WAREHOUSES, ODDBALLS & NOISE
REMEMBERING ELECTRONIC ARTS

Emily Morandini

It was only after I’d moved my young life, packed in assorted milk crates, from Canberra to western Sydney to attend my first day at UWS to study Electronic Arts, that I realised I didn’t know what contemporary art was. I don’t mean that in a contemplative way. As the lecturers talked about fine arts; painting, sculpture, mixed media, I felt a growing sense of unease – a moment of in which I was acutely aware of my ignorance, or just straight up foolishness. I didn’t study art in high school, except for a term in seventh grade during which we painted a colour wheel. I knew absolutely nothing of the names of the visual artists that were mentioned over the next few weeks, even the most celebrated ones. During lecture breaks I would sneak over to the library to look up who, or what, Duchamp was. Yet the interview I’d had to gain entrance to the course suggested I was exactly in the right place. The panel consisted of David Haines and Julian Knowles, and as part of my portfolio I played a long-winded recording of a 1975 Roland SH-5 synthesizer, mixed down from a 4-track cassette recorder. I remember admitting, embarrassed, that “it’s not really composed, it’s just a bunch of sounds,” but both Haines and Knowles were visibly delighted. Names I did know at the time: Stockhausen, Schaeffer, Cage.

Starting in 2001 and consisting of about 20 students per year, the Electronic Arts course sat in between the Music and Fine Arts departments. Even at that time, this concept was radical compared to other Australian tertiary offerings, which is why I assume it attracted such an oddball cohort to and within the outer west of Sydney. For some, the disorientation of this cross-disciplinary approach between the two departments was obvious, perhaps even causing tension and a few fickle rivalries. Eventually, of course, many within the small EA cohort bonded – largely over a shared loathing of MaxMSP and a shared appreciation for noise. Anything with noise.

From hazy memory, the degree seemed to be conducted directly or indirectly on various sites throughout Sydney and surrounds. The MCA, AGNSW, Artspace, Performance Space, Casula Powerhouse, Penrith Regional Gallery, Firstdraft, Space3, The Frequency Lab, Pelt, Lan Franchies Memorial Discotheque, the Swamp Bar at UWS, as well as a host of other dingy and long-gone ARIs, warehouses, pubs, and makeshift share-house exhibitions. Sydney was quite a lot of fun back then.

With the encouragement (or was it directive?) of our lecturers we soon started exhibiting, participating in festivals, playing gigs, forming electronic music solos, duos, trios, orchestras, then forming art collectives, incorporating, disbanding. We organised and disorganised, learning the art of art-practice without any worldly resources, just pure joy and enthusiasm. It seemed that our cohort expanded as we adopted students from other institutions into our ranks, and concurrently we were welcomed into the larger community of our tutors, lecturers, established artists, curators, and organisers. I don’t quite understand how all this happened and we still managed to fulfil the more mundane requirements of a degree. The point, I guess, is that it was just as much an initiation ceremony into the arts community as it was about honing our individual disciplines. Regardless of what or whether we continue to practice, a genuine sense of community and friendship from those days remain.

It was only about two years into the newly started degree, just at the point where you can sink your teeth into electives that the units started disappearing with little explanation. There was one elective in particular, run by Joyce Hinterding, called something along the lines of ‘Magnetic Fields and Pressure Waves’. I had my heart set on doing this unit since enrolment. Rumour had it one of the projects was listening to the energy of the sun. When I asked a friend in the year above what the unit had been like, I distinctly remember their face light up – no words, just the radiant, happy glow of someone who now knew the secrets of the heliosphere. I think I’ve inadvertently spend much of my latter art projects attempting to recapture what I can only imagine was lost: studying the alchemy of hand-built radios, chasing no-show auroras with whip antennas, performing dark rituals with buried oscillators. For the most part though, university politics still have a cruel way of starving out any sense of wonder about the world, something we could all do with a little more of.

Despite the grossly premature end to Electronic Arts, I count myself lucky to have been within the first few years of this degree. Over a decade on I am still surrounded by the people I met at UWS: my partner Ivan, friends, and colleagues. Admittedly, I sometimes wish I’d pursued something that translated more ‘easily’ into a career – but then comes the realisation that my current career path, like many others, simply did not exist in 2001. It goes without saying that technology has changed dramatically since then, and the way people engage with it is unrecognisable. As part of Electronic Arts we were taught to think about, and utilise technology from the perspective of an artist – that is to be curious, brave and brutally critical. What a fortunate skill to learn at such a transitional point in time.

Learn more about Emily by visiting her website.