‘micro soft words (for dummies and enlightened beings)’
A performance by Christine Ellison with Erato Tzavara and Graham Dunning.
Tuesday 24 July
6:30pm
South Street
In this live work, performers respond to language from software to explore the sonic potential of digital commands. Amplified objects and voice are used to interpret a graphic score that has been synthesized from words and symbols of software interfaces.
Inspired by the improvisational scores of Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, George Maciunas and Steve Reich this work takes performance strategies from the mid 20th century into a current discourse with technology.
The project draws on Reading’s rapidly growing status as ‘Britain’s answer to Silicon Valley’, as it considers how technology can be both a friendly tool or a coded obstacle, bringing communities together or, equally, dividing them. The performance site becomes a speculative interface between the technological and the corporeal, intersplicing digital and DIY mentalities.
The work is developed through a series of workshops with artists from Reading, London and Athens, that culminate in a sequence of short performances. This is the first stage in a longer term project that explores what is at stake by considering the corporeal through a digital consciousness. The audience is invited to respond to the work in a discussion after the performances.
Christine Ellison is an artist based in Reading. Through sound, materials and performance her work engages concepts of technology and post-humanism taking advances in digital devices as starting points for the revision of former technologies, basic tools and ways of making. She is the founder of POLLYFIBRE: girlband from a post-digital dimension, and experimental sound platform Agency of Noise.
Erato Tzavara is a video artist based between Athens and London, specialising in digital scenography, multimedia dramaturgy, 3d mapping and moving image techniques for live performance. She creates video design for dance productions as well as education and research. She regularly collaborates with choreographers, musicians and media artists, researching the plasticity of digital image in space and the crossover of discipline boundaries.
Graham Dunning is a sound artist based in London, who performs solo and in ensembles. He teaches Experimental Sound Art at the Mary Ward Centre in London and regularly runs independent workshops. He has published through Entr’acte, Seagrave, Tombed Visions and hosts a monthly experimental radio show on NTS radio called Fractal Meat.