Tumblong has been an extremely interesting pilot project. The outcomes were quite different from what was anticipated at the outset, and all the more provocative for that.

In a nutshell, the site has probably functioned better as a virtual salon and art gallery, than it did as a collaborative virtual art studio (which was how it was originally conceived). One of the reasons for that was paradoxically the intensity of engagement and differences of opinion between the British and Australian artists. These differences inhibited the opportunities for collaboration, but deepened the level of engagement with issues in British-Australian cross-cultural communication.

We thought we were designing a virtual art studio into which we were inserting a pot-pourri of cultural mementoes to stimulate communication. These mementoes, and the naming and iconography of the site as a whole, were nuanced (we thought) to take account of the importance of indigenous experience in relations between the two countries.

As it turned out, the nuances were very powerful and effectively defined the project as Australian. In retrospect, this was probably inevitable, as is clear if one conceives of how a notional project, for example, linking Australia with its former colony Papua New Guinea would inevitably focus on PNG as the locus of revelation about the nature of the relationship.

In the case of Tumblong what made the Australian focus irrevocable was the fact that each of the artists brought their own artefacts to the site in their early engagement, and all of these artefacts had neo-colonial or post-colonial resonances for other participants. Susan proposed sheep, Elizabeth an imperial encyclopedia, Graham a set of dots on the landscape emanating from Britain, and Brook effectively proposed his own Aboriginal identity as a central cultural artefact of the project.

Such a strong socio-political focus in the terms of engagement between the British and Australian artists tended to disadvantage the British artists, for two reasons: firstly, neither had actually been to Australia, and so had no locus standi, literally, upon which they could base a rejoinder to the Australians. Secondly, overt politics had not figured strongly in the previous work or approach of the British artists, and so again they were at a disadvantage. The work that both Susan and Graham produced can be seen as strong statements of the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of engagement by them with an artefact - ÒAustraliaÓ - of which they could have no confidence in the relevance of their own perceptions.

By the same token, the British artists could be very confident of the perception of their own work in a British, European and perhaps trans-Atlantic context. From that vantage point, Australian pre-occupations were a long way away from metropolitan concerns.

Over the three-month period of activity on the site, there were 5500 visits, of which half were identifiably Australian, about a third from the rest of the world and the remainder impossible to identify. Anecdotal feedback indicates that the interest by visitors to the site was intense, especially as the lines of disagreement became more visible. In that sense, it was the interaction between the participants that generated the interest, rather than the individual activities of participants.

This was a very fertile outcome in the process of cross-cultural communication between two parties, both of whom no doubt felt they started off with a fairly clear understanding of one another. It bodes well for the value of the Web in cross-cultural communication of emotional and intellectual substance. What is still an open question is the relationship of the Web to artistic production.

Chris Nash, Paul Bonaventura 1998

We have archived earlier signposts.