The King Of Rave Graphics

by brenda walsh

If you’ve been to a dance party in the last four years, there’s a good chance you got the directions to the decrepit warehouse in the Western suburbs from one of Troy Innocent’s flyers. As one half of art collective Cyber Dada, Troy is pushing graphics and animation to new heights and he pretty much short circuited our minds with his talk of cyber related hoo ha. His ideas and projects are at the vanguard of the computer revolution and all we can do now is try to keep up.

Vice: How did you start doing computer graphics? What you do is seriously mindblowing.

Troy:

I actually just recently finished a graphic design course at Swinburne Uni and in that time I found some old animation systems and me and my buddy Dale started playing around with them and making art.

Oh yeah, what were you using?

A program called Spaceward Supernova mainly. It was originally used for TV graphics but we found ways of making it do really great stuff.

Spaceward Supernova! No wonder your work is so incredible. And so, now that you’ve finished your course, what are you up to?

Well, with Cyber Dada, we make fun of all the techno hype going on. We do installations and video art and performances and we make lots of flyers to promote them. Usually that involves doing some type and graphics on the computer and then running it through a photocopier and then finishing it off with one or two colour stencils.

That sounds like a lot of work.

Yeah, well it costs about $15 to print a single colour A4 image from the computer so when we need to do hundreds, we’ve obviously got to be clever about it.

You’ve been doing a lot of work with Ollie Olsen too right?

Yeah, he does a lot of the music for my work and I’ve been doing the visual stuff for his new project Shaolin Wooden Men. The idea is that they’re these entities made of sound who don’t manifest in physical reality until you hear them. It’s kind of complicated.

Yeah, it sure is!

Ollie wrote a Shaolin Wooden Men manifesto, which had some of these ideas in it, and than I made some film clips and we also made a Shaolin Wooden Men game where you can compose music in a video arcade game type interface. We’ve shown the projects in galleries around the world.

What do you listen to while you work?

I listen to a lot of psy-harmonics stuff. I’m also starting to listen to drum and bass. I got into the psy-trance stuff for a bit but I listen to a lot of acid now. I’ll always be an acid guy. I’m always looking for intense music—fast techno really helps me work for twelve hours straight.

How much better do you think computers can actually get? Really?

Well, I imagine they can get much better. I get pretty frustrated—a lot of my ideas take me forever to complete. It’s still addictive though.

You were just at the Adelaide festival. What did you do there?

Well, it was basically a performance based on a concept we named Flavoured Biproducts. It used a technology we called techno digesto fetishism and let people experience the process of eating and shitting out their own lover in a cybersex type scenario.

Jesus. That’s intense. Have you experimented with VR?

Yeah, but the technology is so expensive, so not as much as I would have liked. I have no doubt it’s going to change our lives. I’ve heard people say that it’s going to liberate humankind and cause some kind of singularity or global consciousness or whatever but we’ll just have to wait to see whether that’s true I guess.