Emily Morandini, filet électronique photo Kusum Normoyle |
Emily Morandini's piece is the filet électronique and has the virtue of a completely self-descriptive name. Round filet lace nets are threaded with copper needlework, punctuated at the ends by batteries and speakers, emitting a treble whine. Yep, networks, right angles, minute interconnected fibres—craft had 'em before mass electronics. Check, check and check. You remember the Hyperbolic Crochet Reef (created by Christine and Margaret Wertheim, http://crochetcoralreef.org) where dainty handicraft recalls raw nature? This is the yang to that yin, a stitched homage to circuitry over coral, courtly handicraft for the post-technological parlour.
Peter Blamey, Island photo Kusum Normoyle |
A bouquet of found circuit boards opens leaf-wise, with machine-drilled pores and copper-etched capillaries. This is one part robotic Ikebana to two spontaneously generated silicon organisms. The surface is dusted with a faint fuzz of copper floss, moving in the air currents, and it squeals as you brush it, like an electric touch-me-not.
Peter Blamey, Island photo Kusum Normoyle |
Where the connectivity in Morandini's piece is punning, verbal and personal, Blamey’s work is direct, physical and inhuman, the waste fields of a million appliances made audible. The sound from those speakers is the unfiltered interference from the ad hoc antennae of the circuit-boards, performed it seems, for ears other than ours: the secret life of circuits, played out on an Earth after us.
Here are two sardonic takes on the DIY resurgence. Post-consumerist transposed into post-consumer in a world where DIY has been associated as often with fertiliser bombs as with handicraft; where survivalism and tree changing vie for fertile land; where going back to the land may lead you to an open-cut pit, or a strip mall, but you decide to stay there and till it yet.
Emily Morandini & Peter Blamey - filet électronique/island, ICAN, Sydney; July 22-Aug 7; http://interlaps-overlaces.tumblr.com/; http://icanart.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/july-2011-electronique-filet-island/
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. web
© Dan MacKinlay; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]