Tuesday 4 September 2007

near Zlaté Piesky

I spent an intensive week last week at the Kubikov 13 Summer Academy in Bratislava with Martin Blažíček facilitating a video performance workshop. After a slightly uncertain start the six participants paired off and threw themselves into their appointed task of making a collaborative performance which was to explore ways of representing space and location. The workshops were located in a former cement factory near Zlaté Piesky lake (which provided us with a fresh supply of rather voracious mosquitoes every sunset), which is an apparently incongruous beach resort given that the surrounding area is a slightly overgrown, somewhat crumbling, rather neglected industrial desert, as well as being the location of the biggest Tesco store I’ve ever seen. Tesco thoughtfully provides a free bus service to and from the city centre 20 – 30 minutes away and most of the participants took the opportunity to visit and to capture video in the city.

Martin and I didn’t visit the city centre as we were as busy making our own performance as we were with keeping an eye on the progress of the others. Instead we explored the rail yard behind our hotel with the notion of locating the source of the plaintive mechanical cries which had disturbed our sleep the previous night. We never did find the source of the sound but it was recorded, sampled and manipulated for the soundtrack to our performance, which also consisted of images of and through the stacks of rail, along and across the tracks in twin split screen loop compositions playing with perspective and temporal shifts.

Here (QuickTime Movie, 42Mb, 19' 12") is video documentation of the performance we gave on the last night.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

gr8!
m.

Philip Sanderson said...

A case of two screens better then one?

Steven Ball said...

Well not so much better more like essential to a piece that has conceptually and compositionally been made specifically for two screens.

Philip Sanderson said...

Yes it was a pun on "two heads better than one" thereby encompassing the essential duality and interplay etc......

Steven Ball said...

aah two threads are better than pun, perhaps