Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Artistic applications of Art and Technology

Practitioner presentation

Sky-field, performative installation

Short Abstract:

This presentation illustrates the creation process and conceptual framework of Sky-field which took place on September 2018 and February 2019 at Belfast campus of Ulster University. Sky-field is the third artistic research installation of my practice-based PhD that focused to the research design of immersive performative installations (Nollert, 2003) which involved a degree of bodily interaction between the participants and the artwork. The research was informed by the notion of Butoh-body (Kasai, 2000).

Sky-field was a participatory video install-action (Connolly, 1999) where I experimented by implementing video projection within the space. My research question through Sky-field has been addressing and testing out the potentialities of video as medium to enhance the immersive effect of Butoh-body.

During my PhD research, I have been working with different methods and forms of engagement to date. The research design included:

1. stillness and individual fruition in Seabed where the audio input marked the temporality of the piece.
2. small groups’ tasks engaging with materiality and its processual character in Waste-is-land; here the audio input was the recording of a vocal improvisation
3. finally, experimenting with the compresence of audio and video medium while a task given to a broader group was evolving in Sky-field.

In Sky-field, I have been questioning how and whether the medium of video-as part of the whole setting of the installation-may enrich participants’ immersivity.