“You see all but, untrained in decoding the data on the monitors, you understand nothing, except the aesthetics."Tony Dunn, "An A-Z of order and chance”, Performance Magazine, Nos. 50/51, November.January 1987-8, p.20.
In Brisbane in 1988 all roads lead to World Expo. "Get into Brisbane", say signs of ongoing festival. World Expo '88 sprawls on its South Bank site like a feast awaiting consumption, decked in fantastic sculpture and bands of neon, and nightly garnished with laser and fireworks displays. All the magnetism of capital is sported by this hitech canvas tinseltown.
lnterFace, the Queensland Bicentennial Art Spaces Project, could scarcely have competed with the assault of Expo. Unfolding over late February and March, lnterFace put art out into the streets of Brisbane, but failed to stop the traffic. lnterFace lacked the monetary, administrative, technical and even the appropriate artistic resources to stage with success and with maximum visibility such an expansively scaled project. But if the project overstretched its resources, and overly fractured its identity, it is still too easy to chastise lnterFace for an absence of spectacle and for bungled opportunity.
To read lnterFace as spectacle, first and foremost, is to misread lnterFace. This is despite the expectation of spectacle set into the project subtitle. "City as a Work of Art, or City Under Redevelopment" does speak more of skyscrapers than of the unseen hi-tech cables, circuits, and networks which drive the late twentieth century city. While lnterFace did produce a show at street level, it retained also the dynamic between the seen and the unseen, between the cable and the image, between information and retrieval. If lnterFace was spectacle, it was the spectacle of communication.
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Diena Georgettl, Will for Amalgamation, 1988. Installation at Custom's House, Brisbane. Photograph: Diena Georgetti.
Peter Callas, Untitled, 1988. Slide projection onto State Health Building, Brisbane. Photograph: James Creagh.
