RealTime is Australia's largest arts magazine providing quality writing about innovation in the arts focusing on contemporary performance, dance, music, sound art, visual art and new media art. RealTime are conducting an intensive 10-day writing workshop inviting selected writers to join the editorial team in responding to the festival. Writings will be completed and submitted in morning sessions, edited and then placed online later in the day. You can access their work on www.realtimearts.net
THE WORKSHOP
RealTime-Inbetween Time will be a fast and intensive writing workshop. Participants will share their responses to works in exercise sessions and in the festival with each other and the editorial team. Responses to works seen in the festival will be completed and submitted in morning sessions, edited and then placed online later in the day.
Participation in the workshop requires a willingness to write on the run, the courage to frankly discuss your writing with fellow writers and the editors and to commit to the intensity of the festival experience. Having to write about a festival as it unfolds adds great depth to that experience, sharpens the senses and strengthens writing skill.
RealTime’s commitment is to what we call experiential writing. We believe that the writer’s first commitment is to creating an economic, accurate and vivid evocation of the work experienced. This requires of the writer a heightened descriptive capacity and the willingness to suspend the rush to judgement. Of course, you will judge the work, implicitly or explicitly, in due course in your review, but we want the reader to have a shared a sense of the work. This is not a plea for objectivity, rather for a considered subjectivity in which the phenomenogical loop between artwork and viewer is central to the review. Nor does it rule out theoretical considerations, but we believe that these remain abstract unless rooted in the immediate experience of the work.
STAGE 1
In the first 2 days of the workshop, the writers will meet with the editors to discuss the nature of reviewing, especially of new and emerging practices, to engage in writing exercises and shared editing, and to plan the allocation of festival works to be reviewed.
STAGE 2
In the course of the festival (Feb 1-5), RealTime will publish reviews online as soon as possible, once they have been discussed and edited. The editors will work with individual writers and small groups, sharing and fine tuning these quick turnaround responses.
STAGE 3
In the 3 days after the festival (Feb 6-8), final reviews will be edited and placed online, overviews of the festival discussed and the workshop collectively assessed.
EDITORIAL TEAM
Keith Gallasch PROJECT MANAGER/EDITOR
Keith Gallasch, Managing Editor, RealTime. Keith is a writer, performer and dramaturg, and a founding editor of RealTime (1994). He has co-edited the In Repertoire series for the Australia Council including the Guide to Australian New Media Art. Keith’s Art in a Cold Climate: Re-thinking the Australia Council, was published in October 2004 by Currency House as part of their Platform Paper series of essays on arts issues.
Virginia Baxter EDITOR
Virginia Baxter, Managing Editor, RealTime. Virginia is a writer, performer and dramaturg, and a founding editor of RealTime (1994). Virginia has written on performance, dance and photomedia for RealTime, has co-edited the In Repertoire series for the Australia Council, has been Chair of Playworks, the national organisation for women writing for performance, and is currently working as dramaturg and writer on 2 performance projects.
Gail Priest EDITOR/WEB MANAGER
Gail Priest, Associate Editor, RealTime. Gail is a writer, curator, performer and sound artist. She was Co-director of Electrofringe 2003-04, the national new media arts laboratory, and has written extensively on sound art and new media art for RealTime. She curated d>Art.04 Sound for dLux media arts in the 2004 Sydney International Film Festival and is currently working on a CD of recent compositions.
An important part of February’s visiting writer Richard Dedomenici is February's Visiting Writer. Richard's practice involves the production of small independent publications that are often irreverent, thought- provoking and funny. Throughout February, Richard will be curating a display of his work for the Arnolfini bookshop cabinet. A one-man subversive think-tank, Richard Dedomenici’s poetic acts of low-grade civil disobedience forcibly ask pertinent questions of society. Richard will also be leading a tour of the Inbetween Time Festival (details to be announced as part of the IBT programme) and will return to Arnolfini on 2 March to give a presentation that will include a new piece of work commissioned by Arnolfini.
You can also read Richard's contributions on www.dedomenici.blogspot.com
Inbetween Time can inspire people to write; this part of the site aims to capture the results of this inspiration. Our first submission is from Raj Patel who works for Arup Acoustics.
In everyday life it is common for our sense of the visual to override the auditory. But so much of what we experience and how we experience it is informed as much by what we hear as what we see. As an experiment, go somewhere you are familiar with and close your eyes. Listen. And you'll know what I mean. You can define a staggering amount about your surroundings by listening alone. Now close your eyes and listen again. I mean really listen. This time think about where the sounds are coming from. Suddenly you should reawaken a sense that you only use subconsciously; you listen in 3d. You can hear sound coming from all around you and precisely pinpoint where they are coming from and where they are going. Do it now if you haven't tried it. Now you are ready to experience Whiteplains2.
The installation is as much about the visual as it is about sound. The creators, Alex Bradley and Charlie Poulet want to you interact with it and immerse yourselves in it. The piece is a bold departure in audio visual art and represents the first installation of its kind, the genesis and uniqueness of which, we hope, will interest you.
I met the creators in Gateshead, December 2004 when they were in residency at The Baltic Flour Mills Art Gallery. At the time, as acoustician for The Sage Gateshead, I was testing the acoustics of three different music spaces with a variety of musicians. In our work, for a number of years, we have been using a unique environment called Arup SoundLab to listen to how spaces are going to sound before they are built, comparing them to known benchmarks. It uses a sound reproduction technique called ambisonics. Twelve loudspeakers create a sphere of sound in the lab. At the very centre of the sphere we can exactly reproduce the timing, direction and strength of sound reflections in any space, allowing us to accurately render how they sound and use it to design better acoustics. We created the tool not only to improve our design palette but also to allow our clients and architects to listen to the spaces too, taking design away from the visual and helping them to understand how to shape architecture and materials for better sound.
Alex, Charlie and I hatched a plan to use the ambisonic system to create an audio aspect to an art work taking full advantage of how we listen in 3d. They bought the sounds to our studio in New York with a conceptual framework of the dynamics and movement. A suite of tools in MaxMSP created by Alban Bassuet allowed the artists to manipulate the sounds in both time and space. The piece is unique in depth and colour as sounds emerge far beyond the architectural boundaries of the gallery, travelling on individual journeys, dancing and weaving with each other on the way. The sounds move through you and around you. The composition varies depending on where you stand, offering a multitude of experiences.
This is the first project in our collaboration to move audio visual art work into a new experiential domain for the audience and challenging your senses. I hope you have as much fun with it as Alban, and I did being part of the process of making it happen. Thanks to Alex and Charlie for being up for it and making it all their own.
Raj Patel, Arup Acoustics, New York, January 2006.
