Panel Statement

Panel: Re-rooting Digital Culture: Media Art Ecologies

MAKE-SHIFT is a house party, a chat room, a slide show and a per­for­mance process – a live event for the 21st cen­tury that re-imag­ines the pri­vate ac­tions of our do­mes­tic lives as mul­ti­ple, in­ter­con­nected and with global con­se­quences. make-shift hap­pens si­mul­ta­ne­ously be­tween two or­di­nary houses and a be­spoke on­line per­for­mance space ac­ces­si­ble to any­one, any­where with a broad­band con­nec­tion. Two per­form­ers (one in each house) work with house­hold ob­jects, re­cy­cling rub­bish and cy­ber­for­mance tools to bro­ker in­ter­ac­tion and dis­cus­sion be­tween local and re­mote au­di­ences in a type of per­for­ma­tive salon. This per­for­mance pre­sen­ta­tion of MAKE-SHIFT ad­dresses the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of nest­ing and feed­ing, the re­la­tion­ships be­tween mo­bil­ity and be­com­ing un­stuck. It thinks about how, con­trary to our feel­ing of po­lit­i­cal dis­em­pow­er­ment, our small daily ac­tions ac­cu­mu­late and ir­rev­o­ca­bly trans­form the world we live in. It talks about stuff and how it breaks down – and that how ever hard you try to make it go away – noth­ing is ever re­ally gone – just re-arranged.

• Paula Crutchlow lives with her fam­ily in Ex­eter, Devon. She grad­u­ated in Dance from De Mont­fort Uni­ver­sity, and in 2000 com­pleted an MA in De­vised The­atre at Dart­ing­ton Col­lege of Arts, UK where she was an As­so­ci­ate Lec­turer in The­atre until their re­lo­ca­tion to Fal­mouth in 2010. Paula has worked in Britain and in­ter­na­tion­ally as a per­former, di­rec­tor and tutor of move­ment and de­vised the­atre. As a co-founder and Artis­tic Di­rec­tor of Blind Ditch she has col­lab­o­rated on con­text-spe­cific col­lab­o­ra­tive art, per­for­mance and cul­tural events which en­gage au­di­ences and par­tic­i­pants in dis­tinct ways through the use of dig­i­tal media and live per­for­mance.
• Helen Var­ley Jamieson is a writer, the­atre prac­ti­tioner and dig­i­tal artist from New Zealand. In 2008 she com­pleted a Mas­ter of Arts (re­search) at Queens­land Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy (Aus­tralia) in­ves­ti­gat­ing her prac­tice of cy­ber­for­mance – live per­for­mance on the in­ter­net – which she has been de­vel­op­ing for over a decade. She is a found­ing mem­ber of the glob­ally-dis­persed cy­ber­for­mance troupe Avatar Body Col­li­sion, and the pro­ject man­ager of Up­Stage, an open source web-based plat­form for cy­ber­for­mance. Using Up­Stage, she has co-cu­rated on­line fes­ti­vals in­volv­ing artists and au­di­ences around the world. Helen is also the “web queen” of the Mag­dalena Pro­ject, an in­ter­na­tional net­work of women in con­tem­po­rary the­atre.