Same/Everything

Liquid Architecture & Firstdraft

23.08.16 18:00-21:00pm

Four performers, two from Liquid Architectures Autotune Everything: Art and the Sonic–Cosmic–Politic program, two from Firstdraft's Same Same program.

Johannes Kreidler (Germany) + Seth Kim Cohen (USA) + Roslyn Helper (Sydney) + Chunyin Rainbow Chan (Sydney)

Two plus two equals Same/Everything.

These experimental projects explore consensus, standardisation, sameness and their opposites.

JOHANNES KREIDLER: The more unmusical, the better.

A series of conceptual pieces for solo performer and video. Reality in music is the reality of music, concepts are dissonances for advanced listeners.

We are Duchampions.

SETH KIM-COHEN: The be in bathos equals the pee in pathos (except at the bathhouse)

Your body doesn’t behave. Doesn’t behave like someone else’s body appears to behave. Your body’s agency isn’t one with its effects like someone else’s always is. You can tell it what to do. But that’s not the same as telling what it does. You are, in this sense, like the manager of a wayward ward. You are dancing – your body and the body of your charge. Though you’re not in charge. Tell us what you plan to do before you go. We’ll be waiting.

(Something like a dance with appropriated video and narration in what appears to be someone else’s style, possibly 1975 (or 1978?), San Francisco.)

CHUN YIN RAINBOW CHAN: Chan will be performing Western pop songs from 1996 as Cantonese “bootleg” versions. Since immigrating to Australia from Hong Kong in that year, English has fiercely supplanted Cantonese to become her dominant language. Chan is interested in exploring nostalgia, miscommunication and assimilation via generic translation platforms such as Google Translate. A convenient tool that facilitates global circulation of knowledge and capital, Google Translate is a symbol of personal shame and loss of culture for the artist. The songs will be sung in Chinese but will remain faithful to the original melody. This will, in turn, generate numerous tonal errors and render the already-imperfect Chinese translations completely absurd

ROSLYN HELPER: Roslyn will present a performance lecture titled "Summation of Life (Detail) Part 2". Roslyn has used hashtag searches to trawl instagram over a period of months, screenshotting and organising thousands of posts to create a portrait of an average global human. This performance works in counterpoint to Summation of Life (Detail) Part 1, a film that uses predictive text and stock footage to present uncannily familiar human experiences. Presented together, these two works - one generated with predictive technologies and the other generated by humans and organised via a global archiving system - make visible the electronic infrastructures that frame our thoughts, feelings and actions, bringing into question notions of creative agency, emotional authenticity and the feedback loops that constitute our identities.

Biography

Seth Kim-Cohen is a guest of Monash Art Design & Architecture
Johannes Kreidler is supported by Goethe Institut

Liquid Architecture is an Australian organisation for artists working with sound. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound.