Working with installation allows for a complexity of emotional and conceptual concerns akin to that of filmmaking. The idea of 'having some movement that created an environment' led Sydney-based 'multiple media' artist Sarah Waterson to stray from her background in painting and photography (City Art Institute, 1987) towards installation art. In making Mapping E-motion and other installations (Lessons in Cultural Voyeurism, Breathing Machine, 1993-4), Waterson found that she could explore questions of gender and representation, as well as her interest in medical phenomenology, in more expressive and whimsical ways than had been possible in her academic studies (e.g. her MA in Women's Studies, UNSW, 1991).

The notion of 'attraction' is central to Mapping E-motion. This work was first conceived as a box in which two breasts containing magnets moved in a perpetual play of attraction and repulsion. The work evolved into an open interactive display of latex casts of nine different breasts, each mounted on a suspended perspex panel. In a play with the idea of pheromones (olfactory hormones that can mediate erotic stimulation across a distance) the breasts heave and their nipples become erect in response to visitors' movements as detected by ultrasonic sensors. Exhibited in 1993 in Sydney and Brisbane, the work incorporated an audio component for Soundwatch (Auckland, 1994), so that each breast now emits its own small clicking sounds that become faster and higher in response to visitor movement.

Some visitors, lured by the sense of surface conveyed by the latex (Waterson calls it 'a semi-permeable membrane between reaction and sensation'), are tempted to touch the work. Others, I am told, find their own nipples hardening in sympathy. And those viewers used to ogling breasts-in pairs-from a position of voyeuristic mastery no doubt feel a little discomforted by this pulsating array of autonomous and singular organs. As the artist explains:

'Mapping E-motion was supposed to be empowering for women's sexuality. Our culture is always looking at men's physiological reactions to stuff like that. Men and their biological processes can control public sexual space, while women are a surface to reflect on or images to see but are very rarely active sexualities. It's seldom the other way round, [i.e.] giving power to images of women's positive and obvious role in sexuality'. In showing slides to, and discussing this work with, varied audiences I've found that many women fall in love with the 'idea' of it. Waterson reacted ambivalently when I told her of this, and went on to draw a parallel to questions of art sites on the Web (or as she calls it, 'the World Wide Wait'). (Waterson designs Web sites and has her own interactive story running there). On the one hand, she acknowledges theories and concepts as central inspirations, admitting that her creative impulse is often satisfied through making detailed designs alone, and that even 'a suggestion, like an animation' may evoke the aesthetic experience, for 'if a work has the power conceptually to move [one], then it doesn't matter if it's virtual or real'. On the other hand, however, she 'tempers that with the fact that [she] find[s] it more kinaesthetically satisfying to move around and make things'; Waterson loves the 'hands-on' side of making art and building circuits, and finds the way aesthetic experiences over the Web are a second step removed from the physical relationship 'frustrating'. She insists on the different qualities of aesthetic experiences in physical space (e.g. galleries) compared with screen-based virtual spaces. To Waterson, gallery spaces allow a constant renegotiation of point of view on the artwork, and give a better sense that 'yes-somebody's made that'.

'I guess it comes down to physiology. You're physically there and it's a different kinaesthetic experience. It will trigger different memories and experiences of works that won't happen on a keyboard. There's something about seeing actual work-paint, latex-in a space where your body is moving and experiencing that brings out kinaesthetic possibilities different from vision and sound alone.' (the artist)

Since part of this installation's point is to critique conventional mappings of body/technology interactions, and to inscribe visitors' bodies via an alternative cartography of public corporeality, its medium (material, spatial, temporal) is an important dimension of its message, one lost to those who simply get the idea of it from a verbal report, slides or a Website.

If there is any polemic in this intimate and playfully evocative work, it is not around woman as image or surface, but around the question of the interface. In her catalogue note for Tekno Viscera (IMA, Brisbane, 1993), the artist situates this work about the (im)possibilities of electronically simulating erotic stimulation within the context of a technological order where 'the art of button/switch manipulation' has required recruits that act like an 'unthinking/unquestioning/uncreative mandatory read-only drive'. Waterson shares with a number of her contemporaries (especially women) a suspicion about what Nola Farman calls the 'false interactivity' of many CD-ROM- or computer-based works-works in which the user/visitor might be allowed some choice over the sequence of the text, but where, in reality, the programmer/artist controls the parameters and contents of the user's experience. She aims instead at a kind of interaction in which the visitor is 'colluding in the work[the visitors] have to otherwise they won't go away with anything. They have to be a bit passive to what the work is. The visitor is not in a lot of control, neither is the work, and I don't think there is any conflict there about losing control' (the artist).

Waterson is not interested in making computer-based installations that require 'gratuitous buttons or gratuitous aspects of interactivity':

'There's no point people going and winding up a toy if that's going to distract from the toy being interactive or actually working. I'd much rather make a work that people can take or leave as they wantbut I'm not necessarily guiding them through. It's asking people to respond at a number of levels and I'm not necessarily asking them to do this at a particular time or whatever. They're quite free to walk around and there is a response to the work but it is not critical for the work to exist'.

Mapping E-motion is an imaginative and captivating addition to the range of contemporary artistic experiments in designing alternatives to the manipulative point-and-click interface. The work effectively creates a memorable episode of multi-sensory experience: it persists in memory to attune us to subtleties of corporeal and social existence that we don't usually stop to reflect upon.

Sarah Waterson's home page:
http:/www.ozemail.com.au/~sarahw

© Zoë Sofoulis

Zoë Sofoulis (who also writes as Zoë Sofia) is a senior lecturer in feminist studies and cultural studies at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean.