Why? And what does it mean? KWMC

A beautiful response to a photo of yesterday’s performance, the amazing words are by Conner Segesdy of the Digital Fish. 

The performance experiment yesterday went really well. Dane Watkins built a nice, simple-looking interface that we used to create a live data stream of the performance as it happened. Phil Owen, H.Ren and Julie Myers did an excellent job of doing this, through taking photos (which were immediately uploaded, via Flickr, to the screen feed) and writing snippets of text (thoughts, reflections, fragments, which were uploaded in the parallel feed). There was a lot of material and a lot of stuff to go through, and I’ve got to have a think of where to take it from here. I know some people were watching the performance feed live from other parts of the country. Were you? What did you think of it? What other things could do with a feed like this? The possibilities are endless…!

This is a snapshot of the screen at one point yesterday, the whole thing can be seen at the link here

After several weeks of working with a great bunch young people at KWMC, and developing my ideas around data (as part of the larger ‘Whose Data?’ project, it’s time to do another performance experiment. This one will be tomorrow, Tuesday 19th July, from 4.15-6.15pm in the studio at KWMC. Do come along if you’re around, or to the ‘Whose Data?’ presentations at 6.30pm, which it’s connected with. 

What I’ve been thinking about in recent weeks is how we might think about data in terms of performance. On the one hand it’s things like photos, video, text descriptions, my written scores (usually a combination of lists and sketches, that are the plan or script for the performance), but on the other (as importantly!) it could be the meanings that we give things, the things it makes us think about, how it makes us feel. And I guess this is my answer to ‘Why? And what does it mean?’ - that it is only through the data we produce around performance that it means anything. And i always think that live art is brilliant for the fact that it can mean so many different things to so many different people. What you think something means might be completely different to what I think, and that doesn’t matter at all, as long as there’s something meaningful happening.

So tomorrow I’ll be doing a performance experiment, making a two hour performance, which will be photographed and written about throughout, creating a data stream of images, thoughts, descriptions and feelings. And this will feed into the next part of ‘Why? And what does it mean?’, about which I’ll post more later…

(Photograph above, from ] Performance S p a c e [ 2011)

Paul with a bucket on his head.

I did a similar action as part of the performance at KWMC on Wednesday, which is described in the live writing stream below, by Emily and James of Digital Fish. This is a photo of a performance at Arnolfini in Bristol, and was taken by Oliver Rudkin. Photos and videos by the Digital Fish will be edited by them this week and put up asap -watch this space!  

Performance in the KWMC bristol. Paul dressed in his lovely overalls and bare feet starts the performance with 3 continuous loud whistles a bucket is placed on his head still whistling but it isnt as loud as before. Moving blindly walking into a wall. Walking slowly he almost bumps into a young lad and a table!!! ouch. This is actually pretty funny to watch!! Still walking and whistling, Paul gets closer and closer to yet another wall. He makes it with a whistle of relief. He makes his way along the other wall and stumbles over a wheelchair. He quickly recovers and again slowly walking to his start position. he takes his bucket off of his head and rolls his overall trousers up and brings the top half down and ties on his waist. He sips his water. Tips it over his head. i think it was cold as he shivers slightly. GOLD GLITTER!! AHHHHH!!! hope he’s gunna clean it up? In the bucket he goes. compost armed. o.O he’s burying his feet!!!! he holds a bell in his right and and flowers in the left and stands up right arms out. OMG it’s like Christmas ahahaha. Still standing shaking slightly this is going to take a while….. the objects are like a season in a year. roses for spring. glitter like hay fever for summer and a bell for christmas in winter??? rather interesting!!! he drops the bell a loud clanging sound. and he places the flowers on the floor gets out of the soil. places a helmet on and puts his overall back on properly. bells attached to his feet he lays on the floor flowers held in his right hand held upright like the statue of liberty. moving his feet the bells sound. solil for a pillow. All of sudden making us jump he rolls around the floor quickly and sharply. bells still ringing. they slowly stop sounding. He gets up. Hands a bunch of roses to 2 girls and a lad, Ritchie to be precise! Lots of spoons now what’s next? Balloon placed in mouth. He blows it up. Sucks the air out then blows it up again. Weird noises sounding here y’know!! Let’s go of the balloon  and it makes a noise we are all familiar with, giggles, arms up, spoons drop like rain. END aha that was AWESOME!! Paul clean up now please :)

Written by Emily Butler!!

With Help from James Wall!!!

We had a great session with the Digital Fish on Wednesday. After discussing last week ideas of what we could do as performance for camera and video, we thought we’d give one a try. I managed to get hold of some light-up LED gloves (about which Sandra was especially excited, but alas she couldn’t make the session!) and glow sticks, so we did some experiments in the dark in KWMC’s big studio. We got some really brilliant effects with the glow in the dark, and the photos and video, and had a lot of fun! We’re going to edit them next week, but here’s a little taster

Things have been carrying on well with the workshops. We had a great session with the NLarge group on Tuesday - we looked through a selection of the photos that the young people took last week, and reflected on what they might mean. Emotions and responses to the images ranged from “abandoned” and “panic” to “everything’s not what it seems” and “dreaming of the real world”. There were some really beautiful images, I’ve just uploaded them all to Flickr, but here’s a couple to preview!

We were thinking about how we make associations about images, objects and experiences, but how they completely vary depending on our own viewpoint and life experiences. This is true in life as in art - something that might conjure up joy in one person might provoke fear or disgust in another. And this got me thinking about data and how we ‘tag’ things with such associations - so that if I Google search (or have a programme that searches and / or orders things by how they’re tagged) something like “oranges”, it’ll filter through all of the information available and find me things tagged with the word “oranges”. This is simple enough, but what about when it’s a more abstract idea like “curiousity”, “fear” or “movement”. After reviewing all of the images, we then did something which kind of reversed the process. Rather than making meaning out of images, we made images out of meaning. Each person took a word (from the one’s we made earlier, in association to the other images) out of a box, and then we went out and created performance images to interpret those. It was great fun!

Paul Hurley ‘Art Voodoo’ performance, Taunton, July 2010.

In this performance I had coloured tags attached to my silver cape, and the tags had written on them peoples hopes, dreams, fears and worries for the town of Taunton and its regeneration. Through a series of walks and dances around the town centre, I tried to activate these hopes and dreams, and exorcise the fears amd worries.

Tehching Hsieh - One Year Performance 1980 - 1981

Last week I started visiting the youth programmes at KWMC, as part of ‘Why? And what does it mean?’ We looked at all sorts of examples of Live Art, including the Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh, who made some mind-boggling year long performances, including one where he punched a time clock in his studio on the hour, every hour, for a whole year. We also looked at some of the work of Manuel Vason, an amazing photographer, who creates collaborations with artists which we could call performances-for-camera. He’s worked with people from KWMC last year on the project Still Image Moving. We’re hopefully going to be starting some experiments of our own this week. Watch this space for more details…