TPS3 - New Media Hot House! AIT Arts Adelaide 2004

Time_Place_Space is a national initiative that aims to challenge, invigorate and strengthen the area of hybrid arts practice in Australia, with an emphasis on performance.

I attended Time_Place_Space 3 held at AIT Arts in Adelaide, South Australia from 4-17 July, 2004. TPS3 was co-curated by Sarah Miller – Former Director, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Fiona Winning – Former Director, Performance Space and Julianne Pierce – Former Director, Australian Network for Art and Technology. 20 Australian participants were invited and facilitated by three international and three Australian artists: John Gillies, Marianne Weems, Clare Grant, John Cleater, Lyndal Jones and Teresa Crea. The initiative was guided by a curatorial committee and supported by project and production personnel.

Each of the Time_Place_Space residential laboratories is designed as an intensive workshop during which participants are engaged in a range of practical collaborative exercises and critical discussions with peers and facilitators around notions of hybrid practice. The first week of the laboratory tends to focus around a more structured program of activities and facilitator-led, whilst the second week is more oriented towards self-directed activities within a framework of support and feedback. In the case of TPS3 Lyndal Jones led workshops for the first 11 days, leaving 3 days for 'playful' open collaborative exchange and 1 day for presenting. It was in those 3 days, that I was able to best harness my energies and the available resources.

Whilst the laboratory component of Time_Place_Space tends to focus on process, practice and content, as opposed to product, the initiative has had far reaching outcomes and long-term goals. These include seeding and supporting new collaborations and works that have the potential to tour nationally and internationally, building national and international networks of artists, curators and presenters, broadening and diversifying audiences, and establishing an international reputation for Australian artists working in this area of practice. For participating artists, it has enabled a focus on process and dialogue and it has facilitated the sharing of knowledge, experience and resources.

Critical Outcomes

Meeting New Collaborator 1. Martyn Coutts New Media/Movement/Production

Coutts and I met at the national hybrid new media arts workshop residency Time_Place_Space3 (T_P_S3) at AIT Arts Adelaide in 2004. We identified that we both shared an interest in the indexes of live physical and emotional limits. We explored these interests through various independent and facilitator-led collaborative exercises. We discussed techne that could magnify co-existent actual and virtual live performance presences over longer durational improvised performance. It was apparent that we were also each looking for ways of sanctifying a space or a meditative, reflective, personal and contemplative zone to consider points of inclusion and exclusion with others. Coutts was interested in the capture and relay of closed circuit surveillance technologies in performance and I was interested in the closed circuit reciprocities and choreographies of the body. We decided to collaborate bringing together two independent bodies of thought and practice to explore encounters through closed circuit technologies and live movement-based mediated performance. We then reflected on strategies and scenarios that would allow us to reveal moments where we communicate, or not; connect or separate; engage or disengage; separate and or unite; become visible and or invisible, through a ritualized dialogue of presence and absence between an audience and us, specific to our time, place, and space

ArtsTAS New Media | Creative Development Workshop | 2005 Using closed circuit technologies and independent choreographies of the two independent bodies Coutts and I decided to explore the inverse or reverse space between us post T_P_S3. We wanted to research an altered tactile, aural, kinesthetic, postural and technological difference to normal biological performance and existence through the proliferation of spaces either encountered or created. Could we move from an investigation of an ineffectual life-support systems or distant information circuit between two peoples and technologies to find the other in this performance scenario? Could we ‘actually’ Interdepend?

Meeting New Collaborator 2. Lawrence English New Media/Music Composition/Production

More to follow - see future collaboration outcomes Petrification ARC Biennale and RawSpace 2005.