This Secret Location is an exhibition of extraordinary works by national and international artists who occupy the gap between live and digital practice. Located in Bristol’s L-Shed and Arnolfini’s galleries, back of stage and front of house spaces, This Secret Location is accompanied by a series of unique live performances.
As we navigate the fluid borders between the 'real' and the 'virtual', we are beginning to see the possibility of an ambiguous hybrid of the two. Featuring new commissions and premieres, This Secret Location is a showcase of this hybridity with the works conjuring alternative spaces and intimate transactions exploring the impossible places and ways in which strangers might one day meet.
Works by Alex Bradley and Charles Poulet combine a yearning for the future alongside a certain hopeful anxiety. Whiteplane_2 uses ambisonics and large-scale planes of shimmering light to create a work of beauty and subtle disorientation.
Lynette Wallworth’s work creates gently interactive ecosystems allowing the audience to contribute to the revelation of the work. In Still:Waiting, high-definition video in an eerie twilight combines with a surround soundscape that depicts the dramatic arrival and departure of large flocks of birds.
Japan’s leading electronic composer/artist Ryoji Ikeda pushes digital technologies to the limit, focusing on the minutiae of ultrasonics, and sound as sensation and thereby suggesting a unique orientation for our future. For Inbetween Time, Ikeda presents Spectra II, a narrow, ceiling-covered corridor, allowing only one visitor to enter at a time. Apart from a red laser light marking out its end, this space is almost invisible due to its intense alternating darkness/brightness and inaudible due to its ultra-frequencies. As we pass through the corridor, however, subtle oscillation patterns occur around our ears, caused by your movements interfering with the sounds.
Australian George Poonkhin Khut explores subtle bodily interfaces with technology in his work Cardiomorphologies, a restrained and quietly immersive experience that enables audience’s to observe and eventually interact with their own breathing and heart-rate patterns whilst reclining in a comfortable chair. Breathing and heart-rate data is collected and represented as responsive multi-media objects, whose shape, position, colour, timbre and speed are controlled by corresponding changes in heart rate and breathing.
Our House is caught somewhere between now and then offering the audience the opportunity to wander around the Arnolfini as if it was a 1930s semi detached house stacked full of one family’s history. Daniel Belasco Rogers (plan b) has taken his mum’s house, bought by his grandmother in 1936 and using handheld computers that sense location, has mapped it onto Arnolfini’s interior.
Alongside Whiteplane_2, Alex Bradley has been resident as an Arnolfini Associate Artist developing a new work in progress for This Secret Location. In a (certain) silence, Bradley collaborates with product designer Lee McCormack within a specially modified ‘Ocula’, a pod-shaped device that audiences can explore. The body with its millions of receptors and sensors constantly reminds us of our own fragility. Here Bradley asks are we ever really silent as the audience is quite literally taken back to themselves.
Just as explorations of ‘encounter’ and hybridity emerge from the spectacular installations works within This Secret Location, they can also be found within our unusual programme of complementarily intimate live works.
The ‘kiss-in’ is a live art snog-fest, with a mission to examine and record every type and shape of kiss both as a sculpture and as a digital portrait. Dressed in dental outfits, Charlie Murphy and her assistants invite and proposition pairs and groups of the audience to contribute their unique expression of desire to the project. A dental casting material is spooned into their mouths and they are asked to hold their pose for one minute until it sets. Each mouth and way of kissing creates a unique expression of desire.
‘kiss-in-between’ is a site specific presentation created to respond to the context of This Secret Location and the newly refurbished Arnolfini.The casts and portraits are being collected towards The Anatomy of Desire; an ongoing project which includes erotic glass sculptures, photography and video.
The art of conversation is something of an enigma to Caroline Wright. Her work explores the communicative relationship between people and she has been looking at the roles we adopt during everyday verbal exchanges, challenging the boundaries of personal space through her work and trying to manifest visually the physical act of speaking. What happens at the moment of encounter? What role do you adopt during a warm everyday conversation? What happens when the accepted pattern of conversation is momentarily suspended? And what rituals occur whilst passing time over idle chatter?
Cardiff-based interdisciplinary artist Paul Hurley’s work is primarily concerned with the body - as organism, as signifier, as site of action and resistance. For some time he has been working on a series of performances, durational actions, videos and installations whereby he “becomes' a number of invertebrates. More recently Hurley has been making investigations into love, sexuality and desire. In a new work for Inbetween Time, Hurley will bring together these diverse explorations in an intimate celebration of the flesh, specifically that of a certain sea-dwelling bivalve mollusc. Paul Hurley is supported by an Artsadmin Artist's Bursary and is undertaking a collaborative PhD with Bristol University and Arnolfini.
Since 2003, Eve Dent has been making the ‘anchor series’, a series of impromptu interventions within numerous sites in the UK and abroad. Based around ideas of the body as a medium through which the poetic life of a site or building is expressed, she attempts to fit her body into the nooks, crannies or internal holes or cavities that exist within the architecture. Her work for Inbetween Time will be a playful exploration of the encouter between audience, body and site and also a more dynamic response to environment, influenced by the methods of ‘authentic movement’.
