ORGANISING FOR DISORDER, A CURATED STATE OF LOSS AND FLOW

The questions I ask have come through the positions that my cohorts and I find our selves in when preparing and performing audio visual statements for public creation.

Through performance and reflections on the differing time periods leading up to, during and post play, a model has emerged that embraces the notion of void and the state of loss as a locating metaphor for performance. It is through the understanding of the void as a space that is empty of [ ] and full of [ ] that we can curate through the use of collections a state where we, as a situation—place, performers, machines, media, collaborators and audience—can become lost in a curated ether of disorder.

From this disorder and through the complex streams of action and reaction emerges the temporal artefact flow that serves as both public and personal cognition of the engulfing situation. The emergence of situation based artefact through this metaphor brings to the fore each node that leads to a creation of place, a clearing that for a period is the artefact and the situation.

Through the assumption that an organised disorder will develop, the performer and the performance extends its hand to hold the hands of all. By ‘all’ I refer back to the situation which encompasses the performer, the materials that have been curated, the journeys that lead to the building of collections, the outputs of others including collaborators, machines and audience, the time and space of the act, the self guided qualities of feedback and human techno crashes and finally the unknown of the coming together of a potentially disparate collective.

The engaging contradictions that lie within this model include the position of being lost to find, the complex relationships of the empty and the full, being and not being and disordered order. In all everything is, and is not, at any given period, a period defined by shifting markers designating the in and out, depending upon the needs of the creative process.

Through this paper I will be exploring the role of the curated collection as being the foundation of performance. This has emerged through reflection on performances that I have conducted and witnessed over the past three years and drawing on phenomenological theorem and the wanderings and writings of the Situationists.