Babes In Techno-World by Nick Crowe  

Babes In Techno-World by Nick Crowe
Make Magazine, Summer issue, 1997, England

The KIT collaboration ... works with a "you touch it, it changes" model in their installation shown show as part of 36MC in Manchester.

For this exhibition on the margins of Video Positive (and there were several) KIT has created a gold, floral-curtain covered punchbag in an environment of garden centre woodchippings, video projection and astroturf. The KIT punchbag, upon being punched, fires lush overcolored sweeps from a hole in the ground. It can almost feel like you are beating the images out of the work.

Interactivity, the body and a concern for the relationship between the natural and the digital are shared concerns here. But the similarities are far less remarkable than how different works actually feel. There's a relaxation with the medium evident in a gold-covered punch that seems missing from a great deal of the work in Video Positive. Tony Oursler's video dolls being the notable exception. Elsewhere the fact of digitality is, more than anything, what we are being presented with. Perhaps this emphasis on the material ontology of the work has been responsible for distracting some artiists from broader concerns of creativity within a social context - leaving us with running water and bird song.