A Little History…

Between 2005 and 2015, Dawn Industry & Darkstereo (local non-profit projects exposing independent music) hosted 19 bespoke live events throughout Melbourne, affectionately named “Enzyme”. These fun-filled and often chaotic evenings featured emerging underground, extreme and experimental music. One such event during this era was “Enzyme Tower” in 2010 (some old photos are at Flickr), conducted as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. In the years since, the founder of the projects moved away from Melbourne for a time before eventually returning to Victoria in 2023.

A lot has changed in the 9 years since Dawn Industry hosted its last event, and the project is busy trying to plan a rebirth of the Enzyme days. It is re-connecting with artists, searching for new performers, negotiating with venues, and all the other background activities that are essential to making such things a reality. Who knows, perhaps Enzyme can become a real-life event for the Fringe Festival in 2025? Until then though, we have Enzymecomplex!

Enzymecomplex?

For this year’s festival, we’re ready to try something new. Something a little more modern, yet ultimately driven by such a humble thing as a website.

A digital on-demand event.

Rather than presenting a series of videos, images, written works or audio files in a traditional manner, we wanted our audience to navigate and explore people’s work as a journey, driven by user decision-making. A multimedia and isolated online environment that guests can traverse at their leisure. As visitors move through the site’s unpredictable spaces they will uncover a hand-selected range of art.

The content of each artist’s virtual space was entirely up to them, and we’ve done our best to encourage work that is purely exclusive to this year’s event. We hope that it feels akin to a journey through an unusual and unpredictable exhibition, whilst also offering a place where contributors have had free-reign to not only present their work, but also paint the surrounding walls, describing a pocket of virtual space crafted for them, by them.

How Does It Work?

The premise is simple. When you enter the complex, you are transported into the beginning of an exploration-based experience.

There is no strict or linear path through the artist’s areas. Like an exhibition space, visitors are free to wander as they desire. Along the way they will be presented with original works of art, website pages which contain exclusive content, artist profiles, external links to further information, and more.