The modular nature of Scott's career to date, with its chronological divisions that separate into media categories (performance, video and digital), conceals the constant presence of notions of body, memory, history and technology. In her work, some or all of these concepts are brought together at different times.

Bodily dimensions

Gender has always been an issue in Scott's work. She has long drawn on her own body as a component of process or as subject matter and it became the conduit allowing a shift from painting to performance in 1975. Working in San Francisco at this time, Scott used her own body literally as a canvas. As she has written:

'the figure turned and pulled light, time, sound and shape out of the painted landscape in order to move the atmosphere into the third dimension'.¹

These works, which were often sited to obscure monuments or historic views, transgressed a number of boundaries. They undermined the physical form of the body and gravitational forces. Physical confinement referenced the fear of claustrophobia or a metaphorical cycle of life and death. The dialectic between creation and destruction was evident in the tearing of the holistic casting of the body each time Scott broke free of her restraints, leaving a symbolic human shape in the remaining materials.

Elements in Scott's work, such as sensory and physical associations, often reappear. The Taped concept was central to Continental Drift (1989), where the audience members were manipulated as if they comprised cells of a body shape on an adjoining wall. Her performances are often emotional and cathartic, for instance Sind Sie Krank? (Are You Sick?), an action for the preservation of Germany's Black Forest that was performed at Sydney's Ivan Dougherty Gallery in 1993.

Manipulation † not only of the body, but of the audience and, by implication, a wider public † became evident in works from the second half of the 1970s. Distortion of text, image, behaviour, history and memory arose from practices that tested behavioural control. A series of 'Accidents' analysed processes of learning, recollection and spontaneity, examining responses to instructions or information given in various forms.

Big Brother

'ÿwithin modernity vision is merely one layer of a body, of a sensory-motor apparatus that could be captured, shaped, directed by a range of external techniques but which was also an evolving dynamic system capable of creating and destabilising forms.' (Jonathan Crary)

The spatial works were a type of social experiment, documenting patterns of behaviour in an attempt to test the operations or flexibility of entrenched patterns of decision making. Walking the plank over a corridor of water, the participants in Choice (1977) were confronted with a T-intersection and only those taking the 'right' direction were rewarded. Passers-by could see their movements videoed as objects of study in Inside-Out (1978) and visitors navigating the space were filmed, categorised and re-presented to the public in Extremities (1979).

Scott reaffirmed the viewer's presence by incorporating her into architectural space and electronic narrative. Audience members, seeing themselves at a distance, perhaps as The Other, were given the opportunity for self-reflection. Like Bruce Nauman's corridor installations in the 1970s, where visitors were also surveyed by video, an enquiry was being made into sensory manipulation and physical and psychological response to a structured situation. In these and later works, Scott used technology in Heideggerian terms as an instrument of revealing, disclosing attitudes, effects and events as they occur and making evident the types of frameworks or configurations through which they are witnessed.³ In the installation Constriction (1982), Scott compared the movements of the audience with the caged animals in the installation. Through these practices, the artist takes on the Foucaultian disciplinary authority of the watchtower, the monitor or the satellite that monitors bodies through techniques of vision.

Private body/public body

The relations between watching and interaction in Scott's performance and installation work are aspects of the wider exploration of the problematised status of the knowing subject in a digital world. The exposure to power relations in the objectifying and distancing instrumentality of the surveying gaze, with its disciplinary but invisible force, lead to further meditations on the construction of personal and social identity, particularly as it is constituted by memories and narratives, landscapes and ideology.

With the autobiographical origins of the nostalgic Homecoming performance (1979) involving her family and rituals of washing hair, pouring water or reading from letters; objects such as eggs and certain animals became important for their metaphorical connotations. A horse in Persist the Memory (1979) revives the romantic girlhood dream of pony club bond between horse and girl; birds were released to freedom in Order, The Underfire (1981); and habitual conformity with the regimes of hierarchical social structures was denoted by a swarm of bees in the video Desire the Code (1982). In the video Life Flight (1988) the body is a site of nature, a garden; and water is used as a metaphor for life, hope and change in the performance and video Continental Drift (1990/91). In this work, the speculation around and excavation of the earth's crust is compared to the diagnoses and treatment of human illness, with a recuperative utopian inflection. Eastern philosophical and spiritual references connect the separate spheres of mind and body or nature and human.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a number of works considered the formation of archetypes and collective memory in rapidly changing environments. The landscape gradually took on feminine, timeless characteristics, from Freeform Ceramics (handmade tiles with silkscreen images) in the early 1970s to the introduction of water and sand in the performances Choice (1977), Out the Back (1981), Sand the Stimulant (1980) and Desire the Code (1981). The destruction of the natural landscape figured strongly in Out the Back, where Scott slit open her chest, causing sand to pour forth.

Constriction, an installation that evolved over different sites, was the last work to deal with what Scott called Primal Coding. Following on from Sand the Stimulant, it presented her concerns with cycles of animal and human behaviour and shifts in ecological states. Reflecting a number of threatening powers (a boa constrictor feeding on white mice, nuclear power plants) real-time images of the spectator were projected over a dystopic sandy landscape. Scott's performance emphasised the disappearance of knowledge and the destruction of natural balances amongst the Darwinian chain of existence.

For her New York showing of Constriction in the same year, percussive mechanical and insect sounds were added. Subsequently, at the Canberra School of Art Clocktower, Scott added video of aerial monitoring of events in Australia's political capital. Caught in the filmic relay of surveillance feedback, the audience was both seeing and being seen, trapped between real and potential time, unable to act as agents of change.

In the 1980s Scott became interested in the repetition of social typologies across history, particularly in television and mass media. The writings of Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes stimulated her exploration of new feminine mythologies, leading to displacement and metamorphoses of performing and visual bodies.

Mythical female roles as goddess, temptress, siren and witch were visualised in the mid-1980s and connected with other ritualised narratives from the animal kingdom or mass media in slightly later works. In Double Dream (1985), two women characters on video embodied the dualisms of desert/sea, or dry/wet. The video, gondola and images referenced Marshall McLuhan's idea of 'hot' and 'cold' media, where 'hot' media, such as radio and film, provide a high quality of information, leaving little to the imagination; and where 'cold' media require further interaction for the exchange of information to be complete.⁴ Inspired by medieval and classical mythology, fairy tales and fantasy, Scott replaces the idea of woman as pleasurable consumer object as proposed by the 'hot' medium of television with alternative images of women responding emotionally and sensually to imaginary environments.

Eve, Medusa, Helen of Troy and she-wolves are just a few of the references that were combined in Double Space (1985), Scott's new soliloquy for the spinning planet earth and its inhabitants. Religious and secular myths comparing human and animal characteristics or stereotyping species metamorphose into an imagined feminine symbolism.

While the cathartic element was central to Scott's live or video performance works, the world of dreams is often referenced in installations through the recurrence of archetypes, models and symbols. Room exists in the ontological nature of Scott's practice for reflection on the conditions of being at the end of the 20th Century.

In Double Time (1985), Scott considers communication, utilising a space between transmission and reception. Images never form information; they seem to remain trapped behind high colour electronic signals. Comprising video monitors set into two wishing wells, the installation alluded to things watery and planetary, over-world and under-world, wishes and fantasies. The viewer's interaction in the work is negligible: only by interrupting the reflection of the image on the water's surface could the female subject be momentarily influenced. With the advent of Media Massage (1988), women control the forces of technology and are able to reverse the role of the female body from object to subject.

Disembodied relations

While her work has moved away from corporeal, phenomenological experience, Scott has refused to adopt the recent Western rhetoric of a hyperreal and virtual future promising a genderless experience that transcends the body. The seduction of commercial desire and the impact of electronic goods on personal and social relations is central to her works of the later 1980s and 1990s where she questions technological idealism.

Bringing together her interests in science, mythology, women's experience and the representations of the mass media, Scott has investigated contemporary definitions of utopia and Western estrangement from a lost paradise. Domestic appliances are pervasive, luring women into changing lifestyles and work patterns. In Machine Dreams (1991), a retrospective look at a family's relation to dated domestic technology is couched in the abstraction of scientific diagrams.

Paradise Tossed (1992), an extension of Machine Dreams, surveys the broader sphere of domestic (sewing machine, mixmaster) and workplace (typewriter, telephone) technologies and their affects on the behaviour of women†their constraints and freedoms, their isolation and integration. Although women's productive lives have relied on operating such machines, the user's ability to handle appliances subconsciously, enabling the user to dream of being elsewhere, is highlighted. Sound and images from the 1900s, 1930s, 1960s and 1990s connect the social changes that have taken place across the century with the timelessness of desire for material objects as containers of 'utopian' values.

While Scott's early work integrated visitors' haptic relations to the surrounding space, physicality is replaced by a preference for information in the 1990s. Scott's employment of electronic media as a mode of interaction and communication also incorporates hermeneutic relations that define how we interpret and understand the world.⁵ The social manifestations of technology are examined, i.e. technology conceived not as neutral tool or agent but as a material object, historical agent, mode of signification and embodiment of commercial imperatives. Different technologies are imbricated in diverse and economic conditions, comprising the logic of modernisation, in which the spectator is continually in the process of being reshaped and deployed for a ceaselessly changing set of productive and consumer tasks.

The ever quickening speed of the circulatory nature of consumption and inflammation of desire is another of the cyclic patterns, with time and nature, embedded in Scott's practice. At the conclusion of the 1980s, the future promised instantaneous global communications and homogeneity but remained economically and technologically fragmented; culturally, psychologically and physically determined by economics and technology. Like a number of other women artists working with digital media (e.g. Char Davies, Patricia Piccinini), associations of technology and interactivity with liberated exchange are both critiqued and performed by Scott. Her art identifies the networks of connections between information technologies and the biological, social, textual and cultural changes that initiate, accompany and complicate their development; relations described as 'informatics' by Donna Haraway.⁶

The notion of seduction is integral to the nature of informatics, although the objects of desire change. Scott's culminating work on this theme, Frontiers of Utopia (1995-6), a combination of video, still and graphic images, is a development of Machine Dreams and the animation Paradise Tossed. Glimpses into the life and times of eight Twentieth Century women, their diaries, personal belongings or surroundings, can be accessed or compared across decades. Traversing time and place, viewers approach history in modes equivalent to memory retrieval, collating their own collage of historical sounds and images in surveys of the forces that shaped routine, change and control women's lives.

As a whole, Scott's practice presents a dialectical combination of high and low technology, real and simulated space, past and present, material objects and immaterial concepts. The lived environment is examined and re-presented, focusing on relations that could and do exist between the self, nature, technology and the wider social sphere. By presenting the tendency to rationalise and control surroundings through the application of technology, Scott encourages reflection on the processes and effects of change that underlie history, in particular the social, economic and political forces that impact on the lives of women.

References

1 Artist's statement, 'The Figure' in Characters of Motion, Straw Man Press, San Francisco, 1980, p. 66.
2 Artist's statement, Twenty Five Years of Performance Art in Australia, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, exhibition catalogue, p. 48.
3 Heidegger, M., The Question Concerning Technology, Harper & Row, New York, 1977.
4 McLuhan, M., Understanding Media, Sphere, London, 1967, p. 31.
5 Recent cosmological, mathematical and digital challenges to conventional hermeneutics of space were expressed through visual distortion in Scott's installation Great Attractor (1990).
6 Haraway, D., 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century' in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, Free Association Books, London, 1991, pp. 149-182.

©Zara Stanhope

Zara Stanhope is the curator of The Body Remembers.