Tsk-tsk-tsk & beyond: anticipating distributed aesthetics

This paper considers some important precursory events in the formative history of Australian media arts. These events have anticipated the post-object, serial conception of arts practice that Nicolas Bourriaud has called relational aesthetics. Relational aesthetics interpret both artwork and audience in differential, highly idiosyncratic ways; ways that have become important to our contemporary vocabulary of interactive, immersive and interfaced art. This paper will consider the ways in which the concept of the network was important to artists such as Philip Brophy and Tsk-tsk-tsk in the early 1980s. It will also explore related notions of 'audience manipulation' in the work of Martine Corompt.