Upon entering the gallery the first thing we notice is the aural element of the show which challenges our experience of the gallery, despite the more than 100 year history of recorded sound it remains a relative outsider medium in the gallery. This is incongruous in an environment where the audience is so 'over' everything that they are considered impossible to shake from their post-interest detachment. Phillip Samartzis' composition for the installation consists of a half hour loop playing on a surround system and several smaller loops intersecting the principle piece randomly from a set of smaller speakers spread throughout the space. There is a haphazard quality to the sound which is partially a result of the unpredictable relation of the two playback systems but principally due to Samartzis' compositional style. He will not allow a traditional structural engagement in which constant alternation between tension and release builds to a climax, allowing us to 'go with the flow'. Rather we are shunted from sonic event to event with the only connective principles being their common textural quality and their appearance within the same space. The sounds themselves are machine noise under the microscope, fragments of sound stretched and repeated to create an environment at once artificial and fabricated but also familiar to a contemporary ear, those noises in our environment heard but ignored, in this example privileged and demanding reconsideration. The arrangement of this sound over time has a aimless quality which removes it's reading from the common rendition of machine noise as repetitive and thus inhumane. It is on this point that we can identify one of the key elements of the show - that of animation. I refer to this term as describing the process by which inanimate objects are given movement and ,therefore, life; most commonly referenced to a human experience of life. Samartzis renders his sound not as a polemic decrying the dehumanising effect of machine life but rather finds an organic quality in his material, bringing out the 'nature' of machines.

Martine Corompt has constructed the housing for the electronic works of Samartzis and Ian Haig and in so doing really sets the tone of the show, influencing our reading of the other artist's work. The speakers and projectors are housed in squat little fibreglass 'people' reminiscent of the Willendorf Venus and linked by a series of large ribbed cables providing the animating power. The largest of her figures, with rotating projector heads, are further softened by the addition of industrial felt. Corompt has created an atmosphere which reeks of artificiality but immediately upsets a negative reading of this quality by giving her work an organicism - as though the little people just sort of grew there.

Ian Haig has created a series of head and shoulders portraits of toys, mutating them by digital means to create grotesque mutants, which despite his best intentions are still very cute. These disembodied heads fly around the room by virtue of rotating slide projectors giving the darkened space a side-show alley, 'Haunted House' feel and forming the most apparent link to the show's title.

The fact that these works appear on slide rather than video/data projector or installed personal computer (all devices utilised by Haig and Corompt previously) is indicative of the low-tech ethos that permeates the show, debunking the newer is better techno-mania that passes for content in much digital art. In a related way the artists refer to this as a multi-media show in an attempt to liberate the term from it's buzz word category and invoke a more literal reading of it with the art-political aim of removing the haze of government funded euphoria interrupting a critical reading of new media art. In a year full of installations this is a truly cohesive show challenging the found object aesthetic and performing the even rarer feat of getting a smile from an audience, more accustomed to intimidating strangeness than any suggestion of fun in the gallery.

For more information about Trick or Treat see their URL: http://cs.art.rmit.edu.au/media_arts/Ian_Haig/trick.html