Leonardo

Leonardo 34.3 (2001) 185

The Leonardo Gallery

Melinda Rackham

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Melinda Rackham is a digital artist who has worked on-line since 1995. Her recent interactive artwork Carrier (shown here, © Melinda Rackham, 1995) investigates "viral symbiosis in the biological and virtual domains," focusing upon the hepatitis C virus (HCV). Carrier uses the Java agent "sHe" as an intelligent viral provocateur to guide us through the site and to links containing information about HCV. Carrier's mixture of personal stories, Shockwave visualizations, VRML, and complex sound generations create a multilevel and unexpectedly personal exploration of viral life. The piece gives us the courage to look at such deadliness with a positive attitude. Another of Rackham's works, Line, probes "the physical and virtual architectures that connect and contain us at this moment in human history." Line exists simultaneously on two planes: as an Internet site that traces an intimate electronic relationship between two people (physically located in Australia and Japan) and as a gallery installation consisting of a laser beam that intersects a book containing intimate photographic images of the landscape with the architectures of these locations. Line questions individual identity, the nature of communication and the concept of location within the "cyberpolis."

Finally, inspired by both the potential and the limitations of the on-line world, Rackham's tunnel, a "cyberurban melodrama," explores gender fluidity (the main characters slip from male to female à la Orlando), instant and anonymous intimacy and the "reckless abandonment of the flesh" of cyber-relationships. The viewer/voyeur clicks through levels of erotic text and images to uncover the melodrama of a (nearly successful) sexual encounter and, along the way, discover just how unsexy on-line sex can be.

(Melinda Rackham, P.O. Box 1744, Strawberry Hills, Sydney, Australia 2012. E-mail: <melinda@subtle.net>.)