Abstract

Tim Etchells artistic director of the renowned UK performance group Forced Entertainment and photographer Hugo Glendinning will present work from their CD-Rom projects Frozen Palaces and Nightwalks. They will discuss the projects in relation to their experience as artists whose work spans a range of media from theatre and gallery-based performances, sitespecfic>interventions, photography, installation and video. “Our work concerns the relationship(s) between spaces, performance actions, and photography in stills, film or video. Projects have repeatedly explored the construction and deconstruction of narrative from visual and textual fragments and the role of the viewer in navigating space and visual material. Extending these concerns at the heart of our most recent work in digital media is the development of a new language in which narrative can be both made and deconstructed. Utilising and reinventing the possibilities of interactive media our two recent projects Frozen Palaces and Nightwalks have created series of linked navigable 360 panoramas – landscapes of frozen narrative and displaced figures through which the user may move and explore on a computer screen. Indeed, for us the use of Apple’s QTVR as we are employing it in these projects, lies somewhere between installation, cinema and photography itself, allowing a unique opportunity to interrogate the nature of photographic representation and to expand the potential of the medium as it meets digital technology. From installation it takes the active, seeking and mobile gaze of the viewer in 3-dimensional (albeit virtual) space, from cinema it can reference the conventions of moving camera and point-of-view and from photography it can allow us to render the>world as a still moment, a place in which time has been halted…”. In the vast house of “Frozen Palaces” time itself has stopped still. In each room, a series of events – from love affairs through murders, ghostly levitations, parties and even drunken hallucinations – is halted at some banal or significant moment. In this house of interlocking dreams the people or actors themselves have the status of objects -clues to be found and connected. The viewer alone is free to move, explore, and investigate a series of inter-linked scenes of a world full of people and crammed with stories but a world that has stopped completely still. Using Apple’s QuickTime VR (QTVR), “Frozen Palaces” is a ground-breaking collaboration between Britain’s Sheffield-based artists Forced Entertainment and leading arts photographer Hugo Glendinning.

Frozen Palaces research and development was supported by: Arts Council Of England, Combined Arts Department and the Yorkshire Media Production Agency.

Programming and technical consultants: Mary Agnes Krell & Todd Reidy.

• Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment, UK, is an artist and a writer, best known for his work as director of Forced Entertainment, one of the UK’s most prominent and long-lived experimental performance groups. Formed in 1984 they were described recently by The Guardian as “Britain’s most brilliant experimental theatre company..” Etchells has written the text for all of the group’s productions and has directed all of them since 1986. He won a Time Out/London Dance and Performance Award for his text for Emanuelle Enchanted (1992/93). In recent years under Etchells’ direction the group has augmented its performances with projects made especially for galleries and unusual sites, most notably a number of works in collaboration with photographer Hugo Glendinning, including “Frozen Palaces” (CD-ROM) and “Ground Plans For Paradise” (installation). The work also includes “Dreams’ Winter” for Manchester Central Library (1995), which was nominated for a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award, and Nights In This City (1995 and 1997), a performance which took place on a coach trip around Sheffield (and later Rotterdam, NL) and ended with an installation in a huge disused bus depot. In 1998 Etchells led the work on Forced Entertainment’s collaborative writing project on the internet “Paradise”, commissioned by Lovebytes/Channel and open since 23 May. This project invites written contributions from artists and members of the public. Texts and documentations of Etchells’ writing and performance work have been published in diverse places ranging from Art & Design to Language Alive. Etchells has written and published extensively on new performance and installation at conferences, in books and in journals such as Performance Research and Frieze. A collection of his critical/theoretical writing and performance texts titled “Certain Fragments” will be published by Routledge in early 1999. The text for his piece “Quizoola!”, a marathon performance of 2000 questions and answers will be published (in German) by Rowholt in 1998. Documentation of “Ground Plans For Paradise” featured in the most recent edition of the Canadian publication Alphabet City.
• Hugo Glendinning, UK. In 1998, photographer Hugo Glendinning collaborated with Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment (above) to make “Filthy Words & Phrases”, a seven hour video piece in which a lone performer writes a 2000 word catalogue of slang words and sexual obscenities on a blackboard in a deserted schoolroom. Shot in one continuous take with three cameras using a live vision-mix the work premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in a special mixed-media event in the cities most notorious sex cinema. The work was also screened recently at the LEA gallery in London. The previous collaboration between Glendinning and Etchells was titled “DIY” – a ten minute deviant and semi-fictional documentary featuring performance artist Michael Atavar. The film was winner of Best Short Documentary San Francisco Film Festival 1998. Etchells has also published a number of short stories, a collection of which will be published by PulpFaction in 1998 under the title “Bad Lives”. forced.co.uk  Current art-project on the web: PARADISE: lovebytes.org.uk/paradise