Domestic Disturbances(or Prometheus housebound)

Home is where we experience those events and processes that make us who we are. Our experiences and memories start there. Our values and beliefs are forged there. Our most important personal dramas are played out on the home stage. We usually think of the home as a safe haven, a sanctuary from the pressures of society and work, an island of sanity in a world gone mad. But the home is also the most dangerous place in the world to be-rape, industrial accidents, and physical, emotional and mental abuse all most commonly happen in the home. Domestic Disturbances, a linked exhibition and screening program curated for experimenta media arts festival 1996, asks the viewer to reconsider his/her relationship to home and hearth.

Home is the beginning of all stories and the base of all literature. From the odyssey to the road movie, our culture is permeated with visions and narratives of the home. Of the foundation of our narrative tradition, the folktale, the linguist Vladimir Propp *1 notes that there are two fundamental plot lines that form the basis of all stories: one is leaving the home; the other is regaining or returning home. Every story involves travelling from, or to, home-maybe even both. The notion of 'home' seems to correspond to something buried and atavistic within all of us.

But the home is not a static entity. It has been transformed both physically and conceptually myriad times throughout history. Once the site of pre-industrial production, the home was emptied by the industrial revolution and became an after-hours retreat. Increasing wages and changing social ideologies re-figured it and its occupants. Man became the master of his castle; with the womenfolk cast as ministering angels at his hearth. Feminism and changing economic demands contested this state of affairs and urged a re-evaluation of the value of women's labour and opportunities. Now the home is yet again undergoing a period of rapid change. Home entertainment/shopping/banking et al, network services, armed enclaves and 'teledildonics' are re-shaping our leisure and personal lives. Electronic commuting, self-employment and a shrinking job market are once again remaking the home a focus of (post-)industrial production and employment for both men and women.

Simultaneously many of the traditional functions and 'natural' attributes of the home are becoming industrialised and mass-produced. Immigration, the increasing importance of Asian countries and the development of a global economy are transforming our daily rituals; introducing new consumer possibilities, alternative gender and social definitions, and new forms of personal identity.

The historical development of the notion of 'home' is concurrent with our acceptance of the individual, rather than the family, as the basic social unit. The right of the individual to personal privacy is almost completely dependent on access to private space. Until this century, personal privacy was the exception, and was viewed with a high degree of suspicion by society. It wasn't until the 1950s in France, for example, that the majority of the population lived in dwellings with running water and electricity and in which most individuals had a room of their own. Now it is only the extremely poor and dispossessed who must live their lives in the glare of constant public scrutiny.

The home shuts out casual surveillance and allows individuals to drop their social masks, to 'be themselves'. And the home itself has come to be seen as an expression of the individual; its physical form and decoration far more than a simple indicator of familial status. Elsie de Wolf, an American interior decorator who achieved celebrity status in the early part of the century, is credited with introducing the notion that one's home was not merely a display of wealth or adherence to societal decorating mores; she argued that society 'must visualise our homes as individual expressions of ourselves'.2 No longer, argued Ms de Wolf, should one slavishly follow fashion in the acquisition and arrangement of objects in the home. Emily Post, in advising on changing social mores in 1931, insisted that 'Its [the home's] personality should express your personality, just as every gesture you make-or fail to make-expresses your gay ambition or your restraint, your old fashioned conventions, your perplexing mystery, or your emancipated modernism-whatever characteristics are typically yours'.3 In the 1990s 'cocooning' is the buzzword, supported by a plethora of infotainment programs and publications, and increasing expenditure both on and in the home.

The notion of the 'home', which is usually seen as intrinsically about the personal and the individual, should not be separated from the parallel narratives of politics and economics. Just as modern housing standards are the direct result of changing production technologies, social engineering and the generation of surplus capital, so, too, government policy feeds from and reflects social change. Many commentators note that the modern welfare state arose to become, in effect, paterfamilias for the poor, for those without the means to ensure a permanent roof of their own. The state took on the role of a patriarch, with the responsibility to ensure that those under his roof were fed and cared for. But with this assumption of responsibility also came the traditional right of the patriarch to determine the behaviour and destiny of dependents.

Hannah Arendt4 points out that until this century the role of the state was to act as a substitute, for the poor, of a privately-owned house. The social beliefs that have gone with the nation were moral substitutes for the kind of personal autonomy achievable only in a home owned by the individual. Perhaps this accounts for the sequestering of political rights, of a voice in the running of the nation, to those who owned their own homes. Equally, it could be seen in the lack of political rights for women, the insane and criminal, and children. Home ownership confers power over those sheltered within its umbrella; removing the rights of dependents to autonomous action and imposing a variety of obligations, including labour and allegiance. It is interesting to note here that women achieved the right to own property after marriage and to vote almost at the same time-although it has taken many decades for women to be seen as a political force independent of their father's/husband's class position.

With ownership comes authority and autonomy; but the more universal the ownership of a home of one's own has become, the more publicly legislated all the activities of life, formerly seen as the private realm, have become. Thus the increasing insistence by the state of its right to act, in Max Weber's words, as the 'sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory, and the sole appropriate object of its citizens allegiances'5; less like Big Brother and more like Big Daddy.

In recent times 'economic rationalism' has provided many governments with the justifications for further ensuring that their citizens' allegiances are to the state. The role of unions, for example, has been systematically eroded and increasingly, workers must negotiate both their pay and their workplace conditions on an individual basis with their employers. The move back to the home as the primary work site may further exacerbate this trend. Just as piece work in the garment industry has remained shamefully underpaid and exploitative, and piece workers individually vulnerable to abuse and manipulation by the contractors, so too the deployment of electronic commuters and information workers back to the home removes the protection of group organisation and activism. The pixel pusher and the information worker of the near future may well find themselves the piece workers of the 21st Century, working harder and longer for less.

In the last 15 years every major nation, and many smaller countries like Australia, have produced plans which use the notion of the 'information society' as the key. These plans are based on the idea that the rapid development and deployment of computers will inevitably produce a new kind of society. Computerised machinery and processes are emptying the factories. Most white-collar workers have found that computers have increased their workloads and decreased the amount of clerical and other forms of lower-echelon support available to them. Employers, initially resistant to the idea of their workers being based off-premises (and therefore less subject to scrutiny and management), have discovered that electronic commuting substantially decreases their overheads-and greatly increases productivity. Workers themselves note that working from home has many benefits, but they often miss social contact with fellow workers and risk isolation and lack of access to information. Information industry pundits predict that the future belongs to the 'nomadic' knowledge worker who will jump from one short-term contract to another. At the same time the number of jobs will fall and economic and social disparities will increase sharply. The likely outcome will be, they believe, a dramatic upsurge in crime, social unrest and breakdown. The 'haves' will retreat into gated enclaves protected by electronic surveillance and armed guards as is already happening in Los Angeles.6

For centuries knowledge, news, messages etc. have been exchanged via a variety of carriers. Only a few decades ago it became obvious that every form of communication was capable of being reduced to data, stored and re-transmitted. We began to realise that anything, be it text, sound, still or moving image, could be thought of as information. Whatever the source of the communication, and whatever the method of its transmission, the material passed through the condition of being 'information'. The world has come to seem to be constituted of information. And information has become one of the great, transforming paradigms of the 20th Century. This notion has had far-reaching impact on every area of our lives. It has structured government policy, technological innovation and dissemination-as well as our own sense of our corporeal selves. Much of the efficacy of the concept of 'information' has been gained from the discovery of DNA and the realisation that in modern molecular biology, information is not a metaphor; rather, it is a literal account of the operations of the genetic code. Thus the idea that information is the organising principle of life itself.

The idea that we are moving into an 'information society' implies that this is a society in which a majority of people will spend their time carrying out tasks associated with information-collecting it, storing it, retrieving it, expressing and disseminating it. It is tempting to hypothesise that in this changing economy it is women who are the already constituted 'expert workers', capable of drawing on centuries of being charged with the labour of passing along essential survival information to the next generations, passing information between individuals to ensure community cohesion, and acting as the mechanism between the past and future generations to transmit 'unofficial' information (family histories, folk stories, pragmatic day-to-day solutions to domestic and individual problems). It is also tempting to hypothesise that artists will occupy a privileged position in this new society; after all, it is artists who deal directly in the currency of symbolic communications.

The business of making symbols is no longer peripheral to the mainstream economy. These days, information industries could be said to correspond with what Horkheimer and Adorno called the 'culture industry'.6 They defined this as 'the mode by which cultural forms are produced, organised and exchanged as commodities within a capitalist socio-economic system'.7 This is a system in which, however, information subsumes the culture industry. And it does this by virtue of its own success.The information industries, that vast amalgam of all symbolic and communication activity along with the material support for such activity, now functions at the very centre of the economy. The traditional fine arts have become their sidearm, the support material of tourism, design and international marketing, with a subsidiary political role as providers of prestige and those who underpin the new nationalism.

The artist is consequently under pressure to behave as a player within an economic world. The academies have turned into lobbies. The artist cannot get started without professional packaging and promotion. The artefacts of art become 'intellectual property'. The arts have outgrown the ability of their traditional market (wealthy individuals) to support them and their new position is somewhere between the personal and public realms; alongside education, healthcare and other social services, they have become partly paid-for services, partly civil rights. They have become the object of official arrangements and provisions and thus, concomitantly, of official deprivation. Today, artists make up a greater proportion of the population than ever before, but they attract lower levels of remuneration than any other profession apart from that of housewife. Corporate and public sponsorship is a signifier of the new role of art, dependent on forming alliances with a key aspirant social class, thus transforming artists into officially sanctioned beggars. In an era of general expectation of the spectacular, artistic success has become synonymous with the ability to wheedle corporate and government support.

Whether or not the evolving digital arts fall into the same honey trap will largely depend on what happens in the next decade. With only the evidence of the recent past to go on, this seems likely. Most debate about digital arts has centred on delivery systems, on that Yin-Yang of technophilia/phobia which has been the leitmotiv of the 20th Century. Just as the traditional arts have been forced to invent the blockbuster to compete with the larger-than-life spectacles of the cinema and the mesmerising effects of the televisual hearth, so too the temptation for digital arts is to sideline meaning and highlight the sophistication and expense of display technologies. This may be a logical corollary of a nascent medium that is still looking for its message and still seeking for ways to meaningfully discuss and critique its productions. Some would argue that there have been few meaningful productions to critique.

For a very young medium, digital art has already generated more than its fair share of inane ideas and aesthetic clichés. Many of these are a legacy of its inception by computer engineers and programmers and of the popular self-fulfilling cliché of the nerdy Sci-Fi-obsessed geek. Some are the result of the artist's tools; the hard- and soft-technologies that are developing so rapidly that just learning new systems and software can become a full-time occupation, leaving little room for conceptual and aesthetic experimentation. This has resulted in much digital art being the modern-day equivalent of the sewing sampler-the artist's learning process presented as an object for public display. The limitations of current technologies make it difficult to simulate the organic eccentric forms and sensual textures of nature; they tend to enforce a certain aesthetic similarity rooted in the artificial, the replicable, the perfect.

The digital arts seem a world removed from the cosy corporeal familiarity we associate with the home, the site of so many of our most intimate-and messy-bodily functions. The 'proper' place for the emotional and the non-rational, the home would not seem to easily accommodate a scrutiny aided by the hardware of the sciences and mathematics, a technology born out of war and logic.

Yet it is in re-presenting the domestic and that most fundamental home of all-the body-that much of the most exciting digital art is being produced. What is less surprising is that it is largely women who are producing it. Perhaps some of the challenge, and the frisson, that these works provide is in the unlikely alliances that they forge. Not just the simple shock to the system of the mating of flesh and machine, for example, but a far more invigorating disturbance generated by the complex intermeshing of concepts, processes, insights, and sheer skills. Art that is about more than itself.

The technologies that the artists in Domestic Disturbances use to create their works are not secondary to the ideas that they are creating. They are intrinsic to the ideas. They are inseparable from them in the same way that every truly meaningful instance of communication is inseparable from the medium in which it is communicated. What they are not is self-conscious about their use. Some of these works take significant steps towards the invention of a language truly native to their medium. And what better place to take those first steps than in the home.

Domestic Disturbances will tour throughout 1997-98. For further information about the tour please contact Sally Tulloch (Tour Manager) tel. (61 3) 9525 5025