Scorched Happiness - Adam Nash - Australian Culture Now 2004

Approaching Scorched Happiness on Saturday night, I really desperately wanted to like it. After all there's nothing worse then a good night with good company, but a film that destroys the vibe. Unfortunately, Scorched Happiness spoiled the fun.

Well, at least I think it did. To be honest, I really can't be sure what I saw. There's a segment that occassionally appears on Letterman where Dave and Paul pull up the curtain to see a performer of some sort strut their stuff for 30 seconds, and then discuss the proposition "Is this anything?". If Dave and Paul had have been in the audience on Saturday night, as well as no doubt being the centre of attention, they would have concluded that it failed the 'anything' test.

Artist Adam Nash describes the project thus:

Scorched Happiness is a live performance in 3D multi-user cyberspace based on Julia Kristeva’s text Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner – a visceral journey into the nature of racism. Defying conventional notions of ‘avatars’ as human representations, the performers, logged in via the web, become huge, layered, temporally chimeric audiovisual events filling up the space, then receding in reaction to each other’s manifestations.


WTF??

In practice, this amounts to Nash on stage logged on to the internet, interacting with two other performers at a separate physical location but in the same space on-line. The interaction takes places in a 3D cyberworld, and the three players take the form of shapes or objects (avatars, apparently), constantly altering their shape, form and angle as they glide across the giant projector screen. As they move, the shape make strange electronic noises, possibly flatulence. It's a simple as that. No twist, no incisive social commentry, no grand realisation at the end. Just a sophisticated electronic form of the oil-in-a-glass-case executive desk toy.

See if you can make more sense of it through this site here. Good luck

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