Redefining "Live Act"
By Ann Lawlor
On June 26th, at 6pm, Fordham’s new art venue, situated in the former offices of a pawn brokers just off Brick Lane, kicked off its Live Art program with a five-hour event involving eight UK and international performers in three spaces.
Mediators, curated by Ann Lawlor, was created to knock down passive viewing of art and to compel the audience to interact. Re-defining the lines of responsibility between the artist and the audience, this radical event used bodies, sound, web-casting, video and installation to create a network of effects and reverberations, throughout its 5-hour manifestation. Eight UK and international performers invited an active audience to play, to engage, to talk back.
Elaine Kordys mapped the audience’s moving, pausing, speaking in a mixture of reality and fiction. Using a scalpel, she etched their navigation of the space and printed snatches of conversation onto perspex with letraset; she included what she heard them say and what they also said to her.
David Stalling, singer and composer, equipped himself with 4 microphones, 4 loudspeakers, computer-based delays and interactive systems. While sampling and animating the performance space with his own vocalizations, sonic contributions were invited from the audience. Composer Fergal Dowling oversaw the technical aspects of the extended improvisation.
FrenchMottershead invited audience members to play their micro-performance game — pick a card, perform the secret task and mark the location with a red sticker — to help create an experimental social milieu. In addition, a small group of anonymous micro-performers, trained during an on-site workshop hours prior to the event, circulated amongst the audience further encouraging engagement and play.
Video artist Dave Eyre collected images from the evening’s performances — his roaming camera mixing and recycling the audience, the performers, their interaction, and mixed these with pre-collected visuals of other spaces and other audiences to create a new piece during the event which was projected live in situ.
David Aylward and Tom Scott, enclosed in a transparent box, invited the audience on a sensory stroll around their own white cube — black box.
The combination of a narrow walkway for visitors and air fans caused the material of the box to billow, and brought the visitors into unnervingly close contact between the blurred membranes of recycled sound and vision experiences — an audio trip from trance to chance, and back again.
Spc.org worked to interlink audio and video, monitoring all the performance spaces, and these components were threaded together into a live web-streaming broadcast featuring the performance and interference of those present.
Provocative, insolent and pertinent, IAT screened a 5 hour program of their digital films, offsetting the banal treadmill of life with sparks of events or micro-events, either real or invented, that are perfectly at odds with the everyday. During the event, the audience was invited to try their luck and compete for the prestigious Tosser of the Year Award.
Billy Quinn built a wall using his own body by-products, as well as cement, to incarcerate himself, and re-created acts carried out by medieval anchorites. The anchorite isolated himself within the community as opposed to the hermit who removed himself from it. He is happiest when the wall is completed. He mediates inwards through silence and outwards through his window.
