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INTIMACY: Across Digital and Visceral Performance Programme

Friday 7 December 2007

09:30 - 13:30 Seminar: The Politics of Intimacy

Leader: Prof. Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University (TBC)

This seminar will look at intimacy as a strategy and/or weapon employed to achieve end results –a means to an end, in performance, technology and everyday life. According to Hanif Kureishi, our era seems un-ideological because “politics has moved inside, into the body. The politics of personal relationships, of private need, of gender, (...) sexuality, (...) have replaced that of society, which seems uncontrollable. ("The Two of Us", http://www.hanifkureishi.com/twoofus.html) It is envisaged that this seminar will explore issues of intimacy in relation to 'the politics inside'.

11:00 - 19:00 Workshop: Bodies of Colour

Leader: Prof. Johannes Birringer, Brunel University of West London

For this workshop, Prof. Birringer suggests a reflection on the art of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (see show at Tate Modern, June-September 2007): “Oiticia moved from abstraction and 2D work to increasingly 3D works, sculptures, then boxes, installations, architectural models and social projects. His work of the 60s and 70s culminates in the Penetraveis and Perangolés series. In the late 70s, just prior to his premature death while in exile in New York, he created several installations called 'Quasi-Cinema' (audio visual installations for the audience-participants, based on his utopian and metaphysical principles of vivencia and the supra-sensorial).

The Perangolés have always attracted my attention, as they are 'wearables' (inhabitable fabrics, colours-in-action). I see them as extraordinary forerunners of our contemporary experiments with wearables. For INTIMACY I will invite the participants to explore the contemporary (technologically augmented and supported) wearable sensorial interface for performance, by wearing special garments with sensors, and interacting in the tactile sensorial manner within the media environment (images, sounds, colours).”

11:00 - 19:00 Workshop: Intimate Live Art

Leader: Kira O'Reilly

Kira O’Reilly is an Irish artist based in the UK. Since 1997 her work has been exhibited widely throughout Europe, Australia and more recently China, where she performed at the DaDao festival in Beijing. In 2004 she was an artist in residence at SymbioticA, the art science collaborative research lab, at the University of Western Australia. She has been the recipient of awards from the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council of England and Artsadmin. O’Reilly employs performance, video, installation, and more recently biomedical and biotechnical practices to consider the body as material, site and metaphor in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot in shifting permutations. The work is explicit, sometimes uncomfortable, and seeks to question rather than provide easy answers. By asking the audience to take a risk, a sense of intimacy is established, creating a direct and immediate dialogue of tender exchanges. O’Reilly’s involvement in INTIMACY is drawn from her extensive practice in explicit formal and experiential manifestations of intimate encounters for her other in performance.

12:00 - 14:00 & 17:00 - 19:00 Poster Presentations

14:00 - 18:00: One to One Performances

Sam Rose

Sam Rose Since 1999, Sam Rose has been showing work nationally and internationally working mainly with performance, video, and text. Her practice is process driven and interdisciplinary in approach, and she has recently worked collaboratively with sound artist Paul Taylor, and costume designers Emma Wilkes and Nadia Malik. Her work has been concerned with the body as a site for exploring issues of gender, sexuality, and desire. Rose is invited to show either a recent one-to-one entitled A Place of Encounter which consists of a half-hour manicure that touches upon our relation to our “other” through the interface of the skin or, funding pending, we will commission a new work on intimacy.

14:00 - 18:00 Seminar: At Risk

Leader: Tracey Warr

Performance analysis underpinned with theoretical philosophy will be incorporated to interrogate manifestations of visceral, psychological and affect-led risk as integral/oppositional qualities of intimate performance works. Tracing the relationship between risk and intimacy, states of inter-action and questions of response-ability will be explored together, it is hoped, with references to the current trend of performances employing a One-to-One format.

19:30 - Launch of Intimacy – Performances

The Endless Forest By Entropy8zuper!

“You are a deer. So are the other players. You meet each other in an endless forest on the internet. The setting is idyllic, the atmosphere peaceful. You communicate with one another through sounds and body language.” Belgium-based artists' duo Tale of Tales will invite you to join them online for an enchanted experience where language is lost and magic things are bound to happen... (Online performance)

Would You Like His Name? By Lucille Calmel www.myrtilles.org (TBC)

“About low screens and hard lovers and stage addictions coming from Internet lists and death and one two three points about charming princes about copying pictures together driving an alphabet about disasters and reveals of being deeply lost into them about daily words and shouts coming from body acts about living loving about mutations of skin related to words about being there, Internet as a love nervous system, e-motions.”

Other Performances TBC