Title: Department of Computer Science Seminar
Date: Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2000
Time: 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]
Speaker: Ms Linda Wallace (Ph.D Student in School of Art at ANU)
Description: "PROBE: Explorations Into Australian Computational Space"


                        Abstract



The PROBE exhibition of Australian new media artwork touched down at the
Australian Embassy in Beijing in mid-October last year for nine days and
proved to be what could only be described as an immediate and overwhelming
success. 

In a country renowned for tight state control of all media and information
PROBE generated (arguably) the most national media coverage of any Australian
art exhibition ever, not just in terms of the sheer size of the numbers of
people who were introduced to the concept of artists using new media (ie China
has a population of around 1.2 billion people...), but the extraordinary
number of national media stories in both print and television -- quite a feat
at a time of great unrest and tight security around the celebrations of the
50th anniversary of the People's Republic.

Maybe around 4,000 people (including lots of students) came to see the
exhibition in Beijing over the nine days, despite the problems associated with
having the show at the embassy (ie there is a soldier from the Chinese
military stationed outside every embassy in China, so people had to have an
invitation to get in).

We see the work of contemporary Chinese artists on the international circuit,
but rarely if ever does foreign contemporary art, particularly new media art,
show in China. PROBE changed the rules. 



URLs:
http://www.machinehunger.com.au/probe
http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars00/dept20000816

 
Biography:

Linda Wallace, a Ph.D student at the ANU's school of art, on an ACSys Ph.D
scholarship and located in the dept of computer science, will talk about one
of her studio works called PROBE: explorations into Australian computational
space, held last year in Beijing.