# Linda Dement

Linda Dement (born 1960 in Brisbane) is an Australian multidisciplinary artist, working in the fields of digital arts, photography, film, and writing non-fiction. Dement is largely known for her exploration of the creative possibilities of emergent technologies such as the CD-ROM, 3-D modelling, interactive software, and early computing.

## Career

Linda Dement began exhibiting in 1984. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) from City Art Institute, Sydney in 1988.
Dement's ground-breaking computing arts and still image works have been exhibited in Australia and internationally in galleries and festivals, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Ars Electronica in Austria, the International Symposia of Electronic Art in Sydney and Montreal and the Impakt Media Arts Festival in Europe. Dement is also an esteemed ANAT Alumnus.
Collaboration is a central to Dement's ouvre. The award-winning "Eurydice 1997–2007", Dement worked with American writer Kathy Acker, initially the intention was to cocreate an interactive digital piece, using the novel [Eurydice in the Underworld](1997) as a starting point. In 1996 Kathy Acker had a double mastectomy and wrote Eurydice in the Underworld about that experience. Although Acker managed to clear her body of cancer, it returned, and she died on 29 November 1997. Thus Dement continued with the project alone, producing images for each location they had planned for the interactive work, a new series of images exploring aesthetic portrayal of perversity was created, they are output as Lambda mural prints, each 1 x 2.25m, mounted on aluminium. Two of these works won the National Digital Art Award, in 2005 "Blue Plastic", and in 2006 "White Rose". Dement discusses the process with ABC Radio National ABC Digital Art Prize.
Linda Dement's "Eurydice 1997–2007" received critical acclaim, "Like exterminating angels, American writer Kathy Acker and Australian visual artist Linda Dement, shine a light on the dark and bloody depths of experience... These are images so corporeal and pitilessly physical, that you don't so much look at them as give them your fretful attention." George Alexander Art Monthly Australia Iss. 148, (April 2002): 20–22.
In "Bloodbath" (2010) at October 2010, Hordern Pavilion, Sydney, Australia, artist Linda Dement worked with five artists, [Francesca daRimini], [Nancy Mauro-Flude], Kate Richards, Sarah Waterson with the Sydney Roller Derby League in a creative development and beta testing of a live event where each artwork responded to live incoming data from collisions in a [Sydney Roller Derby League], all-girl flat track roller derby game to explore art through human collision and sport. Sensors attached to players headgear sends that data to a server to create a digital artwork, developing the work literally blow-by-blow! Artworks, such as Axle Grind features a robotic guitar that is triggered live by bumps and collisions from the players on track. Supported by Australia Council for the Arts Novel arts experiences using digital technologies and live audience engagement are now emerging across Australia with the help of the Digital Culture Fund.
In tandem with Australian artist collective VNS Matrix, decades earlier, Dement's work pioneered Australian cyberfeminism in art. Cyberfeminist politics and poetics used technology to deconstruct gender stereotypes in mainstream culture, and proactively situated women in relation to the rise of electronic culture in the early 1990s. Through her work, Dement aims to "give form to the unbearable." Dement's work has been described as depersonalised autobiography, that is, an appropriation of the digital as a space of expression, or a "rupture" in the info-tech dominated sphere of computer culture. Her work explores the relationship between the physical body and the body politic, exaggerating female "other-ness" or the "monstrous-feminine."
Cyberflesh Girlmonster (1995) CD-ROM by Linda Dement, made from donated body parts collected during Artists' Week of the Adelaide Festival 1994 to construct the computer based interactive work. About 30 women participated in the original event by scanning their chosen flesh and digitally recording a sentence or sound. Conglomerate bodies were created from the information donated. These have been animated and made interactive. When a viewer clicks on one of these monsters, the words attached to that body part could be heard or seen, another monster may appear, a digital video could play, a story or medical information about the physical state described by the story, may be displayed. The user moves relatively blindly between these. There is no menu system or clear controllable interface. The work is a macabre, comic representation of monstrous femininity from a feminist perspective that encompasses revenge, desire and violence V2 featuring Cyberflesh Girlmonster.

## Censorship

Some of Dement's early works have come under censorship by the Australian Government. Typhoid Mary was taken to the NSW Parliament as being "obscene" and subsequently came under the classification of the Australian Government's Office of Film and Literature as "not suitable for those under the age of 18." In My Gash also received a formal "Restricted" classification.
Stephen Wright (2013) claimed Dement's work exemplifies "The politics of trauma – of what it means to struggle into identity, to carry childhood and the world, and its baleful interiors into that weird shifting space called adulthood and a supposed responsibility – is the politics of the ways in which that trauma is hidden, or re-directed, cathected to the consumer paradise or fused with cyberspace...And the reason why, as another critic has said, we don’t so much look at Linda Dement’s work as give it our 'fretful attention' is perhaps because it’s the end of the road. There is nothing beyond memory and desire, there is nothing beyond what we do to each other here and now, and how that is played out or hidden. In Monstrous women and the monstrous work of Linda Dement

## Works

Works :
| Year | Title | Media | Notes |
| 2018–19 | Cyberfeminist Bed Sheet Flown as a Flag | Performance art, and mixed media Sheet terrain of punk, cyberfeminism, rebellious aberration and corporeal digital | a collaboration with Nancy Mauro-Flude, they devised a performance of the bed-sheet-flag, unfurling ribbons of quotes from the stains of the authors. |
| 2013 | Awry Signals | Performance art, augmented reality, and mixed media for the creation of the electronic device | a collaboration with Nancy Mauro-Flude to create a séance device and performance |
| 2013 | 50BPM | | a collaboration with Kelly Doley |
| 2013 | Kill Fix | | |
| 2012 | Moving Forest | | Nicknamed "Castle 2012" |
| 2011 | Killing the Host | | |
| 2010 | Bloodbath | | Bump Projects; a collaboration with Francesca da Rimini, Kate Richards, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Sarah Waterson and Sydney Roller Derby League. |
| 2009 | The Ends of the Earth | | a collaboration with Jane Castle |
| 2009 | On Track | | a collaboration with group in Serial; Linda Dement, Petra Gemeinboeck, PRINZGAU/podgorschek and Marion Tränkle, formed through the eMobilArt workshop programme 2008 – 2009 |
| 2008 | Moving Forest London | | a collaboration with Shu Lea Cheang and Martin Howse for the Transmediale Festival in Berlin, Germany. |
| 2007 | I Know You Think It's Too Late | | |
| 2007–1997 | Eurydice | | a collaboration with Kathy Acker |
| 1999 | In My Gash | CD-ROM | |
| 1995 | Cyberflesh Girlmonster | CD-ROM | To make this work, Dement set up a stall as part of Artist Week at Adelaide Festival in 1994. She then digitally scanned 30 women's body parts of their choice. These scanned body parts were then digitally manipulated and reworked as "mutant" bodies to make up the work. Many of the "flesh donors" were prominent Australian cyberfeminist artists present at the Festival. |
| 1991 | Typhoid Mary | CD-ROM | |
| 1991–1981 | | Various photographic works | |

## Writing

* Artists Thinking About Science (with Helen Watson-Verran et al.). Adelaide, S.A.: Australian Network for Art and Technology, 1994.
* I Really Want to Kill You But I Can't Remember Why (with Jasmine Hirst et al.). Woolloomooloo, NSW: Artspace Australia, 1995.
* "Girl #4 Late 70s," in Peter Blazey et al. (eds.), Love Cries. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1995
* "Payment," in Leonie Stevens (ed.), Warp Drive. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 1998
* Byte Me: art + culture + technology (with Kevin Murray et al.). Bendigo, Vic.: Bendigo Art Gallery, 1999

## Awards and prizes

* Dement was twice awarded the Harries Australian National Digital Art Award in 2005 and 2006, was awarded a New Media Arts Fellowship in 1996 and the Digital Futures Fund in 2010 by the Australia Council for the Arts, Best CD-ROM at the 9th Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival in Germany; and Honorable Mentions by New Voices/New Visions, Palo Alto, California; and Ars Electronica, Austria.

## Residencies

* City of Sydney William Street Creative Hub, 2014