Presenters:
Rachael Colley and Nuala Clooney
Title: by/with/by
Abstract: An immersive, interactive presentation of work in progress. By|With|By will present a range of eating implements and invite the audience to engage in known ritualistic aspects of a shared meal. The aim being that through these ambiguous objects the audience will rediscover tactile and sensual pleasures that might, in turn, end the meal in an intimate, internalized dialogue. As the meal goes from full to empty, bellies empty to full, people congregate and segregate. Objects that were once clean are now dirty. The focus shifts to the discarded implements, the disorder of the table, the remnants.
Bio: By|With|By is a collaborative partnership between Rachael Colley, a lecturer and researcher at the School of Jewellery (Birmingham) and Nuala Clooney a cross disciplinary artist and visiting lecturer (Devon/Birmingham). They are currently researching the links between rituals, bodily drives and language.
Linda Duvall
Title: Bhaji and Gossip
Abstract: I am proposing to present an updated iteration of an earlier live participatory project Tea and Gossip. This earlier project provided a means to address an ethically complex situation through the medium of conversation. I created a short video in which a series of hired non-actors performed various intuitive roles related to the core issue of misattributed paternity. The actual product was the resulting conversation that developed in response to this video.
I am proposing to create a new video using similar strategies but with a different relevant issue. In revisiting this direction, I am particularly interested in interrogating those elements that contribute to a fruitful dialogue. Through the strategy of the enlarged conversation, participants contribute and hear a range of presuppositions, logical arguments, biased opinions, and attitudes. This proposed project provides a forum in which individuals may thoughtfully explore their assumptions around a given ethically complicated situation through the medium of conversation. Within this structure, the expressed opinions may challenge previous assumptions or reinforce already hardened opinions, all directions that reveal themselves in the ensuing conversations. I will present this work as a small group discussion. I will function as curious host.
Bio: Linda Duvall is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist who presents within gallery contexts, on the web, and within public and private spaces. Her work exists at the intersection of collaboration, intimate performances and research-in-action. She has been identified as a ‘rebel sociologist’ (Kim Simon) for her emphasis on discourse rather than empirical outcome.
Duvall has completed degrees in Sociology and English (Carleton University) and Visual Arts (OCAD University, University of Michigan, Transart Institute), and is currently a Professional Affiliate at the University of Saskatchewan. Her work has been presented extensively, including exhibitions in Guatemala, Ireland, Barcelona, Italy, Slovenia and across Canada.
Tom Estes
Title: The Ideal Robot Home Show
Abstract: The internet is changing the structure of our brains and the structure of our planet in extraordinary ways, so quickly that we haven’t yet developed a proper vocabulary for it. Technological progress has accelerated to the point that the future is happening to us far faster than we could ever have anticipated. This new world is what Hans Ulrich Obrist calls “extreme present,” a time in which it feels impossible to maintain pace with the present, never mind to chart the future.
With the potential of an Artificial Intelligence to rival our own consciousness and the proliferation of robots with the capacity to replace a human workforce, Performance Artist Tom Estes presents the creation of an Abstract Expressionist Action Painting (with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic, or subconscious creation) created with the use of Biomorphic robotics (rather than the human hand) as an interesting metaphor for our times.
Bio: Visionary, nerd and all-around nice guy, Artist Tom Estes has had his work hung, played and performed in a few of the world’s right places and a couple of deliciously wrong ones. Estes considers himself a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, DIY comic-prank approach. His performance work for In Dialogue, entitled ‘The Ideal Robot Home Show’ incorporates the use of biomorphic robotics. The work is a kind of thought experiment in which consumer technologies and Science Fiction merge and mingle in an ever-expanding field of social, political and economic trends.
http://www.tomestesartist.com/
Sarah Green
Title: Narrative threads or threads of narrative
Abstract: This yarn based workshop that will engage individuals in the tactility of the crafts through weaving in and around a temporary structure. Participants will be required to work together to negotiate both space and each other, with each individual weave combining to form a whole. The central structure will encourage individuals to engage with each other, encouraging conversation to flow and migrate between participants as they work up, down and along the structure in different directions, giving everyone the chance to exchange narratives, stories and ideas.
Bio: Current PhD researcher at Loughborough University Sarah Green is also a community-based artist. Her most recent collaboration was with Charnwood Arts as project co-ordinator on ‘Our Knitted Story’, exhibited in June 2015 and as a regional partner for ‘The Craftivists Garden’ with The Craftivist Collective and Falmouth University. Her doctoral research focuses on men’s mental wellbeing and through community-based practice she hopes to establish whether the textile crafts have the potential to provide men with an everyday activity or therapeutic tool that they can use to help them prevent or reduce the risk of deteriorating mental wellbeing.
http://www.supercrochetgirl.wordpress.com/
John Hammersley
Title: An invitation to dialogue: dialogue at conference across time and space
Abstract: An invitation to dialogue is a site-specific public work of art. The artist John Hammersley invites people to join him in a conversation, which explores the possibility and constraints of achieving new understanding of dialogue through public conversational encounters as art. These works are then re-presented as artists multisite case-reflections demonstrating a reiteration of conversation through time and across multiple sites, and a layered mode of dialogue which offsets the tendency to privilege essentialist and prescriptive interpretations of dialogue in art.
Part 1) Conversational art work.
An invitation to dialogue: situated conversational encounter as art.
Part 2) Conference Presentation.
Presentation of a case-reflection of ‘An invitation to dialogue’ at The Biannual conference of the Society of Continental Philosophy and the Federation of Continental Philosophy.
Bio: Dr John Hammersley is an artist-researcher and lecturer whose research explores how social constructionist dialogue as art demonstrates a layered mode of practical inquiry, which weaves together interactive, explorative, re-presentational and reflective modes of dialogue in the performance of knowledge. A lecturer and visiting tutor on art and design courses in the UK, The USA and Malaysia, he is a member of the artists’ network ‘The Dialogic’, and affiliate of community psychology and qualitative research methods Sections of the British Psychological Society.
http://www.hammersley.info/project-03
Frank Heather
Title: GlobalVoices
Abstract: GlobalVoices is a multilingual choral project celebrating the role of Interpreters as facilitators in building a global community. Forming my major project of my final year at Birmingham Conservatoire, I am composing music that documents and tells the story of the Interpreters at the UN, The Nuremberg Trials, the EU, InZone, the ICRC, NATO linguistic support and Court and Medical Interpreting. These people are both the linguistic and cultural bridges that connect nations to form global communities and dissolve barriers. Each choir member will sing in one of the 6 official languages of the UN, and the pieces with synthesise the languages with an ensemble and audio of Interpreters in action at meetings, and statements in all of the 24 languages of the EU. I am unpicking the babel and cacophony of voices, to celebrate and demonstrate how interpreting functions. There will be a concert in March 2017, and a subsequent recording to be released.
Bio: Franklin Heather is an impassioned Jazz Trumpeter and English as a Foreign Language Teacher. His first serious musical experience was gained when he joined the Southampton Youth Jazz Orchestra (SYJO) and received lessons with the prestigious New Orleans trumpeter Abram Wilson in London. Starting in 2012, Franklin is studying a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Performance at Birmingham Conservatoire under the tuition of Percy Pursglove. He worked as a resident trumpeter for 2 years, at the champagne bar, Bar Epernay, playing duo. He also had the privilege of completing an Erasmus exchange at the Conservatorio Superior en Valencia studying under Voro Garcia, Toni Belenguer y Ramón Cardo. In April 2015 he released his first EP entitled ‘Dreamtigers’ written for contemporary jazz duo. After completing the CELTA in the summer of 2015 he moved back to Valencia and taught English in a School, Academy and Business for a year. In the summer of 2016 he attended the course on Global Health and Human Rights at the University of Geneva and collected information for his current project; GlobalVoices. Alongside this, he is currently teaching refugees and asylum seekers at St Chad’s Sanctuary.
https://globalvoicesweb.wordpress.com
Caroline Horton and Jacqueline Taylor
Title: It doesn’t need to be straightforward
Abstract: ‘Rearrangements’ is a collaborative project supported by an Exchange Collaborative Research Award that critically, practically and creatively interrogates narrative, form and structure and how this affects meaning-making when encountering and interpreting artistic practice. Bringing together our practices as a theatre-maker and visual arts academic, ‘Rearrangements’ seeks to devise new languages in which meaning can be conveyed beyond normative narrative conventions that privilege ‘text’ and linear forms.
It doesn’t need to be straightforward performatively reflects/en-acts/unfolds/(per)forms our own conversations with one another about the multiple art forms we have encountered and conversations we have had with other artists and academics across a number of fields as part of ‘Rearrangements’. Circling around, beneath, inside and at the edges of these conversations, we hope to enunciate alternative forms of encounter, narrative and structure, as well as our own rearrangement(s). Drawing on Jacqueline’s experience in creating hybrid textual and material work and Caroline’s experience as a performer in which body/voice/movement can be considered as material, we also hope for forms, gestures and layers of language to emerge performatively beyond its ‘devising’; reconstituting its own site of encounter.
Bios:
Caroline Horton is an award-winning theatre maker, writer and performer, whose shows include ‘You’re Not Like The Other Girls Chrissy’ (nominated for an Olivier Award; The Stage Awards, Best Solo Performer 2010), ‘Mess’ (The Stage Award, Best Ensemble 2012), ‘Islands’ (selected for the 2015 British Council Showcase), Penelope RETOLD and Tranklements. She has also written and performed plays for Radio 4: Paris, Nana & Me (Imison Award shortlist) and Pandora. Caroline is an associate at Birmingham Rep and BBC Birmingham Writer in Residence, and is working on a new show, All of Me.
Dr Jacqueline Taylor is an artist, writer, researcher and Lecturer in Research Practice at the Faculty of Arts, Design & Media, Birmingham City University. Her research examines the interrelations between painting, signification and poetics, drawing on l’écriture féminine, which seeks to develop alterative modalities of signification beyond conventional structures of language. Jacqueline has exhibited her artwork, and presented and published her research internationally, alongside alternative ‘hybrid’ academic outputs and ‘art-writing’ in the form of textual encounters with artworks that rethink text/artwork relations.
http://www.jacquelinetaylor.co.uk
Daniel Hunt
Title: Yeah!
Performers: Selina Mosinski, Russell Tanham & Joe Booker
Abstract: ‘Yeah!’ presents a dialogue between two opposing performances, both of which could be considered to be sculptural objects: Two performers engaged in a simple, repetitive and ultimately dull dialogue, and a large, conspicuous covered object at the other side of the space. Underneath the object’s cloth is a cage (1 x 1 x 1.9m.) Inside the cage is The Bigots (dimensions variable, materials varied, though mostly organic). The Bigots are a distillation of everything a rock band is or should be, and can only play one song – Yeah! which at just over one minute in length is likewise a distillation of everything that a rock song should be. The cage cover is removed once, disrupting the dialogue for one minute.
The cage decorates the dialogue – it is the more aesthetically interesting of the two, though has no significant content, and at the same time is subservient to it due to the spatial and temporal composition; it is a blip of glitter amongst a beige surface.
The work ultimately becomes an investigation of, or focus on audience attention, expectation and response; their attention being constantly redirected back and forth between the two objects through an interplay of attraction and repulsion.
Bio: Daniel Hunt is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Lincoln. His performance work centres around the exploration of forms of collaboration, improvisation, performative decoration, and the experimental application of found text. Recent performance work has been presented at More Storm Festival, Middlesex, Properganda, Stoke Newington, Emergency, Manchester, PEEP Anatomy at the Edinburgh Fringe, Hoopla!, Stratford, the Stockton International Riverside Festival, South Hill Park, Bracknell, LIFT Molten Festival, The Whitstable Biennale, and Watch This Space at the National Theatre. He a PhD researcher at Nottingham Trent University and collaborates with Selina Mosinski as Hunt and Mosinski
Petra Johnson
Title: A Montage of Small Movements: Turbulences, Ripples and Currents of Thought.
Abstract: Animated by 62 acts of kindness observed during 22 one-to-one walks this presentation asks what if we look upon kindness as a technology rather than an emotion? The question differentiates between two types of technology: prescriptive technology, which is imposed from above and artisanal technology, which can be shaped individually according to our preferences.
Artist Petra Johnson will present a recent collaboration with REFORMERart, an art space focussing on media art and public participation. The outcome of their work, “A Montage of Small Movements,” realised one specific format (consisting of walking, observing, writing) in response to the following questions pursued by the interdisciplinary ‘Screens Collective’ (of which Petra is a founding member):
–How might we develop content suitable for urban screens that instigates a search for fields of potentiality within everyday life?’
–How might we visualize simultaneously a collective shaping of fluid (relational) maps based on shared vulnerabilities as well as glimpses of experienced potentialities?
Bio: Petra Johnson (PhD) is a research-based artist whose interests focus on contact improvisation, pedestrian movement and the role of ordinary affects in everyday life. She regularly initiates interdisciplinary research fora around related topics. Her work ranges from choreographic installations to a constantly evolving particpatory walking practice, the outcomes of which explore poetic approaches to relational mapping: The Constellations below our Feet.
Petra lives and works in Shanghai and Stourbridge, UK.
Garret Lynch
Title: On audience attitude in participative and interactive forms
Abstract: Audiences are experiencing a growing apprehension and distrust of interaction in art and a reluctance to engage with art that employs it. Interactive art can be categorised in broadly two ways: works that are highly technological or works that are highly social. While apprehension of interaction in art has always existed it is proposed that rather than originating from fear of technology or social embarrassment, it now originates in an understanding of what technology can do (e.g. surveillance, data harvesting etc.) and a hyper-awareness of the self in the public sphere.
A short provocation/presentation (5-10 minutes) introducing this topic followed by a panel-led discussion is proposed. The panel, selected from the symposium and coordinated via its organisers, should consist of art practitioners who routinely deal with interaction and participation in their practice e.g. new media artists, performance artists, drama practitioners etc. The discussion will explore the topic using the following questions as a starting point:
– What are practitioners’ experiences of audience attitudes that are developing with an increased understanding of interaction in art?
– What strategies are practitioners employing as a result?
– How are practitioners and public art venues developing methods of exhibiting art that supports interactive forms?
Bio: Garrett Lynch (IRL) is an artist, lecturer, curator and theorist. His work addresses networks (in their most open sense) within artistic contexts; the spaces between artist, artworks and audience as a means, site and context for artistic initiation, creation and discourse.
Garrett’s practice spans online art, installation, performance and writing. In 2013, he hosted the conference Remote Encounters: Connecting bodies, collapsing spaces and temporal ubiquity in networked performance (http://remote-encounters.tumblr.com/), subsequently publishing papers as issue 10.1 of the performance studies journal Liminalities (http://liminalities.net/10-1/). Post-graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, Garrett is currently Senior Lecturer at Bournemouth University.
matthews and allen
Title: Two is company – Three is a crowd
Abstract
matthews and allen propose to deliver a 10 minute presentation relating to ‘collaborative contributions to knowledge’ within academic research. It is hoped that this discourse may promote alternative models of scholarly activity for post-graduate researchers and challenge academia’s apparent preoccupation with monologic authorship.
Bios:
matthews and allen is the name given to the collaboration between Helen Matthews and Marilyn Allen. Their collaborative dialogue adopts a ludic approach to language that typically problematises monovocal practices.
matthews and allen are collaborative artists. They are converse and they converse, they are deliberate and they deliberate, they are appropriate and they appropriate, they are alternate and they alternate, they are contrary and contrary, they are content and content; they are all, they are both and they are many.
matthews and allen have recently completed a collaborative PhD and whilst collaboration is an accepted mode of practice in contemporary art, academic research may be said to exhibit a reliance on ‘individual contributions to knowledge’; a reliance which arguably limits its potential.
As collaborative practitioners it was imperative for matthews and allen to formulate a research model that would be both permissible within an institutional context and incorporate their collaborative methodologies. The disjuncture between a monologic contribution to knowledge (singular subjectivity) and matthews and allen’s collaborative dialogue (inter-subjectivity) provoked a reconsideration of these two modes of inquiry and posed the question of how an alternative model of research may be negotiated
websites http://matthewsandallen.co.uk
Francesco Mazzarella and Gavin Rogers
Title: Objects as dialogue
Abstract:
For centuries artefacts and objects have remained at the centre of human existence and imagination. These objects become signifiers of the past, catalysts of the present and projections of the future. There is argument to be had that language has not just been formed through the standard linguistic forms of reading and writing, but also through the creation of artefacts by artisans, designers and makers. In many respects objects are a three-dimensional language, which we are able to see, touch, smell, imagine and curate. These objects and artefacts are real, transnational, physical and tangible and are becoming an evermore important facet in an increasingly two-dimensional digital world.
Service designer Francesco Mazzarella and artistic researcher Gavin Rogers will present and test a working participatory platform, which puts objects and artefacts at the centre of dialogical practice. This experimental work invites audiences to engage their sense with a variety of artefacts, and through these discoveries learn something new about themselves and their contexts – past, present and future.
Bios:
Francesco Mazzarella
Service Designer Francesco Mazzarella is currently exploring the contribution of service design to the transition of textile artisans’ communities towards a sustainable future. Recently, Francesco has conducted a participatory action research with lace artisans in Nottingham. He has conducted a storytelling study around heritage lace makers, and organised workshops as a participatory platform for multidisciplinary stakeholders to identify challenges and opportunities to achieve holistic sustainability (i.e. providing social engagement, rescuing cultural heritage, boosting economic development and enhancing environmental stewardship). Francesco believes that a slow approach to manufacturing and consumption can embrace sustainable values at systems level.
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/design-school/staff/francesco-mazzarella/
Gavin Rogers
Gavin is an artist, performer and socially engaged researcher. His practice is situated across a range of media from performance to sculpture. Gavin has particular interest in the area of identity; juxtaposing, stereotyping and discovering personal, social and psychogeographical identities though visual, textual and verbal languages. Gavin is currently cataloguing objects and artefacts from his late grandfather’s sheds. These physical inventions, tools, resources and artefacts have become a central component to a body of visual artwork aimed at revealing the cathartic and artistic benefits of hoarding objects. “I hoarded the world in the hope that when I died, the sum total of all my things would suggest the life and world in which I lived”.
www.gavin-Jr.comwww.gavin-Jr.com
Ella McCartney
Title: To Act, To Know, To Be
Abstract
As a starting point, the piece takes six poses from Michael Jackson posters. Ella McCartney and dancers Amy Harris and Ruby Embley have adapted the poses through rehearsals and conversations around language acquisition, improvisation and misinterpretation. Beginning as a constrained and controlled routine the piece progresses into fluent, responsive movements between the dancers.
Performers: Ruby Embley and Amy Harris
Bio: Ella McCartney is currently working as a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Birkbeck College. The title to act, to know and to be (Garcia & Li Wei, 2014) refers to an on-going body of work that Ella is developing throughout her residency and will conclude in a solo-presentation in London in February 2017. Recent exhibitions include Soviet Space Archive: Configuration II, Calvert 22 (2015) B.O.R.G, Antwerp, Light / Colour / Object, Super Dakota, Brussels, Image / Object, Folio + Motto-Berlin and Tilt: International Artist Residency, The Royal Academy of Art (all 2014). Ella McCartney Graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2011 and completed a BA (Hons.) in History of Art and Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 2008. Alongside her practice, she works as a lecturer at a number of University Fine Art departments as well as working on curatorial and education projects with Museums.
Reference: Garcia, O., & Li Wei (2014). Translanguaging: Language Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Sam Metz and Abigail Parsons
Title: Congregation
Abstract
InDialogue
- The act of assembling.
- A body of assembled people or things; a gathering.
A durational performance for 4 performers in the interstitial spaces at Nottingham Contemporary.
The corridors, waiting spaces and through-spaces of the gallery are to become a site for the repeated gathering of bodies together – a congregation. The piece revolves around a periodic shifting of bodies, moving around the gallery space. A collection of bodies form at certain points, this isn’t timed – although the interactions will seem ritualistic to the viewer. One participant becomes the ‘interlocutor’, the subject that the congregation identifies as needing support and to whom they offer a physical gathering, forming a non-verbal dialogue with that body through many bodies. The idea of simply giving physical presence en-masse to a chosen participant creates an interesting dynamic that questions what it means to form dialogue with other bodies, where the notion of dialogue becomes an offering of embodied presence and support. The chosen participant will emerge organically in the performance and will also include at times an audience member. The piece is staged to shift attention between performers, audience and the site. Visually the performers become physical sculptures that rearrange and form new arrangements around the gallery over time.
Bios:
Sam Metz is a performance artist, educator and researcher based in Nottingham. She is currently engaged in developing theories of the body in space through practice based research. Sam’s work is often interested in revealing notions of ‘mechanisms’ and ‘workings’ in participation (performance), technology and imagining. Her research interest can be described within design anthropology with a particular focus on anthropology of the senses and somatics. Metz’s work is characterized by quirky physicality and ‘ugly movements’ taken from reworking found postures, valuing process over product. She is motivated by the tacit knowledge of the body, what the body learns when nobody is watching.
Abigail Parsons has performed and worked with international choreographers and companies including: Nicola Conibere, Sioned Huwes, New Art Club, Miguel Periera (R&D 2014), JazzArt Theatre Dance Company, Rong Tao, and with dancers of the Tavaziva Dance Company. Alongside her performance work, Abigail also teaches Ballet and Contemporary Dance to various ages throughout Nottingham, and often involves herself with community based projects. One of her current projects is exploring codified language within movement and will be creating a piece with BA Dance students at NCN Claredon College creating a piece of work that has evolved its own semiotic code.
Tychonas Michailids and Balandino Di Donato
Title: Vibrotactile feedback for interaction in Dance performances
Abstract: In this presentation we describe a work-in-progress for a two-way vibrotactile feedback system that enables creative communication between two dancers in an immersive digital environment. Through a series of tests, we have examined in what ways vibrotactile feedback can be applied to enhance and immerse the performers within a digitally created system as well as become aware of each other. Through the augmentation of vibrotactile feedback, dancers are able to communicate, inform and interact with each other in a way that seems familiar. Dancers become aware of the technology in a physical and visceral way that can significantly improve the interaction and the immersive experience.
Here we explain how vibrotactile feedback provides a link that enables communication and interaction between two dancers. Movement and gesture from one performer are translated and transformed into vibrating signal sensed by the other dancer. Through the vibrotactile experience we were able to identify and propose creative and communicative pathways between two dancers suggesting a creative interplay.
Bios:
Tychonas Michailidis is post-doctoral fellow at Southampton Solent University. His research interests focus on human-computer-interaction and the meaning of haptics in performances. As a composer/performer he is interested in sensor technologies and real time sound transformation. Tychonas has performed his music in various festivals across Europe.
Balandino Di Donato is a full-time Ph.D. student at the Integra Lab, Birmingham Conservatoire where he works on audio signal elaboration through gestural control. His latest project MyoMapper is an open- source application that manages and translates the information from the Thalmic’s Myo armband to be used in any audio and visual software through OSC and MIDI messages. Balandino’s research interests focus on human- computer-interaction, interaction design, audio signal elaboration, music performance and virtual realities.
Jake Moore and Jade Williams
Title: Dancing Girl Emoji
Abstract: Delta Sorority is an artist-led organisation comprised of artist-curators Jake Moore and Jade Anna Williams. Based in Nottingham, England, they aim to provide a platform to support, connect and exhibit the work of emerging digital artists.
Delta Sorority will discuss the outcomes of Dancing Girl Emoji, the overarching title of a series of public-facing events that took place at BACKLIT Gallery in August. The programme considered Delta Sorority’s collaborative research into the impact of the technological progression of communication and the rise of social media platforms, looking in depth at notions of agency in relation to facial-recognition software, the digital facade, and the potential for emojis, GIFs and ‘stickers’ to facilitate transcultural communication. The presentation will centre upon Delta Sorority’s first collaborative work, a video performance also entitled Dancing Girl Emoji, which will act as a prism for the discussion of the project’s wider themes. An archive of Dancing Girl Emoji, along with documentation of the accompanying projects can be found at www.deltasorority.com
Bios:
Jake Moore is an artist-curator based in Nottingham, UK. He graduated from Nottingham Trent University in 2015, receiving a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. Moore has most recently exhibited works ‘Liquid States’ – BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham (February 2016); ‘Superfluid’ – Bankley Gallery/Scaffold Gallery, Manchester (June 2016); ‘(de)generate’ – MUESLI, Liverpool (June-July 2016); ‘Induced Expectations’ – 12ø Collective, London (August 2016); ‘Dancing Girl Emoji’ – BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham (August 2016).
http://www.jakedavidmoore.com/
Jade Anna Williams is an artist-curator based in Nottingham, UK. Her BA (Hons) in Fine Art was received from Nottingham Trent University in 2015. Williams, a digital and video artist, has most recently exhibited works ‘Am I Pretty Now?’ – Lights of Soho, London (January 2016); ‘Superimposer II’ – RED Gallery, London (June 2016); ‘The Leisure Series’ – 30/30, 12ø Collective, London (August 2016); ‘Dancing Girl Emoji’ – BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham (August 2016).
Sally Morfill and Ana Čavić
Title: Rules that order the reading of clouds
Abstract: Rules that order the reading of clouds is a screen-based work that explores the process of constructing meaning using line.
According to Laurent Jenny, the intention of the artist/writer Henri Michaux’s early graphic work was ‘to reconcile writing and drawing, which after all are both attributes of the same line’. This idea of the ‘same line’ producing both visual and literary meanings influenced The Naturalness of Strange Things, (2015), a collaboration between Morfill and Čavić in which some of Michaux’s lines were redrawn, translated into adhesive vinyl and physically reconfigured as poetry.
In this new work, the medium for our dialogue, is again the nomadic line that traverses visual and literary fields as it moves between drawing and poetry. Our starting point is a single digitised sketch selected from a series of quickly executed line drawings of a landscape with clouds. The image is gradually deconstructed and recomposed as a poem, then in turn, the poem is deconstructed and reconfigured as a drawing, emulating the movements of clouds. We set in motion a call and response between drawing and writing, as each new configuration of lines, conjuring new meanings, emphasises the fluidity of communication.
Bio:
They are a London based performative press duo that re-imagines the role of the publisher and the publicist into a theatrical persona.
Sally Morfill is an artist and educator who lives and works in London and Manchester. As a member of Five Years, a collaborative artists’ project, since 2007 she has curated shows for the programme, whilst continuing her practice and exhibiting her own work. Sally is currently a PhD candidate with MIRIAD at Manchester School of Art.
http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/smorfill
Ana Čavić
Ana founded Ladies of the Press* in 2007 with René O’Drobinak. They are a London based performative press duo that re-imagines the role of the publisher and the publicist into a theatrical persona.
http://www.ladiesofthepress.org
Katarina Rankovic
Title: Rosa + Lawrence Were Here: A Ritual Resuscitation of Eternal Lovers
Abstract: The fierce contemporary imperative to engineer strong artificial intelligence rages on in the world of programming code. What an odd place to go looking for the building blocks of an artificial mind! How can a thinking thing be liberated from such a formal arena of predestined possibility?
Like AI programs or genetic code, “Rosa + Lawrence Were Here” is a stealthy script inviting unprecedented futures. Where programmers script for intelligence, this text uses natural language to script for agency.
The play script is a dialogue between two lovers, that are characters. Their love therefore, does not exist outside of enactment. They must hijack the bodies of actors who read them off in order to breath and love again, resuscitated for the brief duration of the enactment before they must once again return to sleep. But there is a crafty seed planted in the text. A categorical subversion. A loophole to agency. Written into its texture are resourceful anomalies that may lend Rosa and Lawrence an escape route. With the life force lent by accumulated readings, how many enactments will it take before our unborn lovers gather enough donated consciousness, history and material traces to emerge as real as you or I?
Bio: Katarina currently works in jealous drawings, a one-woman empathy circus, writing a novel about a “lethargic line”, delivering fake Youtube tutorials, and most relevant to this context, a series of self-referential theatrical scripts written with the intention of being “run” like programming code, or “expressed” like genetic code, through the iterability of performance. Upon completion of her BA studies at the University of the Arts London, she is due to continue her interdisciplinary practice-based research on “the performative line” and “empathy as art methodology” during an MA in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in 2016.
http://www.katarina-rankovic.com/
Zoe Robertson, Natalie Garrett Brown and Amy Voris
Title: Conversations on Wearing: A trio of object, movement and words
Abstract: For our second proposal we offer a mobile intervention, involving three artists and three wearable objects which is designed to inhabit pathways of flow and transition amongst the conference public spaces. The objects are selected from an existing collaborative project, flockOmania. Flexible in duration and location this intervention will offer conference delegates an opportunity to witness an artists’ discussion on process as it evolves through a structured movement improvisation with 3 art objects recently exhibited as part of flockOmania 2 at Parkside Gallery, Birmingham. Through this intervention we intend to deepen and develop our engagement with a central theme of our shared improvisational structure related to the notion of ‘wearing’. This intervention will serve to bring our current project into dialogue with new materials and objects that will inform our next phase of collaboration. Within the wider community of the conference, we are specifically interested to explore the known and unknown, spoken and unspoken rules of play that underpin our existing collaborative practice. Revisiting the existing performance scores, which posit bodily engagement with objects as a continuum between ‘wearing as merging’ and ‘wearing as conversation’, this intervention will open up a space for us as artists to further interrogate our collaborative dialogues on practice.
Bios:
Zoe Robertson is a jewellery artist researching jewellery within performance at the School of Jewellery, Birmingham City University. She creates theatrically sized jewellery, experiments on the edges of the discipline and enjoys working collaboratively. She is co-founder of The Dual Works an artist studio based in the heart of the Jewellery Quarter and her work is exhibited within an international arena.
http://www.zoerobertson.co.uk/
Amy Voris is a dance-artist based in Manchester. Her practice is responsive and associative, driven by an interest in developing relationships with people and with movement material over long stretches of time. Her current research is concerned with Authentic Movement as a methodology for the choreographic process. Amy has worked in higher education for over a decade and completed training in Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy with Linda Hartley in 2012.
Dr Natalie Garrett Brown, BA, MA, PhD is Head of School for Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University. Her practice and research interests are theoretically situated within Feminist understandings of embodied subjectivity and the ways in which Somatic practices can inform dance education, making and performance.
Susanne Palzer
Title: Performance Test P2_OPEN PLATFORM
Abstract: In dialogue with the audience Susanne Palzer will be testing human RAM and explore the use of code in this analogue hack of presentation software. Reduced to the basic elements of ‘a speaker conveying information to an audience’ and ‘software running a sequence of numbered slides on a digital platform’ (advancing in time), Performance Test P2_OPEN PLATFORM is a physical performance of a deconstructed digital presentation. Set up as a random process experiment the audience are asked to embody two code snippets that either advance the (paper) slides in a linear direction (clapping) or give random access to a certain slide (shouting out a number). The outcome of the experiment will depend on the audience: some people may use code very focussed to unlock the information within the presentation while others may rejoice in the pure fact of being in control! Either way the speaker’s human RAM will be put to the test and might be pushed to the limit – resulting in ‘command overload’. If his happens the process may have to be killed.
Slide content will draw on the artist’s ongoing investigation into the fusion of digital technology and physical performance.
Bio: Susanne Palzer is a cross-disciplinary artist, researcher and performer based in Sheffield, UK. Her current practice is an investigation into the fusion of digital technology and physical performance. She has been curating the performance events OPEN PLATFORM/RAP(s)-TwT. since 2012 and is a director at Access Space, Sheffield.
Zoë Petersen
Title: Glazebrook Growers Exchange: Seeds for Words
Abstract: What’s going on in the garden? The Glazebrook Growers are a gardening group set up by artist Zoë Petersen with her neighbours on a housing estate in South London. Prompted by a desire to enable a more ‘shared life’ on the estate, it has grown into an ongoing investigation into ways of thinking about ‘community’, and who and what is included in it.
What’s the best way to run a gardening group? What happens if we use the principles of Actor-Network Theory (Bruno Latour) and an Ethic of Care (Joan Tronto) to look at the garden and those active in relation to it? Could this generate an approach to the commons that recognizes nonhuman agency? Should we share our cabbages with the pigeons?
InDialogue participants are invited to sign up and visit the Glazebrook Growers stall, and take part in a conversation around some of the questions generated by the project. Seeds gathered on Croxted Road Estate this summer will be exchanged for your words and ideas. Material gathered at InDialogue 2016 will be taken back and shared with the Glazebrook Growers early next year.
Bio: The Glazebrook Growers are a housing estate gardening group facilitated by artist Zoë Petersen as part of a dialogical practice. Past practice has focused on shared living spaces, both as the subject of artworks and as a setting for participatory events. She is currently a PhD student at Loughborough University; her research looks at how art practice realised through the gardening group might help to expand a commons or ‘shared life’.
glazebrookgrowers.wordpress.com.
Gaby Saldanha
Title: A performative theory of translator style
Abstract: Drawing on Butler’s (1990) performative theory of gender, Harvey (2003: 4) suggests, rather tentatively, the possibilities opened by a performative theory of the translated text as a way of moving beyond an understanding of ‘translated texts as caused objects’ and towards an understanding of ‘translated texts as interfaces’ where the problematics of the intercultural crossing is inscribed within their very nature. This understanding of performance and translation resonates with Bhabha’s (2007) argument that cultural communication is performative in the sense that it enacts and creates identities, is constructivist rather than essentialist. Underlying these arguments is an understanding of translation as the staging of difference. This paper further develops Harvey’s tentative proposal for a performative theory of translation by applying an anthropological understanding of performance, Richard Schechner’s (1985) characterisation of performance as restored behaviour, which has also been used to explain theatrical performance, to explain translator’s agency, more specifically, what I call ‘translator style’. The concept of restored behaviour refers to “the process of framing, editing, and rehearsing; the making and manipulating of strips of behaviour” (Schechenr 1985: 33). Understanding the translator’s agency as restored behaviour enables us to conceptualise translator style in a way that is not only reflective, or even interpretative, but constructive. I argue here that in framing, editing and rehearsing the source text, translators are staging differences and creating identities for themselves, the world of the source text and their audiences. This, in turn, enables us to discuss a translator’s oeuvre as a coherent body of work which has its own artistic motivating principle. In order to illustrate and support my argument I provide examples of patterns of translation strategies, following the model proposed in Saldanha 2011 for identifying stylistic features in translated texts and then analyse discursive representations of translators’ agency. This analysis relies on peritexts produced by translators themselves as well as by professional and non-professional readers, mainly in the form of reviews published on broadsheet newspapers and online.
Bio: I am a lecturer, I study translation, I live in two languages
Dan Scott
Title: Listening in Dialogue: Towards a listening art
Abstract: This one-hour long experimental workshop/discussion/performance will explore the notion of a listening art, distinct from sound art, drawing on my PhD research on sound art’s strategies and modes of listening and their applicability to participatory, dialogical and socially-engaged practice. It will utilise listening techniques taken from the sound arts (usually applied to music or non-semantic sound), including Pierre Schaeffer’s Reduced Listening and Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening and apply them to a conversation about the role of listening in practices that centre around dialogue and social interaction. The workshop will be discursive, critical and self-reflexive, a dialogue which listens to itself listening and momentarily privileges listening over what is sounded:
1 Pauline Oliveros’ Environmental Dialogues: A group listening/performance of Oliveros’ exercise/composition.
2 Dialogue as sound object: A “reduced listening” to responses to the performance – speaking in groups of three, one speaking, one responding, one reduced listening, then rotating and discussing further.
3 “A space made by listening”: a closing improvised conversation that is prompted by different ways of listening. Words spoken, afforded by listening. We will draw on drummer John Steven’s improvisation techniques, outlined in his book Search and Reflect, intended for musicians, and apply them to our closing dialogue.
Bio: Dan Scott’s work incorporates sound, installation, performance and participatory projects. He has carried out projects internationally including recent projects Liberation Through Hearing, outside the Royal Academy in London, Yesterday at Harewood House in Yorkshire and the Sonic Trails series at Tate Modern. Dan works as a visiting lecturer at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama where he tutors in sound and scenography and is currently engaged in a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts, London, on practices of listening in contemporary art.
Joanna Sperryn-Jones and Craig Newsome
Title: Blackburn College UK & Blackburn College USA
Abstract: Last year I was involved in two international collaborative art practice projects and presentations with international artist researchers. These projects focused on two elements; firstly how to generate a methodological practice of a multi-sensorial encounter of things in our everyday surroundings and secondly how the dialogue of sharing and collaboration internationally influences each others’ creative practices. We were interested in practices of collaboration and how each of our sensing practices influenced the other. This forms the basis of the Blackburn colleges’ collaborative project.
Many of the students on BA(Hons) Fine Art at Blackburn (both UK & USA) have never travelled outside their respective countries so this project provides a way to engage them in both art and life outside of their usual experience. The project is based on students’ own experiences of their home town and surroundings and in comparing this to students in the other country. An essential element in understanding your own visual culture is in experiencing and comparing this to others.
For this presentation we would focus on the transformative effect for the students of interweaving the two localities and cultures and how they might use this in turn to create transformation within their own locality.
Bios:
http://joannasperrynjones.carbonmade.com
Craig Newsom is Pegram Department Chair in Fine Arts, Blackburn College. Illinois, USA and has an MFA from University of Chicago.
Dani Tagen
Trail Performance at Tea_Leaf_Arts, preparing for End Year show at Goldsmiths
Title: Mobile Talks
Abstract “How can a meeting of two realities alter them bilaterally?” (Bourriaud, 2002:52). Mobile Talks is a performance about private mobile phone conversations in public places. An intervention to upset the normality of the environment it is presented in.
Bio: Dani Tagen is a contemporary artist interested in the everyday-life. She works in various medium including installations, prints, performance and site-specific. Her work explores concepts relating to everyday life- a process that attempts to challenge what is worth noticing . The materials she uses are very important to her; they have to maintain a dialogue with her research. She is mainly inspired by technologu, language and time and how, on an anthropological level, these three concepts make who we are. She holds a Master in Contemporary Art and Teaching form Goldsmiths University London, where she lives and works.
Arlene Tucker and Anastasia Artemeva
Photo credit: The 3rd Graders at Viertolan Koulu in Vantaa, Finland are creating their “Shared Environment” Dear You art project for the 3rd graders at Korsholm Skole in Hinnerup, Denmark. Photo by Eliisa Sorvali.
Title: Dear You: communicating through artwork
Abstract
The tutorial will be held in the form of a combined seminar/workshop, offering participants insight into the creative process of a correspondence artistic project called Dear You. Artemeva and Tucker, the instructors, are artists and educators who have created the extensive international project for schools and children around the world. Dear You’s infrastructure will be used as a working model for tutorial participants to share, exchange and develop possible collaborations in the future. From the variety of practical exercises, we will discuss how we can create our own functioning participatory design-based projects that are communication oriented. There will be time for practical application and testing of the proposed techniques. The tutorial, as a whole, is intended to be informal, interactive, and immediately applicable.
http://www.dearyouartproject.com
Bios:
Arlene Tucker is a Taiwanese American installation artist, educator, and toy and game designer interested in adding play elements to daily life through her art. Inspired by translation studies, animals and nature, she finds ways to connect and make meaning in our shared environments. Often process-based, her artistic work creates spaces and situations for exchange, dialogue, and transformations to occur and surprise all players. In particular, capturing ways to tell what one has not said is a current topic of exploration. Tucker has a BFA from the Savannah College of Art & Design in USA, a Masters in Semiotics from Tartu University in Estonia, and is now working towards an art teacher’s certificate at Helsinki University in Finland. While her works have traveled to numerous parts of Europe, North America, and Asia, she has been living in Helsinki, Finland since 2011.
Anastasia Artemeva is a Russian-Irish artist, teacher and a cultural producer. In 2012 she graduated with BA in Sculpture and Combined Media from Limerick School of Art and Design and from Aalto University with MA in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art in 2016. Artemeva’s work presents a philosophy of political participation in everyday life. Her artistic research manifests in process-oriented educational, dialogical and curatorial projects. Artemeva’s practice explores possibilities of space, experienced by an individual and a community, the notions of presence and the invisible, affected by the socio–political, cultural and personal boundaries. Currently Artemeva teaches art and English in various schools and communities in Helsinki. In recent years she has presented artworks extensively throughout Europe.
Gemma-Rose Turnbull
Title : Co-authorship vs. Making-stage collaborative gestures
Abstract: Photographers Gemma-Rose Turnbull and Emily Fitzgerald have a collaborative partnership that is based in their shared interest in photographic methodologies of co-authorship. Their practice of working with people, rather than taking photographs of people, is a methodological investigation into democratizing the narrative structures of documentary-based storytelling. However co-authored production does not always lend itself to the development of refined outcomes, with the tension between the process of production and the photographic representations that are created raising more questions about who this practice is for, and what its comparative value is to the traditional documentary model of author-subject.
These tensions are particularly apparent when photographers introduce these new methodologies of making without rethinking how the ideals that motivated the changed process of image creation are represented through the choices made in all steps of the project. Or when photographers sacrifice the image-outcome for the purpose of having a process that is focused primarily on the social aesthetic. These more limited approaches mean the works may run the risk of becoming tokenistic, or visually uninteresting; both outcomes make advocating for social change, or making critical statements against structures that perpetuate socio-economic inequality, difficult.
Bio: Gemma-Rose Turnbull is an Australian artist whose photo-based practice and research examine the integration of collaborative and participatory methodologies into the traditional single-authorship structures of documentary photography.
Gemma is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at Coventry University. She spent 2014 as a Scholar in Residence in the Art and Social Practice MFA program led by Harrell Fletcher and Jen Delos Reyes at Portland State University, and is completing a PhD at The University of Queensland, Australia.
DOWNLOAD ABSTRACTS AND BIOS PDF:
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