A big impression

LOITER AROUND THE Arts Centre and you will have the chance of bumping into some extraordinary art pioneers this summer. Two of the biggest names in contemporary Chinese art - the revered New York-based artist Xu Bing and famed critic Gao Minglu - are conducting summer workshops and lectures for a summer residency project. And one of America's most challenging new media artists and educators, Christa Erickson, is also lurking in the building.

I find her sitting before a pack of local students in a basement lecture room. Staring from behind thick-rimmed, black spectacles and a disarmingly sweet smile, she has the look of a 1950s schoolteacher or a shrink. But don't be fooled. This is the daughter of a Nasa scientist, who led a double life as computer programmer and sculptor and now deals in jaw-dropping installation works (rooms taken over by huge physical objects that require you to interact with technology in weird and wonderful ways). She melds video, sculpture, programming, performance and the internet and never lets a room full of people remain in their adult, all-knowing states.

'I am fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies and the technologies that mediate our experience of them,' she begins. 'I create environments where computer control is used to orchestrate quasi-cinematic experiences.'

Erickson's trick is to 'put the visitor in the subject position of a child in the face of new technologies'. She lures them into 'media saturated playgrounds' where they have to engage in games with the art works. 'I see this moment of discovery as an opportunity for the audience to rediscover their physical body in an increasingly disembodied culture,' says the artist.

Take for example, Mnemonic Devices (2000). The work was inspired by the sonogram (her nephew as an unborn foetus) that her brother e-mailed her. This set her thoughts spiralling - how will his world differ from ours? Will it be 'less physical'? With a click of her right finger she plunges us into a filmed example of the piece. A four-metre seesaw (banned from American playgrounds these days but used to inspire memories in adult viewers) balances in the centre of the large room. It is lined with photo cells that register the presence of humans and determines the direction and speed of the projected video on the screen behind. One clip is of a couple holding hands. The shot teasingly moves forwards and backwards, as the seesaw's occupants rock up and down.

On the other side of the room, two computer terminals are wired to the web where audiences are asked to compete in a scavenger hunt-style game through the internet. Body movement has now been reduced to a mere tapping of the fingers - and co-operation has changed to competition.