things to note and an admonition

well you are basically printing money with tourism [especially with the environments that aotearoa/new zealand provides]

but how do you 'encounter' landscape - that's a thread in ian wedde's book 'the viewing platform' and its playing through the work we are progressing with presently

ed and helen may provide some answers there [and create currency at the same time...]

i'm interested to hear how the progression of the work is received

we will have both an online audience member and possibly one onsite - the former who was there from the scheduled start and the later who experienced the show as part of the media event at the great hall [at first remixed sound and visuals in a massive hall, then discovered on small screens and as part of an installation

this time we will be able to start the piece at the same point for both audiences and as always in this clean green place we will admonish them to

'take only photographs, leave only footprints'

multiple audiences

"Familiar Features" is our first experiment with addressing both the online and on-site audience (we have presented other work both online and offline, but this is the first time that we've specifically set out to make a show that is just as good for either audience).

Questions:
- can we make a work that satisfies both audiences?
- what aspects will both audiences experience, and what will be separate experiences?
- will the two audiences engage with each other, and if so, how?

Another question is: Why? My answer to that is because people want it. Every time we do a show that is happening in a particular physical place, people ask how they can watch it online. We have to say, you can't. We're not in the business of webcasting. We use multiple applications, we have specific screenography (the arrangement of application windows on the screen) and there is interaction between the on-stage performer and the remote performers on the screen that would be difficult to convey via a web cast.

So why not make a show that communicates to both these audiences simultaneously - or at least have a go and see what happens. The difficult part is that until we are actually presenting it to an audience, we can't be sure that it works. The first presentation of "Familiar Features" (at Intimacy & Inyerface was well-received. Things have moved on quite a bit since then and now we are building up to the next experiment ...

one step at a time ...

creative processes are pretty fascinating. as a group, we have developed a way of devising collaboratively, and each show takes a unique path within that process.

with our current work-in-progress, familiar features, we have had a couple of weeks of struggling, going off on tangents and around in circles, until last night when the introduction of a new idea (just as we were agreeing that we had to stop exploring new ideas and focus on the essence of the work) led to everything falling into place.

all the time we spent on tangents, false starts, going down dead ends and wrestling with conflicting ideas - is it time wasted, or is it a vital part of the process? i believe it ultimately enriches the work. every possibility that we explore answers some of our questions about what we are trying to do. an intriguing path may not end up being the final way, but we learn a lot by exploring it - and that feeds into the layers within the work, even if it's so buried that the audience may never know it's there. it's like painters who build up layers and layers of paint in order to achieve a particular effect.

the new idea last night gives us a practical framework, which supports all the essential ideas we want to talk about in this piece as well as giving a clear start and end. it's important that we have a strong structure as we're dealing with both online and offline audience, & need to think about how the experience will be for both audiences.

imaginary space

An MA student at WSA, writes about how Nation States with heavily defined, regulated and guarded borders have strict criteria about who can be a citizen of their country. Whereas people, who migrate around the world for variety of reasons including persecution, make look back/across their 'own' country, perceiving that country as home, when the country does not/longer recognises that individual as citizen or 'belonging' to the national state.

This is of couese why the space of the internet is so precious and so important to remain unregularised, uncompartmentalised - free space as it were. With that in mind, I'd think every effort should be made to stop Ed & Helen colonisation any inch of cyberspace.

Can you own cyberspace? Access is controlled and limited, but ownership is illusory, fading like vapour trails from planes that 'write' messages in the sky. Or like the Etch-a-Sketch drawings that get shaken away.

If you can't own but can only occupy imaginary terriotiory of cyberspace for a while, what need for immigration?

Could we be thinking of using our space in a less terrestial way?

I like the notion of boundaries forming and dissolving.
Dissolve is strong action

creative attentiveness

where do you get ideas? collectively we throw together words and images and story emerges

but its an interesting question for me they always seem to somehow just arrive…

sometimes with great ceremony – the flash of inspiration, the light bulb going on, expecting a fanfare
sometimes they slip in the backdoor and have been rattling around in the pantry making themselves a cup of tea before i even register them…

i find motion is a good trigger [biking for miles, dancing, battling weeds in the garden – letting the body go in intense physicality somehow frees the mind to play over initially what is uppermost in the list of ‘To Do’ but then to range wider down more obscure tangential tracks

travel fascinates me the process of exploration - the senses are open, absorbing detail, hands are touching, ears are tuned, eyes are really looking…

be it on a bicycle, boards, swimming,driving or flying the sense of movement definitely becomes a catalyst for the imagination. James K Baxter [poet] mentioned this in his account of the trip a group of artists did into the Southern Alps
‘dislocation as a means of tapping into the creative process…’

dis – location, how you locate yourself, being in the local environment[in may my notebook shows a picture of four silhouettes in a car – mountain in the bacground]
words: drive around nz, interview celebs, takes a car around information super highway, locations, interview the passengers [driving oil prices up] overlay images, mapping software, invis avatars as gps references…

these are thoughts i promoted that collectively lead to Trip the Light Fantastic [in itself a road trip of story - complete with postcards!]


i always, always, always ‘diary’ my process – that is i constantly draw things literally there or imaginary, write down events, ideas, scribble notations to earlier ideas – note colours, arrangements of things, doodle around words – add arrows, stars and exclamation marks

over the first few days of scanz my notebook attempts to show through drawings the beauty of the powhiri and my explorations of the dried seed pods at the campus and my playing with the ideas of essence, presence, reflection, flow and locating self with various compasses [physical, elemental, insubstantial]

here are my notes [dated 06 07 2006] which eventually surfaced as the work in progress ‘familiar features’
photos of empty boards with face holes
avatars are famous faces, or icons of country
show is stages in different countries
visitor in own country
stories of location – make you local
walking into frame of kiwiana
familiar features

Not Porn

Someone asked Vicki 'where do you get your ideas?'


In today's associative jamming/ruminating process, we discovered some group symmetries and found some shop names:

Seemingly, 2 northern ABCers are born under astrological water signs. Bear with me. Astrology isnt just for the simple minded. Its a great antidote to religion and an excellent parlour game. 2 southern ABCers are characterised as fire signs. Hence 'Fire & Ice' which prompted Len's recollection of the Robert Frost poem:

Fire and Ice

SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.


Vicki muttered 'Wing & Prayer' and I wondered what kind of shop that would be. What would it sell? Vicki thought just one solitary wing, but maybe unlimited prayers. We ran with this.

If 4 astrologically susceptible women owned an online shop, and happened to be fire & water signs, what would they call it? 'Wet and Warm.' I reckon that sounds like a porn shop. So you'd have to make a point, especially if your shop is on the internet where apparently 40% of content is pornography, to state otherwise and so the shop would end up being: 'Wet & Warm: Not Porn!"

But all of this was taking us further and further away from the Victorian cutouts, or was it?

resurrection

tonight we agreed to start using this blog as a development tool : ) so i thought i'd post to start warming it up ... we have been talking about "familiar features" our work-in-progress, to be shown at the dunedin fringe in early october, & also stumbled on another idea for a show ...

it has been a bad technology day out there in cyberspace. starting with the polytech's firewall not being opened for my workshop this morning and continuing through internet outages in wellington, power cuts in hari hari and mail delivery problems in london ... it's a wonder we ever manage to get anything done at all!!!