Medialab Prado.

AVlab at Medialab Prado has been an amazing experience. I, too, feel the need to migrate my blog to a new one for my post-graduate art practice; so I will post a proper review of the experience on that when I return to London next week. A notice here will also be posted, but it will be embedded in my regular website

In the meantime, my post-MA performance life begins! at the wrap-up party for the lab. Will be fun to see what my work is like in a nightclub with typical set up of 1 projector, darkness and big (ish?) sound.

Here's the info in case any of you find yourselves in madrid:

October 1 / 11pm / @ Tempo Club
TRANS-AVLAB EXPRESS
AVLAB 1.0's last sonic stop. Live sound, experimental and audiovisual performances by artists of the workshop: Olaconmuchospeces aka Diego Javier Alberti / Sotaques (VJ Xorume + DJ/MC Gérson De Veras) / Servando Barreiro / Noish ~ aka Oskar / James Webb / Groundrush aka Simon Dell / Hans Christoph Steiner / Raúl Bri Díaz Pobrete / Tom Tlalim / Josecarlos Flores / Lena Schniewind / Jaime Lobato / Alberto Cerro / Roberto Moreno Maya / DJ Hidráulico.
@ Tempo Club (Duque de Osuna, 8. Plaza de España Metro Station). Free admission.

Being a performer for someone else.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been rehearsing for a piece that will be performed at Laban Contemporary Dance as part of a showcase of MA Dance Theatre students. The piece I'm part of is by Nicola Conibere and it's been really useful to simply be a performer, in a purely dance/movement based piece. (thanks again, Harriet, for the tip!)

Nicola's research is taking her along many similar paths to my own and I have been fascinated to see where the intersections are. IN particular, she is interested in how people encounter one another, particularly in a theatrical context. The choreography is creating a structure that the performers have some flexibility with and our action is triggered by audience members entering and leaving the space.

I will do a more detailed write up here in the blog once the performance is over, this is something of a publicity notice for the upcoming show. There will be all sorts of performances going on throughout the building that night, so it should be a good time and I believe it's free.

Here are the details for Nicola's performance:

Studio 4
Laban Contemporary dance
creekside
london SE8 3DZ
(between deptford and greenwich)

Performance time: 6.30/7pm - 9.30pm

The piece is durational and only 8 audience members will be allowed in the space at a time, so you might have to queue a little bit. Hopefully not too long.

Daily weekly semi-regular performance sketches

After the David Gale workshop, we all realized how nice it is to just get some quick performances together and see what's going on.

Since I'm exploring interacting with myself on video and it's just so easy to post video to the web these days, I am going to endeavor to post some sketches to this blog. At the very least, it will be weekly. Hopefully, it will be much more frequent than that.

I constantly think that what I'm doing is pretty abstract, so I hope that involving some nebulous "net public" at this stage will help to open my practice up to folks and maybe take some of the mystery out of it - for me too!

I can't wait for all the really rude juvenile comments on YouTube...

These 3 videos are me interacting with different layers of video. I wanted to alternate between sound and movement, but it's all kinda static. However, I thought some neat stuff was starting to happen by the last one. Especially giving some context and purpose to what I felt was pretty random weird movement in the second one.

I also know you guys love hearing me singing like I've never had a singing lesson in my life! It's very liberating.

Video half of performance workshop w/ David Gale

Digitized and posted the video portion of the performance I did a couple weeks ago as part of the workshop with David Gale. It was a quick purging performance where I got a little goofy on the video, and was overly wooden with the live component. A sort of overstating what I've been feeling about my work.

Anyway, here is the video.

Nunning sketches.

Check out the "related video" links on my YouTube site for these! Ha!

Initial thoughts on Nunning.

Learned a bunch from the Nunnery show. The overarching impression I've walked away from my piece with is that I've thrown open too many doors and have to figure out which ones are the ones I'm interested in moving forward with. I may or may not get around to organizing them into themes before I post this. Just want to get things down while they're still quite fresh.


So what is the piece about? Let's start with what seems to be there based on observations and audience feedback:

• pretty singing
• minimal, often unconfident live performance
• slippage between live and recorded image. What is actually happening live and what is pre-recorded? (I even saw one woman taking the headphones off in the middle of watching it, which was fantastic)
• immersion of viewer through soundtrack
• alienation of viewer through trapping them in a corner behind a camera and forcing them to watch complicated video piece on a small screen
• a layered piece that was read on different levels by different people
• a vague sense that there was "alot there" but no one at the actual performance who could put a finger on it
• from feedback pre-performance "extremely rich" area to explore. Yes, I'm finding it overwhelmingly rich!
• putting the audience in my shoes behind the camera
• confusing the role of the viewer to those around them who think that the person behind the camera is actually filming. As a result, preventing many possible viewers from approaching the camera and watching the piece.

What I wanted it to be about, or things that I put in there on purpose:

• embodiment in space of both viewer and performer
• performer highlights interesting aspects of space through movement and vocalization
• video reinforces these
• performer ultimately becomes integrated into the different sensory layers of the space
• viewer becomes embodied simultaneously through immersion and alienation. When they walk away from the piece, they have a heightened awareness of the space.
• 3 phases to video that shifted mood, but also shifted weight of foreground/background between the video and the physical space
• mirroring 3 phases live

What seems to be ideal viewing moment for this piece?

• when the place has some people milling around, or walking from place to place
• when I appear live in the space as well, especially when singing. even if the singing isn't the same tune as the video piece.

If I did piece like this again, conditions I would insist upon:

• layered space: a place where there are people walking through, different points of entry and exit. I tried the piece in 5 different locations, both at WCA and at the Nunnery. The most interesting ones had people in different planes from the viewer walking through the frame. The 2 locations that were enclosed rooms were pretty boring.
• 2-3 days in the space before the performance to rehearse and plot out performance sound and movement. The performance side of things continued to be weak for the whole weekend. My performance skills are at a point where I still need to have a clear plan in place ahead of time. I can't wing it and hope for the best, even if I love improv. Sticking to a path and controlled movement on Sunday made me feel like I was starting to get there, and allowed me to find a good pitch to my performance over time. I was hoping that having all this time would do exactly that. However, in the future, I need to have this time BEFORE the actual performance!
• 2-3 full days of shooting with rough edits performed each evening or on the fly. Although I felt good about the work I did in the Nunnery. I ended up limiting my possibilities by only taking half a day there. Things that I thought would work together when reviewing the tape in the space ended up not working together at all. Editing is so easy with final cut these days!

But what exactly is the main point of interest or focal point of the piece?

• is it about the space?
• is it about the performer? in the foreground or the background?
• the viewer? alienated or immersed?
• the articulation of space through movement? sound? alienation? interruption? integration?
• my embodiment as a performer within my body? surroundings? in relation to the technology? the viewer?

Other things I felt or heard repeatedly:

• When I think back on this weekend, I feel like I'm playing a conceptual tennis match. Except no one's keeping score.
• live performance was chaos until Sunday. On Sunday, I had time to find something to do with myself that seemed to hold things together more. I created a walk for myself around the gallery walking backwards and forwards as if I were another person just looking at the art. However, once in a while I would stop and study something that wasn't the art, or start singing. If someone blocked my path, I reversed direction.It was interesting and seemed to make the piece hold together better.
• the whole piece "worked" on Sunday, but what do I mean by that?
• at what point do I give up and get someone who is a trained performer to do it for me? This question makes me really angry. I feel like there is some assumption that if you're not really good, you shouldn't put yourself in your work. How will I learn if I'm not in the work? And yet ultimately, when does my lack of performance skill get in the way of me communicating what I want to with the piece? I can't answer this right now. Still narrowing down what the piece is about?
• is it really important that people sit behind a camera? What would be other ways of doing this?
• soundtrack was fab.
• I realized that I was most interested in the sonic dimension of the space.
• I am also most interested in exploring the sonic dimension of video. I think. The one piece of this I can clarify right now is that I think the true power of video rests in its marriage of both sound and image.
• most people wanted to sit with the piece longer than one cycle. This is good. However, the underlying criticism of this is that I should have made the piece longer, chosen maybe 1 mood, or made each section longer.
• The discussion on Saturday kept coming back to the idea of audience expectations. This was most interesting because it made me think about all the unexpected, or extraneous things that audience members might focus on with my piece. For example, the whole thing about people spending ages in the space and not touching my piece because they didn't really it was a piece and the signifiers for a camera on a tripod are not to approach. This throws a whole new debate about my piece out there. And I need to be careful about such things because it can detract from what I am more interested in communicating with people.
• The other thing that comes to mind about being trapped behind the camera is that one of the interesting things about Janet Cardiff's video walks was that even though the viewer is behind the camera, their bodies are in motion, which seems like a freer way of experiencing the piece and perhaps enhances the viewer's embodiment of the piece. (I do believe Harriet made some comment along these lines when she viewed my test piece!)
  
• The piece was TOO hidden. I didn't want the performance to be in your face. But I wanted people to be aware of it. People were aware of my presence more than they were of the video. Sadly, my presence was nowhere near as interesting as the video.
• Do I need to be in the space to make the piece "work"? Are people walking away with what I intended when my presence in real time isn't there?
• Do I need to control when the viewers encounter me in the physical space?
• Is it interesting to have it unravel completely differently for every viewer?

Nunning.

Hi Blog! How are you? I have been neglecting you.
There have been things that I felt the urge to post, but wanted to elaborate on. I regret that this has led to nothing being posted in a month?! Good grief.

And now my performance at the Nunnery is imminent. I'm really curious to see how it goes. It's been very interested to be present during the curation of the show. I tried to throw in my two cents here and there, but of course I know nothing about these matters. Overall, I feel like my presence over the last couple of days was appreciated and there's been a great, casual collaboration amongst us as we run our thoughts and ideas past each other. I think it's also been invaluable to just be in the space so that I'm not walking in tomorrow night only having spent a couple of hours in there previously.

I'm terribly nervous about the private view tomorrow night. My main fear is that the whole place will become hushed when I start singing. Now that I'm typing it, I can see how it might actually be incredibly bizarre and powerful. But the assumption that I have about my audience is that they're expecting a Performance, a prepared song, something worth shutting up and listening to. I'd rather they just kept on talking. I like the disjunction that my piece is creating with this weird, out-of-time thing people and the space are just doing their thing in the present tense around it.

Other than that, I think it's going to be a fantastic experience and exhausting and that by Sunday I'll have a rhythm to it. I'm happy with the video, with the voiced and unspoken reactions my "test audience" has been having to it. Wish the private view was Sunday...must go in tomorrow early and just try some things out and continue to get to know the space.

I really want this to go well.

Group Show - The Hostess.

I have this character who has appeared from time to time: The Hostess.

She used to give a lot of parties, spend no more than 5 minutes talking to anyone at the Club, make some great drinks, connect people who might not have known each other, and take people apple picking once a year for 10 years.


She went camping one weekend in the wilds of northern VT with a friend of hers. The Red Tent Flamingo Bingo showed how even a little bit of style could enchant the cast of characters who turned up at a pre-Burning Man regional festival.



And of course, nothing can beat a martini and bowling at Halloween:


Finally, she took it to an extreme and was forced to emcee a vaudeville night where she channeled Julie Andrews in a most heightened, low budget, camp way. There is video. I will post at some point.

The real point is:
The Hostess can easily become an over-the-top caricature, but her roots are deeply set in my natural self. I come from a long line of Hostesses (oh golly, is that another term for whore in this country????), who handle social events with huge smiles, open hearts, and a bustling desire to make sure that the guests feel like the center of the 5 minutes of attention that you will grace them with before going off to refresh someone's drink or make sure the canapes don't burn. Even now in describing the reality of this character, I am hamming it up. It's really easy to do. And I need to be careful about treading this line for the group show. I need to draw from the genuine place, and also get clear about my purpose at this event is.

How the Hostess might fit into the Group show:
- Publicity (could head out to other schools and give them invites)
- the Welcoming committee
- the Usher
- the Social Butterfly (asking questions, maybe too personal, of guests. connecting them to each other "have you met...?"
- the Instigator of Party Games (why don't we try making mommy and daddy go on a holiday in this diorama? oo! wouldn't it be fun if you could dress these dolls up FOR REAL?)
- the Usurper of Choice (just what do you think you're doing with that paper meat? Didn't you get a paper flower in your goodie bag? No? Sorry, you'll need to move to this room over here/you need to leave.)
- the Bouncer (OK everybody go home! Don't have to go home but you can't stay here!)

Lots of opportunity. What is appropriate for this 'party'?
How much of my own plot do I bring in?

The Visual Language of a sound artist.

This was a weekend of experimental music. Started on Friday with a trip to the ICA for the first night of the "Atlantic Waves" festival which was being put on as part of the Wire's 25th anniversary. Full house for 3 sets that took solo artists and put them together for live improvisations. Two of the sets had video. The last video set wasn't bad, (I got to meet the artist at a gig on Sunday, but for some reason was confused and thought he had performed on Saturday...). This photo below is of one of the artists he performed with, but I don't think the visuals are his. The image is more to illustrate the vibe at these things...



I thought the best set was the second one without any visuals. There wasn't anything inherently more gripping about the stage presence of this group. What was effective was that they chose to perform in near darkness. There was a little bit of blue light, a dull glow off the video screen, and the light from some of the laptops. This cut a beautiful silhouette of their shapes, which was nice to look at when you felt like opening your eyes, but otherwise clearly instructed the audience members to listen. Paul commented afterwards that his mind had wandered in and out of listening to the music, but when it wandered it ended up thinking the most creative thoughts. The same thing had happened to me!

On Sunday, we went to a church in Islington and heard more experimental music. Most of the musicians at this gig were playing accoustic instruments or home-made electronics (as opposed to laptop). They also seemed to have more presence as performers overall. Joao (the video artist from Friday) was playing a bell for one set and at a point, he decided it would be a good idea to wander around the church with the bell creating a nice visual and aural effect. There was also a double bass player who was incredible to watch. His body was intensely engaged in his playing and he had a manner to his movement that almost made it look like a dance duet between the double bass and himself. Particularly effective because the double bass is about the same size as a person. Musicians like this are what I think of when I hear the word "embodiment". He and his instrument were one entity and playing it was like breathing to him. I could've watched him play for hours. And he seemed like he could have played for days.

Don't have his name with me at the moment. Will update this when I do. Please kick me for not introducing myself and getting his contact info.

I'm need to briefly rant about boring visuals and lack of stage presence at these types of events. I often sense that reclusive musicians might think that video will allow them to get lost in the visuals or distract the audience from looking at them when in fact, the video is making the audience watch more intently. I've worked with alot of shy musicians and we usually end up figuring out how they could "hide" better, including putting a dancer in front of the screen so the focus will be on them. Now, of course, I'd like to work with musicians who want to find more interesting ways to deal with being on stage and work towards a sense that everything happening between performers, instruments, technology, etc is a coherent whole. Maybe it's improvised, but there's an intention to communicate a total experience to the audience. (Golly, what do I mean by that? Gonna leave it in anyway.)

Catching up part 1: artist lectures

A bit of a "backblog" here. Want to get this all down before there are EVEN MORE things I want to make note of here.

1) Siobhan Davies & Shobana Jeyasingh @ Southbank Centre 7 OCT 2007
- Davies: interested in layers and the ability of the body to express internal processes like no other medium since it's all part of an integrated whole.
- Jeyasingh: interested in surfaces due to her training in classical indian dance. However, she too, broke with her tradition to find out what more she could do with it

I was struck by the difference in the way they describe their practices, coming from very different directions, but still feeling an undertanding and affinity for each others' work. I also appreciated Davies in particular, for her passion and interest in her particular mode of expression and the fact that she can thrive and be one of the country's most respected choreographers sticking to something as simple as "wanting to describe different circles in the space" (not exact quote) in her most recent work which was stages earlier this month.
I have tremendous respect for people who are committed to one particular practice and are able to succeed doing that one thing. There is increasing pressure to be multi-talented. This is a huge relief for those of us who like working across disciplines since I've felt that the emphasis for many years has been on specialists, but I hope that we don't forget to appreciate the people who have chosen a more narrow path and gone to a profound depth with it.

The other thing I noted was their discussion of the role of the choreographer. While the process of creating a dance might be a collaborative process, they both thought it was important to have that one person who would have a view of the big picture and make choices for what components go where and how the piece is organized in the space.

2) Paul Ryan at the Wellcome Trust, 19 NOV 2007
Ryan's lecture was on the semiotics of the sketchbook and the way that the sketch/sketchbook has been used more frequently in post-modern exhibitions.

I was happy that I went along to this lecture because it reminded me to think about exposing the process of my performance. My favorite exhibits these days are ones where I can see artists' process, or a performance where I can see the technicians working their magic "behind the scenes." In my artists statement, I make the claim that my performative video work helps create a connection between the audience and the performers because I create moments where the audience discovers that what they are seeing on the screen is coming from my camera.

Question: what are different ways that I can continue to integrate the process into the final performance?

Other notes:
- Peirce school of semiotics (do I want to read any?)
- He had a really concise, nice definition of semiotics - "how meaning is conveyed"
- Ryan, whose medium is drawing, said that he thought performance and installation work was less dogmatic than more traditional forms (painting, sculpture). The ephemeral nature of performance/installation meansyou are freer to try out different ideas whereas you've made a real commitment when you cast something in bronze. reminded me of McCluhan's "the media is the message" that Doug brought up in the VLP seminar earlier this week.
- the prevalence of these "private" works in public space has made them much less private. more self consciousness in the sketchbook knowing that you might incorporate it into a show later on. What would happen if you had some really private things that no one ever saw? How would that affect your work on it? Typing this question in a blog is interesting to me....exposing my thoughts that would normally stay stuck in the notebook. And yet there are pages and pages in the notebook that won't go here.

Prying.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Been watching clips of work by several different artists on UbuWeb today.

I've been struck by several of the pieces, but wanted to write a bit about Vito Acconci's video Prying. It's described as a video of a performance that he did with Kathy Dillon at a "New York University." My assumption was that it would be a pretty distant, impersonal documentation of the performance. From the little slice of Acconci's work that I'm familiar with, I should have known better! The camera is right in close up on Dillon's face while Acconci tries to pry her eyes open. For 21 minutes. Acconci is this faceless, mostly bodiless pair of aggressive hands. It's all about the woman's struggle against him.

I think this video is a wonderful example of an artifact from a performance that stands alone after the fact. I even question whether the intensity would be parallel if you had actually been witnessing the performance. I want to assume that it was as intense because of the dynamic that I know can carry between audience and performer even if you are not as close up as this camera. Presuming that's the case, the only was to transpose that emotion into a filmed format is to do exactly what they did: get in close.

My heart is still racing after watching this. There's also a wonderful breaking of the 4th wall about 15-17 mins in where Dillon's movement trying to escape the prying fingers knocks the couple into the cameraman and suddenly, the audience has been acknowledged - a hallmark of Acconci's work, but somehow more impactful here through that unintentional act than when he's demanding that you pay attention to him.