The Alternative Document, 2-3 July, Lincoln Performing Arts Centre
The Alternative Document symposium explores the relationship between event
and documentation as a provocation between the text /visual record and
ephemeral art practices as a negotiation between sites that are often
represented as polar opposites. These sites could be imagined as a territory
where the distinction between land and sea is blurred, for example in alluvial plains,
where the interplay between its different stages replenishes and revives each
state. Rather than prioritizing one form over another, each manifestation
generates potential for further responses, creating an ongoing work. The full
call for papers can be read here.
In collaboration with Clare Thornton, I am currently developing the following presentation, which has been accepted for inclusion in this conference.
The Italic I: Between Live-ness and
the Lens
The
Italic I is an artistic collaboration exploring the different
states of potential made possible through purposefully surrendering to a repeated fall. The fall is encountered
almost exclusively through its photographic document, considered less as a pale
imitation of live-ness but rather as a means through which to ‘see it again’, differently. Photography repeats the
live event, yet the intent is not to reproduce or re-present, as present an alternative perspective
(through the camera’s capacity for ‘seeing’ faster or slower than the eye).
The live performance of falling is mediated through
the lens, slowing and extending its different episodes, yet, the intent is not to
capture what a fall looks like, but rather to reflect on its interiority (its
‘inner movement’ as lived experience). We seek a visual vocabulary for the invisible
register of intensity or sensation within falling, the force of what-cannot-always-be-seen.
Our documents make tangible an experience not actually visible in the live event; where paradoxically, the document is somehow
closer to the live(d) experience than the encounter with the performance itself.
Moreover, the document itself is performed live, ephemeral. Staged using slide
technology as an ever-changing permutational flow, the cross-fading of
non-consecutive images generates a virtual performance (a fall) that did not
exist in reality, but which perhaps comes closer to the feeling-of-the-fall. The
work explores how lens technologies might
have the capacity to evoke a quality of live-ness not simply the visual
document of life, addressing those expanded modalities of performance
and performativity - those emergent temporalities and subjectivities - produced
at the threshold where live and lens meet.
