SEAM Symposium 2009 Presentations

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image credit: Labyrinth, Carol Brown Dancer

SEAM PRESENTATIONS/EXHIBITIONS

+ Exhibition
+ Performances
+ Screenings

Spatial Phrases Exhibition
16 SEPTEMBER, 6 PM
LOCATION: FraserStudios, Chippendale
Exhibition preview

17 – 18 SEPTEMBER, 11 AM to 6 PM
LOCATION: FraserStudios, Chippendale
Exhibition opens to the public

Installation from Perception_Space_Materials Laboratory
Convened by Dr Benedict Anderson
People move – architecture stops. People desire - space defines. The architect collects movements and desires and releases them due to the demands of building. Choreographing Spatial Phrases is one-week laboratory that aims to explore alternative relationships between architecture, perception and the human body in the thinking, making and construction of space. The one-week laboratory will examine how space is perceived and recorded so as to 'action' and 'interact' various design methodologies towards conceiving and designing space.

Starting with the concept of the 'living city' as an entire interconnected entity developed by experimental groups such as Archigram, Superstudio and Archizoom and more recently Beginning as a base for projecting our own collective ideas with the utopian ideals of architectural futurists such as Superstudio, Archigram, Archizoom, OMA and Dillier + Scofidio concepts of the 'living city' as an entire interconnected entity the constructed choreographies will seek to address the gallery as the site for material performances by constructing divergent models. Through developing techniques of spatial observation the laboratory will build towards ‘choreographies of space’ and a ‘dramaturgies of intention’ in form making, human vision and mobility, constructed geometries and articulated surfaces.

Through creating active investigations in the production and perception of space via a series of cognitive day-by-day material constructions, the laboratory seeks to initiate new perceptions of space as the space changes with each new intervention; permitting new understandings to each previous construction. Over the course of 5 days, participants will explore through materials, an ongoing installation based on choreographies of space embodied within.

Power-On
Work by Alan Schacher, Sean Bacon and Michelle Mahrer

In a power generation station, the product, electricity, is a form of pure invisible energy. The architecture designed to house the manufacture of power is a coded matrix of negatives. Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Western Sydney, operated by Liverpool Council, is located in a former power station constructed on clean Bauhausian lines. The project to create a work in the unrestored upper levels, comprising stairways, gantries, hoppers and steel-mesh platforms, has been hindered by access issues. The team wish to bring to the fore the Escher-like distortion that the vista generates. As we could not place a body in the space we have videoed the interior and will work in post-production as a proposal towards a future work.

As model for an alternative method of performance presentation it was hoped to stage a live off-limits performance, glimpsed through architectural portals, which would be projected onto permanent screens within the main lobby and onto the exterior of the building, and also streamed live on the internet.

The Door, the Stair, the Bed and the Chair
Choreographer/film-maker: Sue Healey
Performers: Nalina Wait
Architect: Mark Healey
Digital Artist: Adam Synnott
Cinematography: Judd Overton

This work is inspired by an image of early Renaissance art, (Fra Angelico’s, The Predella scene from the Perugia altar-piece, 1437), where a succession of events and architectural settings is shown in one image, strongly suggestive of a cinematic montage. Using key architectural elements - the door and the stair, the project seeks to articulate existential space through precisely choreographed moving images. In depicting these spaces the team will create a setting where film, dance and architecture are intricately interwoven, amplifying an emotional and physical response to space. These potent architectural/design symbols will frame the projected choreography through a structuring of space, scale and situation; the door, as a framing device and the mediator between two worlds; the stair, as the symbolic spine.

Miss World, 2002
Work by Margie Medlin
Dancer/Choreographer: Rebecca Hilton

Featuring a duet between a live dancer and a virtual dancer this project explores the complex relationship between the real and the virtual. The primary intention of the work is to form a new relationship between film and dance. The choreography investigates the interplay between the camera and the dance, by creating choreographies, uses the combined capacity of dance and film to convey the qualities and feeling of the movement to the viewer. Giving a dynamic range and emphasis the human and the visceral quality of the dance. The work is also using the dancer's movements to draw attention to the body in the changing face of cities and the culture of urban planning.

Miss World has been exhibited in the "Future Cinema" exhibition at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Jun - Sept 2003; at the "Future Cinema" exhibition, ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, Oct 2002 - Jan 2003; Tanzmedial in Cologne, Germany, Dec 2002 - Feb 2003; and Media Festival Bangalore, India, in Feb 2003. Screenings in Cuba, Chile and Costa Rica 2002 and 2003.

Review in Ballet Tanz, The Art of Dance.
"Miss World" is the title of an installation by Australian-based artist Margie Medlin, created in 2002 in collaboration with the Karlsruhe centre for art and media technology and last shown at the tanzmedial exhibition in Cologne. A monumental triptych made out of three concrete walls, the work draws from the spectator involuntary comparisons between the images projected on to it: on the right-hand wall, a dancing female cyber figure and on the left, slightly unsynchronised film of a real woman dancing the same way (choreographed and danced by Rebecca Hilton). In the centre, we see images of spoiled landscapes and ugly urban development which would quickly lose their fascination if one did not realise that these images are moving in the same way as the women - the camera is dancing. In Medlin's work, which the spectator is intended to perceive through identification and empathy, just like stage dance, camera and dancer blend into one; the camera becomes an appendage of the body. Medlin is drawn to dance because of its "intellectual and emotional information without a text basis". While "Miss World" addresses numerous issues, from the cult of physical perfection to the role of technology in society and the brutal urbanisation of the natural environment, it is primarily a highly intelligent reflection on dance through the media of new technology.”