Following Yelling at Stars,1 their 2008 transmission into space from the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, collaborators Willoh S. Weiland and Nicky Forster have created Void Love, an online soap opera that takes us on a journey into deep space via disaster, romance, dark matter, and the never-ending uncertainty of life.

Emma McRae: Void Love is an intricate work that draws parallels between the birth and growth of the universe, a romantic love story and a woman emerging from a coma. In creating the work was your main interest exploring the ways in which art and science are doing the same thing, in that they are both trying to understand what life is and what our experience of life is?

Willoh S. Weiland: Definitely. I think, particularly, in drawing this analogy between coming out of a coma and the birth of the universe, the similarity between art and science is the degree of uncertainty that both narratives are grappling with. The scientists at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing (CAS) at Swinburne University2 are engaged in great leaps of the imagination that require an incredible capacity to visualise what does not exist. is is really analogous to the artistic process in lots of ways, and also to this narrative of a coma — we’ve got all these disparate images and events and we understand that they’re there, first of all, and that they’re obviously relevant, but we can’t see the connections between them. That’s what the astronomers are doing, trying to fill in the gaps. And I think art really does that in so many ways, tries to articulate the things that are not visible to everyone yet.

EM: The structure and aesthetic of the work strongly reflect this notion
of construction, of building ideas from disparate pieces of information. The minimal visuals of the work — much of which consists of black text on a white background — are like screenplay directions, and highlight the constructed nature of the story.

WW: I think that came out of the fact that Swinburne’s got the Supercomputer, which collects data from the telescopes in Australia (at Parkes and Mopra) and turns it into information that can be used. They do a lot of modelling. But the idea of simulation is a construction in itself, which is evidenced in, for example, the current theories we have about dark matter. There are a number of theories (and this comes up in a few of the interviews and the episodes) that could match the observations. For us,
the soap opera narrative became about the doctor who is looking after this patient, getting signs and clues — you know, the woman comes in, she’s been involved in an accident but she’s got tattoos of words and she’s pale like she’s never been outside — and he starts coming to all these theories about what this might mean, theories he feels certain about but that do not necessarily match the observations.

EM: He constructs his own version of the truth.

WW: Yeah, and multiple versions of the possible truth. And some of them are right, but it’s also another area of uncertainty, trying to come up with something we can grab onto. And I think that’s such a necessary part of human experience, to try and create, otherwise there’s just the seething desperate chaos.

EM: Which is why the soap opera form works so well. Unlike a film, a soap opera has no end or final resolution, it just continues on and on in a way that’s more related to how we construct the stories of our lives so they make sense to us. The work successfully captures the overblown sense of drama in soap operas; it could easily be an actual episode of The Bold and the Beautiful that you’ve transcribed. It’s not, is it?

WW: No, but I love that that might be the case. The attraction for me to
the soap opera has a lot to do with the deep stereotyping of the tragic heroine and also that there is a mystery element to it. Lots of the images are plants for information — which will be revealed! We’ve made four episodes and there are not a lot of visuals in the early episodes, the idea being that we would marry the visual information to the amount of memory that’s returning to her so in the later episodes there will be more. I guess that’s another construct: having this cliff-hanger sense of what’s about to happen … ongoing suspense … it’s sort of painful.

EM: In the work there’s a crash, which is a second — a moment — in life, and then suddenly this woman’s in a coma and stuck between life and death. It’s dramatic, but also very personal. Did you have a strong idea of the narrative and what the work would be before you began the residency at CAS, or did it develop from your experience of watching the scientists at work?

WW: Both. The pitch was to make a soap opera because I was fascinated
by the implications and stakes of the research — it’s breathtaking! We
were originally going to talk about the Square Kilometre Array project,
but then we decided to do this broader thing about just simple … you know, the evolution of the entire universe!3 The soap opera idea came from responding to the research being really dramatic and weird and hyperbolic, that it’s not this dry, dreary science. The scientists’ research is organised into the periods of time in the development of the universe they’re working on. The idea that one person’s life can be so dramatically transformed by a second came out of the ridiculous timescales that they are dealing with. There are people working on three seconds after the big bang, looking at what happened in those three seconds, modelling those three seconds, and working out that the universe is cooling, the gas is forming and so on. Then there are people working one minute after, and people working three billion years after. It’s just really impossible to get a sense of it, it’s mind-boggling!

EM: Interviews with the scientists form much of the audio in the episodes and are extremely rich and layered. Then there’s the voice of Kamahl, as the doctor, which is so smooth and reassuring, and provides such a sense of tragedy and drama. What led you to bring these together?

WW: Very early on I was listening to the first interview and I thought, oh my god, this is so dense, I don’t want people to feel like they have to understand astrophysics to listen to it. And then there’s the quality of the interviews, a lot of the speakers are quite nervous, for instance, and it just needed some sugar around it all. It needed a narrator with a mellifluous voice. And Kamahl is also a bizarre cultural icon who represents certain soap qualities: he sings all the classics, he’s kind of a parody of himself almost, but he has intense sincerity about him as well. So, the weighting is definitely towards the audio, and I think that will continue. The sound of the astronomers’ interviews is so beautiful and fascinating. I’ve never really worked with voice recordings before and I was so surprised how intimate they are. Listening to someone’s voice is really intense, you’re almost inside their mouths.

EM: Which is why it’s so effective as an online work. It becomes a more personal experience because everyone watches it in their own environment, and they can stop and start or go back as they please. But as an artist this gives you less control over the work because you can’t construct the environment in which you want the work to be viewed the way you would in a gallery. Do you prefer that or does it feel like a risk?

WW: I love control! But I think that online is definitely the correct environment for it to be viewed. I think the work has to be personal because it requires a few viewings and the license to stop and start, and I couldn’t think of a way to do that without making a movie. I guess for us it was like, how can we make something that will make people spend time with an artwork online? In terms of the interactivity of the website and the way in which the episodes work, the challenge is whether it’s something that people will treat as a work to come back to. And I like encouraging people to drink martinis and put headphones on, you know, I’d really respond to that!

Endnotes

1. For more information about Yelling at Stars see: http://aphids.net/archive/Yelling_At_Stars_Next_Wave_Festival

2. The artists undertook a Synapse residency through the Australian Network for Art and Technology at CAS for the development of Void Love. Void Love was supported by the Australian Network for Art and Technology, The Australia Council for the Arts and The Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology.

3. Australia is currently bidding against South Africa to build the Square Kilometre Array, which will be the biggest radio telescope in the world.