Performance & Cocktails at Duckie

Dress posh for an evening of performance art Duckie. Performance & Cocktails, 25, 26th and 27th August. I’m just performing on 27th.

Add comment | August 13th, 2010

Thresholds of Performance, between body, laboratory and text. 2010 - 2013.

This autumn I begin a three year AHRC funded creative fellowship at Queen Mary University of London called Thresholds of Performance, between body, laboratory and text. It will enable me to continue explorations across the biological arts, develop my explicitly embodied performative articulations in relation to biomedia, and the entwining and entanglements of material and language. This will include trans/inter/intra/undisciplinarity in rigourous and unruly formations. Exploiting the wonderful advantages of being an artist researcher within the academy, whilst maintaining possibilities of visitor, interloper and intervener across the permeable membrane of within and without scholarly contexts.  I look forward to working within the vibrant research community at QMUL and enabling some vital and exciting connections with researchers and artists across a great many different fields that converge and border concerns of performance studies, visual arts, biological arts, animal studies, cultural studies, gender studies geography, philosophy and a great many more. It promises to be a fruitful and rich research trajectory.

Add comment | August 10th, 2010

Silent drifting and wandering

The first Fierce Interrobang takes place on 25th June at Warwick Arts Centre.I’ll be leading a 2 hour exercise on exploring the landscape through drifting and wandering in silence. Somewhat altered from the original, it’s provenance is a exercise led by members of Goat Island during one of their summer schools which I attended in Glasgow during the summer of 1998 that facilitated sensory research.The walk allows a simple score of exchanges of leading and following to take a group of people on a collective movement through a landscape. The silence combined with the act of following and not having necessarily having to make decisions seems to allow other senses to rearrange themselves and to come to other prominence. A diffusion of awareness, perhaps more pervasive and peripheral, allows for sound and texturescapes to inhabited and moved through and a collective self-organisation emerges through non verbal exchange.These are small opportunities to be in our everyday environments and to participate in them via slight alterities of orientation and mode by deploying collaborative performative exercises.

Add comment | June 21st, 2010

ORLAN A Hybrid Body of Artworks

ORLAN

A Hybrid Body of Artworks

A new Routledge publication.It includes an essay, Psychic Weight by Dominic Johnson on ORLAN, Breyer P-Orridge, Gina  Pane and myself. Thank you Dominic.

Add comment | June 3rd, 2010

Brief notes on peering, gazing and scrying

My searching out of the subtle gossamer of spider webs involves a kind of peering, a gazing and glazing of the eyes onto planes of nothingthereness, onto thin air; it asks a for a scrying of planes of space, a light visual touching and glancing, gleaning for invisible threads. Photons bouncing off the lines creating appearances and disappearances of silvery threads, and for my eyes to see them they have to almost feel, to relax and not focus on objects but to occupy another seeing, almost feeling out the vibratory strings of cobbe webbed space and knitted architecture with scanning gaze.Scrying is normally associated with seeking out other forms of the invisible and clairvoyant (clear vision) by gazing onto surfaces like mirrors, water, crystals, to descry and to catch sight of layering of vision that belie the everyday optic. Scrying a black obsidian mirror now housed in the British Museum, Edward Kelly seered and communicated the angelic conferences of Enochian magical workings to John Dee. When I first learnt of the mirror I was in thrawl to the glamour and esoterica of Dee and Kelly and the obtuse sigils of Enoch’s angelic scripts. I visited the museum and gazed through the display cabinet glassiness and tried to gaze onto the black obsidian, but it was awkwardly placed and of course I saw nothing. The Enochian alphabet reminds me of Cigninota, the practice of swan beak marking by swan breeders from the times when swans were central to any great feast and were almost eaten into extinction. The marks guarded the swan and would become more prominant as the swan aged.My descrying occurs during walking and bicycling but walking is best.. Gait and gaze move into rhythm in streets and parks and gardens. Corners and angles give practical and partial holds for attaching and fixing, from which to span and arch and spin out dynamic lines. But this is the peering and gazing of no horizons, it’s not a linear looking, or a perspective based measuring, it is diffuse and lateral and proprioceptive. The eyes move back, widen, the back brain settles as the the front brain relaxes. It is less grabbing, more receptive and the body borders feel less guarded and defined, interwoven and implicated into the fabric of the exterior world. Webs are felt on skin, barely and yet tellingly there. Like slight hair strands. Pressure felt and pressed onto the tensile drag lines are sensed with the acutest of nervy skin tact. Fingers and eyes, Eva Haywards ‘fingery eyes’ or peering fingering.

Add comment | May 24th, 2010

Fierce request for Futures And Pasts

In response to a Fierce request for their Futures And Pasts presentation this Saturday. I am also presenting for 30 minutes.Set a clock for 60 seconds and read:write to yourself from a futured future

unpack your selves from cryptic stasis

unfold your limbs and smooth out you skins

unfurl your hairs

pass a warm hand over your still closed eye lid

loiter on eyelashed rest on check

poised cuticle solid flow over nails breadth

arrested mole, check A,B,C.

unpick your way into crevices of anxious failures of maybes and maybe nots

and ecstatic successes felt and

feel scattering in silvered stretch marks weltering in skin gorges

re-collect and re-member versions of eyes

I’s

egg yolk retinas

fashion patchworks of moments into quilted cut ups

memories punctured with whimsey and fancy

short fuses

shot through with gold veins

running mutterings fused 

mutated never really happened that way but it might, could, would

shiftiness in the conditional

tense tenses

breathe

enfoldened rewritings

note body temperature rising to swell and flood and flush

fling speculation and body memory into some pretended morrow

find your way back

to your back

to front

to quiet alarm

See how it goes

Take it handy

And where would you be going

at the end of the day

where there’s a will there’s a way

and please remember to cheer up

With contributions from leading artists, academics and writers in the field, Futures and Pasts is a long weekend of live art at the ICA exploring the diverse pasts and possible futures of live art and performance. Curated by writer, artist and performance maker Tim Etchells with the aid of artist Ant Hampton and Lois Keidan (Live Art Development Agency) this ambitious event combines marathon lecture performance with a rolling scheme of conversations, interviews and archival investigations alongside speculation as to the future of this vigorous and vital area of contemporary art practice.  

“I worked with Ant Hampton last year to produce a provocative virtual season of events for the ICA when they closed their Live Art department, so it’s an odd thing to be invited into an institution of which one has been publicly critical of. However the chance to help hold the doors of the ICA open to Live Art for a while is too good to miss, especially considering the ICA’s historical role as an important supporter of live work.”  Tim Etchells

Futures and Pasts culminates in a day long Open Space discussion event or public meeting, framed by Phelim McDermott and inviting practitioners, curators and audiences to identify and explore key questions and ways forward for the live art and performance scene in the UK.

Futures and Pasts comprises four main strands. You can join as an audience member or participant anytime over the long weekend, moving between parallel events and discussions.

Add comment | May 21st, 2010

voodoo cell affects contact with it

HeLa art practice relation theories of fascinating results of

cervical deliberation bookmark Henrietta’s daughter deeply

voodoo cell affects contact with it – distance @ read @account generational facilitiates ancestoral spirit

vitalismknowledge Maya Deren

Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti Gosh trash

HeLa zombie biocapitalist exploitation story curious lab spell practitioners seminar life situations zombie book  would cut shot gun collaborate ’40’s dresses Amsterdam  twist  demented Feelgood  celebs  ”miracle tissue regenerator”

placenta mutation wayward Dr

frenzy Fucking cells snarl knife-fighter daughter’s specifically voodoo knowledge

certainly surprise contact even mother’s author injured responded piss

off guess vitality intimating influence cousins cancer

human inflicted immortality  again, I’m only halfway ideas suggest used

well reasons hmmm curious virulence mayhem in labs species Helacyton gartleri reframed take sympathetic medicine familiar Victimless Scale  amazed prattlings above

1 comment | May 13th, 2010

SPILL: On Agency

SPILL Festival of Performance: On AgencyEdited by Robert Pacitti and Shelia Ghelani.Published by Pacitti Company.available here.

1 comment | May 12th, 2010

Fierce Start Party, 16th April, 2010

photo credit, Briony Cambell, for Fierce, Birmingham.

Kira O’Reilly from this is tomorrow on Vimeo.

Add comment | April 16th, 2010

Antennae, the PIG edition.

Click here to download the new PIG edition of Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.It includes a feature on my work inthewrongplaceness.The cover is an image by Astrid Kogler, from the series, The Pig Trilogy,  2007 © Astrid Kogler.Antennae is in it’s 3rd year of production, it is free, no advertising, non-profit and non funded, so please consider making a donation.

Add comment | March 26th, 2010