After Lethaby performance documentation

After Lethaby video performance by Martin Blažíček and Steven Ball, Lethaby Gallery, Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London, 20 May 2009.

After Lethaby

audio-visual performance
Steven Ball and Martin Blažíček
6pm, Wednesday 20 May
Lethaby Gallery
Central St Martins College of Art and Design
Southampton Row
London WC1B 4AP
Free
Beginning on Saturday, Martin and I will capture images and audio around and about Central St Martins’s Lethaby building, interrogating spatial, historical and other phenomena of the space and its use. This will be developed into a one-off live audio-visual performance conceived specifically for the building's gallery. The development of the work will be documented over the days preceding the performance at http://blazicek.net/lethaby.

The performance is part of the expanded cinema seminar series organized by Duncan White for British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection and follows the Expanded Cartography and the New Live Cinema symposium which runs from 10am – 5pm in G12 Conference Room. For more information see the Study Collection website.

Image from the Museum and Contemporary Collection at Central Saint Martins

Personal Electronics Dossier

On Saturday I will be performing Personal Electronics as part of the series of moving image performances Intermission: Who is Miss Roder being presented by the Melbourne International Film Festival in Australia. The performance is concerned with ideas around the notion of paranoia and was partly inspired by reports that instances of what one might call ‘everyday paranoia’ are on the increase. My subject expanded when I discovered phenomena such as gang stalking (people stalked or harassed in public by gangs of strangers, on the street, in cars, etc.), electronic harassment using lasers and voice to skull technology (people attacked in their own homes by remote lasers or hearing voices inside their own heads transmitted using technology that by-passes the ears), where individuals claim to be long-term victims of attacks by perpetrators unknown. There are many websites dedicated to reports about these attacks, speculation as to who the perpetrators (known as ‘perps’) may be and their motivation, as well as calls to government to introduce legislation against the practice (which might be optimistic as other sites suggest that governments themselves might be instigating much of this activity to intimidate and discredit personae non gratae).

There are also many videos on YouTube and Google Video made by the victims of these attacks. My performance will consist largely of extracts from online videos uploaded by victims with live voice performance of text extracted from videos and reports, including anonymous contributions to the performance gathered up to the day of the performance via a form on my website. The live voice will be performed by reciting recordings of extracts of these texts, played back in random shuffle mode on an iPod through earphones, in effect I will be repeating the voices in my own head. This will be presented without commentary.

The unasked questions might be whether this is an absurd extreme of the kind of everyday anxiety and paranoia that most people are familiar with, or whether the victims’ experiences are evidence that much paranoia points to justified concerns about organised activities being perpetrated potentially against all individuals.

Here is a link to some of the information available online as a research dossier of material for Personal Electronics: http://delicious.com/spherical_object/personalelectronics

Work in Australia

With the recession biting at our heels in the UK it seems that many are considering fleeing to distant shores with the promise of a better life. According to this article certainly ‘white collar’ Australians in the UK seem to be cutting their losses and making the trip home believing “…that Australia, with its strong economy and buoyant jobs market, is the best place to ride out the credit crunch.” And then the other day on the tube I glanced over the shoulder of someone reading one of those nasty free papers; what caught my eye was an advert suggesting that the reader might “work in Oz” and gave this MySpace page. Was this a new attempt to lure Poms downunder to a life of endless barbeques on endless beaches, living in the shadow of Uluru or Sydney Opera House or any number of other clichéd icons of the ‘Australian lifestyle’? Well yes and no. Rather than an update on the White Australia Policy it is in fact simply encouraging young adults to take a working holiday in the country, itself of course frequently a backdoor to residency. In trying to debunk some of the old clichés the MySpace page constructs another image of Australia as the gap year rite of passage of choice.

Anyway this was not intended to be a deconstruction of contemporary representations of Australian culture, you’ll have to wait a little longer for that one, but to mention that I will be presenting some work in Australia later this month in Sydney and Melbourne in early August:

Loose Space and Circular Time
- a non-chronological retrospective of a selection of film and video works made between 1991 and 2008.
7.30pm, Friday 25 July, Teaching and Learning Cinema, SYDNEY (a bar), 302 Cleveland Street, Surry Hills, Sydney

Personal Electronics
- a video/spoken word performance
10pm, Saturday 2 August, Intermission, Melbourne International Film Festival, Fortyfive Downstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

Two days later we travel out of Melbourne to catch the cogcollective screening
Intimate Journeys
curated by Lynn Loo
7pm, Monday 4 August at A Perfect Drop, 5 Howe Street, Daylesford, Victoria.

near Zlaté Piesky 2

Unlike Martin and I, two of the Kubikov 13 Summer Open Academy collaborative video performance participants Lyllie Sue and Maciej Ostaszewski, actually managed to escape the confines of the Zlaté Piesky area into central Bratislava where they captured images of architecture and people around the city. In performance they fashioned these into an increasingly abstracted study as the lines and structures of highways and office blocks become repeated line and grid systems. Here is documentation video of their performance (QuickTime Movie, 37Mb, 11' 38").

Viktor Fucek and Tomáš Benko, on the other hand, strayed hardly any further than the immediate surrounds of the workshop space but made a little go a long way neatly demonstrating how the everyday, the immediate and local – a chair, a tyre - can become fascinating through changing points of view. They constructed a tripod mount that allowed them to shoot the same moving subject simultaneously from different angles, resulting in some nice surprising overlapping twin screen action. Here is documentation video of their performance (QuickTime Movie, 32Mb, 13' 39").

Both performances were accompanied by specially devised live soundtracks from participants in the collaborative sound performance workshop.

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.

collaborative video performance workshop

Serious workshop business with Martin Blažíček at 13 Kubikov Summer Open Academy, Bratislava. More images here.