DOTCOM AOK


		Better known as a behind-the-scenes artworker and designer, Warren Olds' latest installation cements his place as NZ's leading translator of networked visual cultures. Review by Danny Butt Many artists with a sculpture or spatial design background made a much better transition to web design than those from traditional graphic design backgrounds who claimed the web as their birthright - and the rise of jobs like "information architect" give some clues to how these disciplines are connected. This is also the case with some of my favourite net.artists: people like Melinda Rackham [1] and Julia Scher [2] construct online environments that are immersive in ways few old-skool time-based media artists can. These artists understand that the Internet is based on inherently spatial metaphors. Only settler nations built on relentless land acquisition and "terra nullius" could design these virtual geographies: "domains", "multihoming", "namespaces". As Kroker and Weinstein observed back in '94, the will to virtuality is also a colonial urge [3] . Warren Olds [4] trained as a printmaker, and is well known in New Zealand as the designer for the contemporary art magazine Log Illustrated [5] , and designer of numerous catalogues for NZ artists. He was also a prime organising force behind the Dunedin-based artist run space The Honeymoon Suite, and is associated with Cuckoo [6] , a group of artists and academics who are curating some of Auckland's most interesting art shows. Olds' art career has had a lower profile, probably due to primarily showing in the South Island, yet it has been no less prolific or significant. Popular visual culture and it's relationship to an arts presentation context is the stock-in-trade of his work. A common strand has been the activation or evocation of physical spaces outside the gallery - whether through public presentation of work such as the Kiosk Project [7] and Otira [8] installations, or incorporation of vernacular forms within a gallery context (Arcade game cabinet art, stickers, etc.). Perhaps surprisingly, given his work as a graphic designer, Olds' investigations bear a closer resemblance to the work of Auckland-based conceptualist Daniel Malone [9] than the pretty designer eye-candy of, say, Hannah and Aaron Beehre [10] . Although Olds' content has referenced digital cultures for some time, the outcomes have begun to merge technology with the spatial aspects of his installation practice. Over the last two years Olds has developed a signature painting style utilising auto-tracing tools in popular vector design programs. Other works have directly engaged browsing practices: a recent commission redesigned the website of The Blue Oyster [11] into a WAP interface, complete with virtual Ericsson phone. DOTCOM AOK's title takes it's name from a photograph of a tag bearing the same wording, though the print is small format and tucked around a corner. The guts of the work are two wall paintings of empty football stadiums [12] - one in the gallery itself, and one in a meeting room upstairs from the gallery. From the top room a data projection of a video game beams back down into the gallery. The game can be controlled from the room upstairs, while audiences in the gallery space can hear sound from the game through a pair of quadraphonic headphones. The game is an 1988 Taito arcade classic, "The Newzealand Story" (sic). Next to the controls Olds has placed a printout of a 100+ page how-to-play guide [13] full of background info and cheats. The game itself is an excellent example of the platform/maze genre which will be familiar to fans of Wonderboy and Bubble Bobble. You control Tiki, a kiwi who looks more like a canary than than NZ's national bird, and your mission is to rescue your girlfriend Phee Phee from a giant Walrus. Action takes place in well known tourist locations around NZ, and hazards include what appear to be Maori warriors throwing boomerangs (?!), kina (sea urchins), and a lamb carrying a cannon (word!). At first glance the relationship between the game and paintings isn't too clear. But whether you're watching the game or playing, you soon notice that an imaginary audience of eighty thousand or so is watching your back from one of the two stadium drawings. Talk about performance anxiety! After a while in the gallery, it also becomes apparent that the wall paintings are rendered in the game's 32-colour palette. The accentuated perspectival views in the paintings are eerily reminiscent of early 3D arcade games such as BattleZone. In this sense the installation contrasts the two dominant spatial models of early computer gaming: the 2D, omnidirectional, sprite-based maze/platform game; and the vector-based, wireframe models which enabled greater dimensional flexibility on the hardware of the time. Olds' work is notable for the ideas it offers about presenting screen-sourced visual material in the physical space of the gallery. Where many digital artists try and find a way to disguise monitors or just black out rooms for a data projection, Olds treats the exhibition site as an integral element in the user experience. In DOTCOM AOK, virtual reality is site-specific. His methodology is the visual weblog: taking disparate elements and annotating them in ways that trace the unexpected connections of our networked culture. You get a sense of an open-source philosophy, a Google instead of the usual collections of sponsored links. In Olds' portal, click-through rather than stickiness is the goal. [1] http://www.subtle.net [BACK] [2] http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199805/msg00013.html http://architecture.mit.edu/people/profiles/prscher.html [BACK] [3] http://www.rochester.edu/College/FS/Publications/KrokerVirtual.html [BACK] [4] http://www.warrenolds.com [visual documentation of DOTCOM AOK available on the site] [BACK] [5] http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/log/ [BACK] [6] http://www.cuckoo.org.nz [BACK] [7] http://www.oblique.org.nz/kiosk/programme/2000olds.htm [BACK] [8] http://www.oblique.org.nz/otira/document/hms.htm [BACK] [9] http://www.fusionanomaly.net/tessa/malonelike.html [BACK] [10] http://www.prospect2001.org.nz/cgi-bin/artist.pl?artistID=7&ection=ae http://www.readymade.co.nz/ [BACK] [11] http://www.blueoyster.org.nz [BACK] [12] http://www.footballgroundguide.co.uk [BACK] [13] http://www.sys2064.com/faq/new_zealand_story.txt [BACK]