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Through digital ports, portals and corporeality, Jordana Maisie asks us think about the imposed limitations of personal communication technologies with a body of work that spans photography, video, sound, and interactive installation. It was at the point of being in a long-distance relationship for two-and-a-half years - and probably after one too many Skype conversations - that the Sydney artist sought to recognise the importance of human physical connection. Working outside of the totalising hyper-reality of our virtual existence, but utilising its tools, Maisie began making work that deployed technology in a gallery setting. Sparking conversations between our bodies and sculptural, sound, or video elements, the works not only encourage but often require her audience's bodily presence in order to materialise. In Potential energy, 2009, gallery goers walked gingerly around an abundance of wiring while concealed sensors caused a line of individual chains to sway in response. Maisie imposed this kinaesthetic connection to the elements, highlighting and re-purposing our bodies within physical space and even transforming the context of the work through time: the spectator inevitably becomes spectacle as they move from experiencing the work itself to a conscious awareness of others viewing their engagement with it.

Maisie's work promotes a degree of intimacy and playfulness that comes from engaging with the exhibition space. Her self-prescribed task is to make her conceptual ideas manifest in direct experience, honouring human-to-human contact and presenting alternate pathways for interacting with technology. One senses that she achieves her aim by tapping into an irresistible childlike curiosity where movement precludes thinking and technology is made to talk back. As one snoops around Maisie's recreation of a studio apartment in Movement as metaphor, 2008, sensors are tripped and anonymous voices make banal comments from within the furniture. When encountering her petite dollhouse on the darkened gallery floor in Professional voyeur part one, 2007, we instinctively lean down and overhear a woman's voice speaking of an intimate relationship, our inadvertent eavesdropping and larger scale making one feel like an oversized and unwelcome Alice in Wonderland.

These works point to the unexpected witnessing of unpublished speech that we can only encounter within our overlapping lived experiences. Maisie's concern is to counteract the image-driven, self-vetted and more solitary communication that happens outside of physical contact where we wade through branded, highly mediated and finite interfaces. Far removed from the unending temporal expanse of the internet chat room, group forum or social networking site - interfaces which disrupt the immediacy of the gaze, landscapes and bodies - these 'real life' and 'real space' vignettes ask the audience to perceive as Merleau-Ponty wanted us to: through embodiment, motility and spatiality ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.