographs called Earthbound. In Cornucopia (2009) Valentine assembled a still life of glass bowls and vases placed outdoors on the typically infertile, sandy soils of a field in the Mallee. Mysteriously illuminated, these cut glass objects are usually used to display flowers, or as vessels containing an abundance of fruit, water or wine—hence the title Cornucopia. Like the Yonetanis’ still life, these objects also suggest fragility, yet Valentin has managed to convey a sense of suspense in response to an unknown future, or the tentative hope that the empty vessels could eventually catch the rain, even if it arrives so rarely in this region. In Terrarium (2009) the artist again placed glass objects: a tube and bell jar, in an arid field. The tube is subtly illuminated to reveal a fragile plant, while the bell jar contains both a butterfly and a bee (both pollinators) on an illuminated glass Petri dish. Valentin is interested in the future impact of climate change on biodiversity, and particularly on how more extreme weather events change the onset of the seasons and then impact on phenological cycles.9 Shot in weak moonlight, these small life forms seem fragile indeed, though their preciousness is emphasised by the visual references to scientific study that nonetheless suggest tentative grounds for optimism.

This restrained optimism is also evinced in the imaginary seed bank contained in a series of bell jars in ab ovo (2008), an installation by the Canadian artist Lyndal Osborne. Inspired by the Millennium Seed Bank near London10 Osborne’s colourful seeds are enlarged three-dimensional versions of the complex seed structures made visible by the electron microscope, and are presented as fecund time capsules for possible futures. Almost every country has established seed banks, though they can be vulnerable to the effects of war as in recent examples in Iraq and Afghanistan, or by earthquakes and extreme climatic events such as those occurring recently in The Philippines, Honduras and Nicaragua.

If Osborne and Valentin’s works suggest some grounds for environmental optimism, others such as those by Australian artist Lesley Duxbury or the American artist Thomas Doyle, convey a heightened sense of an environmental tipping point. In Doyle’s Well Enough Alone (2005), the artist depicts the small figure of a man before a wall of water which is held in an odd moment of suspended animation. Time seems to stand still as the tiny figure gingerly approaches the suspended wall of water, and is a moment of risk made palpable by the quirkiness of a clearly nonsensical, surrealist scenario. In By Degrees (2010) on the other hand, Duxbury conveys an uncompromising image of a massive melting glacier on Baffin Island in Nunuvut in the Canadian Arctic as a kind of tipping point in slow motion. Glaciers are powerful icons of gradual change insofar as they resemble ice cores, tree rings or geological strata as three-dimensional maps of time, and Duxbury emphasises the slow passage of time by staggering the three images in a gradual descent. Glaciers are also remarkable for their translucent blue-green colours, though in this instance Duxbury has stained the glacier with a pink glow as a harbinger of global warming. She has also

valentin [pp60–61]

osborne [pp48–49]

doyle [pp28–29]

emphasised the massive scale of the glacier by including the diminutive figure of a man almost indiscernible in the middle right foreground. The mighty glacier makes its way down the mountain by degrees, yet as we know, glaciers are also retreating in response to variation by degrees in global warming. Hence this image of a glacier caught in a movement so slow that it appears to be inactive, becomes a metaphor for a largely invisible momentum towards an environmental tipping point.

Another work focusing on ice and climate change is the video and sound installation Isolation (2011) by Philip Samartzis. This work combines the terrestrial sounds and images of equipment at the Davis Station in Eastern Antarctica with sounds from a high altitude from the station’s radar system through coded tone pulses that measure upper atmospheric turbulence. The slow video footage of empty rooms emphasises the banalities of everyday life at the station and the range of technological infrastructure needed to maintain life on the frozen continent. It also registers the signs of stress and fatigue on the antennae and machinery at the station produced by intense cold, and in this way draws attention to human vulnerability to extreme climatic conditions. Conversely, the impact of humans on a vulnerable environment is also suggested by how the video does not present Antarctica as a pristine white wilderness, but rather highlights areas of a barren rocky landscape along with the general human detritus around the station. By combining the daily hum of machines with the coded sounds from the stratosphere Samartzis also seeks to further dramatize reciprocal influences between the human and non-human worlds.

If icebergs are fitting images for thinking about time as a slow and continual process, Melbourne artist Stephen Haley deftly compresses time by conveying the rapid global changes that can occur in one second. In his digital art series One Second More Haley represents a selection of either commodities or processes of expenditure produced globally in a single second (at the production rates of 2010). These include 1146 barrels of oil, 31,168 plastic bags, 43,259 energy intensive internet searches, $46,392 in US military spending, 2963 kilos of wild fish, 961 toilet rolls, and 5982 plastic water bottles. In One Second (Plastic Water Bottles 5982) (2010) the eponymous waste is dropped into an imaginary ocean. On first impression this image recalls the ‘great Pacific garbage patch’—a vast floating island of plastic in the North Pacific gyre, but it is also a work with considerable potential to engage the viewer in thinking about the future since if in one second we produce this amount of plastic, it’s not hard to see the massive scale of the problem. In One Second (All Together) (2010) Haley brings all this global production together as a dark swarm of objects hovering over a digitally constructed landscape. Inside the dark cloud, oil barrels float alongside thousands of plastic bags, water bottles and masses of black dots representing internet searches or military dollars. The world is a big place, and the future is an open blue sky of unknown possibilities, but this work effectively invites us to imagine how this sky might look like filled with the detritus of only 10 minutes of global production. What it might imply for the world in 2112 requires more thought, since in Haley’s terms we would

saMartZis [pp52–53]

haley [pp34–35]

duxbury [pp30–31]

16 17

be looking at a surface saturated in black ink. So perhaps the unintended consequences of such production in the present is easier to grasp, and not least for such questions as how so much slowly eroding plastic in the oceans might impact on biodiversity and the food chain.

Like Haley, another Melbourne artist Debbie Symons presents numerical facts and data about escalating environmental change in ways that engage the imagination. In her digital video still Arrivals/Departures (2011), Symons presents an airport Arrivals and Departures screen as an effective device for listing species introduced into Australia as “Arrivals—International” and endangered indigenous species as “Departures—Domestic”. As the IUCN list of endangered species attests,11 we are witnessing a massive global loss in biodiversity, and the simple numerical tallies in Symons’ work tell their own story with great clarity whilst leaving enough space for us to connect the flourishing numbers of arrivals with the impact on the dwindling numbers of those departing.

Justine Cooper’s photographic series Saved By Science also conveys ideas about species extinction with her poignant images of stuffed or preserved animals stored in cabinets and museum corridors, pictures of cupboards full of leopard pelts or rectilinear grids of Luna Moths. In particular, her photo of museum Accession Books (2004) tells the story of a non-human world conceived primarily as an abstracted Linnaean taxonomy rather than as a global ecological system that includes the human. In some ways Cooper’s works are about the past and some of the traditional ontological models that informed earlier science, but they also refer to the futures of species that are currentky endangered and represented here as pathetic museum specimens. It was through science that we came to understand the flaws in the kind of pre-modern theocentric logic that claimed human beings alone have supernatural qualities, and thus make us different in kind from animals, rather than by degrees of difference. And since many of Cooper’s specimens such as leopard skins and elephant feet were in fact quite literally saved by science rather than being sold on the black market, her title is not as ironically critical of science at it first appears.

The finely detailed paintings by Sam Leach reflect on some of the future possibilities of science, yet also encompass the ways science is grounded in the past and hence cannot be divorced from the animal origins of human enterprise. In The Paradox of Prediction (2009) for example,12 a hairless ape looks out towards the viewer. This particular ape Cinder, died recently after living for some time in an American zoo. She had a disease (alopecia universalis) that also occurs in humans and leads to hairlessness, though what interests Leach in this instance is the way the apes’ appearance made her look at once more vulnerable, and more human. If some of the findings of science such as evolutionary theory are often understood as theoretical abstraction rather than the material foundation of our everyday sense of time, Leach’s works suggest that the processes of science may take many years to filter through to common understanding.

syMons [pp58–59]

Cooper [pp24–25]

leaCh [pp38–39]

Leach is also interested in Bruno Latour’s notion that science itself cannot claim completely impartial objectivity since he argues that there are still remnants of mysticism and animism at its core. This is the subject of Leach’s work We Have Never Been Modern (2011) that makes a direct reference to Latour’s work in the history and philosophy of science.13 In this painting scientists cluster round a satellite in a clean room, while a huge griffin vulture perches above. The vulture is one of those Leach witnessed devouring human flesh in a Tibetan sky burial where material human remains are redistributed into the ecosystem. The satellite is also a device that distributes human energy as images and texts are relayed across the world, and by bringing these objects together in a strange form of visual poetry, Leach seeks to suggest the notion that energy may be dispersed in the future in ways that do not conceal human materiality.

In Clade Pruning (2011) an imaginary biologist sits at a desk patiently engaged in the process of sorting through the fewest possible branches of shared phylogenetic origins between humans and seals in preparation for a biogenetic experiment. In his white coat the scientist looks quite the picture of professional enquiry yet the seal in the shadows of the work serves as a reminder of the connections between the man and his own animal origins. For Leach, this is a more modern retelling of ancient myths, such as the Celtic legend of the selkies for example, which suggested that our ancestors were seal-like creatures from the oceans, which in a way they were.

The question of how biogenetic engineering might affect the future is also raised in the work of American photographer Keith Cottingham in Triplets (1993). In this digitally constructed image three adolescent boys at first appear to be triplets, but are in fact perfect digital copies, their gazes all the more difficult to differentiate as they are gathered together in the one image. The adolescent twin boys in Patricia Piccinini’s sculpture Game Boys Advanced (2002) are also clones, yet despite their adolescence their wrinkled skin suggests they have begun to age prematurely. As the brief life of Dolly the sheep (the first cloned mammal) indicated, premature ageing appears to be one of the limitations of cloning—a point emphasised by the title of the work. If these clones are a kind of advanced version of normal boys, they are also already advanced in years.

Kellyann Geurts provides other angles on bioengineering, though her focus is on experiments to improve the capacity of the mind. In her digital inkjet print Oscillogram (2011) for example, Geurts evokes the effects of the early 20th century experimental technology that aimed to make thoughts tangible through photographic processes, colours, shapes and recording devices. In the rather more sinister imagery of Vague Intellectual Pleasure (2009) however, a man is wired up to a machine and appears to smile in response to what the machine has to offer. This work conveys dystopian nuances of a social regime dedicated purely to the experience of pleasure similar to those explored by the early 20th century science fiction writer Aldous Huxley. Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) speculated on how humans may have progressed by year 2540. He imagined an entirely hedonistic society where promiscuous sex combined with heightened cultural experiences

CottinghaM [pp26–27]

piCCinini [pp50–51]

geurts [pp32–33]

18 19

(the ‘feelies’) and the distribution of a narcotic called soma keeps everyone in their places in a rigidly hierarchical social system. And while the man in Geurts’s work at least seems like he could be having a good time, there is something about the way his head is locked in isolation within a machine that renders this kind of induced pleasure, like Huxley’s future world, as the kind of dubious utopia we might do well to avoid.

If most of the artists in 2112 see the next 100 years as a period unlikelyto produce a future utopia, the 17 architectural teams which explore the future urban condition (along with a few of the artists) envisage more optimistic scenarios. Their approaches range from the poetic to the highly subversive, and they are the result of a national competition set by the Australian Institute of Architects. From an image of Brisbane reconfigured to accommodate floods, or new cities branching out across littoral zones and images of organic urbanism to submerged oceanic cities, Australian architects see cities as the resilient structures of the future. The creative directors of ‘Now and When: Australian Urbanism’, John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec, present these explorations in Australian urbanism (both ‘Now’ and in the future ‘When’) using 3D stereoscopic photography and computer generated simulations, thus giving the viewer an entirely new angle on the possibilities inherent in our cities.

The Japanese artist, Mariko Mori also presents an optimistic vision of the future in Miko No Inori (1996) where she appears in a shiny, high-tech world with futuristic platinum blond hair and white clothing, her silver eyes gazing into a crystal ball. To her, the ball seems to hold great promise for us all. Her more recent video Primal Rhythm (2010) is a draft for an ambitious solar monument to be built on Mikayo Island in Seven Light Bay, 180 kilometres off the coast of Okinawa. The future is illuminated by a Pillar of Light and a Moon Stone, which for Mori are symbolic representations of human reunification with the natural world. On the annual Winter solstice the ‘solar pillar of light’ standing in the water will cast a shadow over the ‘moon stone’ on a large rock. On other days the moon stone will change colour according to the movement of local tides—in this way Mori encourages her audience to reconnect with the earth. Mori made her optimistic aspiration clear in a recent statement to the media: I believe that people will reconnect with the rhythm of the sun, the moon, and the sea while experiencing this work, and become one with the universe of the mind that exists inside every human being.14

In The Nomadic Nature Kit (2010) the German artist Kirsten Johannsen also suggests the future may have its utopian elements. Johannsen’s travel kit contains a fragment of the ecosphere in the form of a precious miniature garden designed for the astronauts of the future. A lab table is set up onboard so that terrestrial cycles in temperature and humidity are retained inside a contained sphere to maintain the garden designed to comfort deep space travelers and remind them of their earthly roots.

Mori [pp44–45]

Johannsen [pp36–37]

now and when [pp68–70]

Conversely, the protection of our dependence on the earth is based on more recent events in the Japanese artist Kenji Yanobe’s Antennae of the Earth (2001) where he takes the dystopian scenarios of nuclear disaster, and converts them into a utopian vision in which the artist becomes something of a shaman of the future. Whilst the March 2011 tsunami and its impact on the nuclear facility at Fukushima left the Japanese people in a state of considerable uncertainty about the risks that come with the benefits of nuclear power, the wounds of nuclear war were also felt more acutely in Japan than anywhere else in the world after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. And it was, perhaps, this particularly Japanese mistrust of nuclear technology that in 1997 led Yanobe to visit the Belarus/Ukrainian exclusion zone created a decade earlier in 1986 when the Soviet towns of Chernobyl and Pripyat were cordoned off after a severe nuclear accident at the local power plant.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone has proven fertile territory for imagining the future, most presciently in the work of the Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in their science fiction novella Roadside Picnic (1971). This is a powerful fusion of socialist vision and uncanny prophesy of the zone that was to appear over fifteen years later at Chernobyl and Pripyat. The zone imagined by the Strugatsky brothers was also the inspiration for Andrei Tarkovsky’s brilliant film Stalker (1979). And Tarkovsky’s film was, in turn, the source of a number of contemporary video games, most notably S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl (2007) S.T.A.L.K.E.R Call of Pripyat (2009) which both clearly acknowledge the uncannily prophetic connection between Roadside Picnic, Stalker and the exclusion zone at Chernobyl/Pripyat. A further strange confluence of art and life in Russia is also suggested by the activity known as “Chernobyl stalking,”15 when aficionados of the Stalker legacy travel to the Ukraine, put on combat gear, and take the risk of reenacting the science fiction vision within the radioactive exclusion zone.16 Though still regarded as a site unfit for humans, and dangerous for animals17 the exclusion zone has nonetheless become a green zone where various wild creatures, including bears and wolves, now live in a locale where the human presence remains only in ruins.

When Kenji Yanobe visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone in 1997, he wore a special ‘Atom Suit’ which further to its contamination was later sealed in a lead and glass case as an artwork. In 2112: Imagining the Future a life-size representation of Yanobe in another ‘Atom Suit’ equipped with Geiger counters appears in Antennae of the Earth (2001). The figure stands authoritively in the guise of the traditional statue of the 10th century Buddhist monk Kuuya Shounin, with Buddhist sutras emerging from his mouth and a sacred staff in hand. This central figure of the artist as a revered monk is surrounded and protected by a field of miniature figures in tiny atom suits standing like soldiers in formation on a field of salt. In effect, Yanobe presents himself as a shaman of survival in a post-Chernobyl world, and he becomes a cultural antenna for the protection of the environment through art.

yanobe [pp64–65]

20 21

The artists in 2112 present a number of ways of looking at the future, and the strongest of these images suggest that the real strength of science fiction lies in its understanding of the present. Space Age visions notwithstanding, the artists’ consistent concern with environmental degradation as the most significant future scenario pertinent to the year 2112, also remains very much a question of our own time.

—

1—As the American political philosopher Marshall Berman argued convincingly in: All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982).2—This well know line first came from L.P Hartley’s novel The Go Between (1953).3—There is a good review of their approach in André Burguière The Annales School: An Intellectual History. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2009. 4—Neil Schubin’s Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion Year History of the Human Body (Random House, New York, 2008) is a good place to begin a consideration of deep history.5—Curt Stager’s Deep Future The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth Thomas Dunn Books, New York extends the limited time frame of the next 100 years, significant though they will be, into the distant future of glacial and inter-glacial cycles.6—See http://www.aftertherapturepets.com/ for a canny business set up by atheists for post rapture pet care.7—Timothy Morton Ecology Without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics Harvard University Press, 2007.8—http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/02/detroit-homes-mortgage-foreclosures-809—Phenology is the study of life cycle events in plants and animals, and how variations in the climate might impact on such things as when trees come into blossom, when birds lay their eggs or begin to migrate, or when other animals begin to hibernate. 10—To date the Millennium Seed Bank has collected and classified over 3000 seed varieties from 48 different countries. By 2011 the bank had conserved over 10% of the 242,000 species of world seeds. These seeds have already been used as start-up stock in countries where their own stocks have been destroyed.11—http://www.iucnredlist.org/12—“The paradox of prediction makes two claims. The first is that, though we tend to think prediction makes a statement about the future, it’s just a representation of our present understanding. Through recognition of emerging patterns in the present, prediction describes our understanding evolving. To the extent that it becomes fixed, it cannot evolve, and therefore will not predict. A second aspect of the paradox: prediction is not necessarily passive. It may actively influence realization of the possibility it predicts. So there’s a double reflection. Prediction both reflects and creates understanding. And to the extent that it “reflects” the future, it may also play a part in creating it”. —Zann Gill Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, issue on “Art and Science” vol. 115. Number 3, summer 1986.13—Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University press, Massachusetts, 1993). 14—http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/34286/mariko-mori-plans-a-futuristic-island-earthwork/15—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_stalking16—http://chornobyl.in.ua/en/real-stalker.html17—http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/03/18/us-chernobyl-radiation-idUSTRE52H09020090318

22 23

philip brophy Northern Void 2007 — both images Catalogue No 1

24 25

Justine Cooper Leopards, Congo, 1911 (Panthera pardus) 2004 — Catalogue No 3 Accession Books 2004 — Catalogue No 5

26 27

Keith CottinghaM Triplets from the series Fictitious Portraits: Constructed Photographic Images 1993 — Catalogue No 6

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thoMas doyle Well Enough Alone 2005 — Catalogue No 7

30 31

lesley duxbury By Degrees 2010 — Catalogue No 8

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stephen haley One Second (All Together) 2010 — Catalogue No 12

PHOTO: MARGUND SALLOWSKY

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Kirsten Johannsen Nomadic Nature Kit, artwork for astronauts, earthbound set up 2010 — Catalogue No 14 Nomadic Nature Kit, artwork for astronauts, object (assembled) 2010 — Catalogue No 14

PHOTO: ©HEINRICH HERMESPHOTO: ©KIRSTEN JOHANNSEN

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saM leaChbelow: We Have Never Been Modern 2011 — Catalogue No 15right: The Paradox of Prediction 2009 — Catalogue No 17

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yves MarChand & roMain Meffre Fisher Body 21 Plant, Detroit 2008 — Catalogue No 26 New Glacier Missionary Baptist Church, Detroit 2007 — Catalogue No 25

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MariKo Mori Miko No Inori 1996 — Catalogue No 28 Primal Rhythm 2011 — Catalogue No 29 MariKo Mori

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lyndal osborne ab ovo 2008 — Catalogue No 33 PHOTOS: MARK FREEMAN

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patriCia piCCinini Game Boys Advanced 2002 — Catalogue No 34 PHOTOS: GRAHAM BARING, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND TOLARNO GALLERIES, MELBOURNE.

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philip saMartZis Isolation 2011 — Catalogue No 35

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stephanie valentin Cornucopia from the series Earthbound 2009 — Catalogue No 39 Terrarium from the series Earthbound 2009 — Catalogue No 40

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darren wardle Faultline 2008 — Catalogue No 41

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND NELLIE CASTAN GALLERY, MELBOURNE

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KenJi yanobe Atom Suit Project: Antenna of the Earth 2001 — Catalogue No 42 PHOTO: GREG WEIT

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Ken + Julia yonetani Still Life — The Food Bowl 2011 — Catalogue No 43

now and when: australian urbanisM

NOW: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Photographer: John Gollings.NOW: Mount Whaleback mine, Newman, Western Australia. Photographer: John Gollings.

WHEN: Fear Free City. Concept and image: Justyna Karakiewicz, Tom Kvan and Steve Hatzellis, Melbourne School of Design (The University of Melbourne).WHEN: The Oceanic City. ARUP: Alanna Howe and Alexander Hespe. Image: FloodSlicer.

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now and when: australian urbanisM

ExHIBITION IN THE AUSTRALIAN PAVILION 12th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia 2010.Images: Courtesy of Gollings Studio.

72 73

philip brophy1 Northern Void, 2007

Digital video with quadraphonic audioDimensions variablePrivate collection

Justine Cooper2 Luna Moths (Actias luna), 2004

Chromogenic print75 x 97.5 cmCourtesy of the artist and Jan Manton Art, QLD

3 Leopards, Congo, 1911 (Panthera pardus), 2004Chromogenic print75 x 97.5 cmCourtesy of the artist and Jan Manton Art, QLD

4 Waiting Room, 2004Chromogenic print75 x 97.5 cmCourtesy of the artist and Jan Manton Art, QLD

5 Accession Books, 2004Chromogenic print75 x 97.5 cmCourtesy of the artist and Jan Manton Art, QLD

Keith CottinghaM6 Triplets from Fictitious Portraits –

Constructed Photographic Images, 1993Archival Fuji colour coupler prints116.8 x 96.5 cm edition 12Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York / www.feldmangallery.com

thoMas doyle7 Well Enough Alone, 2005

Mixed media36.2 x 41.9 x 48.3 cmCourtesy of the artist

lesley duxbury8 By Degrees, 2010

Inkjet print on paper50 x 120 x 3.5 cmCourtesy of the artist

Kellyann geurts9 Oscillogram, 2011

Digital Inkjet Print, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Pearl [paper]150 x 100 cm

10 Vague Intellectual Pleasure, 2009Digital inkjet print, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Pearl [paper]105 x 100 cmBoth works private collection

stephen haley11 One Second

(Plastic Water Bottles 5982), 2010Lightjet photograph edition 2/5120 x 120 cmCourtesy of the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

12 One Second (All Together), 2010Lightjet photograph edition 1/5300 x 120 cmRMIT University Collection

13 GameOverGame, 2004Projected QuickTime movie: colour, 1 minute 47 secondsDimensions variableCourtesy of the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

Kirsten Johannsen14 Nomadic Nature Kit, artwork for

astronauts 2010, earthbound set up and object (assembled)Mixed media installationDimensions variable, approx 210 x 50 x 350 cmCourtesy of the artist

saM leaCh15 We Have Never Been Modern, 2011

Oil and resin on wood45 x 35 cm Private collection

16 Clade Pruning, 2011Oil and resin on wood35 x 27 cmPrivate collection, Hong Kong

17 The Paradox of Prediction, 2009Oil and resin on wood30 x 20 cmCourtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, NSW

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18 Sometimes You Have to Leave Without Saying Goodbye, 2010Oil on linen30 x 40 cmPrivate collection

19 The Shape of Eternal Vigilance, 2009Oil on linen23 x 30 cmCourtesy of the artist

20 All That is Solid Melts into Air, 2011Oil on linen 120 x 213 cm Courtesy of the artist

21 Why Do We Remember the Past and Not the Future? 2010Oil on linen150 x 280 cmCourtesy of Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide

yves MarChand & roMain Meffre

22 Adams Theater, Detroit, 2007Chromogenic print95 x 120 cmCourtesy of the artists

23 Postal Printing Office, Broderick Tower, Detroit, 2008Chromogenic print95 x 120 cmCourtesy of the artists

24 Biology Classroom, Cass Technical High School, Detroit, 2008Chromogenic print95 x 120 cmCourtesy of the artists

25 New Glacier Missionary Baptist Church, Detroit, 2007Chromogenic print95 x 120 cmCourtesy of the artists

26 Fisher Body 21 Plant, Detroit, 2008Chromogenic print95 x 120 cmCourtesy of the artists

27 Packard Motors Plant, Detroit, 2006Chromogenic print95 x 120 cmCourtesy of the artists

MariKo Mori28 Miko No Inori, 1996

Video720 x 480 pixels29 frames per secondCourtesy of Mariko Mori Studio Inc., New York

29 Primal Rhythm, 2011Video720 x 480 pixels29 frames per secondCourtesy of Mariko Mori Studio Inc., New York

hisaharu Motoda30 Indication–MCG (Melbourne), 2010

Lithograph 20.2 x 55.5 cmCourtesy of the artist

31 Indication–Opera House (Sydney), 2010Lithograph 54.2 x 80 cmCourtesy of the artist

32 Indication–Shibuya Center Town, 2005Lithograph64 x 115.5 cmCourtesy of the artist

lyndal osborne33 ab ovo, 2008

Mixed media installation183 x 792 x 457 cmCourtesy of the artist

patriCia piCCinini34 Game Boys Advanced

from the series We Are Family, 2002Silicone, polyurethane, fibreglass, clothing, human hair, video game131 x 69 x 35 cmMichael Buxton Collection

philip saMartZis35 Isolation, 2011

Multi-screen video and multi-channel sound installationDimensions variableCourtesy of the artist

74 75

roMan signer36 Wasserstiefel, 1986

Photograph50 x 40 cmCourtesy of the artist

superflex37 Flooded McDonalds, 2009

RED video installation: colour, sound, 20 minutes, 16:9 edition 3/5400 x 700 cm Collection of Queensland Art Gallery. Purchased 2010 with funds from Tim Fairfax, AM through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation

debbie syMons38 Arrivals/Departures, 2011

Digital video Courtesy of the artist

stephanie valentin

39 Cornucopia from the series Earthbound, 2009Pigment print70 x 86 cm Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, NSW

40 Terrarium from the series Earthbound, 2009Pigment print70 x 86 cm Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, NSW

darren wardle41 Faultline, 2008

Oil and acrylic on canvas152.5 x 274 cmPrivate CollectionImage courtesy of the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

KenJi yanobe42 Atom Suit Project:

Antenna of the Earth, 2001Geiger counter, plastic, photo, othersInstallation approx 180 x 420 x 148 cmCollection of the artist and courtesy of Yamamoto Gendai Gallery, Tokyo

Ken + Julia yonetani43 Still Life – The Food Bowl, 2011

Murray River salt installation Dimensions variableCourtesy of the artists and ARTEREAL Gallery, NSW / www.artereal.com.au

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now and when: australian urbanisM

42 Exhibition conceived and developed by Creative Directors John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec and courtesy of the Australian Institute of Architects. Creative Team includes ‘Design by Pidgeon’ (all design elements), FloodSlicer (3D architectural visualisations), Nick Murray and Carl Anderson (Sound designers).

now / John gollings Photography by John GollingsMelbourne, Sydney, Surfers Paradise, Super Pit gold mine (Kalgoorlie, Western Australia), Mount Whaleback mine (Newman, Western Australia). All aerial stereoscopic photography by John Gollings.

when / floodsliCer 3D animation produced by FloodSlicer. The content for the segment comes from 17 architectural teams, each presenting separate concepts. These are:

sydney 2050: fraying ground RAG URBANISM (Richard Goodwin, Andrew Benjamin, Gerard Reinmuth)

symbiotic CitySteve Whitford (University of Melbourne) and James Brearley (BAU Brearley Architects and Urbanists)

the fear free CityJustyna Karakiewicz, Tom Kvan and Steve Hatzellis

a City of hopeEdmond & Corrigan

Mould CityColony Collective, Melbourne School of Design (University of Melbourne) (Madeleine Beech, Jono Brener, Nicola Dovey, Peter Raisbeck and Simon Wollan)

sedimentary CityBrit Andresen and Mara Francis (The University of Queensland)

aquatownNH Architecture with Andrew Mackenzie

Multiplicity John Wardle Architects & Stefano Boscutti

ocean CityArup (Alanna Howe, Alexander Hespe)

+41-41 Peck Dunin Simpson Architects (Fiona Dunin, Alex Peck, Andrew Simpson in association with Martina Johnson, Third Skin, Eckersley Garden Architecture, Angus McIntyre, Tim Kreger)

survival vs resilience The collaborative team of BKK Architects, Village Well, Charter Keck Cramer and Daniel Piker (Tim Black, Julian Kosloff, Simon Knott, George Huon, Julian Faelli, Madeleine Beech, Jane Caught and Steffan Heath

terra form australis HASSELL, Holopoint & The Environment Institute (Tim Horton, Tony Grist, Prof Mike Young, Ben Kilsby, Sharon Mackay, Susie Nicolai, Mike Mouritz)

island proposition 2100 (ip2100) Scott Lloyd, Aaron Roberts (room11) and Katrina Stoll

implementing the rhetoric Harrison and White with Nano Langenheim (Marcus White, Stuart Harrison and Nano Langenheim)

how does it Make you feel (hdiMyf) Ben Statkus (Statkus Architecture), Daniel Agdag, Melanie Etchell, William Golding, Anna Nguyen, Joel Ng

saturation CityMcGauran Giannini Soon (MGS), Bild + Dyskors, Material Thinking (Eli Giannini, Jocelyn Chiew, Catherine Ranger, Ben Milbourne, Edmund Carter, Paul Carter)

a tale of two CitiesBillard Leece Partnership Pty Ltd (Grace Chung, Alan Hunt, Georgie Kearney, David Leece, Grant Roberts, Ardhene Sembrano, Rajith Senanayake, Guy Sendy-Smithers, Suffian Shahabuddin, Bob Sinclair, Stuart Webber)+soundscapeNick Murray and Carl Anderson

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philip brophy made his feature directorial debut with Body Melt (1993), following a series of experimental shorts like Salt Saliva Sperm & Sweat (1988). His recent shorts include the Words In My Mouth - Voices In My Head (2004) series and The Sound Of Milk (Prologue) (2004). His most recent video is the featurette Northern Void (2007) which features a live score composed and performed by Ph2 (Philip Brophy and Philip Samartzis). His current features in development as writer/director/co-producer are Grey Metal & The Sound Of Milk. Concurrent with his film projects, Philip produces Dolby 5.1 audiovisual works for galleries: the 4-screen digital animations 10 Transforming Youths (200 9) and 10 Flaming Youths (2010), the 2-screen digital animation Vox (2007) and the -3-screen installation Fluorescent (2004). His major interactive work is The Body Malleable (2002-2004). Complete information is available at www.philipbrophy.com

Justine Cooper finds inspiration in the questions that puzzle her. Why would a pro-life man approve of stem cell research if it could provide a cure for his baldness? Why would you choose to take a sleep medication with side effects that include waking up without knowing you were awake, and doing things you didn’t know you were doing? What motivates our scientific institutions to collect and arrange the natural world into a vast repository of objects and artefacts, yet exclude samples from western civilizations? Cooper uses a variety of imaging methods, including MRIs, large format photography, video, animation, and online media to explore the frictions found in the public and private ways the disciplines of science and medicine are a part of us, as individuals and as a culture. Past projects include inventing new drugs (HAVIDOL) and playing with dolls (Living in Sim). Exhibitions and screenings include The International Center of Photography, New York; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland; The Singapore Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute for Media Art, and The George Pompidou Centre, Paris. She was born in Sydney, Australia and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Keith CottinghaM, based in San Francisco, has been working with computer technology since 1988. He has studied at San Francisco State University, at the San Francisco Center for Computer Art, and at the San Luis Obispo Polytechnic. Cottingham simulates the material world, but does not represent it. He establishes a tension between the ‘look’ of reality, derived from the authority of the photographic image, and the animations’ content, which are invented morphologies. Stylised and deconstructe d, the subjects are composites based on cultural, philosophical, architectural, and natural sources. He identifies his animations as ‘constructive imaginings,’ which provide the freedom to enter, even create new symbolic worlds. His animations depict the natural process of movement between opposing forces as, for example, the outward current that carries under its surface a counter-current. In the cultural, technological, and personal spheres, these interactions have the potential to result in violent collision and destruction or mutual evolution and infusion. Cottingham’s work has been reproduced and exhibited in major exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States, including the List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, MA; Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, Spain; Hayward Gallery, London, England; Stadtische Museen, Heilbronn, Germany, and Neue Galerie Graz, Austria.

thoMas doyle was born in Michigan, USA in 1976 and now lives and works in New York. Doyle’s work combines his formal training as a painter and printmaker with a fascination with scale models that began at an early age. His sculptures, rendered in 1:100 to 1:43 scale, often depict human figures beset by quiet calamities, often of the natural kind. Doyle’s work has been shown at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2011), LeBasse Projects gallery, Culver City, California (2010, 2011), Ridgefield Guild of Arts, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2010), Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California (2011), Yoo Art Space Gallery, Seoul (2009), Mixed Greens gallery, New York (2008, 2009), among others. He is a recipient of the 2009 West Collection purchase prize and is a MacDowell Colony fellow.

lesley duxbury was born in Lancashire, U.K., arrived in Australia in 1983, and now lives in Melbourne. She uses printmedia, both analogue and digital, to address issues concerning the natural environment, in particular the atmosphere and its phenomena, which she explores through work that emulates and recreates our experiences and perceptions of it. The phenomenological experiences of extended walks in remote landscapes, during which she takes photographs and makes extensive notes, are the impetus for her investigations. Most recent walks in the Canadian Arctic and Iceland have invigorated her concerns about the possible effects of Climate Change. Duxbury is currently the Deputy Head, Research and Innovation in the School of Art at RMIT University. She has exhibited for over twenty five years in Australia and internationally with solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Perth, Christchurch and Sydney and more than fifty selected group exhibitions in Australia, including National Gallery of Australia and National Gallery of Victoria, Seoul, Vienna; and Hong Kong. She is the recipient of the Australia Council Visual Arts Board New Work Grant and VACB studio residency in Paris. Other than exhibiting in galleries, Lesley has completed a public art commission for Edith Cowan University and the AMP Building in Perth and coordinated the 100 X 100 Print project for the Print Council of Australia. Her work is held in all major public collections in Australia.

Kellyann geurts was born in Melbourne. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the Faculty of Art and Design at Monash University, and lectures in Fine Art Photography at the School of Art, RMIT University. Her current work The Digital Thought Photography Project, located in a sci-fi genre, examines mental landscapes through digital imaging. The interpretation of thought processes continues to hold strong interest amongst scientists and artists and for centuries has been interpreted with the latest scientific and experimental technologies of the time. The Digital Thought Photography Project re-contextualizes processes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that aimed to make thoughts tangible through photographic processes, colour, shapes; actual and fictional recording devices. These works portray modern brain-computer interfaces and futuristic thought-recording devices. Geurts’ practice has long explored mind patterns and brain imaging through photographic and digital media. In the past five years her works have been shown at: Dianne Tanzer Gallery; St Vincent’s Hospital; Red Gallery; Project Space; RMIT School of Art Gallery; Spare Room (Project Space); Federation Square Public Screen and National Neurosciences Facility, Melbourne and she has presented papers at Goldsmiths College London and University of Amsterdam. She has published two Artist Books that are part of the collection at the State Library of Victoria (General Collection & Rare Book Collection).

stephen haley was born in Melbourne in 1961. He is a painter and digital media artist. He is also a writer and has lectured in Art History at various institutions. He currently holds the position of Graduate Research Coordinator (MFA) at the Art Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts/ University of Melbourne. His works investigate contemporary actual and virtual space and often employ the use of 3D modelling software to construct fantastic simulations premised on repetition and difference. More recent work has turned to broader environmental considerations but still build upon his PhD thesis completed in 2005 that considered the mirror as the defining metaphor for contemporary Western culture and space. Haley has won a number of prestigious art awards and residencies including the Deacons, Graham James/Arts21 Award (1998, the ANZ Visual Art Fellowship (2004), the R&M McGivern Prize for Painting (2006), Australia Council Visual Arts Board studio residency in Los Angeles (2006) and a Australia Council Visual Arts Board New Work Grant (2009). He has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally for the past 18 years including at the National Gallery of Victoria; Bendigo Art Gallery; 18th Street Arts Centre, Los Angeles; Director’s Lounge Contemporary Art and Media Festival, Berlin; ArtCore Brewery Annex, Los Angeles; Glendale Art College, Los Angeles; and with Lumas Gallery in Berlin, Paris, New York, Zurich and London.

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Kirsten Johannsen was born 1957 in Bremen, Germany and is based in Berlin. In her studio practice, Johannsen creates interactive environments and sculptures that delve into the complexities of nature—its time and its passages. Her interest is concentrated on the way ‘home’ will be defined in the future. In her current study and work Johannsen explores psychological and perceptive transformations astronauts detect during extended crewed mission into outer space. Her objects and installations have been exhibited at HEAD Geneve Switzerland; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund; Bundesgartenschau Schwerin; Transmediale 07, Berlin, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, NGBK Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Kunstverein Ulm, K&S Galerie Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Raleigh, USA; Zeche Zollern, Dortmund, Germany; Regional Gallery, Noosa Australia; Edison Höfe, Berlin; ZKM Zentrum für Kunst & Medientechnologie, Medienmuseum Karlsruhe, Germany 1997. Johannsen has lectured at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in Switzerland.

saM leaCh was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1973. His work draws on the tradition of history painting and its recent developments to create contemporary paintings that deal with the impact of science on the relationship between humans and the non-human world. Leach’s typically intimate scale detailed oil paintings take their cues from new scientific discoveries and technologies which change our understanding of the world and what it means to be human. Leach’s work has been exhibited in several museum shows including Optimism at the Queensland Art Gallery and Neo Goth at the University of Queensland Art Museum in 2008, in 2009 the Shilo Project at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and Horror Come Darkness at the Macquarie University Art Gallery and Still at Hawkesbury Regional Gallery in 2010. His work is held in public collections of regional galleries of Geelong, Gold Coast, Coffs Harbour, Newcastle and Gippsland and the collections of the Latrobe University and University of Queensland.

tony lloyd was born in Melbourne in 1970. Since gaining his Masters degree at RMIT University in 2000, Lloyd has shown widely in Australia and internationally. Lloyd has had twenty solo and numerous group exhibitions in Australia, Europe and Asia. Recent showings have been at the Cat Street Gallery in Hong Kong and xin Dong Cheng Space For Contemporary Art, Beijing. In 2009, Gippsland Art Gallery presented Lost Highways a major survey of his work from 1999–2009. Public collections include, State Library of Victoria, Gippsland Art Gallery, Artbank and the City of Whitehorse. Lloyd has received Development Grants from Australia Council for the Arts and has been short listed for numerous art prizes. He has twice held residencies at The British School, Rome, Italy; and at Canvas International Art in the Netherlands.

yves MarChand & roMain Meffre (born in 1981 and 1987) grew up near Paris and shared an interest in photographing ruins. After meeting in 2002, they began creating a systematic record of ruins and the changing urban landscape around Paris, then further afield in France, Belgium, England, Spain and Italy. Visiting these places made them more sensitive to the uniqueness of historic buildings, especially those built in the 19th and 20th Centuries which were often neglected. They see ruins as visible symbols of societal change. The state of ruin is temporary, the result of changing eras and the fall of empires; their photography is a modest attempt to preserve this ephemeral state. In 2005 they travelled to Detroit: a city where vast modern ruins are simply a logical part of the landscape. At the beginning of the 20th Century with the invention of assembly line, Detroit rose as the car capital of the world. ‘Motor City’ produced what became the economic, industrial and urban model of modern society. From the 50s however, de-industrialisation, segregation, social tension and disinvestment has turned Motor City into ruin. The population fell from 2 million to 900,000 inhabitants. Within fifty years, a once prosperous city fell from grace to become the most ruined city in the western world. Marchand and Meffre presented their first exhibition Les fabuleuses ruines de Detroit in June 2006. They have revisited Detroit several times since to complete their work on the city. Their first book, The Ruins of Detroit, was released in 2010 by Steidl.

MariKo Mori combines manga-like pop art, self-portraits, feminine cyborgs, and Buddhist ideologies with advanced technology to produce life-size digitally edited photographs, two and three dimensional video installations and most recently, architectural landscapes. Born in 1967 in Tokyo, Japan, she graduated from the Bunka Fashion College (Tokyo) in 1988 where she spent her teenage years working as a fashion model. Later, feeling restrained by the Japanese ethic of uniformity, she moved to London attending the Byam Shaw School of Art (1988–89), and Chelsea College of Art, London (1989-92). Since embarking on an Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992–93, she continues to live and work in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: Oneness (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brazilia, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, 2011; Pinchuk Arts Centre, Kiev, Ukraine, 2008; Groninger Museum, Groningen, Holland, 2007; Aros Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark, 2007); Mariko Mori: Kumano (Asia Society, New York, 2010); Flat Stone (SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tokyo, 2009); and White Hole (Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, 2009). Mori has exhibited widely in international group exhibitions and biennale’s. Her work is held in galleries worldwide and she continues to foster an international reputation.

hisaharu Motoda was born in Kumamoto, Japan in 1973. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kyushu Sangyo University (1999) and Master of Fine Arts from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (2001). In 2009-2010, Motoda participated in a Japanese Government Overseas Study Fellowship, in Australia and USA. Selected solo exhibitions include: Murata & Friends “Neo-Ruin” (Berlin, Germany, 2011); C・SQUARE, Art Gallery of Chukyo University (Nagoya, Japan, 2011); Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (Melbourne, Australia, 2010); hpgrp GALLERY TOKYO (Tokyo, Japan, 2009); Gallery III, Contemporary Art Museum of Kumamoto (Japan, 2007). Selected group exhibitions include: JAPANCONGO: Carsten Hollers double-take on Jean Pigozzis collection (Le Magasin–Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France and Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia, 2011); IMMANENT LANDSCAPE (Oyama City Kurumaya Museum of Art, Tochigi, Japan, 2011); Color of Printmaking: Lithography (Bumpodo Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 2010); IMMANENT LANDSCAPE (West Space, Melbourne, Australia, 2010); Collections #034 –Imaginarium– (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 2010); The View of Contemporary Paintings (Tokyo Station Gallery, Japan, 2009); VOCA 2008 (The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, JAPAN, 2009); SORA-WA-HARETEIRUKEDO (Musee Hamaguchi Yozo, Yamasa Collection, Tokyo, Japan, 2008).

lyndal osborne was born in Newcastle, Australia. She studied at the National Art School in Sydney and received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. Since 1971, Osborne has been based in Edmonton, and is a Professor Emeritus in Department of Art and Design, University of Alberta. Osborne has been exhibiting in Canada and internationally since the early 1970s and has shown in over 360 exhibitions. Her installation work speaks of the forces of transformation within nature, as well as commenting upon pressing issues relating to the environment. In her recent work Osborne has focused on an examination of the issues of genetically modified organisms and agricultural sustainability for subject matter. Her work is represented in numerous Canadian collections, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Alberta. Recent exhibitions include Museum London (2011), Deschambault, Quebec (2011), University of Lethbridge Art Gallery (2011), Art Gallery of Alberta (2010), Dunlop Gallery, Regina (2010), Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa (2008) and Canadian Clay and Glass Museum, Kitchener (2008), Doland Museum, Shanghai, China (2003).

patriCia piCCinini was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1965 and moved to Australia with her family in 1972. In 1988 she gained a Bachelor of Arts (Economic History) from Australian National University. From 1989 to 1991 she studied painting at Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne. Soon after completing her art degree, she initiated the Basement Project Gallery, Melbourne, which she coordinated from 1994–1996. She was an Australia Council New Media Fellow from 2000–2001 and in 2006 she was awarded the Australia Council Residency, ISCP New York. She represented Australia at the Venice

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Biennale in 2003. Selected solo exhibitions include: Hold me Close to your Heart, Arter Space for Art (Istanbul, Turkey, 2011); Once Apon a Time, Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide, Australia, 2011); Not as We Know It, Haunch of Venison (New York, USA, 2010); Relativity, Art Gallery of Western Australia (Perth, Australia, 2010); Evolution, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (Hobart, Australia, 2009); (tiernas) Criaturas/(tender) Creatures, Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain, 2007); Hug: Recent Works by Patricia Piccinini, Des Moines Art Centre (Des Moines, USA. Toured to: Frye Museum, Seattle. 2007); We are Family, Australian Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy Toured to: Hara Museum Tokyo, Japan, 2003); Call of the Wild, Museum of Contemporary Art, (Sydney, Australia, 2002); Retrospectology, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, (Melbourne, Australia, 2002).

philip saMartZis is a Melbourne based sound artist who has performed and exhibited widely including presentations at The Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris (2001); The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2002); The Mori Arts Centre, Tokyo (2003); The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2007); The National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2009); and The South African National Museum, Cape Town (2010). He has curated five Immersion festivals focusing on the theory and practice of sound spatialisation, as well as Variable Resistance, a series of international sound art presentations for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2001/2), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002) and the Podewil Art Center, Berlin (2003). Philip has released five solo compact discs, Residue (1998), Windmills Bordered By Nothingness (1999), Mort aux Vaches (2003), Soft and Loud (2004) and Unheard Spaces (2006). In 2010 the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Australian Antarctic Division awarded Philip fellowships to document the effects of extreme climate and weather events on the human condition at Davis Station in Eastern Antarctica, and Macquarie Island. The outcomes have been presented in the National Archives of Australia’s Traversing Antarctica (2011) centenary exhibition; Polar South: Art in Antarctica, Muntref Museum, the National University of Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires (2011); and the 11th International Symposium on Antarctic Earth Sciences, Edinburgh (2011).

roMan signer was born in Appenzell. He works and lives in St.Gallen, Switzerland. Signer’s works have acquired the label ‘time-sculpture’. They share traditional sculpture’s concern with the crafting of physical materials in three dimensions, but they extend that concern into what may or may not be characterised as the fourth dimension: the dimension of time. Variously combining three-dimensional objects, live action, still photography and moving-image documentation, Signer’s time-sculptures frame episodes of the containment and release of energy—always with ingenuity, often with captivating, epigrammatic swiftness and irresistible humour. —Rachel Withers, Roman Signer, 2007. Solo exhibitions include: Acht Stühle, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS), Mexico City/MEx (2011); Swiss Institute, New York (2010), Helmhaus, Zürich (2008), Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2007), Sammlung Hauser und Wirth, St. Gallen/CH (2003), Shiseido Galleries, Tokyo (2003), Wiener Secession, Wien (1999), 48. Biennale di Venezia, Swiss Pavillion, Venice (1999). Selected group exhibitions include: MONA— Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Australia (2011), The New Décor, The Hayward Gallery, London (2010), Estuaire, Nantes-Saint-Nazaire (2009), Gakona, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2009), Skulptur.Projekte, Münster (1997), Documenta 8, Kassel (1987). Roman Signer is represented by the Galeries Hauser&Wirth, Zurich, Martin Janda, Vienna, Art: Concept, Paris, Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Häusler Contemporary, Munich and Stampa, Basel.

superflex is a Danish artists’ group founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. Their projects often relate to economic forces, democratic production conditions and self-organisation. Superflex describe their projects as tools; as proposals that invite people to actively participate in and communicate the development of experimental models that alter prevailing economic production conditions. Their projects are often assisted by experts who contribute special interests; the tools can then be further utilised and modified by users. Selected solo exhibitions include: Supershow—more than a show (Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland), Social Pudding

in collaboration with Rirkrit Tiravanija (GFZK, Leipzig, Germany), Open market (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main), Guarana Power (REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles); Mori Museum, Tokyo; Gallery 1301PE, Los Angeles; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Superflex has participated in many international arts biennials such as the Gwangju biennial in Korea, Istanbul Biennial, Sao Paulo Biennial, Shanghai Biennial and in the Utopia Station exhibition at the Venice Biennale. They contributed to the exhibition Rethink Kakotopia shown at the Nikolaj Centre of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen 2009 and at Tensta Konsthall 2010.

debbie syMons was born in 1970 in Melbourne, Australia. Symons’ formative training was at Victoria College Prahran (VCA) in the fields of painting and printmaking. She is currently completing a PhD on Anthropocentrism and the Environmental Dilemma at Monash University with the assistance of an Australian Postgraduate Scholarship. Her work utilises environmental data to investigate and interrogate the inextricable links between environmental degradation and free market capitalism; exploring mankind’s ecological conundrum. She has worked with scientific organisation such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species to facilitate the statistical information basis pertaining to her works. Symons’ works have been shown internationally through the International Urban Screen Association and nationally; Urban Screens, Federation Square, Albury Digital Outdoor Gallery, Craft Victoria, Trocadero Art Space, Lorne Sculpture 2011, Shifted Gallery, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Monash University Faculty Gallery, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, The Substation and 69 Smith St Gallery. Symons’ was awarded the Emerging Artist New Work grant from the Australia Council for the Arts in 2009.

stephanie valentin’s work is motivated by the shifting relationship between the forces of nature, technology and culture. Throughout her career she has shown a fascination for the interconnectedness of biological life and the intricacy and complexity of the natural world. Previously her work has investigated the sub-visible realm through photogram magnifications and microscopy. In particular she has utilised experimental electron microscopy techniques to produce micro-sculptural interventions on non-living biological forms. Valentin was born in 1962 and lives and works in Sydney. She holds a Master of Fine Art, Photomedia, from the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW (2001) and is a PHD Candidate at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Selected solo exhibitions include: unseasonal, Stills Gallery, Sydney, 2011; earthbound, Stills Gallery, Sydney, 2009; Chemie des Kleinsten, Galerie f5.6, Munich, Germany, 2003; Black and White Photographs: Stephanie Valentin & Judith Ahern, Australian Centre For Photography, Sydney, 1986. Selected group exhibitions include: Stormy Weather, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2010; The Challenged Landscape, UTS Gallery, Sydney, 2010; Signs of Truth. Photography and Science, Altana Gallery, University of Technology Dresden, Germany, 2006–2007; firstimpressions—Contemporary Australian Photograms, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003 and Stranger Than Fiction, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1991.

darren wardle was born in Melbourne in 1969 and works between Melbourne and New York. His lurid paintings use Modernist architecture to explore spatial illusion as well as to elaborate a vision of contemporary consciousness. Amplified by his digitally inflected toxic colour and painted with a flat glow that resembles electronic monitors, Wardle’s work embodies the anxiety of architecture under threat from unpredictable forces. His work has been shown at Artists Space, New York; Chelsea Art Museum, New York; The New York Armory Show, Stux Gallery, New York; Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne; Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles; Art 2102, LA; Glendale College Art Gallery, LA; Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York; Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney; Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo; Geelong Gallery, Geelong; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra. In 2011 Wardle held a solo show at Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney and was included in curated shows at The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, Praxis Art Space

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Singapore and KIAF, Seoul with Nellie Castan Gallery. The National Gallery of Victoria, Latrobe University Museum Collection, RMIT University Collection, Lyon House Museum and Heide Museum of Modern Art have collected his work.

KenJi yanobe was born in 1965 in Osaka, Japan. He attended Kyoto City University of Arts and received a Master of Arts degree in 1991. Since the early 1990s, Yanobe has been incorporating the theme of survival in present-day society into his work, creating numerous large-scale mechanical sculptural works that may be attached to one’s body or ridden and controlled. With the dawning of the 21st century, Yanobe shifted to the theme of revival, and in 2003, he held the exhibition Megalomania, the culmination of his work up to that time, at The National Museum of Art, Osaka (on the site of Osaka Expo ‘70 world’s fair). In 2004, he created The City of Children Project during a six-month residency at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Yanobe is continuing to develop creative activities that transcend established artistic forms, with such projects as Kindergarten, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi (2005), The World of Torayan, Kirishima Open-Air Museum, Kagoshima (2007), ULTRA, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi (2009), Mythos, Nizayama Forest Art Museum, Toyama (2010). His works has also been shown at Neo Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2001), SENTATSUMIRAI Futuro Anteriore – Arte Attuale Dal Giappone, Centro Per L’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (2001), Manga! Japanese Pictures, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2008), Busan Biennale ‘Living in Evolution’, Busan, Korea (2010).

Ken + Julia yonetani have been working collaboratively since 2009. Their latest series of works Still Life: The Food Bowl, was recently exhibited at Artereal Gallery, Sydney; Palimpsest #8: Collaborators and Sabateurs, Mildura and at GV Art, London. Ken Yonetani was born in 1971 in Tokyo, Japan. He lives and works in Katoomba NSW, Australia. He received a Bachelor of Economics in Japan and worked in the Foreign Exchange Market in Tokyo for three years. Following this, he was an assistant for pottery master, Toshio Kinjo, oldest son of Jiro Kinjo a National Living Treasure of Japan. He completed his MA at The Australian National University School of Art in 2005. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. He was selected for the Australian contingent at The 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Julia Yonetani is an artist, writer, and researcher. She holds a PhD from the Australian National University, and has held positions lecturing and researching in History, Cultural Studies, and Art Theory at the University of New South Wales, Western Sydney University and the University of the Ryukyus, Japan. She has exhibited with Ken Yonetani at galleries such as the La Trobe Museum of Art, Melbourne, Jan Manton Art, Brisbane, Artereal Gallery, Sydney and Campbelltown Arts Centre, and has published in publications such as Cultural Studies Review, Artlink, Art and Perception, Asian Studies Review, Japanese Studies, and Critical Asian Studies. In February 2010 she staged a bed-in with Ken at Federation Square, Melbourne. She has been involved in various environmental movements and represented Okinawan environmental groups at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Amman, Jordan in 2000.

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now and when: australian urbanisM John gollings and ivan riJaveC were Creative Directors for Australia’s exhibition in the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, and a major project of the Australian Institute of Architects. The exhibition ‘NOW and WHEN’ offers a rich exploration of issues facing Australia’s highly urbanised population that include sustainability, urban sprawl, climate and immigration. The 2-part film is accompanied by an evocative soundscape and was created using 3D stereoscopic photography and computer generated simulations. NOW is a 3D photo study of aerial images taken from a helicopter of East coast cities Melbourne, Sydney and Surfers Paradise, in counterpoint with the mining holes of the Western Australian outback. WHEN presents 17 speculative approaches to the urban condition in the future, and is the result of a national competition set by the Australian

Institute of Architects. Freed from the restrictions of planning and design constraints architects entered an imaginative realm offering new ways to approach design. While the problems in these fantastic environments are often apparent, the projects range from the poetic and optimistic to the highly subversive. By animating the future in super-real stereoscopic images ‘When’ exploits architecture’s capacity to become a performing urban art. John Gollings is one of Australia’s premier architectural photographers, heading up Gollings Studio, and Ivan Rijavec leads an award-winning practice Rijavec Architects—both are based in Melbourne. The Creative team (Design by Pidgeon, FloodSlicer, and Sound Design two4k) are all Melbourne based.

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2112: Imagining the Future

Exhibition dates: 2 December 2011— 28 January 2012 Curator: Linda Williams

Acknowledgements: Appreciative thanks to the participants and their representatives: Philip Brophy; Justine Cooper: Jan Manton Art, QLD; Keith Cottingham: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Thomas Doyle; Lesley Duxbury; Kellyann Geurts; Stephen Haley: Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne; Kirsten Johannsen; Sam Leach: Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, NSW; Tony Lloyd: Hill Smith Gallery, SA; David Feighan; Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre; Mariko Mori: Mariko Mori Studio, Inc., New York; Hisaharu Motoda; Lyndal Osborne; Patricia Piccinini: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne; Michael Buxton Collection; Philip Samartzis; Roman Signer: Barbara Signer; Superflex: 1301PE, Los Angeles; Director Tony Ellwood and Queensland Art Gallery; Debbie Symons; Stephanie Valentin: Stills Gallery, NSW; Darren Wardle: Nellie Castan

Gallery, Melbourne; Kenji Yanobe: Yamamoto Gendai Gallery, Tokyo; Ken + Julia Yonetani; Artereal NSW. NOW and WHEN: Australian Urbanism, courtesy of the Australian Institute of Architects, featured in the Australian Pavilion at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia 2010; NOW and WHEN Creative Directors: John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec.

We also thank the following most warmly for their support: The Japan Foundation, Sydney; JICC, Consulate-General of Japan; Dr Anne Marie Freybourg, Kunstpraxis, Berlin; Dr Andrew Milner, Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University; Dr Jane Mullett, Research Fellow in the Climate Change Adaptation Program, Global Cities Research Institute at RMIT University; Jen Rae.

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Catalogue published by RMIT Gallery / December 2011 / Limited Edition 1000Editor: Suzanne Davies / Production Coordinator: Vanessa GerransPhotography: Courtesy of the artists and their representativesGraphic Design: Ian Robertson / Printing: Bambra Press, Melbourne

Cover and inside covers: Mariko Mori, video still (detail) Miko No Inori, 1996, Catalogue No 28Courtesy of Mariko Mori Studio Inc., New York

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entryAuthor: Williams, Linda, 1946– / Title: 2112 imagining the future Linda Williams, Andrew Milner, Jane Mullett. Editor Suzanne Davies.ISBN: 9780980771022 (pbk.)Subjects: Art, Modern–Victoria–Melbourne –21st century–Exhibitions.Climatic changes–Effect of human beings on–Exhibitions.Environmental protection in art—Exhibitions; Forecasting–Exhibitions.Other Authors/Contributors: Davies, Suzanne. Milner, Andrew. Mullett, Jane.Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Gallery.Dewey Number: 704.9495516

Printed on Mega Recycled FSC / 250 + 150gsmTypeface: Akkurat / Designed by Laurenz Brunner 2003

RMIT GalleryDirector: Suzanne DaviesExhibitions Coordinator: Vanessa GerransInstallation Manager: Peter WilsonInstallation: Malcolm Lloyd, James Lynch, David MutchMedia: Evelyn TsitasAdministration: Megha BalakrishnanAdministration Assistants: Pooja Dubey, Julia Lang, Danielle Measday, Maria StolnikRMIT Gallery Volunteers: Eloise Barbagallo, Anna Du, Isabela Rojas, Mary-Ann Spiers, Umran Ustalar, Amelia Winata.

RMIT Gallery / RMIT University 344 Swanston Street Melbourne GPO Box 2476 Melbourne Victoria Australia 3001Tel: +613 9925 1717 Fax: +613 9925 1738 E: rmit.gallery@rmit.edu.au W: www.rmit.edu.au/rmitgalleryBecome a Fan of RMIT Gallery on Facebook Follow RMIT Gallery on Twitter

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