>>>>>>>>>>moved>>>>>>>>>>

The yet untitled new work by choreographer Luke George has just finished the first development. As the video artist I have been engaged in some rigorous discussions about what the work could be and where it could go (and I have also been making some video as well).

It is always and interesting thing when you begin a process about how clear the ideas are and where your medium fits with that form. This work is being built from the dancers working from the floor, and is about what is in the room at the time, there are no steps built from outside the room then brought in.

One thing I really enjoyed from this development was the sense that everything was connected and we were building one long piece and although there are 8 collaborators all contributing at all times there is a collective consciousness which is evolving. This has come from Luke G working with Ben Cisterne (Lighting), Luke Smiles and Frog (Production Manager) for years with Stompin, dancing with Kristy and Tim for a number of projects, working with me on LIFE SIZE and with Ede Strong (Costume) as a friend and colleague. But it is also something specific to this work, all throughout the past few weeks two artists would come in with the same idea - it started to become quite spooky, but was also an affirmation that we were all on the right track

So now seeing the art is going so well, all we need to do is think of a name for the work. Nachos, Barbeque Shapes and Granny Smiths are currently top of the charts…

I am taking part in Not Yet its Difficult’s dramaturgical project Meetings and Conversations at the Meat Market in North Melbourne. Today was a day of discussion around making work which was very inspiring and left me feeling excited about where I am and the collaborations I have.

The group was a varied collection of directors, writers, designers, sound artists and visual artists. Willoh and myself were paired with Scott Rankin (Big hART) who we will now continue a working relationship with into the future.

Of the many and varied things discussed, there were some that really connected with me. I began talking about wanting to be a part of an ensemble and that it was something I had wanted for a long period of time since my early days of performing in Tasmania. I had seen work by companies like Les Ballets C de la B and had been totally enamoured by the depth of the work and the connection that the performers had with each other. This came from training nine months together every day to make work. What I had realised whilst sitting there talking about all that was that I had found a different type of ensemble, a new type of working relationship with Willoh.

We are working as a duo, creating work quickly and not being constrained by funding bodies or timelines. And to this David Pledger said a great thing - some artists go through a stage where they replicate the structures that are already out there, but some see what is there and adjust by creating something new. And whilst what we are doing is not a new structure it feels good to be building something that is a) a continuing practice b) is on our own terms and c) (hopefully) is sustainable financially.

Alex Gibson was there as part of his company X:Machine and I thought that his comments about open source software was really exciting. He made links between the way that this non-commercially driven code was being distributed and the way that artists work together. Both groups work collaboratively on projects, they aren’t driven by money and what is created in the end is disseminated in an open way.

I had never made these links before - it always seemed to me like there was a psychological distance between collaborating real world artists and artists working ‘virtually’ together. I guess the fact you don’t know who you are collaborating with online - I always felt like movements like wiki’s and open source were more like a bee hive situation where you work away doing your job and in the end you are making a difference to the whole, but you don’t understand the whole. The genius to this is that you have no ego involved because you don’t know who you are working with, you are just making it better. In contemporary arts collaboration you most certainly do know who you are working with and ego most certainly does come into play…

A day of creating the fifth in Simon Terril’s Crowd Theory series. This large scale photographic work was filmed on toxic ground near the Melbourne ports. I was a marshall for the event and it was great to meet so many diverse people from the ports, Footscray and beyond. There was especially interest in the very present friction between the ports and the green groups over the bay dredging and other issues.

The Inhabited Man
Richard Murphett and Leisa Shelton
25th July 2008, Space 28 VCA, Melbourne

Sometimes I wonder how reviewers do it - how do they manage to level out their feelings about works from one day to the next?

In the day to day hurly-burly of inner city life, one’s state of being appears to be constantly in flux. So how then could you feel like you were giving each show justice? I guess you could have a ranking system of some sort with a selection of marks for each part of the work. Again even if you tried to rationalise each element of a show in the end you are still being subjective.

Which brings me to The Inhabited Man, by Richard Murphett and Leisa Shelton, which I saw thursday night. There were many parts of this work that I loved and I was moved to tears on one occasion, HOWEVER, something just didnt happen for me - that magical je ne sais qua that makes it all click inside you. It was difficult, and I wonder if it was supposed to be that way?

The way that all the media came together was seamless, I remember one moment where I was listening to a voice over of a woman coming from a speaker in the centre back of the stage, whilst simultaneously hearing the main character speaking, reading text on a screen and also listening to a soundtrack. And while all of this was commendable and I indeed love to take in as much information as possible I began to wonder about how much resonance was being felt due to such an overload.

Now was this ‘non-click’ due to a long and tiring week for me? Or did things just not quite happen? The performances were great, (Merfyn Owen especially), the writing was solid (although the puzzling Polish angle had me a little bamboozled) and the imagery was beautiful.

I guess in retrospect I feel like I should be allowed to have an off day and that the way that I feel about that particular work should not be judged harshly. After all we are not robots. Which in the end is the thing that I most took away from The Inhabited Man. The main character was not a robot, and to expect him to be ‘normal’ and judge him by the normal rules that society has laid down is not fair, especially for someone who has seen what he has seen and done the things he has done.

Oh yes and a power ballad as a coda, it wouldn’t matter how I felt - I would never like that…

Photo of projection screen in Flesh Fest.

LIFE SIZE team plus guest performer Brooke Stamp and lighting operator Heath Barrett

Pics from the event Pure Pleasure part of the Nightclub Project, Next Wave Festival 2008.

LIFE SIZE performed 2 works - Flesh Fest and also Charles in Charge.

I am currently working with Luke, Luke and Kristy on putting the finishing touches on a LIFE SIZE tour to PICA (perth institute of contemporary art) which will happen in November this year.

Last night I went to see the Dark Knight.

For my own interest all through the plotline was scattered references about chance, chaos vs order and psychological gameplay.

The Joker described himself as an agent of chaos and then aided in the turning of Harvey Dent into an ‘agent of chance’. Games were set up where Batman and the police had to make a choice about what to do or where to put their resources at any one time. “Kill this man in 60 minutes or I blow up a hospital” or “She is in one place, he is in another - who are you going to save?”

But the moment in the film that was the most satisfying (both in terms of my game research and also just generally) was the sequence where the two ferry boats have been given detonators to bombs on the opposite ferry. This is a version of a classic game theory problem known as The Prisoner’s Dilemma;

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (”defects”) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

In this game, regardless of what the opponent chooses, each player always receives a higher payoff (lesser sentence) by betraying; that is to say that betraying is the strictly dominant strategy. For instance, Prisoner A can accurately say, “No matter what Prisoner B does, I personally am better off betraying than staying silent. Therefore, for my own sake, I should betray.” However, if the other player acts similarly, then they both betray and both get a lower payoff than they would get by staying silent. Rational self-interested decisions result in each prisoner’s being worse off than if each chose to lessen the sentence of the accomplice at the cost of staying a little longer in jail himself. Hence a seeming dilemma.

So, the odds are clearly with ‘betrayal’, you are generally better off.

However the amazing thing about this exercise when played for real - the players in this situation will NOT betray the other ‘prisoner’. Why is this? Is it too naive and optimistic to believe that people are good? that they will do the ‘right’ thing?

In the case of the people on the ferries in Dark Knight, they chose not to blow the other people up. The effect of this in the film was to elevate these regular, normal people into the fabric of the storyline. We were no longer watching the Joker and Batman play out some sort of iconic godlike battle above the city, it was no longer about order vs chaos it was purely empathy for another person like oneself.

Whilst cutting some documentation footage today for The Outside I saw a frame that reminded me of an image I have seen around the melbourne interwebs for a while - this one;

which is Rollergrooves (Tai Snaith and Narinda Reeders) a performance installation duo working in Melbourne for a number of years.

And this image which i was editing yesterday. It is from the making of a scene between the mother and father in The Outside. This was during the National Script Workshop last week. Strange ghostly coincidences…

Yesterday I saw Tim Webster’s Affective Urbanism 4 at Kings Gallery in Melbourne’s CBD.

He has made two beautiful ‘video objects’ for this exhibition. One a six screen homage to the car indicator light and the other a rather stoic upright two screen look at traffic lights.

I am not a great gallery goer at the best of times, I will sweep through even the most big name galleries ticking artworks off as though they were sprint points on the Tour de France. It takes something of great interest and usually something moving (imagery, machines, people, something….) to make me stop.

And on first look Tim’s exhibition could have been one that would have been caught up in the flurry of moving to the next artwork. I was lucky enough that Tim was able to show me the work himself which meant I spent more time with it than I would have normally, and this was when I truly understood what the work was on about.

In the car indicator light piece (I didn’t catch the titles - bad me) was where I saw a glimpse of what i have been researching - the game. All six indicators had their own timing, all six video loops had their own length and depending on the file size were being played back at different speeds. So each individual blink of the light was sliding against the other blinks in an entirely random sequence, sometimes they would sync up, other times they would connect for periods of time across lines, but never the same.

There was something John Cageian about the piece, in allowing things to fall where they may within a set of structured rules. I was talking to a colleague Kelly Ryall tonight about a project we will begin in August called Perfection which is a sound and video piece and he was talking about game theory, and saying that there is a theory that we are always in a game. Even as we were sitting there talking, his responses were part of a game he was playing with me. Again, as I write this blog I am teetering on the brink of a public/private game with myself and with anyone who may read this.

This is somewhere I had got to in my own research and thinking, but in Tim’s work I saw the game being played out in a very real and tangible sense.

I have wondered why it took me so long to become enamoured with this piece? Was it because of the small size - would it have had more impact upon me if the lights had have taken up more of my eyespace? Or did I need to see it in the dark? I actually got Tim to turn the lights off (what a demanding artwanker I am) and I did like it better (but I guess then you miss the object that the screens are encased in).

Anyhow, I liked the rhythm - it has made me think about the new Luke George piece I am starting next week and how I want to cut something that is rhythmical with bodies in it….

I had a small moment today as I was walking to Kings gallery in Melbourne’s CDB, when I inadvertently saw a picture of a semi-naked girl on the front page of the Herald Sun with the caption underneath “Mum defends 10 year old bodybuilder”. As I looked at the picture (this is her underneath wearing a lot more clothes than the fullsize front cover photo did) I shook my head, almost bemused. I started thinking that it was ridiculous that the parents were allowed to enter her and that her body hadn’t developed for her to be in a competition like this etc etc etc blah blah blah…….

In my righteousness, I shook my head at the parents from afar. However almost immediately I began to link this “outrage” to the Bill Henson media extravaganza that has been playing out over the past few weeks in the Australian media. Of course, who couldn’t draw parallels? children in compromised positions, sexualisation of minors, questionable guardianship, media beatup…

What is the difference between the parents of the bodybuilding girl and the parents of the subjects in Bill Henson’s photos?

Now, up until now I had been defending Bill Henson’s right to express his art, but I wonder if the fact that I am an artist has clouded my viewpoint on this? If I was a member of the Bodybuilding fraternity would I think that this was all a media beatup and there is nothing wrong with kids getting fit? After all, we are now the fattest nation on earth.

Deadpan coming to Newcastle in October.

I have a penchant (some may call it a weakness) for an instructional video. I do not know why, but it makes me want to make one. Above are some of the choice cuts from regional NSW opportunity shops. I am quite excited to get back to Melbourne and view the gold that is within.