The Secret of Happiness and Paula Dawson

Traditionally portraiture in both painting and photography has elicited and implied the candid revelation of the subject's countenance, mediated by the artist's gaze and medium of pictorial representation. In Luc Courchesnes's interactive video installation for video monitor, computer, trackball, and laserdisc player, "Portrait of Paula Dawson 1992-4", this mode of representation is elaborated into the domain of virtual space. The visitor/viewer enters this simulated zone of conversation to negotiate and respond to the subject's personal pronouncements both fictional and real.

"Paula Dawson and the Secret of Happiness" is a collaborative installation with Canadian interactive multimedia video artist Luc Courchesne, Kevin D. Murray (biographer), Katie Pye (stylist and couturier), Fiona Hall (photographer) and curator Merryn Gates (Assistant Director, Ian Potter Gallery). Luc Courchesne visited Sydney as a participant at TISEA (Third International Symposium of Electronic Art) in 1992 where his "Portrait One" 1991 - interactive video portrait was displayed. During this visit the Paula Dawson video portrait was recorded.

The other visual focus of the exhibition is Katie Pye's lavish and baroque array of highly stylised costumes designed for Paula Dawson (including the yellow silk jacard and silk organza suit worn by Paula Dawson for the opening of "Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself" presented by MIMA at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne in 199~). These 'romantic' costumes are augmented by Fiona Hall's photography documenting Paula Dawson's personal history including four views of the site of the constructed public bar used to produce the 1989 hologram, "To Absent Friends" installed as part of Jennifer Phipps' curated exhibition, "Creators and Inventors" at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Paula describes that event in 1988, "To Absent Friends" and Fiona Hall's documenting of the site for the resultant hologram.

"So we built the bar inside the lab and invited sixty people over to have a party. It was a fake New Year's Eve party, so everyone had come dressed as though they were going to meet their friends."

Perhaps a clue to Paula Dawson's secret of happiness? Happy Happy Joy Joy indeed!

Melbourne writer and photographic art historian Kevin D. Murray has furnished a 'fictional biography' of Paula Dawson which includes a list of chapter titles, acknowledgements, foreword, preface, appendix, artists' statements, chapter notes, glossary and index. It remains a work in progress; a 'prototype edition'. The author states in his preface, "The prototype edition contains the life of Paula Dawson in its embryonic form. This 'text-less' edition offers readers a view of the framework on which the final life is woven. As a mere biographical shell, the identity presented here of Paula Dawson will probably appear to most as ghostly and fragmented. Given the current taste for forms which are broken and incomplete, this emptiness might actually be preferable to the final version in some readers' eyes... it offers itself as a literary equivalent of 'installation art' which provides space for visitors to move around and appear to make sense of the work themselves."

The interactive video portrait/virtual conversation begins with the viewer activating the trackball captor mechanism to designate/navigate through the multiple choice questions which Paula's persona answers on screen positing fresh options and questions.

Paula Dawson: "do I remind you of anyone?" viewer clicks on to text display of "Lauren Bacall".

Paula Dawson: "no one has ever said that to me before!"

Luc Courchesne's video portrait utilises the hardware and software con figuration of a laserdisc (laservision CAV/NTSC), a television monitor and Hypercard stacks on a MacIntosh computer. The image is rendered by the reflection of the horizontally mounted monitor from above onto a 45 degree angled glass plate facing the viewer. The artist's involvement with interactive video, installation and videography dates from his work at the MIT Media Lab. His work has been exhibited at all the major electronic art symposia (MuuMedia, Helsinki 1993, TISEA Sydney 1992, Siggraph Las Vegas 1991 etc.). Luc Courchesne lives and works in Montreal, Quebec, where he is a professor at the Universite de Montreal and in Marseille, France where he is researcher in residence at the Institute de Recherche et de Creation (IMEREC).

The experience of interfacing with a virtual and immaterial simulated persona is as Courchesne describes a, "metaphor for conversation". Allucquere Roseanne Stone, erstwhile recording engineer to Jimi Hendrix, transsexual and more recently the director of the Interactive Multimedia Laboratory at the University of Texas, recently stated; "I mean an interface is a metaphor. We used to think of it as a physical object, a keyboard... but interfaces are metaphors, and they stand in for absent structures and the absence is the important word here, they're ABSENT structures. They're not where you could see them. It doesn't mean that they are inside the machine, but they're in an elsewhere. And you can call that cyberspace, or you can call it symbolic exchange."

"Hypermedia means a network of nodes and links. The nodes are the content, the material of the world and the links are the freedom to move within it. A hypermedia author creates a world of possibilities; then he/she invites people in and gives them freedom; finally he/she characterizes the experience by developing a metaphor for the experience. With new developments in interface design, hypermedia is increasingly interactive and immersive; the window on the artwork is growing to surround the 'visitor'... more than in any other medium hypermedia entails shared authorship." - Luc Courchesne from the artist's statement page 188.

Paula Dawson has mapped out a career trajectory for the next decade and beyond. Her current projects include, "You Are Here" (moon illuminated), a site specific hologram displaying a 2.5 million year visual history of extinct fauna from the immediate fossil record in situ on and around an island between two headlands on the Great Barrier Reef - to be illuminated by moonlight for eight minutes per month (weather permitting) for the next (gasp!) 2.5 million years! Copies of this hologram will be mass-produced for sale to be bought by the public and to be installed in non-site locations on windows around the world between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, again being illuminated by available moonlight. Her film "All Days are Nights" (as yet to be completed) will be screened in conjunction with these holographic installations. She also proposes holograms for the 1000 dollar bill (2003), a Mastercard 'Creditworthy' commission (2002) and the first virtual hologram (2006).

Paula Dawson describes this enigma and seeming tautology thus:

"A hologram designed for the sightless. Witnesses must wear a pair of VR gloves on which resistance is felt which is determined by a computer generate(l sculpture." Perhaps Paula Dawson's 'secret of happiness' is derived from her indefatigable enthusiasm and wildly inventive artistic strategies coupled with the scientific rigour to make such experiments in hypermedia accessible and intensely engaging, funny even for technophobes. The acronym for LASER is illustrative of Paula Dawson's effulgent imaging techniques and apparel - Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation is again a reminder that these new imaging technologies (video and holography) are the only visual media that use emitted light from the cathode ray tube screen and/or a liquid crystal display, both of which glow in a darkened space. All other visual means of pictorial representation are imaged by reflected light. The serene beam and the gleaming dream... ~

"The light that never was on sea of land - The consecration, and the poets dream."
William Wordsworth


© Brecon Walsh, MESH #3 Autumn 1994. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts