in the late afternoon a shifting group of us meet for P4 -- improvised performances, a lab for trialling ideas about gesture, poetry, sound, installation, whatever. The sessions are facilitated mainly by snowy (Peter Snow), whose generous and open reflections create an atmosphere conducive to experimentation without fear.

I love P4 -- a chance to get my arse outa the cyber hut and into the landscape, too easy to spend a lot of the day in front of the screen or watching the praying mantis stalk moths, especially when the heat is formidable outside. The P4 offerings are always engaging, and sometimes completely knockout. They exist in a fragile space/time moment, never to be repeated, maybe only seen again on a video which can in no way capture the sense of place or heat or smell.

The other day Agnese and I did a P4 mixing together some Roman-modified text from the French surrealist Laure' with some of the Pine Gap info recuperated from the net. I was blindfolded, listening to the military data on the mini-disk, repeating it to the audience. Agnese climbed the rocky hillface behind me (followed by Henry, the unscripted caretaker's dog, who happily tags along every day now), stopping at different places to yell the words of Laure.

Rome is not a city but a leech

All the streets crooked converge to a liquid and swollen center

The tentacles of the beast

The Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap, 19 kilometres south west of Alice Springs, was established in 1968 as a CIA intelligence base. Today it represents a critical component of America's global missile defence and early warning system.

There I heard from the mouth of Alter8

The good news of Nomadism

Pine Gap is one of 30 sites which make up the "joint US-Australia" facilities. Pine Gap is the most important installation and one of the largest satellite ground control stations in the world. It controls a small number of geostationary signals intelligence satellites, "the most secret of all US intelligence collection satellites". The satellites act as giant microphones which can accurately pick up transmissions and rebroadcast them to receiving stations (such as Pine Gap) on earth, which then process or redirect the signals.

Really there I saw the beautiful eyes of Costanza

Injected with black more black than ink

The Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation has been conducting joint experiments with the Pentagon on the early detection of ballistic missile launches as part of US National Missile Defense research. Code-named Project Dundee, the have included the use of "top secret Jindalee over-the-horizon radar tracking US-built rockets fired out to sea from the north-west coast of Western Australia.

At last Atonal and Mindwarp, Alter8 and ReaG

Searching for the world and life

Were sucked in the powerful flow of magnetic doors

Pine Gap will be the front line of the planned tracking and missile defence network. The new system, called Space-Based Infra-Red System is planned to be operational by 2004.

Darkness crossed every now and then by invisible rays

Reveals a space in their image

The only incandescent trasparency

Is the skeleton and the shape of heart

The Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap costs Australia an estimated $100 million annually.

Each time dumb fits Animate lighting of sulphur and acetylene

And create an aura of mercury on those automatic bodies