While there, she also wrote the following articles:

• Tulse Luper Suitcases (preview, 64, October 2006)
• Riverdance (Earthcore 2006) (64, October 2006)
• Party against Poverty (64, November 2006)
• A Scanner Darkly (film review, 64, November 2006)
• Big Mouth shortcuts (64, November 2006)
• Drink of the month: Champagne cocktails (64, November 2006)
• My Eyes! They Lie! (64, November 2006)
• The Music Genome Project (64, November 2006)
• Drive-by Dolphins (64, December 2006)
• Rooftop Cinema review (64, December 2006)
• Volver (film review, 64, December 2006)

• Drama Queens of the Damned (The Age, 05/12/00, archived version from fan site)
• Lots of sauce, hold the ambulance (Regular column, Next, SMH, 29/03/02)
• Paperless Office (Regular column, Next, SMH, 16/04/02)
• Time to rescue the Everquest addicts (Regular column, Next, The Age, 23/04/02)
• Playing Smart (Lego Mindstorms, SMH, 16/08/02)
• Oracles of Invention (Science Fiction and Inventors, The Age, 18/07/02)
• All torque and no action (High tech tools, The Age, 30/08/02)
• Dead Fashionable (20 years of goth, The Age, 13/09/02)
• Torture in the Asia-Pacific (Amnesty International Human Rights Defender, 08/04/04)
• Exercising the Ghost in the Machine (The Dues, 02/05)
• Transcript of Golan Levin/Paul Miller interview (12/09/03)
• Singing a Stream of Floating Images (Ars Electronica, The Australian, 28/10/03)
• Blogging from Baghdad (rebelcoyote profile, The Age, 01/12/03)
• The prize of their convictions (Opera House activists, The Age, 14/12/03)
• Universal Harmony (Sheva profile, The Age, 14/01/04)
• Proudly Indie Amid the Pop and Glitter (Ember Swift profile, 21/01/04)
• Nasty substance at the bottom of the hit list (GHB overdoses, The Age, 08/03/02, additional work only)
• Earthcore review (Music review, The Age Online, 10/03/04)
• Game for Anything (Cover Feature, Livewire, The Age, 10/03/04)
• Angst of Hybrid Lives (Homi Bhabha profile, The Age, 13/05/04)
• Transcript of Homi Bhabha interview
• Tulse Luper Suitcases (preview, 64, October 2006)
• Riverdance (Earthcore 2006) (64, October 2006)
• Party against Poverty (64, November 2006)
• A Scanner Darkly (film review, 64, November 2006)
• Big Mouth shortcuts (64, November 2006)
• Drink of the month: Champagne cocktails (64, November 2006)
• My Eyes! They Lie! (64, November 2006)
• The Music Genome Project (64, November 2006)
• Drive-by Dolphins (64, December 2006)
• Rooftop Cinema review (64, December 2006)
• Volver (film review, 64, December 2006)
• Deco Delight (11°south, December 2006)
• Get Folked (11°south, December 2006)
• The Happy Household (SuperHappyDevHouse feature, FastThinking, Summer 2007, pdf)
• Hatching an idea (Creative incubators feature, FastThinking, Summer 2007, pdf)

These are the primary articles she wrote:

• Deco Delight (11°south, December 2006)
• Get Folked (11°south, December 2006)

{{heliotrope ink}} was hired in 2005 for the first season. Staff included project manager (dubbed ‘digital media guru’ on the site credits) rosanne bersten, assistant jack fairchild and web community liaison lauren demarte. Roles included media consultancy; web editing; community building. {{heliotrope}} liaised between web design firm Sputnik and the back-end delivery company, and was personally involved in troubleshooting in the weeks before launch. {{heliotrope}} ran weekly competitions on the site, sent material live, operated voting mechanisms and channeled information and statistics between key team members.

Forget the Rules won a 2006 MIPCOM award in Cannes for most innovative new content in a mobile format.

rosanne bersten was hired as launch editor and researched the audience, commissioned features, hired the copyeditor and proofreader, liaised with layout, edited the title, wrote some articles (one on Toledo, Spain; one on Tasmania, Australia), and signed off final pages.

Responses to unique traveller:

“I would just like to pass on our gratitude for the fabulous coverage Tasmania received in your wonderful debut edition. The layout, editorial and images are fabulous and will set you apart from other publications.” — Michelle Grima, Tourism Tasmania

“Looks fab! Good job….totally blown away” — Michael Gebicki, travel writer

“Spacious. Quality. The next thing.” — Ben Canaider, man about town (and wine writer)

“Thank you so much for sending through that beautiful magazine! It has already been passed around the office and read from cover to cover !!” — Lauren Jacobs, STM

x|media|lab has received accolades as an innovative incubator for digital media projects.

The program was well-received by the client and was without error. A copy is available for perusal if required.

In this transcript:

[1: digital musics ]

[2: collaboration and creativity ]

[3: music and the avant-garde ]

[4: maywa denki, reggae and authenticity ]

PM: (talking about a Greg Egan story) This one party where you realise that people are committing suicide at this party, his stuff always has a really dark edge to it, it’s like neo gothic horror, near-futuristic.

RB: …and half the time it’s quantum phsyics and half the time it’s bio-genetics, he’s really sharp and he’s a mathematician, his web site’s unbelievable because it’s hard core maths and quantum physics. He’s a total recluse.

So, Golan, would you call what you’re doing music?

GL: No.

RB: What would you call it?

GL: Well, what you saw the other night, I’d call it new media performance or audio-visual performance.

RB: How do you feel that this new media performance fits in with the parallel development of digital musics at the moment?

GL: Well, actually — Paul will probably disagree with this vociferously but — in many ways, music’s at a dead-end right now and the way it’s not at a dead end are branching out from the last twenty years of albums that are released by record companies and toured by bands and I would say that there will still always be a market for that and people will still always need music that involves recognisable tunes and that they can move their ass to, and I have no contempt for that at all, in fact I’m actually jealous of dance music, I think it can effect people in profound ways. But in terms of development of music as opposed to people’s need for music, development of art music and avant-garde music, people will probably grill me for saying this but I don’t find anything particularly interesting happening for example in the digital musics category of ars electronica. The winning selection is a bunch of people who basically dork around in the studio and make interesting sounds and then release them on a CD, you know, music concrete or that expanse of painful or unpainful industrial sounds and so forth and this has been done for twenty or thirty years, coming out of Horace and Eno and all that. When I tried to think of the future of music, I made the concert two years ago which was the choreographed ringing of people’s mobile phones, you know, this is not an album I’ve produced in a studio where I’ve tried to make the most painful possible sounds.

I think that that kind of music is at a dead end, and I think that the new territory in musics as far as the avant garde is concerned involves branching out into different domains and that’s why for example, in my own work, to the extent that it is music, I’m trying to do things outside of what you can hear or what is even listenable on an album.

PM: Well, the whole idea of creating an environment is something that’s really important right now, I think so much of what’s going on in music culture is a reflection of this whole peer-to-peer issue, the networks, MP3 file exchanges, and just making some annoying squeaky sounds isn’t necessarily so avant-garde, it was something that was done thirty years ago, you look at Stockhausen, at Perez, even Stravinsky —

GL: Sure.

PM: All sorts of stuff.

GL: Or in terms of the idea of using the studio as an instrument, I mean there’s an article by Eno from 1974 about doing this.

PM: Yeah, people have been doing this the whole last century.

RB: What’s your response to the whole sine wave thing?

PM: I just think that the whole idea of what people think about as art music…

GL: I think it hurts.

PM: …I think right now, you’re right, a lot of that is a perceptual dead end, where people are not necessarily taking the medium outside of just making some squeaky sounds. I’m interested much more in an idea of social engineering and that entails the idea of hybridity, openness to all sorts of globalised issues, stuff that takes you out of your local little scene. You know, I travel a lot but I also do a lot of collaborations with people from all walks of life, precisely because that keeps things interesting.

GL: If I had to be a juror [at ars electronica] and I was restricted to looking at things that could be recorded on albums, I don’t even know what I would do, I think I would find very little of interest. I think the making of environments is an example of that, the mobile phone symphony or performance or intervention, this to me is an environment that doesn’t reproduce well on CD at all because the whole thing is happening on a hundred cell phones.

RB: Talking about collaboration, one of the things that interested me here were the Audio Pad and Block Jam stuff and the different ways of making the dance music you were talking about before but with the visual interface becoming a part of the performance in a way that someone just standing in front of a laptop is not.

PM: I can literally compare between a dance music environment and a soundart environment, because I did two different events. I was also going to do this [Iannis] Xenakis thing but I did a collaboration with him a couple of years ago but I didn’t want to do a squeaky noise thing, it just would have been a different vibe, my style would have been more of an ambient take on his work and then format wise I just didn’t think it would fit. No disrespect to anyone doing that kind of stuff. I think it’s a big world and if somebody doesn’t like something or has an issue then check out something else, it’s aesthetics and difference.

RB: What do you think about the performative aspect of someone standing in front of a laptop as music?

PM: That’s fine. If that’s what they get their kicks out of. I think it’s about pleasure and people need to do what makes them feel happy. If they get a kick out of it then more power to them.

GL: That’s a very tolerant attitude and I do basically agree with you in that if people want to go see a performance and there’s a guy playing a laptop then that’s all good. Personally, I find it manifestly and completely uninteresting. I mean, again, suppose you say, hey friends, let’s go out and dance, and there’s a guy in front of a laptop, great, but in terms of what’s interesting, in terms of where we are today, I’ve seen laptop performances and they’re manifestly uninteresting, and for a number of reasons…

PM: But you’re watching the person as if it’s a performance, whereas you should be watching and/or listening and/or watching the screen or projection, you don’t need to watch the person.

GL: Well, sure, but as far as performance goes then this is not the future of performance, this is what I’m saying. The future of performance is not some guy standing behind a laptop doing something completely opaque with probably nothing contingent and nothing at stake in the situation.

RB: Which is why I’m interested in AudioPad. James Patten and Ben Recht have a table with light sensors and little perspex markers. One is drum, one is bass, one is pitch, one of them is a star shaped thing that’s the microphone and another is a starshaped thing that’s the ‘allow alteration to start here’. This is their interface. To make the music they move the markers around, it becomes a visual representation of the sliders so the audience can see what is being done, in an artistic way.

GL: It puts something back into what’s at stake in an live performance, which is that the performer might mess up and not only that, you could see possibly how they might mess up or that there’s something different from occasion to occasion because you can see that the performer is actually doing something.

RB: I also wonder about the ability to visualise collaboration through that.

PM: Let’s put it this way. Because I move through so many different scenes, I mean I check out reggae, I check out hip hop, I check out noise rock, I check out downtown avantgarde free jazz, I check out digital media scene…

GL: You can have an anything goes attitude…

PM: Right, because I move between a lot of scenes, I really have to be open and chilled out about things. What I find interesting is when people critique my performance, each person brings a whole lot of perceptual baggage about what a DJ should be or what an artist should be or what a writer should be, so my issues normally with the sorts of perceptual apparatus that’s applied to me rather than what I would apply to other people so that’s why I’m just like hanging… I really do try to invoke that sense of tolerance and openness in my own views of other people in the hopes that… you know, like last night, when I did the Duchamp piece, I think people were watching me as a DJ and not as an artist, and because of that the expectation and the perceptual baggage that came with that, they were expecting beats, they wanted to get some sort of dance thing doing and I was doing some ambient sort of weird art/noise mixed with… I don’t think it was like the Xenakis thing where it was like disturbing and annoying sounds, it was much more like atmospheric, I was timestretching and sampling Duchamp’s vocal piece where he’s talking about the art of selection and editing and I was editing him saying stuff and timestretching and pulling snippets out of his discussion, kind of as a fun thing about the artist as shareware so to speak, but the perception and the perceptual baggage that people brought with them didn’t allow them to critique the performance as an art piece, it had them critiquing it as a DJ piece, where it’s not dance, what’s going on…

GL: You can’t keep a beat, what’s wrong with you?

PM: Right.

• resfest (2003; role: guest management, daily newsletter production)
• e)mag magazine @ Fairfax (now defunct; 1999–2002; role: editor)
• Transworld books (1998; role: write and edit little net.books series)
• Choice magazine (1998–1999; role: online editor)
• internet.au magazine (1995–1998; role: editor)
• ABC radio (1998–2003; role: occasional guest)
  
• c|net briefs (1995–6; role: online editor)
• Australian Macworld Magazine (1994–2004; role: associate editor then freelance columnist)

This is the set for the famous concert scene in Queen of the Damned, and the most challenging acting exercise for the night is convincing the women in corsets to pretend we’re in the steaming heat of Death Valley, California.

The front rows are the lucky ones: they’re the official extras (300 of them) who are being paid about $1700 each for nine days of filming for the latest Anne Rice vampire film epic. They’ve also been provided with warm polyfleece blankets that they wrap around themselves between takes. Jessica, 24, confesses that the production crew keep referring to them as “gothics” rather than goths. This is her fourth night in the quarry, but she says the camaraderie and the fabulous breakfast served at 5 pm make it worthwhile.

The rest of the crowd were roped in with the promise of a free outdoor concert and the chance to point themselves out in the crowd shots when the film is released late next year (”See that guy with the red hair next to the crowd-surfing chick with the bat collar? And see the hand on his shoulder with the snake ring? That’s my hand!”). Most of them knew there would be filming, but judging by the grumbles around 10pm, three hours into it with no break and no dinner, few expected it would be like this.

The thousands of goth ring-ins have been bused from the Docklands, a bumpy, long ride. Mobile phones have been confiscated and some of the buses are lost in the middle of Woop Woop Central.

Melbourne has been referred to by the director, Michael Rymer, as the goth capital of Australia, but it’s doubtful Werribee has seen anything like this before.

Buses home don’t leave until 5am, but the crowd knew it was a lockin. The last of the buses arrives at the quarry just before sunset. Harried crew wave everyone into the corral, ready for filming. We seem to be behind schedule already. Helicopters take off and circle the crowd, filming from above. Richard Watts, a wellknown DJ from a variety of goth clubs around town, is MC for the evening, exhorting the crowd to wave their arms in the air and cheer for the practise runs. It seems no one told the director most goths dance a fairly restrained thing lovingly called the “goth twostep” while the energetic industrial goth dancer types require a lot more space than we have here.

A guy comes out on stage and the regulars start chanting “Michael! Michael!”. Turns out he’s the standin for main player Stuart Townsend as the vampire Lestat, rockstar god extraordinaire. Cameras on large booms swing down over the crowd as crew work out the line for this shot. DJs Helen and Wendi from the nightclub Abyss (usually on Fridays at Paladin in the city, but transplanted here for the night) play tracks to keep the crowd entertained. It’s fun for a while, but favorite songs are frequently cut short to the sound of loud groans when the real business at hand is ready to start.

Our first scene involves a song we’re all supposed to know - the plot here is that Lestat has an enormous following of pretty young things in black who don’t know he’s a real vampire. Yet. The song has a tacky chorus (”I see hell in your eyes … touching you makes me die inside”), which Watts leads us through. It’s actually a fine song that grows on us as the night goes on and we hear it 50 times. It helps that it was written by Jonathan Davis from Korn. One girl nearby, Jen, 19, throws herself into the spirit of the night: every time we hear the opening bars, she squeals loudly “oh, I LOVE this song!”.

The variety of clothing is astounding. For weeks the website has advertised that the best dressed will get the best positions, so there’s been Effort. Many of the outfits have been sewn especially, with PVC a popular fabric. Bright reds, deep purples and shocking greens compete with the overwhelming darkness of the blacks. Anyone in heels is seriously regretting it. There are some abominations: bad black wigs on people who are obviously not goths in their regular lives, although some carry it off. One, though, looks like he dressed for Detroit Rock City by accident.

Kale, 22, and Adam, 21, have flown from Sydney for the weekend. Adam has short blond hair spiked up and tinged with red tips. His irises are demonic red cateyes - contact lenses, of course, that cost him $600. Interesting eyewear is everywhere: others have pale contacts that only show the pupil, there’s a pair of reflective sunglasses with holographic green skeletons, and Garth Horsfield, the lead singer of Immaculata, has contacts that make his eyes entirely white.

Back in the thick of it, there’s a feeding frenzy as cases of Red Bull are handed out to fading goths. The softdrink is full of caffeine and taurine for extra energy. There’s no alcohol on set and surprisingly few people seem to have indulged in drugs to get through the night.

By 2am, we know the song pretty well. We’ve become familiar with the stunt-goths who are crowd surfing and the hooded-vampire types with capped fangs, we’ve done shots filming the stage, crowd shots, reaction to the band entering shots, and now we’re watching special effects set up for flying vampires. The people who expected a regular party night with some cameras seem to have skulked off to the food tents and the remaining people are enjoying themselves immensely.

It’s getting colder though, and Aaliyah (playing the gorgeous Queen of the Damned herself) is freezing in a skimpy, glittery outfit. A crew member flings a hefty coat over her swiftly every time the take is cut. Pillars around the set spurt flame periodically while we’re shooting, and the warmth is glorious. We even get to do some “shock, horror” reaction shots and hear bits of dialogue. Crow star Vincent Perez, cast in the role of Marius, appears on stage for a few minutes for one shot and is greeted with cheers. By 4.30, when we run through a band entry, Lestat entry and the whole song from start to finish, we’re so hyped we’re shouting and yelling for real. It helps that Townsend is stunning and wearing a body-hugging gold mesh shirt that leaves little to the imagination.

Finally, finally, Rymer tells us we’ve wrapped for the night. He tells us how fabulous we’ve been and we scream loudly again. Tired but happy goths then queue for the ride home and pick up showbags, with a fabulous surprise: a Tshirt reading “Damned” on the front and “The Vampire Lestat, Death Valley 2000″ on the back. Tour merchandise for a concert that never happened. Because we’ve proved we can pretend, right? That’s what it’s all about. We’re actors now. Just try to tell us we’re not.

© The Age