The Australian Network for Art and Technology <http://www.anat.org.au> are Australia's major funding and advisory body for all new technology-related arts. They also do a bunch of other cool stuff like publishing, symposia, and research. New Zealander Honor Harger <honor@va.com.au> recently moved from a position at Artspace to sunny Adelaide to work with ANAT. She told us what's they're about.

How did ANAT come about?

It developed out of some projects and publications in the 1980s which were happening in Australia with artists working in new technologies. A lot of that was video-based practice, and the very early experiments in robotics in Australian art were coming into play. So ANAT evolved into an autonomous organisation after it was recognised that this was not just something which needed the occasional project but was something that required a dedicated forum. In 1988 ANAT became an autonomous organisation that was set up to work as an advocacy and networking agency for artists who use technology, an interface between artists and organisations which can provide support and resources, and advice and information...

So what's the relationship between ANAT and other Australian institutions or organisations which might also have histories of working in technology-based practice?

What we try to do is to align ourselves with as many different organisations as possible. Anybody who can offer us information or resources that we can then hand back to the artists themselves, we're interested in getting to know. So for example, ANAT is a really active member of the CAOS organisation, the thirteen Australian contemporary art spaces. We're also closely aligned with all the investigative client centres, we're part of that network. We're on the board of ISEA, the International Society For Electronic Arts, which is the international forum for all of the ISEA symposiums. We try and put ourselves in situations where we can learn as much from other organisations as we can. We store this information in our database so we can get a good overview of what's happening in lots of different areas of science-based and technology-based practice around Australia, so we can feed that information back to artists who need it.

You're also involved in helping artists gain skills in technology-based areas as well, aren't you?

One of the key functions ANAT's performed over the past few years is providing a national summer school, which we hold once a year in January. That's a three week intensive training environment which puts artists in a kind of master class environment, where they're in a collaborative learning situation, learning really high end, high tech skills. For the last few years it's been art internet technologies being taught by other artists, because what we identified was that although there are a lot of entry level courses at polytechnics and universities now, there are very few that are actually tailoring their courses for artists' needs. We figured that the only people who would really know of what artists' needs would be would be other artists. So we picked a whole range of tutors over the last couple of years who are at the very peak of their practice - of their technological knowledge - and used them as tutors. It might be, for example, CAD technology or internet technologies or high-end multimedia authoring technologies. So it's kind of like trying to create an apprenticeship relationship between artists at different levels of their careers.

ANAT organises residency programmes as well. Can you tell me a bit about that?

What ANAT identified a couple of years ago was that one of the best ways for artists to gain an appreciation and a knowledge of particular aspects of their particular practice is to put them into a really intensive learning environment, and that the best expression of that is a residency environment. So what we've started to do is to get together a three year strategy of getting artists into residencies with other types of organisations. We've called that residency programme Deep Immersion, because of the intensive learning environment that we're hoping to create. There are three parts of Deep Immersion. The first part, which we're running in 1997, is called Creative Collaboration, and that's where we're putting artists into residencies with on-line agencies, on-line organisations, freelance agents who have got a particular sort of understanding of the idea of a ‘virtual community'. Those artists will be doing on-line ‘residencies' with these internet agencies, so they won't be going anywhere - they will be based wherever they are physically based. But they'll be in intensive on-line partnership with an organisation which is known for its work with internet networking. The first one is with Trace, in Britain, which is an on-line writing site. We'll be announcing that residency soon, and there are about four or five others. Then, next year, we shift from an on-line focus to a scientific focus. Essentially it's putting out residencies with scientific institutions. That's something that we've identified through talking to artists over the past few years that there's a real need to do. To put artists in an environment where they can learn very specific skills.

How does the relationship with science based organisations work? It's fairly obvious what artists have to gain by learning specific scientific skills, but how does it feed back into the science organisations?

Well that's something that we're putting a lot of work into researching at the moment. Our entire focus for 1998 is art and science. This year it's been art and the internet. There's a network of scientific organisations in Australia which loosely fit under the term ASTE - Australian Science and Technologies Exhibitors. What we've been asking the science organisations is: What do you have to gain by having an artist in residency, what have you got to gain from art? It's very clear what artists have to gain from scientists, but we can also see a reciprocal relationship. What we're hypothesising is that having an artist feeding into the way that a science organisation is framing, say, a particular series of programmes for itself, is that they might offer different ways of seeing into scientific problems, or different ways of thinking about presenting scientific exhibitions. For example, we're hoping that the idiosyncratic way that artists tend to process their research is going to give the science institutions an insight into different ways of working or, even, more creative ways of working. The feedback we've had so far from the science organisations we've been working with is that that is really needed. There's a real desire to work in ways which are more unorthodox and artists are perceived as a really excellent way of visualising things in a different way. And that's partly what our vision for a reciprocal relationship is about.

You have a relationship with similar organisations in other parts of the world as well, through things like ISEA. Can you elaborate a little on those and how they work, with exchange of information and people?

Perhaps the best example to illustrate that at the moment is Artec, because we've got an artist in residence at Artec, which formed out of a project that ANAT did to try and extend the relationship between Australian art practice and international art practice. Virogenisis was an effort to bring out artists and critics based in other organisations which could be seen as analagous to ANAT, to try and create a cultural exhange. So we try and work out how we can feed into one another by providing resources or information, sharing information, and Artec has been probably one of the most successful examples of this. We formed a relationship with Artec about two years ago. The first expression of that was when we brought out Graham Harwood out for Virogenisis and since then we've been able to form a successful enough relationship with them that they're hosting an artist from here there for free for a substantial amount of time. Our relationship with international organisations is part of our overall desire to try and use our position to leverage opportunities for artists. So we use our knowledge and our resources to present artists with opportunities to travel to diffent parts of the world to experience art practices in a different context.

You've been utilising the internet a lot this year, and you're obviously still doing things like publishing. Does ANAT have a presence in other media within Australia?

You mean like within radio, television...?

Yeah, those ‘old technologies'!

It's interesting actually. The media in Australia, despite the popular perception, is actually a really tough nut to crack for arts organisations. I thought that Australia would be a kind of a nirvana in terms of getting publicity, with avenues like JJJ [Australian youth radio station] being such obvious vehicles, but it's actually extremely difficult to get any kind of visibility for any kind of visual arts or alternative arts practice full stop. There's very little public forum for the discussion of arts-based issues in Australia. There's only one vaguely arts-based programme on the ABC and it's extremely conservative, extremely traditional. They recently had a multimedia special on that programme,( it's called Express), and it was inspired by an event that we had quite a close affiliation with, flying this keynote speaker over for this particular forum. And the way that they chose to cover this event, which was called Binary Code, was in the most unbelievably biased and loaded fashion that I have ever seen. They had basically gone in there with the hypothesis that any kind of new technology was basically null and void in the presentation of the visual arts, and multimedia just wasn't there yet in terms of being an active player.

So they're still getting used to photography as art?

Yes, totally. It was shocking to see this incredibly backward, mindless coverage of something that was a very obvious part of the whole art scene in Australia. So, yes, to go back to your original question, we do our best. We get a reasonable amount of coverage in the national newspapers, like The Australian, and the Sydney Morning Herald, which is sort of regional. They've both got computer-sections where tech-based art is usually covered. It's been identified as a real problem in Australia that technology-based practice is not being discussed by the media. It's not being taken on board by the cultural gatekeepers of the media at all. They don't understand it. There's no coverage in the arts section of the papers, so we always have to go to the computer pages.

How is the perception of what ANAT does from the mainstream Australian art community?

It's hard to gauge whether or not the mainstream art community really understands what ANAT does. They're a little bit tentative in forming an opinion. But my understanding of their perception of the understanding of what ANAT is is that it is kind of good that ANAT's here because it means they don't have to engage with those issues.

So do the state/publicly funded art galleries, as opposed to the CAOS organisations, have any interest in being involved in projects?

It varies enormously from state to state. The state galleries have got very little in common with each other. That's just the way that they're run. We're really lucky in South Australia, because we've got Christopher Chapman here, so that makes things a lot easier. He's obviously very interested in what we're doing, and being the chief contemporary art curator means that he's got a reasonable opportunity to present interesting work. We recently had a performance by one of the people who had been funded on our research and development grant programme doing a major performance down at the South Australian Art Gallery. That received more publicity from the mainstream media than any other art event that anyone can remember in the last year. So it does vary enormously, but there are definitely examples of participation from a mainstream, state level, for sure.

Recently you ran a large sypmosium called Code Red. Can you tell us about that?

Code Red was a sequel to our Virogenisis project which was to bring interesting international people to Australia to speak about the international situation with technology-based art. Code Red differred in that instead of coming from a traditional arts perspective it was coming from a more general media perspective, and it was trying to bring some theoretical background into how art can impact on media, or forms of media. We were really lucky that we sourced some of the major international players, some of the very top international commentators on this particular issue in the world at the moment, most notably Geert Lovink, who is a Netherlands-based activist, writer and theoretician. He set up Net Time, and he also started the Digital City a based virtual community with about one hundred thousand members at the moment. He's also really involved with movements like the Hacking And Progress conference which is held every three years. He's very sought after in terms of his views on the way the internet is developing, particularly his views which contradict the West Coast ideology, as it's known, the Wired view of the internet and technology in general. So we had a weekend in Sydney about ten days ago. We were basically debating how art can impact on the way that technology is developing and how we can develop strategies for more meaningful intervention into the evolution of those technologies. It was an amazingly successful event and we're publishing all of the papers on-line, and we're probably going to do a RealAudio of all the speeches and put them on the ANAT website too.