Sheen

Credits

There has always been a strangely alienating familiarity about Patricia Piccinini's images. A sense of connection to the world that they obviously don't belong to. The familiarity stems in part from the fact that the world which she constructs does almost exist, but less in reality than in the desires of the mediasphere. While always unmistakably unreal, there is a sense that this world ought to exist; that its existence is somehow required by the realities and mythologies of global infoculture.

It is obvious from her work that Piccinini cherishes this synthetic realm but at the same time she is deeply critical of it. In her own words, she speaks from a 'compromised' position, far beneath the moral high ground of the cultural elite. A dweller in this plastic world, she champions its complex beauty which she recognises as built from flatness and pollution.

The world itself is a 'Developed World' that exists at the nexus of many forces; the desires of media, the realities of scientific research, the truth of television, the dreams of technology, the cross-cultural commonality of soft drink brands and the libratory politics of internet cross-identity... It is a world of plastic and speed and reproductive technology and giant bouncing-ball Mars landing vehicles and personalities and highways and sponsorship. Furthermore, it is a world of compromise, hybridisation and relativity rather than purity and absolutes. For Piccinini, it is a world of synthetic truth and beauty and sincerity.

With Sheen, as with much of her previous work, Piccinini charts a vector through this world, distilling from it a series of moments that describe a visual, aural, tactile and olfactory geometry of surface and speed. Sheen is a site specific work ­ which is unusual for Piccinini who is more used to dealing with sites of a generic rather than specific nature. The core concerns of Sheen are derived from the point where the functional realities of the Adelaide Festival Centre Foyer intersect with the issues at the heart of Piccinini's practice. The results of this intersection are then remapped over the site as a series of related installations ­ still images, an interactive video module and a cocktail.

The site itself is transitory. It is an interstitial space ­ insubstantial even ­ designed to funnel people into the main theatre. At its entry it aspires to frictionless passage and minimal turbulence. Along this passage, Piccinini places her digital photographs; flat, smooth images of pure velocity. As the space opens out, it divides. The inner wall continues to channel visitors to the doors into the theatre, while outer stream flows into the turbulent stasis of the bar area. At this point of division, Piccinini sites her interactive video module; a huge streamlined pod of seamless automotive paint that displays endless laps in a virtual velodrome.

At the bar itself­ a space where the desire for perfectly directed, frictionless motion will always be thwarted ­ there is the 'Bluebird', a cocktail commissioned by Piccinini for the exhibition and named after the rocket car that broke the land speed record in 1957. Created by 'Cyclone' Jessie Su, the cocktail is a layered drink designed accompany the work in the show. When poured, it reproduces a strange synthetic stratosphere with distinct bands of blue and white that echo the duco of the video module. When drunk, it is mixed together into a pure electric blue and tastes refreshing and quite tart ­ not nearly as sweet as it looks.

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The series of photographs titled 1:00.613, depict 'the Speeder'­ the archetypal athlete, personifying velocity, training, the human/machine ­ caught zooming around a velodrome track. Velodrome is an interesting word. The 'velo' is from Italian (veloce - speed) and the 'drome' from ancient Greek (dromos - race). While usually applied to bicycle tracks, the velodrome in this case is the literal 'speed-raceway'. Liberated from the specificity of any particular vehicle or format, it is a realm of purified momentum. The Speeder himself moves ambiguously. We cannot even be sure whether he is actually running. It is as if he glides, free of friction coefficients and wind drag, bound only by the simplified physics of a video game.

The 1:00.613 images depict an abstracted motion ­ refined and uncatchable ­ motion without motive. They are a blur.

However, the high-speed blurring in these images is more than just an aesthetic effect or a trick to denote speed. The blurring is central to the concerns that these pictures express. 'Motion Blur' is an artefact of mechanical representation whereby an object that is moving too fast actually passes across the frame of the camera while the shutter is open, leaving a blurry trail across the image. Motion blur marks the moment when the camera is no longer able to convincingly reproduce retinal reality. It is the failure of photography to capture the real world. This mistake is often found in sports photography where the subjects are travelling very quickly. It is remedied by faster film or better lighting allowing for faster shutter speed. In motor racing, photographers will follow the vehicle with their lenses, snapping off images that show the cars frozen against a blur of landscape. Computer generated images have no such problems; their shutters are abstract parameters without duration and with infinite depth of field. 'Failures' such as motion blur must therefore be synthesised, because the computer's failure to reproduce the failure of traditional photography produces images too perfect to be real.

Despite her use of technology, and the central role technology plays in her work, Piccinini is by no means a technophile. She is interested in technology as a reality of contemporary society, not its saviour or raison d'etre. Her interest in motion blur comes from her realisation of the way that it connotes technology's cognisance of its own failure to represent the world; not, like the camera, because it cannot keep pace but because it can only synthesise failure.

Piccinini's images are of a world too fast to be captured.

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At the centre of this world lies the Speeder. He is the natural inhabitant of this biosphere of motion blur. The Speeder is simultaneously the athlete, the superhero of contemporary culture, the technological construct, the person, the personality, plastic and flesh, media identity, economic force and living thing.

The Speeder is also Shane Kelly, World Champion cyclist, World Record Holder for the 1000m sprint, and Gold Medal hope for Australia in the 2000 Olympics. Perhaps it would be more accurate to state that the Speeder is played by Shane Kelly, but that might ignore too much the entanglements that tie Shane Kelly 'the person' to the ideal of the Speeder. As with much of Piccinini's work, the line between the real world and the world that she constructs is often difficult to draw. Just where does the world stop and the Art start? While Sheen is definitely not about Shane Kelly, it would be almost impossible for anybody else to be the Speeder.

All athletes are products of complex mechanical and biological technologies, scientific and medical research. Sports medicine and training technologies are an extremely sophisticated factor in contemporary competition. This is not to suggest that sports science can make a Shane Kelly out of anybody with a bicycle. However, in a world where results are measured in thousandths of a seconds and bodies pushed to the limits of physical and mental tolerance the presence of technology cannot be ignored.

Nowhere is this more obviously and elegantly demonstrated than in cycling; for cycling is a sport that relies on the physique and technique of the riders in concert with their machines. Cycling is based on the mechanical amplification of the body's potential and physical energy ­ in a fashion that is direct and obvious and visible ­ without the denial of the body implied by other vehicular sports. It is also an extremely beautiful and graceful sport, visibly aerodynamic. Rider and bicycle, both stripped, shaved, smoothed and streamlined. There are no brakes or gears on a velodrome bike. The silence of the velodrome is poignant; the susurration of the slipstreams and the quiet churning of the running gear as riders slip by at up to 59km/h. Velocity laid bare, speed made flesh, without the roar of engines.

Shane Kelly was travelling at approximately 59.376 km/h when he set his world record and made little more noise than the keyboard that wrotes this essay. Shane Kelly races against the clock, a precision chronometer measuring times in milliseconds. In fact, his event is a race with information ­ against the abstract force of digits ­ milliseconds like those that govern the operations of a computer. His ultimate opponent is a number: 1:00.613. When Shane races seriously, he races alone.

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Over the last few years a certain of type of arcade video games have developed which posit a radically different mode of interaction. These games show little or no interest in gameplay or competition, revolving instead around the user's immersion in a sort of virtual motion. Games such as Alpine Racer (a skiing simulator), Top Skater (a skateboard simulator) or Wave Racer (a surf-ski simulator) all do almost nothing more than allow the user access to a realm of techno-kinaesthetics and visually synthesised acceleration. In all of these games, the interface employes the user's entire body to control the experience and the aim is purely aesthetic rather than competitive.

The term aesthetic is used here in its original sense ­ as pertaining to the senses or the sensory domain ­ yet it also connotes the development of a sort of hybrid sense; the sense of speed without movement (virtual motion sickness). Speed without motion must surely be a characteristic desire of the late twentieth century, for it is definitely the sort of speed that is embodied by communication technology.

In Sheen, the Speeder races alone, like the sprint cyclist or the video gamer. The Speeder operates in isolation, frozen in motionless rapidity, concurrently inside and outside of his environment. The video gamer also occupies this halfway state; emotionally, visually and perhaps even kinesthetically immersed in the digital world but irrevocably and inevitably separate from it. The visitor to Sheen is also, perhaps unwittingly, caught in a similar relationship with the installation itself.

As well as responding to the site, the work responds interactively to the visitors in the space around it. Walking up the carpetted runway to the lustrous white video module, each visitor is presented with the continuous, point of view vision of the velodrome looping with increasing speed. The viewer's presence, combined with that of everybody else on the carpetted track, directly controls the speed of the disembodied Speeder as it races around the track. In this way, Sheen interacts directly but not individually with the space and its occupants, positing a sort of interactivity that is negotiated rather than controlled. The irony of the view that posits an indivdidual participant but that responds only to the dynamics of a group is a gesture that calls into question the individualist heroism of the video game without denying its aesthetics.

The Velodrome through which the viewer races is the idealised world of the Speeder, not just clean and pure but frictionless. It is a video game world, designed specifically to be moved through at speed, to be experienced in motion. The module itself exemplifies the similarly paradoxical seduction of the static object that is built for speed. It is the model setting for the ceaselessly running image of the virtual velodrome, its streamlined profile inertly oriented to carry it ever forward. While not designed to move, its form is nevertheless functional, however it is designed for minimal impact on the very real flow of people through the foyer space rather than the fluid dynamics of airflow at high speed. The module is designed to house movement; to contain, disrupt, broadcast and respond to it rather than reproduce it physically.

In the end, Sheen is about an increasingly dominant mode of interacting with the world; a mode whereby the world is skimmed over, shaved and streamlined, by a ever accelerating individual whose passage is subject to fewer and fewer interruptions. The viewer to Sheen is invited to stop and contemplate this world of ceaseless progress, however its sheer gloss, blur, automotive surfaces and the natural drag of the site itself create an almost irresistable undertow.

Peter Hennessey, 1997