This SensiLab Forum is about keeping it weird and denying mastery over the strangeness of reality. It is about working with the uncertainty of not knowing, and staging opportunities for collaborators and audiences to not know either. It is about feeling your way through a live, living, arts practice enmeshed in the sensations, wonders and horrors of everyday life. This forum is practical and shares tools and ideas drawn from two decades of interdisciplinary practice to aid others who might also be attempting to create work in ways that initially seem impossible and unprecedented. The ideas and tools introduced emerge from theatre directing and dramaturgy, and so approach artworks as events that are rehearsed, staged and experienced in time.
The talk draws on examples of recent work including Vanitas (2018) an expanded audio walk for cemeteries and smartphones, and Exhuming Johnny (2019) a choreographed performance speculating on the quantum body’s ability to travel backwards in time. The talk also thinks through current works in progress: The Heart (2021) a 42-year AI performance and installation, Child of Now (2021) a massively co-authored story about the next century performed by 14,400 Melbournians, and Sacrifice (2022) a live art experiment with a robot swarm (in disguise as) standing stones.
This SensiLab Forum took place on Wednesday 5th May.