"Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed." Fredrich Nietzsche

When I wake it is my ears which open first, allowing the subtle tones and harmonies of morning to orchestrate my dream. The dream changes to incorporate the sound, vision bends and twists until, with open eyes, I surrender to consciousness. And yet I am left with something - a resonance. A filtration of ideas, soft and un-focused, permeates the beginning of my day. Alluring dreamscapes come in flashes and then - they're gone. Only in evening can I find the borders to that undiscovered country.

It is perhaps the night which has always provided us with the space for exploration. Free from distraction we can allow our thoughts, however random, to find a frequency in the nothingness. From this we find a clarity for inspiration and action.

The rave or dance party flier has often been an invitation for thought and action. An invitation to an event which finds a disassociation from the social sphere while providing a platform for the individual to launch themselves into an altered state. The images offer an exploration of the consciousness, a dream in which we all share the same vision. Nietzsche's concealed reality is apprehended in the establishing relationships found on the flier between ordinary objects as they are released from the conventional logic of common sense causality. Geo-shapes and sweeping undulating environments roll and tumble to meet the mind's eye. "A revolt against all which obeyed the conventions of logical composition, it was a revolt too against bourgeois morality which stifled consciousness and discounted the irrational"¹. This revolt against the logical is seen in almost all of the digital representations found on dance party fliers, the aesthetic not dissimilar to that of artists Georgio De Chirico and Salvador Dali. In theory it could almost be lent in its entirety to Surrealism through its revolt against morality, convention and the stifled consciousness.

waking

The dance party flier offers us a reality which is more than our own, something that is surreal. A great and absolute place in which the circle can find corners, or the reversal of aerodynamics is necessary for flight. Viewing it in the conscious state we are intrigued or perhaps concerned. The image may well be something from the mind of the designer, but elements of it remind us of something, a dream? The hyper-reality of the colours, the organic machines, could well be from our own childhood imagination. You could have been to this place and if not, then the temptation to go is great - a building anxiety. "Each [piece] was applied in a very clean, vivid, hi-tech cyber style, whilst having a dark and twisted edge to leave the viewer feeling slightly unsettled but also intrigued".²

Images which are free politically and morally entice us to a ready state of mischief. They are invitations to lose ourselves in the pleasure dome, or phantasy dream world. They do this by allowing the viewer to approach without inhibition. There is nothing expected from us except an understanding of freedom - that things can be whatever you want them to be. A similar effect can be achieved by simply closing one's eyes and giving in to the kaleidoscopic visions which are complementary to anyone's consciousness. Our mind flitters from one image to the next until we find ourselves in that ready state of mischief. Agreeable visions from our dreams drift effortlessly across the waiting waking mind - the fantasy is born.

In the Land of the Giants (SMART 1996) tongued green plants sing lullabies while their duck billed over lords prepare to greet you, arm - hand extended for the traditional shake in a world free from convention. While the Emerald Forest (SMART 1996) reveals the neo-primitive as the entrance to the forest is guarded by a mythical king - a pixie man, who holding a torch, illuminates a path of passage. Its illumination reveals a clear pool of blue with a vortex behind it, is the light there to warn us of the vortex or invite us into it? Here there is nothing but calmness, whatever decision is made it's bound to be the right one. The primitive element of the digital art finds ground in the illustration of those things ancient, rather than a total theory of primitivism endorsed by artists like Picasso. However the nature of the event publicised by the digital art, i.e. : rave - indicates a sense of hedonism and trance dance, which by all anthropological means is primitive. Bezerk 4 (Unknown 1996), like De Chirico's The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1913) presents to us a castle, a powerful phalocentric image. In the distance lighting strikes with precise super natural force. The anxiety and mystery of the captured moment finds solace only in our desire to turn the flier over and read. In doing so we find comfort in our un-easiness as the rational mind is set to work. The De Chirico shadow has become a pillar of rock with a pitarded orb and yet it still illustrates the idea of what is to come, an uncontrollable and anxious destiny. The future isn't what it used to be.

The art of the fliers attempts to discover, like De Chirico's work, a "magic unreality and poetic sensibility of metaphysical images".³ Something which attracts the viewer into a hollowed state of consciousness, a dream photograph. The work seems to be situated on the frontier between sleep and waking. There is an anxiety, a powerful mystery and sexual symbolism. Both have presented the world of dreams with such technical simplicity, through a juxtaposition of visual data whose alienation from one another only finds reconciliation in the compositions within which they find themselves. The differences between the two are hard to quantify, the digital 3D art of the flier is still evolving its theory while Surrealist works have had sixty years of discourse. Although both contain similar elements if not exact modes of thought, as both the fliers and the Surrealists aimed to evoke a state of anxious dreaming in the audience, it is the technological medium in which the digital art on the fliers explores which sets the two apart.

South Melbourne Art's (SMART) Paul Findlay has found beatitude in this technological medium of 3D digital art. His philosophy, "an ability to see life from a different perspective, to blend and manipulate imagery to convey a message - an adventure into the mysteries of creation and destruction, wanting to annex hallucinogenic mysticism".⁴ is constant. Findlay advocates the idea of an organic cycle, creation and destruction. And yet through the medium with which he disperses such a notion, digital technology, the very concept of the organic becomes absurd. The juxtaposition of these two elements creates an interesting tension through the machine attempting to facilitate a natural and biological process. The influences of films such as Blade Runner (1982), Akira (1990) and Tron (1982) are couriers in the bio-mechanic element found through-out his work. But as Findlay's work illustrates, "in many of our pieces we tried to show the destruction of the world, a world with no natural environment, the Fuct-up future seen through our eyes"⁵. The machine, as concept and product, is accelerating the natural process. It is such a catalyst for life that it can no longer be easily removed from the organic cycle. Its positioning is causing too great a biological effect.

The Hardware dance party fliers show us a continuation of style. Here one artist(s) (Paul Findlay & SMART) has had the opportunity to develop a continuing style for a particular event and we've had the opportunity to watch the evolution of one artist's notion of digital art over seven years. Unlike the 3D rendered art on most dance party fliers which have been commissioned by the organisers' friends or constructed by one time digital artists to answer a contract. The Hardware party fliers show us evolution of idea through evolving technology, Paul Findlay tries to explore more than just the dream-scape. In this case available technologies have enabled the artist(s) "more control to create imagery that matched the visuals in our minds".⁶

Where we continue to see a Surrealist influence through the proliferation of organic distortion as a process of growth. In A Midsummernights Dream (SMART 1994), giant purple toothed plants protrude through a thick bed of clouds. They are airborne, or at the very least their giantness is enough to take them almost to the edge of space. Higher still the pitarded orbs float supreme, watching the skies. We can only inhabit the space between them, between earth and sky. The space is created by a chaotic openness - like when a man walks through a crowd pushing with his shoulders while his hands lie at his sides.

Dali sought to "materialise images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision"⁷. An approach also employed by Findlay. Hardware 7 (SMART 1995) offered the viewer a concrete glimpse inside the mind of a jester. A empty and desolate place, free from the animation which life breathes, exhausted from a life of pleasing others. A stone statue of himself is testimony to his narcissism and our devotion to the laughter he gift wraps for us. We stand in what looks like a rib cage as the jester himself (in this case German D.J. Sven Vath) hypnotises the viewer with authority. The obsession with perspective, detailing and irrationality of the collected objects within the composition are reminiscent of Dali's work. Sleep (1937) and Galatea of the Spheres (1952) could both successfully be used today with the dance party lexicon in mind. Both, if not most of Dali's work follows the locus of the digital flier idea (an acceptance of irrational modes of thinking which can trigger access to alternative realities). In aesthetic and theory they confirm the digital artist's notion of what is in a dream - so much has been unexplored.

discovering

The flier in itself has become a complex product of art. From the digital aesthetic to the graphic design. Organisers of the events have explored the possibilities of touching their audiences in as many different ways as possible. From the design and style of the flier to the actual shape. Some parties have included accessories such as the ërainbow glassesØ at Land of the Giants. Others choose to use different materials, clear or coloured plastics, bags and Asian instant noodles. All available technology is used to entice us to the altered state, from petrochemical products to packaging. All are part of the great idea that we (consumers) are in fact the legal guardians of everything born by this century's great industrial copulation.

But of course the pieces of digital art themselves are in fact elaborate advertisements, their function born from the desire of profit and pleasure. What they advertise however is more than product. They are invitations to an altered state. The elaborately constructed three dimensional digital art found on the front image merely alerts us of what we can see if only we look. They are complex and precise renditions of the dream-scape.

(e)motion

Red was the colour which swept a crowd of people moving with such speed and franticness that their numbers could not be counted. A congregation whose prayer was movement. And in the air flew coloured beams of light, twisting and contorting - like the crowd - to the celebration of sound. Clouds roll their amorphous tissue through the fanatics, bellowing over the sweat soaked symposium with thick eye provoking dischordia. Here the neo-primitive unfolds itself like a colourful childhood pop-up book.

The Party itself is an undiscovered country in which the traveller dances through checkpoint after checkpoint. The mission of the flier is executed through a series of complex steps taken by the participants, who through mind and body, discover a group catharsis. With closed eyes their dreams are included into the mass, the mind's eye as sore as the feet which carried it there.

destination

As we have explored earth, leaving no culture unturned, no area unseen, so too has the digital art of the dance party fliers explored the consciousness. Yet in the last few months there has been a changing of attitude with the approach to the flier aesthetic. The artist and viewer although intrigued by the dream-scape are beginning to require directions. The erection of digital sign posts within dream-scape are signifying a possible end to what we have known. A mapping of the consciousness is occurring as the dreamscape-photograph is superseded by a stronger graphic element. Cream UK Tour (1997) and HMC (1997) illustrate this trend with painful obviousness. The undulating mountain ranges and mythical symbolism are eroding into sharp straight lines, bold typography and simple two colour geometric shapes. As Minimalism hoped to reduce the complexities of existing art and, "proposed art as a specifically man-made object set up against the flux and profusion of nature"⁸, we can see a revolt against the natural. The machine(s), in this case computer graphic trends, are reclaiming the medium as an automatised process - forgetting or ejecting the pyschoactive element found in so much organic based work.

De Chirico illustrates this process in his essay Sull'arte metafisica as plastic loneliness. Here De Chirico states that, "every serious work of art contains two different lonelinesses"⁹. The first he describes as the happiness found in exploring form in regard to the positioning that objects have in relation to one another, in a super-sensory aspect. The second, "is of lines and signals"¹⁰. After one has explored the consciousness one seeks to map its boundaries, to define the area as something tangible and hopefully ease the anxiety and uncertainty of the dreams contained there in.

While the new media has lent itself to a myriad of visual possibilities it is constricted by the very nature of its explosion. The dream-scape genre has allowed the digital artist to take certain visual liberties in form and structure - allowing the viewer to believe the impossible. Yet, applications for the use of this visual technology seem perhaps limited. Beyond the dream there is only reality, and here the viewer suddenly becomes sceptical of the vision. While perhaps we can accept the bending of the occasional truth in a dream, when reality is involved we need the definition of spaces. Anxiety becomes anger, we are not so easily fooled. Yet this limitation has in essence helped to create a niche for the genre. If the application, with available technology, is limited the style becomes entrenched. Suddenly it begins to exist within a linear time frame. It becomes a movement. So that in some distant classroom one hundred years from now the entire subject could well be taught as Digital Mysticism, or simply Raverism.

References

1. The World Of The Surrealists, M. Haslam. Galley Press, 1997. pg 123 par 2 ln 7.
2. Interview : Paul Findlay. Melbourne 1997. B. Brady.
3. Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940 G.H. Hamilton. Penguin Books, 1983. pg 395 par 4 ln 16.
4. Interview : Paul Findlay. Melbourne 1997. B. Brady.
5. ibid.
6. ibid.
7. Conquest of the Irrational, S. Dali. New York, 1935.
8. The Story of Modern Art, N. Lynton. Phaidon Press Ltd. 1980. pg 306 par 1 ln 13.
9. From de Chirico's essay, "Sull'arte metafisica", (1919), quoted by Soby, 66.
10. ibid.