Digital iterations are distinct digital works that share an artistic inquiry with live performance works. As distinct from the dependent relationship between documentation and live performance, digital iterations are interdependent with live performances.
The Digiwork Program
“As we make every new work, how could we extend their life creatively?”
Chamber Made Creative Director, Tim Stitz
Chamber Made is contemporary performance company in Melbourne, Australia working at the intersection of music, sound and contemporary performance. Chamber Made’s Digiwork program is a suite of digital iterations responding to each of their major live works from 2015-2017: Captives of the City (2017), Permission to Speak (2017), Another Other (2017), and Turbulence (2016-2017).
Captives of the City
“A fusion of digital puppetry, live animation, music and performance, Captives of the City is a radical exploration of the desire for change. The Captives face the choice between the terrifying uncertainty of embracing change and the safety of maintaining the status quo.”
Chamber Made, Captives of the City
Captives of the City is a work created by Chamber Made in collaboration with Lemony S Puppet Theatre. Lemony S Puppet Theatre are Sarah Kriegler and Jacob Williams, working with puppets in a variety of contemporary art contexts.
Captives of the City addressed the dissemination and spread of ideas immersed in a visual language of projections of rats. It was an experiential performance, with the audience beginning in the comfortable surrounds of the Arts Centre bar, before being guided deep underground to a dark, enclosed space where actors and musicians perform while projected animations and digitally controlled rats scurry across all wall surfaces.
A trial digiwork version of Captives of the City was presented at Agile Chambers. This took the form of a digital puppet of a rat, projected against a wall, that could be controlled through an iPad by audience. This work came out of considering the existing digital assets of the performance work, and imagining how the existing digital materials could be presented in a gallery context.
In interview with Sarah Kriegler { https://agilerecorder.com/open-process/ (Jump to the interviews section)}, she described how the digital iteration continued the artistic inquiry of the initial performance work:
The premise of captives of the city is that we shouldn’t accept the control of the art by powers that be, that we should be allowing our artists to say what needs to be said even if we disagree with it. There is need and cause for allowing distant voices to be spoken. So what the digiwork does is it gives the audience member the opportunity to experience that. So they are really taking on the idea that they too can say and create when needed.
Kriegler
Further documentation of Captives of the City can be accessed on Chamber Made’s website.
Another Other
Fusing experimental opera, expanded cinema, sound art and installation, Another Other is based on a radical re-reading of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2016).
Chamber Made, Another Other
Another Other is a multimedia live performance created and performed by Erkki Veltheim. Sabina Maselli, Natasha Anderson and Anthony Pateras. The live work is a performance re-reading of a media work, in Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona. Another Other directly remediates the original work through its digital materials as well as its formal logic through a precise duration equivalent to the film.
The digiwork of Another Other is a website that remediates audio-visual material from the performance work. In interview with Veltheim, he described how devising the digiwork was a collective act across the core-creative team of the original performance. “the process has been about having a consensus about which parts of Another Other would make good raw materials for a digital form” (Veltheim).
Another exploration towards a digiwork was presented at Agile Chambers in the form of a spatialised sound and video installation. This work, presented visual and audio material from the initial performance. Maselli’s video imagery was projected on four screens enclosing a square space with bench sitting from which to experience the work. This expression of Another Other was an experiment towards making a gallery installation of the work.
Turbulence
“Set high in the sky in an airline passenger cabin, Turbulence plays out as a musical drama between a Mother (soprano), Daughter (actor), and the voices of a female pilot, flight announcer and baby.”
Chamber Made, Turbulence
Turbulence was initially commissioned in 2013 by Chamber Made as part of a suite of ‘Living Room Operas’ – intimate contemporary operas developed for specific spaces in a person’s home. Composed by Juliana Hodgkinson, it is a chamber opera set on a plane for two performers, a mother – soprano Deborah Kaiser – and a daughter – actor Annelii Bjorasen. Following this performative presentation, musician and filmmaker Pete Humble was approached to make a film version of Turbulence in 2015. Humble created this video work, presented at Federation Square in 2015, without having been attended the initial performance work. It was developed through discussion with the core creative, and through reviewing the digital material they had accumulated. In this way, Humble led a digital investigation into aligned content and themes and this work became the first in Chamber Made’s suite of Digiworks. Uniquely in Chamber Made’s Digiwork oeuvre however,
Humble became a part of the Turbulence core creative team, and film became an essential element of the work in future presentations. Turbulence was presented as a hybrid work in 2016 at Lorne Festival of Performing Arts and at Agile Chambers.
The continued iteration of Turbulence from live to digital to hybrid form, demonstrates the generative potential of digital iterations. Sharing an artistic inquiry into digital space opens new avenues of investigation and play, which in turn supports continued iteration and development.
Project No. 423
As part of Chamber Made’s “Little Operations” development program, I worked with Dylan Sheridan on the development of a digital iteration for his work New Project No. 423. Sheridan is a composer and sound artist, who was developing a mechanical sound theatre work. The Little Operations development was an experiment to determine whether a sound theatre work without performers could hold an audience’s attention. Dylan had created and hacked six mechanical sculptures and with dramaturgical support from Tamara Saulwick, artistic director at Chamber Made, he created a sound theatre work with a view to making a longer form work in the future.
In this work, Dylan investigated misophonia. Misophonia is a condition in which particular sounds elicit strong negative responses. For the digital iteration of this work, I interrogated Dylan’s key concept of misophonia through my own digital practice. I examined my own practice and for this work, created imagery that was displeasing to my sensibilities.
I played with underexposed, grainy, highly compressed images, framed askew. In the post production process, I cleaned up some of these images, leaving blocky grain artefacts, and cropped some of the images to create more zoomed in shots than I had shot. Inspired by the random pattern of digital noise, I devised a grid pattern for the video.
This grid allowed us to create a video work that was subservient to Sheridan’s score. I was able to shift the timing of activations of each of the blocks in order to be triggered in time with Dylan’s composition, giving primacy to the sound objects. Like the performance work, this digital iteration was also a creative development. It was an experiment with Dylan into how our practices could intersect in the making of a new work.
Working in this way was a collaborative exchange. I used Dylan’s initial impulses in creating a rough digital iteration, and was led by his creative offers in the formal composition of the final video work. I took away a more nuanced understanding of my own aesthetic sensibilities for clarity and also a determination to continue grounding future work in collaborative process.
