Specificities of the Planetary Room, 2019
performance (collaboration with Harry Meadows)
A live event with two performers facing a climate sensor sculpture and making sound/actions in response to its petulant voiced demands:
'Make it colder! I want windddd!!'
The work plays with fantasy of ‘sonifying’ climate data through staging the sensor and performers themselves as active parts of the climate of the room.
The climate change sensor stands as ritualistic personification - anemometer, barometer and precipitation gauge intertwined with fetish idols and sea creatures. The performance develops from workshops on idiocy and improvisation drawing on the text 'Idioms and Idiots' by Mattin, Ray Brassier, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Murayama Seijiro, where they discuss ‘acknowledging the specificities of the room’. The ‘specificities of the room’ here include the physical setting of the performance; its institutional conditions; habits of performers and audience, and so on, as material for re-shaping. Extending this further, the work asks what happens when the room extends to the planet? What is the capacity of the body-sound-audience machine in the face of incommunicably vast networks of data?
See a video of the performance and documentation of Harry's sculpture at CRITICAL ZONE OBSERVATORY
images: Stills from video documentation of performance of the work (20 mins), at 'Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines', Bath Spa University, July 2019.
