PERFORMING CRITICAL RESEARCH

The scope of the project is to prioritise the experience of political performance, and create a "feedback loop" where performers perform to recordings of audience and artist criticism. Each month I assign new case studies, spanning post-dramatic theatre, direct political action, live art and opera. I interview (digitally) the people involved as well as audience members, and record all the audio and visual information.

I’m developing digital instruments in tutorials with Doctoral Researcher Jonathan Packham and Edward Henderson (Bastard Assignments) that use webcams to read performance gestures (ie dance and lip-movement). The interview recordings are fed into this instrument, and the gestural information then alters the quality of the sounds in real time (such as changing the pitch, shredding the sound, or layering voices on top of each other). By using my body to affect the clarity of my research, I communicate the important of stillness, listening, and disappearing.