6:30 for 7:00 Tuesday 10 July 2007

Ecology, Performance and Collaboration - Embodying Intimate Transactions.

The Screen on Gordon Square
Birkbeck
43 Gordon Sq
London
WC1H 0PD

Nearest tubes - Euston Square, Warren Street, Russell Square.

As part of this year's EVA Conference, Australian media artist Keith Armstrong is giving a talk for CAS.

Intimate Transactions is a dual site, telematic installation currently been shown in the US. It allows two people located in separate spaces to interact simultaneously using only their bodies (predominantly their backs and feet), using two identical interfaces called 'Bodyshelves'. During a 30-minute, one-on-one session their physical actions allow them to individually and collaboratively explore immersive environments. Each participant's own way of interacting results in quite different, but interrelated animated and generative imagery, real time generated audio (seven channels), and three channels of haptic feedback (felt in the stomach and back). This experience allows each participant to begin to sense their place in a complex web of relations that connect them and everything else within the work.

Intimate Transactions is an investigation in creating embodied experiences that are both performative and improvisational by harnessing individual, performative languages of 'untrained' bodies as a means to engender understandings of 'ecological' relationship. It arose from a deep collaboration between media artists, performance practitioners, sound artists, hardware and software engineers, a furniture maker and a scientific ecologist. Our entire process was informed by a praxis-led approach to art making that stressed embodied connectivity and inseparability. This allowed us to understand how participants might move within the constraints of a particular interface, allowing us to shape and form the overall phrasing and sensibilities of their experiences, whilst maintaining the unique nature of their collaborative experiences. In this presentation Keith will discuss his practice-led research approach and illustrate the presentation with videos, images and sound (www.intimatetransactions.com).

Keith Armstrong is an Australian/English interdisciplinary media artist, Australia Council New Media Arts Fellow, Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Creative Industries Research Fellow and has just finished a Visiting Professorship at Calpoly State University, California, working in collaboration with their Liberal Arts and Architecture Faculties.

His recent work Intimate Transactions, created with the Transmute Collective, received an Honorary Mention in the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica and featured in the 2005 Ars Electronica Festival in Austria. His latest interactive installation, Shifting Intimacies, was presented at the ICA London in March 2006.

Email: keith@embodiedmedia.com
Web: www.embodiedmedia.com