Net art work, 1996

"tunnel" is the digital vagina.
Within unfolds the cyburban melodrama of online sexual relations - the cyber affair - and the ensuing tension between real cyber-sexual experience and real flesh-sexual experience.
Tunnel explores and questions early notions of fluid identity and sexuality on the net. It charts the incongruity and incompatibility when the digitally coded self crosses the terminal boundary.
Cyber relations are located in the "tunnel" - the intimate, feminine, private space of the online world, where the boundaries that define safety and personal space, shift and morph.
Sexual and Emotional Intimacy are achieved in an astoundingly short amount of time. Here online encounters are a projection of the self into another - someone who exists only for our fantasy, and who will disappear when the computer is turned off. Or do they?
What happens when the bodys, minds and genitals of the cyber lovers meet in flesh space?
Will the sensory/data overload blow both their buffers?

(Melinda Rackham)

AU

Melinda Rackham is an Australian artist, curator and writer. An Internet Art pioneer, she has exhibited award winning online interactive artworks at major global festivals and Biennials from 1995. Over the last decade, through roles such as Networked Art Curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Director of ANAT, Melinda has opened new arenas for artists working with Science and Emerging Technologies. More recently, while Adjunct Professor of Media and Communications at RMIT University, Dr Rackham curated Australian Media Arts in Public Spaces in China. Melinda is currently writing her first Novel - a parallel exploration of identity creation in Virtual Worlds and her malleable identity resulting from her own Adoption.

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