- Venue
- Aberystwyth Arts Centre
- Location
- Wales
Only Connect Lab
Aberystwyth Arts Centre
May 2012
The Only Connect project, based at the Arts Centre in Aberystwyth and supported by Arts Council Wales, was offered up to multi-disciplinary artists as a vehicle through which they could explore the potential of new technologies to develop their practices. Having reached a certain tipping point in my own work, I applied to participate, as one of the twelve, principally to experiment with sound media. However, I soon came to realise that I was really coveting a secret desire to use this opportunity to not only create a piece of writing but also to perform it as some sort of public interactive installation.
Creatively, experimentation, rather like freedom, is never the unalloyed pleasure it promises to be. Always beginning with a plethora of possibilities it all too soon meets the constrictions set up by a host of inner and outer personal, political and practical limitations. With all its shining newness technology can initially provide an alluring smokescreen for these concerns. After all, much of what we began to experiment with, such as body mapping and sensing, originated from the world of game-playing. It is playful. It is magic. See what it can do. And Rui Gato and André Sier, two of the lead artists on the project, quickly seduced us with its wizardry.
Inhabiting one of the dance rehearsal studios, the Laboratory came to represent, over those three weeks, both a physical and virtual space in which we tested the boundaries of our, and the technology’s, creative landscapes. João Miguel Garcia, the director, talked much about the tensions between our humanness and the seemingly inanimate media with which we were engaging. The theme was journeying. And yet his particular interest was how the world was before the onset of the Enlightenment. That pre-Renaissance, pre-perspective world – chockful of superstition and mystery. A world read and engaged with viscerally, through the body and its senses.
Sier and Gato initiated us in the linguistic intricacies of programming, the immediacy of touch screen controls and the scope of seemingly rudimentary sensory cameras and microphones. We made light drawings with our bodies, created a musical tree and called up a whole host of reactive imagery through movement and noise. And each day, under Garcia’s tutelage, we would perform our ideas. These sessions, held in an empty dance studio, were empty of technology. They were just about us and our corporeal selves. And they fast became sites of group integration, cooperation and knowledge. Most of us were visual artists (though there were two dancers) and therefore performance was, at times, an awkward affair. And yet much was learnt. Here we tried out those tensions between the old and the new, the real and surreal, the physical and cerebral. It was physical work. And all about the body.
Although cited as a Lab, it was clear that some kind of an outcome, albeit sketchy, was expected for the closing night. And though this is wholly understandable – funders, after all, need to see tangible evidence of what their monies have supported – it tempered our visions too early, making the practical technological demands all too often outweigh the more creative experimental ones. Perhaps this is how it must always be. Nevertheless, and for all the shortcomings involved in having to contain and make safe a complex technological environment for a visiting audience, this was an insightful and hugely rewarding time for me.
As an artist who is used to working with physical matter, I came to this laboratory with a great deal of scepticism and, if I am honest, a modicum of fear. Technology is just not my thing. And yet I ended up hugely enjoying the playfully responsive nature of the media and seeing far more connections than separations in the way that they, and I, work. Some of the pieces we, as a group and as individuals, produced had moments of real, and intimate, beauty that managed to transgress the rather fun-fair-like experience of introducing interactive technology to a new audience. The technical and creative support that we were given was second to none. And yet it was the warm willingness of the group to work together in pushing against their own, and those of the others’, resistance to new modes of expression that gave this project its real, and I hope, enduring value.
Ellen Bell, May 2012
Only Connect Lab was an Aberystwyth Arts Centre (AAC) project supported by Arts Council Wales. The project was designed and managed by AAC Head of Performing Arts, Gill Ogden. Documentation of the project will soon be available on the AAC website – www.aberystwythartscentre.org.uk . For further information please contact Gill Ogden.
