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Cyber culture
More than 40 of Australia's leading arts and cultural institutions are currently taking part in the online national cultural festival, which commenced on 26 November, Online Australia Day 1999.
The Online Australia Cultural Festival, which runs until February 2000, showcases Australian cultural expression and aims to attract a wider audience for Australian arts and culture online.
The Festival offers a model of Australian cultural and arts institutions working together online, making use of the web's networking and promotional potential. It also offers a wide range of the sort of strategies artists are using online in working with and, sometimes against, new technologies, and the rapid pace of change and its effect on our lives.
This collaborative approach with arts organisations maximises the web's networking and promotional opportunities and raises awareness throughout the world about Australian cultural activities.
Perhaps the most exciting feature of staging a cultural festival online is that online technology can act as a catalyst for greater social interaction and community participation.
Online technologies can have a direct role in enhancing community well-being. They can provide better links across the local community while at the same time enabling access to wider national and international resources.
Some of the organisations involved from around Australia include: the Experimental Art Foundation, Melbourne Festival, Powerhouse Museum, Film and Television Institute (WA), Australian Museum, Performance Space, Queensland Theatre Company, the Australian Film Institute, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, ABC Online, the Australian Centre for Photography, Questacon, Regional Arts NSW, Youth Music Australia, and Multimedia Art Asia Pacific.
Staging a cultural festival online has also allowed greater ease of access and participation in Australian arts activities-by highlighting the wealth and diversity of Australian arts and cultural life and, secondly, providing an accessible one-stop gallery that engages an arts audience.
The launch of the Festival at Fox Studios Australia featured visual artist Ken Unsworth and a performance by electronic performers Sonic Animation, who played tracks from their album Orchid for the Underworld-Triple J's album of the week, 22-26 November.
Sonic Animation's performance was also webcast live on Triple J's website at www.abc.net.au/triplej as part of ABC Online Open Day and through Fox Studios.
The Online Festival grew out of Project One, an online arts and culture workshop held in Sydney in May 1999 as part of Online Australia Year, a Commonwealth Government initiative co-ordinated by the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE).
Three main issues presented themselves at the workshop. First, how to connect with the new online audiences. Second, how to best present arts and culture online. Third, the fragmented nature of the multitude of online strategies of Australian arts and cultural organisations, government support bodies and the many others who promote, support and exhibit arts and culture.
The Online Cultural Festival was proposed as a way to bring together-in one virtual space-an example of the wealth of Australian creative work on the web and the many organisations supporting the development and exhibition of such work.
This support of course begins very much in the physical realm, in the day-to-day issues of providing the infrastructure for the arts community and arts' audiences alike. But with the changes in digital media production and distribution technologies this support now also extends beyond the geographical boundaries of those institutions and onto the web.
All the exhibitions in the Festival are exemplary in their different fields and varied objectives, and all work toward overcoming the necessary limitations of these early days of the web and digital media, and of variable budgets and resources.
The information economy provides artists and cultural workers with expanded scope for cultural expression and audience development as well as new marketing, distribution and business opportunities.
Artists can utilise new technologies creatively to create as well as to promote and distribute their art works. In the information economy, artists can become valuable generators and distributors of content. No longer needing to rely on costly intermediaries for distribution and exhibition services, artists can serve a global market with direct access to their work.
Already, artists are uploading music, writing video and animation for download from the Internet direct to users, and are forming new local and global networks to facilitate content aggregation and wider distribution.
Online capacity can help to stimulate and reinvigorate both local communities and communities of interest. It can also provide a tool for individual advancement, whether through greater learning opportunities, greater social interaction, greater access to information and services, including those provided by government.
Contact
Thea Butler
Online Australia Project Officer
Tel: 02 9240 0910
Fax:02 9251 4577
National Office for the
Information Economy
PO Box H237
Australia Square
NSW 1215