Quiet Time creative lab call out

what: CIA Studios “Quiet Time” Creative Lab with Reckless Sleepers

where: CIA Studios, 480 Newcastle St, West Perth

when: 5^th – 16^th December, 2011

application deadline: Monday 29^th August, 2011

assessment: mid September, 2011

notification: end September, 2011

Tactical media arts company pvi collective are delighted to announce a call out for applications to participate in a Reckless Sleepers Creative Lab here at CIA Studios in Perth, WA.

about Reckless Sleepers:

Reckless Sleepers are an internationally renowned interdisciplinary performance company based in the UK & Belgium. Their work evolves from research and development based residency models. Their ability to impact on rigorous research based methodologies for participating artists as well as work site-specifically across artistic disciplines and generate performative outcomes from their workshop models fits perfectly with CIA’s ethos of finding ways to nurture the development of Australian interdisciplinary practice with the support of like-minded peers.

‘Quiet Time’ CIA Creative Lab 2011:

Mole Wetherell, director of Reckless Sleepers, will run the inaugural Australian adaptation of ‘Quiet Time’ for 8 Australian artists for ten days at CIA during dec 2011. The lab will focus on participant generated content that encourages artists from a range of disciplines to use the city as a basis for research and stimulus. The idea is to develop works through the processes of observational research that leads to singular or group devised performance works occurring on-site in the cityscape.

Accepted artists will be exposed to the many strategies that have supported the creation of reckless sleepers projects, these processes offer practical solutions for making performances or translating an idea into a one-off performative event.

Successful applicants will be provided with a small stipend.

Travel allowance funds are available for regional and/or interstate artists.

For more info or to be sent an application form please email:

kate@pvicollective.com

An Initiative of the IETM-Australia Council for the Arts Collaboration Project and supported through the Australia Council for the Arts Infuse program.  CIA Studios is supported by the Department of Culture and the Arts.

pvi collective – sting like a bee

hi pvi,

i feel like we at lala owe you a vote of thanks as it was this is the time…this is the record of the time that brought about the creation of lala. how important was that for you guys to do and how do you see the event now that it has been 2 or 3 years since then?

i think its us who owe you guys the thanks for participating in the first place! its totally cool that everyone seemed to find ways to let it catalyse more conversations, collaborations and artist driven initiatives and that’s more than we had ever bargained for!

it’s ironic that ‘this is the time’ came at a point where we were really struggling with financial survival strategies as a collective. holding the symposium and sharing ideas and stories about the mid career ‘void’ that we all seem to fall into at some point in our practices really emboldened and energised us as a group.

‘this is the time..’ was really special for us though because we were able to rally together as a sector and realise that we have a voice and a place in the cultural landscape. for it to be artist led and primarily focussed on practice was something we were very keen to initiate. as a symposium and live event night, it was an opportunity to talk and show and get a sense of what was happening on a national level with peers. it was v inspiring to have so many critical practitioners under one roof, and in perth too!

interestingly, we are now planning for a ‘this is the time 2..’ [or t2] to happen hopefully in 2012 and are beginning to think about it as an ongoing biennial celebration and interrogation of live art / interdisciplinary art practice. we’ll keep lala posted on developments, but now that cia studios is becoming more established there are more opportunities to house it there and really give it a home…

after being together as a collective for over 12 years now, are you still finding it interesting to be making work, does it feel easier or harder?

well we feel older and not as nimble on our feet! but I think we enjoy setting ourselves impossible challenges so that we’ll always have something juicy to grapple with. its definitely not easier that’s for sure! as the politics of public space shifts, we have to find new strategies to enable ideas to come to life outside.

what is lovely is that over the ten or so years we have developed a collective working methodology and a shared language for making work now, so it means that the devising process feels really grounded. the flip side of that is to stay conscious of not getting too comfortable by sitting within our comfort zones. I think that’s why its become so important for us to expand out and collaborate with new people whose skills are radically different from ours. it enables us to keep learning from others and challenges our perspectives, which has been really healthy.

making work together and expanding our networks of collaborative comrades is still really key to who we are and how we operate as a collective.

when you guys broke into the national scene with tours around the country you were really railing against the post-9/11 political situation, does the political of today still drive your work now and what are you reacting against?

definitely. but i think what we are realising is that the more overtly political a work is, the less transformative potential it has. so works we’re developing now seem to be much more playful, but still with a bit of a sting in their tails, hopefully! we’re also pushing that audience/performer relationship to a point where we are more facilitators to their activities [as opposed to them watching ours] and that shift is really interesting for us, generating more of a shared ownership over a performance or intervention.

you are just about to travel to adelaide to take part in vitalstatistix season called adhocracy, can you tell us about the work you are taking there and how you are engaging the locals?

yay!
yes we are here now undertaking a short residency and collaborating with ten amazing local artists on ‘transumer:deviate from the norm’. its a site-based intervention on the streets of port adelaide that invites audiences to undertake tiny acts of resistance against their built environment.

so audiences are armed with their very own i-torch [a feat of engineering that consists of an iphone welded to a heavy duty torch] and a deviation kit full of absurd weaponry to use at various sites in the work. its very heavily driven by sound, with audio instructions directing the audience thru the streets. and we have associate pvi artist jason sweeney back on-board for this, so are v excited about working with jase again. our adelaide collaborators are ‘the motherfcukers’, an elite team of street superheroes who are determined to use the city as their playground.

so all in all its shaping up to be a bit of an adventure. I think we’re selling out too, as its a limited audience each night, so if peeps are in town and keen to check it out, get a ticket

who are your current influences, artistic or otherwise, who are you loving at the moment?

ooh la la! so many! but I have to say theres two amazing books that really inspired us towards the making of this work and they were: ‘urban interventions: private projects in public spaces’ and ‘trespass: a history of uncommissioned urban art’. just some beautiful works in there and terrific methods of playfully subverting the official narratives of place.

thanks so much!

muchos respect to la la land!

pvi collective are a bunch of fcukers who succeed in accomplishing impossible tasks and who never, ever use capital letters.

pvi collective – pvicollective.com
vitalstatistix – vitalstatistix.com.au

resist @ rolling stock

resist by pvi collective
adapted for rolling stock in Junee, November 2010
images courtesy of the artists and photographer Lisa Blue.

Antipodean live art

When lala (live art list australia) started it felt like an important thing to do – something necessary in the ecology of those artists who as Jason Maling put so beautifully in his essay sit ‘in-between‘.

In recent times I have begun to wonder if this ‘live art’ thing is another fad, like the ‘locative media’/'tactical media’ fad of 4 years ago.

If you title something ‘live art’ will it get picked up by the Inter-Arts office? will it be seen as cool by visual artists who are sick of static installations and performance artists sick of the rigidity of the theatrical formula?

This is a pretty sobering thought, and considering the title of this weblog I am actually questioning my own existence.

After discussing this with some colleagues there were some pretty interesting comments ranging from “I am sick of the term, it is overused and no longer representative” to “I am glad there is a banner under which we can all stand”.

Both of these are actually true, some people need something to grip onto, they struggle with the idea that there can be an experience that you have to negotiate as you view it.

At the same time for both the Next Wave Festival and for Melbourne Fringe Festival these delineations are made by a combination of both staff members and artists, without a clear understanding of what live art is.

For artists such as Madeleine Hodge, Sarah Rodigari, pvi collective, Unreasonable Adults and Jason Maling who have all been a part of the live art scene in the UK and Europe it must feel very strange to be hear the term being bandied around so much here.

Personally in putting together lala (live art list australia), the question always with everything i do is ‘is this live art?’. Sometimes I don’t know, sometimes it is just a feeling, sometimes I look back at a work or an artist and think – that ain’t live art…

Perhaps like a lot of our food and coffee influences in Australia we have to accept that a replication of UK style live art is not realistic here and that the type of interdisciplinary, conceptually driven work that is happening here is not live art but antipodean live art. Just as we have taken in influences by the diasporas from Europe, Asia and Africa, so we also have done in contemporary art.

Influenced by the Japanese body methods that Sydney Front and Gravity Feed were using in the 1980′s, pushed by the injection of video and interactive media as well as Indonesian installation art in the 1990′s and fed by the explosion that has come out of PACT and Performance Space in Sydney and the Next Wave Festivals of Marcus Westbury and Jeff Khan, this antipodean live art scene is unlike any other in the world and perhaps I personally need to let go of the ‘looking to the UK’ for guidance in what we are doing and embrace this bulging scene as something that has its own journey.

Martyn Coutts
Martyn Coutts sometimes calls himself a Live Arts practitioner.