Artist MICHELE BARKER talks with Beth Rosenberg, MARCH 2005

BETH ROSENBERG: Can you talk about your involvement in the new media art world in Australia?
MICHELE BARKER: Ok. New media has, I think, has had quite a long history in Australia, oddly enough. It’s an area that has been around since, arguably, the late eighties, early nineties, which is kind of odd. Australia’s not associated with emerging trends in art. But it just happened to be something that a lot of artists picked up on. And for my part, I started doing…
BR: But why?
BARKER: Well, it became a form that was easily transportable. It was just one of those strange enigmas. I mean, if you look at it, actually one of the very first art CD ROMs was produced by an Australian artist, Linda Dement in 1995. Up until that time, it just really hadn’t been a done thing. I became involved with a lot of those artists producing CD ROMs in the early nineties. I was quite technical from a very young age at art school. I just picked up on digital, which wasn’t really called new media then, but just on utilizing digital processes more within my background, which was traditional photography and photo media and realized that digital offered more scope for me. I’d always been searching for some specific tool. I just couldn’t find it. I was at art school and there it was….computers…
BR: So you went to art school and majored in photography. What years was this?
BARKER: I did my undergraduate, with a bit of time off, from 1988 to 1992.
BR: So you were really right before the bubble of the digital revolution. What new media tools were you using?
BARKER: It was even before the days of Photoshop and I used this program called Color Studio, which actually was made by Letraset, oddly enough. I don’t know if you had Letraset here then, those plastic…
BR: Yes we have Letraset.
BARKER: I started mucking around with this program. I had no idea how it worked. We didn’t have classes or anything like that and there was no one actually to teach us how to do this stuff. We set up a computer lab in our art school; we were the first one in Australia to do that. Maybe that was part of why I went into it. We set up this small computer lab and I’d just sit there for ten hours a day and try and work out what the hell was going on. In those days, you didn’t even have any way of outputting your work. So you’d get this black sheet and you’d put it over you and you’d take a photograph of the screen.
BR: Wow.
BARKER: You’d get a negative and then you’d print it up. It was a bit crazy. I am sure that there were places that did output, but they were very few and far between and cost hundreds of dollars, so I’d just sit there and experiment. It really changed my style, because I started to understand this concept of layering that traditional photography had never offered me. Also using text became really interesting for me. These days, I always say to my students, you know, “Experiment with text, but just don’t stay there,” because it’s just this really obvious thing. When you move from analog photography to digital, it’s like, “Oh, there’s text.” But at the time, that’s precisely why I did go into digital--because I needed to start using text with my images. I’d spend day in and day out working on this stuff. Photoshop came along and then I started working with people like Linda Dement because her work is quite extraordinary in terms of CD ROM production. She actually taught me for a while, and then I’d start to assist on artist CDs, so it was an introduction to getting my head around how interactivity worked. This was about ’91, ’92. People were still using HyperCard to do interactives. Which I look back now and think: Oh my gosh! I remember Bill Seaman at the time was teaching at my university and he’s really interesting. I think he was one of the first people I’d seen who was doing interactivity, but as an installation.
He was quite a bit of an eye opener really in terms of not just something sitting on a computer screen anymore. He moved beyond that.
BR: Were you always interested in art? Were you a kid who was drawing, who was taking pictures, who was photographing?
BARKER: I’ve always been interested in art, but I suppose the irony is that I don’t think I was ever very good at it. It was something that my parents never stopped me from doing. When I was at high school I majored in art, but I realized that I really couldn’t draw that well, and I couldn’t paint. I’d never actually taken a photograph until I went to art school. So it was something that was always there. I just never really found the medium.
BR: But you definitely felt like you had stuff to say.
BARKER: Yeah, I did. It sounds cliché, but that’s what I knew I always wanted to do, I just didn’t really know how to do it. It took quite a while before I realized how to actually express myself and what technologies to use.
BR: Before you made Struck, which is the Eyebeam work can we talk about the precursors to that? One of the works you did was called Praæternatural. In this work you’re talking about the body as other. Can you talk a little bit about that work, and then maybe this will lead up to your current work, Struck.
BARKER: Praæternatural was actually the major piece I did before Struck. It took quite a few years; it took at least four years to produce. It’s an interactive CD ROM. I received quite a lot of money through our Australian Film Commission in Australia, when they were funding new media projects, back in the mid- to late-nineties. It actually ended up being part of my PhD. It became this massive piece that I didn’t know where to stop and which is about this notion of the body as other. The word praæternatural is an eighteenth century obstetrics term; it basically means to give birth to something that’s out of the ordinary institution of nature, but nature still accepts it. I found that really interesting. So I started to use the monstrous or difference as a metaphor from the seventeenth century up until now and looked at the ways in which culturally, the monster is indicative of particular attitudes from that time. It’s no longer so much a religious icon anymore, it’s indicative of science and medicine. I started to look at the developments that were happening scientifically and medically, and how the monster was treated accordingly. It’s kind of an interesting journey that a monster goes through, from being feared to the point, ultimately, in the twentieth and twenty-first century where it’s abolished because of genetics. It’s a piece that uses otherness as a metaphor for what’s happening scientifically.
BR: The term praæternatural is from— it’s a seventeenth century term?
BARKER: It can go back earlier, but the one that I liked was around late seventeenth century into the eighteenth century, where in terms of science, there was a period where otherness was acknowledged as being different, but accepted at the same time, as a curiosity. If you think about it, we’re in this era of a culture of curiosity. So it made sense that otherness…
BR: Are you talking about otherness in terms of the psychoanalytic terminology of otherness? Or, are you talking about otherness in terms of sexual difference?
BARKER: No, predominantly otherness in terms of a bodily otherness.
For example, conjoined twins.
BR: So all the monstrosities that you would get if you gave birth to in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth century, with, for example, the elephant man, conjoined twins, whatever.
BARKER: Yeah, it goes through the role of things like what the imagination had to do with this. For example, in the seventeenth century, and again into the eighteenth century there’s a story of a woman called Mary Toft, who gave birth to seventeen sort of hybrid rabbits.
BR: True story?
BARKER: Yeah. For a month, it was believed. There was this belief that she saw rabbits in the field, she was pregnant, ergo, she gave birth to the rabbits. Everyone was totally fascinated.
BR: That’s so interesting, because I was just reading a book by Paul Collins called “Not Even Wrong…Adventures in Autism” which refers to the story of Peter the Wild Boy. Peter the Wild Boy was a boy who lived in the early eighteenth century. Collins traces the characteristics of this young boy and ultimately, what he comes up with is that this child may have had the neurological disorder autism. Perhaps at the time this could have seemed to fall under the category of otherness.
BARKER: Yeah. I hadn’t heard of that one, actually.
BR: It relates, in a way. It’s interesting that this first work that you did for your PhD thesis, had to do with medicine and medical discourse. It’s just sort of ironic.
BARKER: The irony hasn’t been lost on me.
BR: Of all the things that you could’ve concentrated on! You ended up with a particular work about the cabinet of curiosities of seventeenth and eighteenth century medicine.
BARKER: I finished Praæternatural about six months after I got sick, so I’d been working on it for all these years and was just into the last stages of it when I actually came to America and got sick. To this day, I’m constantly aware of the fact that I worked on this piece about the concept of otherness and differently-abled people and how people perceive that. Someone did say to me once at a conference when I was talking about Praæternatural -- she was in a wheelchair and she was deformed from forceps when she was born. Basically her lower body was crushed. We were talking at the same conference together. She made a comment to another friend of mine. She said, “You know, Michele knows her material really well, but she’s very distant from it. She kind of has a safe distance.” I thought it was a bit strange at the time, thinking: No, no, no, I really understand. Obviously, looking back in hindsight, I had a healthy academic distance, I suppose, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. I’d researched it all and I could relate to it, but…
BR: But why did you concentrate on it? What was it that drew you to that subject matter?
BARKER: I think for a few years, I’d been producing work about the body. I’d been looking at this idea of the body and its relationship to the digital. From ’92 onwards, I started to do a lot of research into cybernetics and open and closed systems and how bodies can work within that. If you think about that whole period and geneticists like Richard Dawkins, a lot of artists were getting really into this idea of the collapse of the genetic code and the computer code; and then you had all this artificial life stuff coming out from Karl Sims and people like that. So I think at a slightly not so informed level, I became interested in this concept of bodies--about how bodies could be constructed digitally. I produced just a few series of works around that kind of construction of genetics and the body, and did an installation piece called The Love Machine a few years back. It was about these photo booths in Hong Kong that you basically take a photograph of yourself and a photograph of somebody else, and it morphs them together and it creates a baby. That’s when I first started collaborating with Anna Munster on work. So we went to Hong Kong and did these shots and we created our own babies. And you can create Asian or Caucasian or Afro-American babies.
BR: Through just this machine?
BARKER: Yeah. It’s like a photo booth but it does this morphing process, which is quite extraordinary. So out of these tiny little passport size images, we created these mural sized, overwhelming digitally distorted genetic children. I think that’s what started me on the trajectory of genetics and reconstruction within the digital. Even though I don’t in any way agree with this concept of collapsing the digital code with the genetic code, I think that it’s something that came out of people like Dawkins and other geneticists. Arguably, it started with Watson and Crick back in 1953, when they talked about genetics as being code and information. That’s when I became interested, and it just kept evolving and mutating. I like the idea of digital mutating. One of the most obvious ways to do that was to look at how the human being mutates, and it became this collapse in Praæternatural.
BR: Why is that piece interactive? What’s the interactivity of it?
BARKER: Well, that’s a good question.
BR: I mean, that’s always a hard word that we often throw around.
BARKER: It is, it is. I think I did it as an interactive work because that’s what people were doing in the mid-nineties. It was new media, therefore you did an interactive CD ROM. I was really interested in cybernetics and gaming theories and what I really wanted to do was create some concept of an open system, where things do actually mutate on their own. This was in my naïve days of thinking that you could create an open system in a computing system, which you just can’t really do. So then I had to keep just going down the line. Then I wanted to create a game. But the cost and the technical implications of gaming programming is just huge.
BR: Yes, it is huge.
BARKER: I just couldn’t do it. I ended up creating something interactive that’s almost not interactive. The user is actually forced through a whole series of pathways, because there’s nothing interactive about interactivity, which is what ultimately, this whole piece taught me. Often I’d have to be reminded to at least put a button occasionally for people to work. But what I found is—and I think this became the crux of the whole piece—is that I realized that in interactivity, essentially, what the artist or the programmer is doing is giving the user a perception of choice, giving them some belief that they’re choosing to do something. In the same way, I realized that’s actually what’s happening with genetics, it’s that people are just being given this perception of choice and decisions, where in fact…
BR: It’s not really a choice.
BARKER: No, it’s not at all.