INTIMACY in London, 7-9 Dec. 2007

INTIMACY

Across Visceral and Digital Performance

intimateperformance

Goldsmiths | Laban | The Albany | Home | Online

7, 8 & 9 December

THREE DAYS OF PERFORMANCES, WORKSHOPS, SEMINARS, SHOW & TELL PRESENTATIONS, HAPPENINGS and a 1-DAY SYMPOSIUM

LOADS OF FREE EVENTS
LAUNCH: FRIDAY 7 DEC., 6:30-11PM @ GOLDSMITHS

 

INTIMACY is a three-day digital and live art programme made to elicit connectivity, induce interaction and provoke debate between cutting edge artists, performers, leading scholars, respected researchers, creative thinkers and local communities. INTIMACY is designed to address a diverse set of responses to the notion of ‘being intimate’ in contemporary performance and as such, in life. You are personally invited to enable the interrogation and creative exploration of formal, aesthetic and affective modes of performing intimacy now.
Please note: Knowledge East is offering 2 BURSARIES worth 500 GBP each, for student workshop participants who will submit a successful application for an enterprise project inspired by any of the 4 INTIMACY workshops. Grab the chance!
INTIMACY features:

FRIDAY 7 DEC:
One-to-one performances with Adrian Howells and Helena Goldwater @ Home (Booking Required | Limited Capacity)
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/programme.php#friday
Workshops with Prof. Johannes Birringer (Ticketed | Book Now, Limited Capacity) and Kira O’Reilly (Sold Out) @ Laban, Godsmiths campus
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/workshops.php
Seminars with Mine Kaylan and Tracey Warr @ Goldsmiths (Ticketed | Book Now, Limited Capacity)
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/seminars.php
Launch with Live Performances & Gigs @ Goldsmiths from 6:30pm. FREE, come along!
Featuring: SUKA OFF, Blind Ditch, Atau Tanaka, Ernesto Sarezale, Adam Overton, Avatar Body Collision, Joe Stevens, Mark Cooley, Leonore Easton & Boris Hoogeveen, Frank Millward, Eva Sjuve & Chantal Zakari
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/programme.php#friday

SATURDAY 8 DEC:
Workshops with Kelli Dipple (Sold Out), Alan Sondheim and Prof. Sandy Baldwin (FREE, booking required) @ Goldsmiths and Second Life
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/workshops.php
Seminars with Dominic Johnson and Paul Sermon (Ticketed | Book Now, Limited Capacity)
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/seminars.php
Performances with Fran Cottell (booking required), Lauren Goode (booking required), Helena Walsh & Chris Johnston @ Goldsmiths. FREE
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/programme.php#sat
Show & Tell Presentations, Screenings and Posters @ Goldsmiths. FREE, come along!
Featuring: body>data>space, Jaime del Val, kondition pluriel, Nikki Tomlinson, Jan van der Crabben,
Branislava Kuburovic, Lena Simic & Gary Anderson, Clara Ursitti, Jo Wonder, Anna Dimitriu, Elena Cologni, Georgia Chatzivasileiadi, Freya Hattenberger, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Eva Sjuve Daniel Agnihotri-Clark, Donna Rutherford, Annie Abrahams & Nicolas Frespech, Michael Pinchbeck & Claudia Kappenberg. Chairing: Teresa Dillon, Ghislaine Boddington, Simon Donger, Roberta Mock, Tim Jones.
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/show-tell.php
Performances @ The Albany. FREE, come along!
Featuring: Martina von Holn (booking required), Michelle Browne, Leena Kela, Sam Rose, Jess Dobkin, Pierre Bongiovanni, Camille Renarhd & Gael Guyon, Rachelle Beaudoin, Caroline Smith, Jaime del Val (ticketed).
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/programme.php#sat
Premiere of Suna No Onna by Dans Sans Joux @ Laban. (Ticketed | Book Now, Limited Capacity)
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/programme.php#sat
Intimacy Meal @ The Albany, £10 p/p. Booking required, email Owen: performintimacy@googlemail.com
SUNDAY 9 DEC:
Symposium @ Goldsmiths (Ticketed | Book Now, Limited Capacity)
Featuring: Amelia Jones, Paul Sermon, Tracey Warr, Mine Kaylan, Dominc Johnson, Kelli Dipple, Kira O’Reilly, Johannes Birringer, Adrian Heathfield, Janis Jefferies, Lizbeth Goodman, Jess Dobkin, Simon Jones, Ang Bartram, Anita Ponton. With performances /events by Adam Overton, Rachel Gomme, Hiwa K. & Anaesthesia Associates
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/symposium.php

ALSO:
7 & 8/12: Urban Workshop with Pierre Bongiovanni, Camille Renarhd & Gael Guyon (Booking Required) FREE
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/programme.php#urban
Throughout: Online Performance by Susana Mendes Silva (booking required); Phone performance by Bernadette Louise; One-to-one event by Chris Dugrenier; Promenade performance by Lisa Alexander
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/intimacy/programme.php#thro
We hope to see you at this event that -between you and me- you just cannot miss….

INTIMACY is co-directed by: Maria X [aka Maria Chatzichristodoulou] & Rachel Zerihan.

The INTIMACY Board are: Prof. Johannes Birringer, Prof. Janis Jefferies, Gerald Lidstone, Prof. Adrian Heathfield, Hazel Gardiner

INTIMACY Across Visceral and Digital Performance is supported by: AHRC ICT Methods Network; Goldsmiths, University of London [Digital Studios, Graduate School, Dpt. of Computing, Dpt. of Drama, Dpt. of Media and Communications, Dpt. of Visual Cultures, Dpt. of Music, Centre for Cultural Studies); Knowledge East; Laban; The Albany and Home.


					

INTIMACY – BOOK NOW!

INTIMACY PROGRAMME:

FRIDAY 7 DECEMBER

10:00-17:00 [Home London]
One-to-One Performances – Programme TBC soon, check website for regular updates

10:00-14:00 [Graduate School Seminar Rooms]
SEMINAR: THE TIME IT TAKES TO TRUE
Leader: MINE KAYLAN, Goldsmiths/University of Sussex
The seminar will investigate a poetics of live interaction with particular attention to time as a significant vector in ‘meaningful’ exchange. Within the context of proximal and of telematic /virtual environments, how does the play of time work in what we might identify as poetic exchange, which we yearn for, recognize as precious, pay good money to experience? What is ‘intimacy’ within these terms? What can we learn from cinema makers about structures of time and visual rhythm in interactions through telemotion? These are some questions I am sucking on, still.
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacytimetotrue.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

11:00-17:00 [Laban Studio at Goldsmiths Campus]
WORKSHOP: BODIES OF COLOUR
Leader: PROF. JOHANNES BIRRINGER, Brunel University of West London
For this workshop, Prof. Birringer suggests a reflection on the art of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (see show at Tate Modern, June-September 2007): “Oiticia moved from abstraction and 2D work to increasingly 3D works, sculptures, then boxes, installations, architectural models and social projects. His work of the 60s and 70s culminates in the Penetraveis and Perangolés series. In the late 70s, just prior to his premature death while in exile in New York, he created several installations called ‘Quasi-Cinema’ (audio visual installations for the audience-participants, based on his utopian and metaphysical principles of vivencia and the supra-sensorial). The Perangolés have always attracted my attention, as they are ‘wearables’ (inhabitable fabrics, colours-in-action). I see them as extraordinary forerunners of our contemporary experiments with wearables. For INTIMACY I will invite the participants to explore the contemporary (technologically augmented and supported) wearable sensorial interface for performance, by wearing special garments with sensors, and interacting in the tactile sensorial manner within the media environment (images, sounds, colours).”
Tickets: 11.5 GBP, concessions 7.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacybodies.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

10:00-18:00 [Laban Studio at Goldsmiths Campus]
WORKSHOP: INTIMATE DETAILS ONLY
Leader: KIRA O’REILLY

Dispersed, elaborated and localised intimacies cluster and move between the complex webs of you and I.
Drag lines and spindles of utterances.
Radical tangos.
Scalpels teasing tissue apart.

Peculiar occurrences of confidence and trust, wonderment and astonishment manifest, unannounced from our reassembling and disassembling of events that unfold, processes that cascade in our designed moments of actions, performances, makings and unmakings.

Sometimes it means that someone thinks I love them. Or that they have love me. It gets all mixed up.

Perhaps we can figure out how to occupy some of the pauses, lapses and moments within this conflicting and confusing concept of intimacy.
Perhaps not.
Perhaps we initiate wilful failures and radical dissociations.
Perhaps we will break our hearts in some disastrous dissasemblage.

Tickets: 11.5 GBP, concessions 7.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacydetails.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

14:00-18:00
SEMINAR: AT RISK [Goldsmiths: Graduate School Seminar Room]
Leader: TRACEY WARR
Body Art puts an other human body in your lap in live performance, photographic document or on screen image. It has often made hard looking for audiences. It asks what is it to be human and what is it to be humane. In this workshop we will examine our own responses, responsibilities and complicities in relation to a range of historical and contemporary artists’ work, including Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Bruce Gilchrist, Marcus Coates, He Yun Chang and Mark Raidpere. We will consider our responses in relation to differing modes of proximity – as viewers of live performances, photographic documents and on screen images.
We will examine a range of theoretical positions on the issues of empathy and responsibility. In the 1930s psychologist Paul Schilder argued for a shared ontology between bodies, claiming that ‘the laws of identification and of communication between images of the body make one’s suffering and pain everybody’s affair’. Does Rosalind Krauss’ contention of an aesthetics of narcissism which she applied to video in the 1970s apply to the digital now? Kathy O’Dell’s critical work explores the notion of a contract of complicity between artist and audience. For Nelly Richard the body is ‘the meeting place between the individual and the collective … the boundary between biology and society, between drives and discourses’. Philosopher Elaine Scarry has demonstrated how the body has the status of being our most definite material reference point and is therefore used to give substance to ideologies or to take it away. The body has been the site of both ideological control and resistance.
Digital technologies have been a key influence in bringing the embodied consciousness and a metaphysics of the body back into focus. What qualities of human interaction are enabled or disabled by digital technologies? If our contemporary co-existence in both real and digital habitats is increasingly removing the distinction between real and fictional or simulated, fantasy and fact, how is that affecting our values? The computer or TV screen turns the live human into a digital object, an avatar. The digital tends to the specular, the solitary, the pornographic, the onanistic, the commodity. Can we play responsibly with each other in the digital domain?
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacyatrisk.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

18:30 – 23:00
LAUNCH OF INTIMACY – FREE, no booking required!

Come along for a very exciting evening of cutting-edge performances and a few glasses of wine, and SPREAD THE WORD.

An eclectic programme of live performances taking place at Goldsmiths Campus: Ben Pimlott Foyer & Seminar Rooms, George Wood Theatre and Studio 3.

With artists: SUKA OFF (Poland), Tale of Tales (Belgium), Avatar Body Collision (International) among many others.

Full Programme TBC soon – check website for frequent updates.

SATURDAY 8 DECEMBER

10:00-14:00 [Goldsmiths: Graduate School Seminar Room]
SEMINAR: PERFORMANCE AND PORNOGRAPHY
Leader: DR. DOMINIC JOHNSON, Queen Mary University of London
This seminar will address representations of erotic and sexual intimacy in performance. Performance will be explored as a staging of forbidden or otherwise troubled intimacies, thinking through works that figure intimacy between queers, intimacy with animals, and intimacy with children. Works for discussion may include Ron Athey and Lee Adam’s
/Revisions of Excess/ event, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s /Porcile/ and /Salo/, Kira O’Reilly’s /Inthewrongplaceness/, Tennessee Williams’ /Suddenly, Last Summer/, and the photography of Slava Mogutin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Kern. In approaching these diverse performances of difficult intimacies, critical frameworks will be set up, deploying Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of the infinite intimacy that is the epiphany of the
face-to-face encounter; William Haver’s imagining of “the pornographic life” lived within the proximate horror of intimate risk; and Georges Bataille’s writings on the threat of intimate interiors as a “scandalous eruption”. In exploring these varied cultural practitioners, odd contiguities, favourable mutations and unfamiliar critical intimacies
may hopefully arise.
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacypornography.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

10:30-14:30
WORKSHOP: INTIMACY AND RECORDED PRESENCE [Goldsmiths: George Wood Theatre]
Leader: KELLI DIPPLE, Tate
This workshop will explore intimacy and presence within the context of the recorded image. Using as a basis for form, instruction based action and one to one performance. The camera is often the interface between performer, action and technology. It is a key element in the relationships between kinaesthetic forms and digital outputs. It is an important starting point and often under estimated. The relationship between performer and camera operator, whether working towards a pre-recorded or live output can be a creative and conversational partnership. With attention and development it can be a complex dialogue involving the intimate exchange of much knowledge. Participants will
explore the power of cinematography in the creation of intimacy and presence. Sound will also be discussed as an integral element.
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacypresence.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

11:00-18:00 [Goldsmiths: Small Hall /Cinema] – FREE, no booking required!
A MARATHON of SHOW & TELL presentations and SCREENINGS with selected artists from around the world.
Programme TBC soon – check website for frequent updates.

11:00-18:00 [The Albany: Community Rooms & Studio]
Performances with artists Sam Rose (UK), Mary Oliver (UK), Leena Kela (Finland), Rachelle Beaudoin (USA), Pierre Bongiovanni & Camille Renard (France) and Martina von Holn (UK), among others.
Programme TBC soon – check website for frequent updates.
Many of the performances are FREE to the public.

14:00-18:00
SEMINAR: (Dis)Embodiment
Leader: PROF. PAUL SERMON, University of Salford.
This seminar will identify and question the notions of embodiment and disembodiment in relation to the interacting performer in telematic and telepresent art installations.
At what point is performer embodying the virtual performer in front of them? And have they therefore become disembodied by doing so? A number of interactive telematic artworks will be looked at in detail during the seminar, establishing case-study examples to answer these questions. Stemming from Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz seminal work Hole-in-Space to Paul Sermon’s telepresent experiments with Telematic Dreaming and to the current immerging creative/critical discourse in ‘Second Life’ that polarizes fundamental existential questions concerning identity, the self, the ego and the (dis)embodied avatar.
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacydisembodiment.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

14:00-18:00
WORKSHOP: AVATAR PASTE AND CODE SOUP IN FIRST AND SECOND LIFE
Leaders: ASS. PROF. SANDY BALDWIN, West Virginia University & ALAN SONDHEIM
This workshop will take place in the virtual world Second Life, and will be conducted by Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin, with participation by other artists and performers in Second Life. Participants from the Intimacy conference will be supplied with location and others details within Second Life. The workshop emerges from Sondheim and Baldwin’s ongoing exploration of analog and digital bodies, using a range of technologies to remap the solid and obdurate real of bodies into the dispersions and virtualities of the digital, and then back again into real physical spaces. The “avatar paste” of the title means at least three things.
Firstly, the pasting of viewpoints together, the suturing of the subject into the avatar. Secondly, paste as glue, as half-liquid and half solid, as a materiality of renewable and infinite pliability. This is the chora of the avatar, the body matrix that is less a framework than a smearing of paste. And thirdly, paste as pasty and dis/comfortable substance, paste as slimy and dripping. While this abjection is already implicit in paste as glue, the pastiness of paste involves the projection and dreaming through of the avatar, the inhabitation of avatar bodies and the emptying of real bodies into the avatar.
“Avatar paste” comes out in avatar motions and behaviors. Firstly, these are formed by symbolic orders, presenting surfaces to read in terms of sexuality, power, emotion, and other projections. At the same time, the pasty avatar body tends towards collapse and abjection. Work on the avatar becomes a choreography of exposure and rupture, modeling and presenting inconceivable and untenable data, within which tensions and relationships are immediate and intimate. One might imagine, then, this inconceivable data as a form of organism itself: as part of a natural world or a world already given; out of this we might think through new ideas of landscape, wilderness, hard ecology, the earth itself.
The workshop will theorize and demonstrate these topics. The first part discusses theoretical frameworks. Alan Sondheim will introduce the topic of dismemberment and telepresence in terms of the presence or appearance of abjection in Second Life avatars. He will connect this to the epistemology of emptiness vis-a-vis sheave theory and Buddhist philosophy, and then to the problems of motion and behavior of avatars. Sandy Baldwin will discuss the topography of limits in Second Life, both body limits and spatial limits, an connect this to issues of the hunt and animal display.
He will also discuss the dynamics of performance and audience in Second Life. The second part of the workshop will show off Sondheim and Baldwin’s approach to re-mapping live bodies into Second Life performances, including: video and other
examples of motion capture and scanning; intermediate processing of files (e.g. editing .bvh data or working with Blender); and then the resulting works, including documents of Second Life performances and re-mappings back into “first life” spaces with dancers and other live performers. The final part of the workshop will include avatar performance by Sondheim, Baldwin, and other participants in Second Life.
FREE!
Book Now by emailing: drp01mc (at) gold.ac.uk
LIMITED CAPACITY

19:30 [LABAN Studio Theatre]
World Première: SUNA NO ONNA (Woman of the Dunes)
Dans Sans Joux has been commissioned to create a new movement-design performance for Intimacy. Suna no Onna, adapted from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s mysterious 1960s cult movie, is a dance installation that merges virtual and real images of a life of existential entrapment in an inhospitable habitat. The ominous sand dunes of Teshigahara’s desert are transformed into virtual realities that shape the unconscious ground where the Woman (Katsura Isobe) meets a scientist-foreigner who stumbles into her life to become a captive.
The work combines dance, interactive video and animation, fashion design, and electronic music created by an ensemble of artists from diverse creative backgrounds. The integration of the various elements of this performance follows an experimental fashion design concept for the development of sensorial and interfacial garments (built with intelligent materials) which respond to movement qualities, energies and emotional gesture.
Conceived and directed by Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux, the stage production features new fashion concepts by Danjoux and digital designs by a group of collaborating artists including Paul Verity Smith, Doros Polydorou, Maria Wiener, and Jonathan Hamilton. Original music is composed by Oded Ben-Tal, and the scenography is by Hsueh-Pei Wang. Lighting design by Miguel Alonso. Suna no Onna is performed by an international cast of three – Japanese dancer Katsura Isobe, British dancer Olu Taiwo, and Chinese dancer Helenna Ren.
Tickets: 12 GBP, concessions 8 GBP
Book Now at: https://www.purchase-tickets-online.co.uk/peo22430/default.asp
LIMITED CAPACITY

SUNDAY 9 DECEMBER

INTIMACY SYMPOSIUM

9:30-10:00
REGISTRATION & COFFEE

10:00-10:30

INTRODUCTION: RACHEL ZERIHAN & MARIA X

10:30-11:15
KEY SPEAKER: PROF. AMELIA JONES

11:15-13:15
Erotics of (Dis)Embodiment
Panel & Seminar Feedback
Speakers: Prof. Professor Paul Sermon, Dr Dominic Johnson, Ang Bartram, Kelli Dipple, Prof. Thecla Schiphorst
Chair: Prof. Janis Jefferies

13:15-14:15
Lunch Break – Cooking event with Hiwa K. (Iraq/Germany) and live performance with Adam Overton (USA)

14:15-16:00

AT RISK
Panel & Seminar Feedback
Speakers: Tracey Warr, Mine Kaylan, Kira O’Reilly, Dr Simon Jones, Jess Dobkin

Chair: Prof. Adrian Heathfield

16:00-16:30

Coffee Break

16:30-18:00
INTIMACY Open Discussion
Chair: Prof. Johannes Birringer

18:00-19:00
Live Performance with Anesthesia Associates (NZ)
Tickets: 14.5 GBP, concessions 9.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacysymposium.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

INTIMACY: Open Call for Papers, Posters & Performances

NTIMACY
Across Visceral and Digital Performance

OPEN CALL FOR PAPERS, POSTERS & PERFORMANCES
INTIMACY Across Visceral and Digital Performance is supported by the AHRC ICT Methods Network, Goldsmiths Graduate School, Goldsmiths Digital Studios, Goldsmiths Drama Department, Goldsmiths Department of Visual Cultures and LABAN.

ABOUT
INTIMACY is a three-day interdisciplinary programme of events made to elicit connectivity, induce interaction and provoke debate between makers, participants and witnesses of works that explicitly address proximity and hybridity in performance. It will feature workshops, seminars, performances, posters, and a 1-day symposium. INTIMACY will employ digital and live art practices as agents, aiming to further practical exploration of and vibrant discourse into notions of intimacy in contemporary performance. It is framed as a forum for artists, scholars, community workers, performers, cultural practitioners, researchers and creative thinkers.

INTIMACY will provide a platform for the discussion of live art/performance practices concerned with displaying intuitive, intimate and visceral relationships between artist and other. It will 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. Confirmed contributors include: Johannes Birringer, Kira O’Reilly, Tracey Warr, Janis Jefferies, Amelia Jones, Kelli Dipple, Dominic Johnson, Paul Sermon.

SPACETIME
INTIMACY will take place on the 7th, 8th and 9th December in and around Goldsmiths University of London, LABAN and The Albany (South London).

CO-DIRECTORS
Rachel Zerihan and Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x]

BOARD
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.
Prof. Adrian Heathfield, School of Arts, Roehampton 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.

PROPOSALS
All participants will be selected on an open submissions basis. Proposals will be peer reviewed by the INTIMACY Board and Advisory Panel. Proposals must not exceed the word limit specified. You may provide additional info such as links to digital material including online video, photos and websites. Further supporting documentation such as hard copies and discs are welcome; if you want these returned please enclose a SAE. We are accepting proposals for:

Paper presentations or Performance Lectures
Poster presentations
Live performances -physical and/or digital

Proposals should be concerned with the relationship between visceral and digital environments/methodologies being explored in contemporary performance practice. Specifically, topics of interest include but are not limited to:
The politics of intimacy in contemporary performance
Risk in relation to intimacy in contemporary performance
Pornography/erotics and performed intimacy
(Dis)embodiment, (tele)presence and intimate performance encounters
Technologies as affective instigators of intimacy
Intimate aesthetics in contemporary performance
Interfaces of performed desire

Accepted proposals will be published on our website. Further publishing possibilities are being explored.

HOW TO SUBMIT
Submit by email to Maria X at <drp01mc@gold.ac.uk> and Rachel Zerihan <intimacyrachelz@yahoo.co.uk> writing INTIMACY SUBMISSION in the subject line.
Send hard copies to INTIMACY c/o 22 Dutton Street, London, SE10 8TB.

Performances: Submit 1) 500-word statement detailing your project; 2) 200-word CV; 3) Tech Drive; 4) Any other supporting material as described above. Please note that only limited technical support can be provided.

Papers/ Performance Lectures: Submit 1) 500-word abstract. This contribution would form a 15 minute paper to be presented at the Symposium on Sunday 9th December; 2) 200-word CV; 3) Any other supporting material as described above.

Posters: Submit 1) 300-word abstract /summary; 2) 200-word CV; 3) Any other supporting material as described above.

DEADLINE
Deadline for submissions: 19 August 2007.
Notification of acceptance: early October 2007

ADVISORY PANEL

Daisy Abbot, AHDS Performing Arts Glasgow
Sylvette Babin, Artist, Editor, Canada
Gavin Barlow, The Albany
Alice Bayliss, School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds
Lauren Berlant, Department of English, University of Chicago, USA
Ghislaine Boddington, Performer, Body>Data>Space
Susan Broadhurst, School of Arts, Brunel University of West London
Brian Brady, LABAN
Teresa Dillon, Polar Produce
Simon Donger, Central School of Speech and Drama
Anna Furse, Drama Department, Goldsmiths University of London
Marc Garrett, Artist, Furtherfield
Gabriella Giannachi, Centre for Intermedia, University of Exeter
Joe Kelleher, School of Arts, Roehampton University
Roberta Mock, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth
Morrigan Mullen, Re-Write
Chris Salter, Artist, Hexagram; Department of Design and Computational Arts, Concordia University, Canada
Jennifer Sheridan, BigDog Interactive
Igor Stromajer, Artist, Slovenia
Bojana Kunst, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Tony Thatcher, Choreographer, LABAN
Helen Varley Jamieson, Performer, New Zealand

For more information on INTIMACY also check http://www.intimateperformance.org or contact intimacyrachelz@yahoo.co.uk or drp01mc@gold.ac.uk for full details of the call

INTIMACY Across Digital and Visceral Performance

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: