Oroborus

Performance/Lecture
Jan van Eyck Academie, 2010

"well your energy is very far in the future
thats for your wife too
you are very, err, oriented in the future"

A telephone call was made to a clairvoyant to ask what we would make in the coming year. She gave many answers, made (we believe) as intuitive interpretations of the kind of thing we would want to hear. In turn, we interpreted every word she said to make a lecture using Oroborus, the snake eating its own tail, as a narrative model to follow: one which starts at the end, then journeys from the beginning of the narrative back to the end again. Upon arrival back to the end, the information we have gained on the journey reasserts a changed perspective.

During the lecture our interpretations made reference to a wide range of subjects, each linking to the next with an interpretive logic that mirrored the operations of the telephone clairvoyant.

Auction #1

Performance/Contract
2008


Auction #1 is a performance in the form of an auction where an auctioneer brokers the sale of the performance itself. The highest bidder purchases the rights of ownership and re-performance. The work can only be re-sold or re-exhibited as a performance in which it is offered for sale with no reserve price.

Auction #1 was sold for the grand sum of £65 at Zoo Art Fair,London, October 2008.

As part of Performance, curated by CollectingLiveArt.
Thanks to Eastside Projects.

The Monolith

DVD video 5min loop
2008


The Monolith from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey is seen travelling through space at high speed to a happy-go-lucky jazz tune. This contrasts with images of the Monolith on Earth. It stands among building sites, modernist constructions and natural landscapes with the same haunting sound which is heard in its presence in Kubrick's film. This sound signals a somewhat pessimistic view of humanity's (mis)use of the intelligence with which it has been blessed, set against the more upbeat space sections which reference humanity's more optimistic outlook of 1968 when 2001 was made.

Acting Dead is a series of portraits of actors when playing dead in films. These film stills, re-rendered in pencil, are removed from the context of the cinematic frame, their fictional narratives and the time-based medium.

Performance #1, #2 & #3

Video Installation
(2007-2008)

Three videos announce themselves as documents of live performances in galleries. The artists use an arsenal of performance cliché’s; they wear black, staring wide-eyed through the crowd, nailing tongues to tables, firing a pistol at a clock, and using milk and sugar as symbolic objects. Atmospheric music plays to intensify the drama while the crowd scratch their chins and applaud as the artists risk injury and death.

The statement at the start of each video, that ‘this performance took place in front of a live audience’ is both true and false. The audience depicted in the video had come to see a performance, which began with the artists saying "we will play the part of the artists, you will play the part of the audience”, followed by the performance of filming the performance, guided by a strict storyboard to shoot the events in the most efficient order.

What remains on the videos is also on the one hand a falsity, consciously taking to its extreme the fraudulent effect of documenting the live. On the other hand it is the lasting testament to the action. While the events depicted in the video (which might be described as a red herring) are believable, if only in a filmic sense, the constructed nature of the videos questions their own status of being documents of the live, and by extension asks where the work truly exists.

Performance #1, #2 and #3 were made at Futura in Prague, Castlefield Gallery in Manchester and at Verkligheten in Umeå.

Manipulated Living

Intervention at The Pallasades Shopping Centre, Birmingham (2007)

Taking control of the sound system in The Pallasades Shopping Centre for one week we played a selection of film scores to the thousands of commuters who must pass through from Birmingham's main train station each day.

The music we chose is made for the purpose of inducing emotions of elevation, joy, sadness or fear in movie viewers. In contrast to the music usually playing in shopping centres, it was incredibly intense and full of cinematic visualisations. By re-applying this cinematic mechanism to a day-to-day situation and treating the location as a film set, we attempted to add the hyper-real potential of the cinematic to the short journey through the shopping centre.

Commissioned by New Generation Arts

The Poets

16:9 DVD 8min Loop (2006)

Two Chinese actors play out a dramatic scenario in a destroyed film set. Their manner is pompous and emotional, their language overtly poetic. However, the subtitled English text, which is made up of lines chosen from the poetry of T.S. Elliot, does not match what the actors actually say in Mandarin, who are merely talking through physical stage directions.

Supported by Arts Council England, Vivid and Shangrila Culture & Arts Centre, Beijing

The Waiting Room

Installation with DVD 30min Loop, Storyboards and Production Video (2006)

A series of videos show various people in a dark waiting room. It is never revealed what they might be waiting for, only that their process of waiting is either incredibly strange or that their monotonous circumstance is allowing their imaginations to take a dark turn.

The scenarios were shot during a residency at The New Art Gallery Walsall where members of the public were invited to star in the videos in a film set in the artists studio. This process is illustrated in a production video showing the artists planning, shooting and creating sound effects, alongside the storyboards made for each scene. These raw materials contrast with the edited video with its dubbed sound effects and music, and link the flights of imagination taken in the video back to the reality behind their production

Supported by Vivid

Within the Chaos there is CHNS
(A Demonstration of the Classic Hollywood Narrative System)

Performance (2005)

The artists wrote a script for a horror film based in St Paul's Church, where an exhibition was to take place. On the night of the opening, an electric guitarist improvised a two-hour film score to the script. Inside the church, only the guitarist could hear the guitar through his headphones. Outside the church, the sound could be heard from a large speaker system in the bell tower, filling the surrounding square with the guitarist's impression of the horror script.

The script closely follows the Classic Hollywood Narrative System (CHNS), a formal system used in 99% of Hollywood films to keep viewers attention, implying a symbolic control over people using the space outside the church.

Performed at The Artist with Two Brains, St Paul's Church, Birmingham, Curated by Chris Hammond
Guitarist: Joel Murphy

Supported by Arts Council England

Like A Musical

Performance/Video Documentation (2005)

Inspired by the fantastical imagery of musical cinema, the artists created two new scenes with a particular location in mind. After writing lyrics and a synopsis, they collaborated with a composer and choreographer and employed five professional actors to rehearse the scenes.
The scenes were performed live and unannounced in city centre locations. At the end of the scene, the actors dispersed anonymously into the crowd.

Commissioned by Fierce International Performance Festival, Birmingham
Presented with Ikon Gallery

Conversation Exchange

Performance/DVD 8 min video (2005)

People passing through the ICA were given the proposal that they may have a conversation with the artist. On sitting down together a tape recorder is started, and they converse for two minutes.
They then swap seats, quickly transcribe the two-minute conversation, and begin to re-enact the conversation for camera, only that they speak each other's words. Often the conversation started with the artist explaining the purpose of the situation, resulting in the video work becoming self-explanatory.

Performed and exhibited at the ICA, London

Columbia

DVD 90min with 6min Trailer (2003)

A film set installation was built and the public invited to take part in the making of a movie about the ill-fated NASA space shuttle Columbia. Visitors were cast as leading roles, cameramen and boom mic operators on a random basis.
During the five days of the exhibition, the entire film production was completed; including live special effects, filming and editing. On the closing night of the exhibition, the final scene was shot and the audience sat in Ground Control, Houston, where the film in which they had just starred was premiered.

By The People's Elbow
Conceived by Reuben Henry and written with Michael Grime
Springhill Institute

I am Karin Kihlberg

Performance (2004-2005)

An actress is trained to take the role of the artist Karin Kihlberg. She appears in art events to replace a fraction of Karin Kihlberg's life.
The actress' rehearse from an illustrated script of Karin's acquaintances, learning them by sight and through descriptions of their relationships with each other. The script enables the actress to take the role of the real Karin.

This parallel life enables the real Karin Kihlberg to take a break from herself. During the performance the real Karin Kihlberg is at home relaxing, having a foot bath.

Performed at Sollentuna Art Fair, Stockholm, represented by Candyland, 2005. Actress: Anna Lundquist, and in Brain Jelly Live Art Showcase, curated by AAS, at UCE Birmingham. Actress: Julie Chapman.

Supported by Arts Council England

Shoot

Performance (2004-2005)

On entering the room, visitors are met with the proposition from the artist that they may shoot him or be shot. A kids banger gun is revealed and alternatives and reasons are discussed, usually ending with somebody being 'shot' in the head and falling onto a crash mat.

The focus is on the conversation formed under the context of a moral dilemma. No matter the outcome, the actions and decisions of the visitors were always questioned, moving the performance into a form of alternative therapy.

Performed at Brain Jelly, UCE, Birmingham, and Konstakuten, Stockholm.

Art Video: The Definitive Critique
with Jacques Croissant

DVD 60 min (2004)

Presented by 19th Century French Painter Jacques Croissant, this illustrated lecture categorises many common forms of single screen video art, and critically exposes an art form whose practitioners suffer from a profuse confusion between art, design, and entertainment. Demonstrating a rich critical analysis, Croissant here explains what makes good quality video art, and what is mere video craft.

This educational video essay, produced specifically for distribution to art institutions, is a reaction to and safeguard against a "Tidal wave of video art crap coming out of the art schools", and warns the artists of tomorrow how they may avoid becoming cheap video art peasants.