LocoMotion explores the act of human motion in a world that is augmented by devices and instruments designed to interface us within the societies and environments in which we travel and live. Taking place in one of the Asian Tigers, the city of Singapore, the project gives forum to the variety of actions and gestures that produce human expression at sites of exchange, transformation, juncture and threshold. With Donna Haraways Cyborg manifesto as a departure point, the works in LocoMotion give form to an array of instances captured at the borders of transgressing traditional and nontraditional boundaries. The human terrain of motion is opened to reveal how we exercise the psychomotor realm of human cognition to position, maneuver, orient and situate our entities, in all of their dimensions, within the spaces, places and environs that we inhabit in the world. The project puts into focus an international engagement with human motion and what can be shared across local, regional and global borders, challenging our assumptions of social and cultural constructs of the actual and virtual terrain of human existence as we know it.

Life Circuit 5.0 (live)

Urich Lau (SGP)

Life Circuit is created for a series of video performances and performance collaborations, using reconstructed industrial headgear, such as welding goggles, gas mask and earmuffs, as video and audio wearable gadgets. Using live-feed images and ambient sounds, the ‘circuit’ converts what is seen and heard into electronic video and audio outputs. The gadgets become an extension to the artist’s anatomy that alters human functionality and interactivity in the capacity of vision and voice, replacing human senses in perception and expressions.

Beads are the Breath of the Landbridge

Peter Morin (CAN)

Beads and the practice of culture - the making of objects and the performance of those objects - has a tradition of transformation and currency. Beads travelled with settler people. The first contact beads, and subsequent beads, were transformed into a vehicle for the breath of the Land. The land, as always, was ever present in the material object production (art), in the practice, in the history. It is my intention to travel the breath of the land to Shanghai. It is my intention to carry beads back to the motherland of bead production. I want to produce a new performance, called 'Beads are the Breath of the Landbridge'. A performance to acknowledge this connection. A performance to acknowledge this art history. A performance about bringing the indigenous innovation to the land of innovation.

Nightmare Inductions

Noxious Sector (CAN)

In this performance we will use self-hypnosis techniques to lead audience members on a guided meditation in which their teeth fall out. To accompany the hypnosis script we will use trance induction sound techniques and ghost hunting equipment to provide a soundtrack for the experience. The performance is imagined as an immersive cognitive experience and an exploration of the visualization powers of the imaginary. To accompany the performance we will set up an interactive installation in which audience members can experience the visualization at their own pace. The installation will involve creating several listening stations that will have yoga mats and a set of headphones on which the hypnosis track can be played. We will also have a video projection and some ambient sound-scapes to provide an atmospheric aesthetic for the installation.

Willow & Flip Toss

Deirdre Logue (CAN) Shot with a toy camera, Willow records a cyclic rushing through the inhospitable low crown of a fallen tree. Revealing the artist’s increased discomfort as she repeats her task, Willow speaks to our tendencies to push into irritation instead of away from it.

In Flip Toss a flip camera is tossed into the sky with as much force as the artist can muster and caught seconds later in her increasingly tender hands. Repeated, it is kinetic, chaotic, violent and visually electric.

Afghanimation

Allyson Mitchell (CAN)

Afghanimation uses stop-motion animation to weave a critique of military/media relations and the complacency of Canadians in smothering, camouflaging and covering up the real stories that come out of the history of occupation and war in Afghanistan. This film is also homage to Canadian filmmaker Joyce Wieland’s evocation of the domestic in order to critique nationalism and foreign policy – which is sadly still relevant and current. This potent work stands on Wieland’s shoulders to tell this new/old, ancient/contemporary story of war, media, lies and distance.

Page last modified on May 07, 2013, at 09:17 AM