INTIMACY is a culturally urgent series of events designed to address an aesthetically and formally diverse set of responses to the notion of ‘being intimate’.

Intimacy has been constructed as a three-day interdisciplinary programme of events made to illicit connectivity, induce interaction and provoke debate between makers of and witnesses to works that explicitly address proximity and hybridity in performance. Digital and live art performance practices will be used as agents to further practical exploration of and vibrant discourse into intimate inter-actions. Resisting rigid forms of communication such as paper-giving and conference proceedings, collaborative techniques have instead been adopted to platform interactive strategies including workshops, seminars, roundtable discussions and performances. Intimacy is framed as a forum for artists, scholars, community workers, performers, cultural practitioners, researchers and creative thinkers.

Performance and live artists appear to be making work which addresses the disparity and isolation that breeds throughout communities facing direct and indirect conflict. Responding to the cultural climate of acute (in)security, current live art practice is explicitly addressing our relationship to one another in environments of extreme closeness and heightened connectivity. The current explosion in One to One performances (a performer, literally performing to an audience of one), for example, is an encounter that’s becoming increasingly rife in new performance festival showcases. Intimacy will provide a platform for the discussion of sub-cultural practices concerned with displaying intuitive, intimate and visceral relationships between artist and other. As such, it affords contemporary practitioners, theorists and students the opportunity of practical and critical engagement with co-ordinates that currently define these practices.

“How are bodies represented through technology? How is desire constructed through representation? What is the relationship of the body to self-awareness?” [Stone, Allucquère Rosanne The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT Press, 1995, p. 17]

Intimacy will employ these questions as a starting point to explore performance practices that engage in intimate encounters, raising issues around bodies of data and flesh; presence as aura and representation; desire as embodied condition and disembodied fantasy; the human and posthuman self. At the same time, it will explore technologies that can enhance ‘closeness’: networking technologies such as the Internet, wireless networks, telecommunications and Web.02; sensor technologies; virtual reality and other digital multi-user environments. These technologies of inter-subjectivity generate heterotopias that can function as the settings for beautiful and threatening encounters. Intimacy will allow for a hands-on exploration of such technologies as a means for intimate inter-actions in digital and hybrid performance practices.

The final outcome will be an online publication in the form of a media wiki which will host papers, reports, and AV documentation of the diverse events. Parts of the publication, such as the reports and documentation, will be made accessible to everyone to rewrite, re-edit and reuse. Intimacy’s open, collaborative and process-driven publication, rather than offering a fixed outcome edited by a sole author, will aim to ensure a multiplicity of voices and initiate an ongoing discussion and exchange among members of the communities.

Featuring performances, workshops, seminars and a symposium, Intimacy invites established scholars, current researchers, leading and emergent artists and eager audiences to enable the interrogation and creative exploration of formal, aesthetic and affective modes of performing intimacy now.

Intimacy is co-organised by Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x] , PhD Candidate at the Goldsmiths Digital Studios and Drama Department, University of London & Sessional Lecturer at Birkbeck College FCE; and Rachel Zerihan, PhD Candidate at the Performance and Live Art Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University.

Intimacy Committee:

• Prof. Johannes Birringer, Chair in Drama and Performance Technologies, School of Arts, Brunel University of West London; Artistic Director of AlienNation Co.
• Hazel Gardiner, Senior Projects Officer, AHRC ICT Methods Network; Researcher.
• Dr. Adrian Heathfield, Principal Research Fellow (Performance and Live Arts), School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University; Writer; Curator.
• Prof. Janis Jefferies, Artistic Director, Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Director Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles; Artist; Writer; Curator.
• Gerald Lidstone, Head of Drama Department, Goldsmiths University of London.