Circle Drawing

Last week we were shooting a new video piece, A Perfect Circle. The work has been commissioned by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum for the Sheffield Pavilion 2009.

A Perfect Circle draws on material from the shamanic-ritual inspired performance piece 9 Billion Miles From Home and its development process.

Here's some of what we said about it in the proposal to Sheffield Pavillion (which in part borrows from this):

Over the years we have seen a constant interaction and influence between the work in different media on each other – performers on stage interacting with projected images, reframing them for the audience; a performer on video engaging the audience as if they were in the room with them live; installation work that incorporates durational performance, video, photography and made objects into one environment.

One strand of this has been a series of video works born out of, inspired by, and kicking against the video documentation of live performances that they originate from. Works created, authored, in the edit suite. Work that pays little heed to the formal construction of the originating performance work, but which focuses on a single moment, or idea, or feeling from that live work and responds to and/or amplifies it. As we fix a performance project in a video document of it, we find ourselves continuing the devising process and taking the work off at a tangent.

More recently these works have started to use video shot as part of the devising process, rather than documentation of a public performance, taking that tangent away from the originating process at an earlier stage. For example, Assembly (2008) utilises video footage shot as a try-out for what would eventually become live link video in the performance Parts For Machines That Do Things, and manipulates and layers it into something quite different.

A Perfect Circle takes this a step further. We shoot the circle making element of the performance piece 9 Billion Miles From Home (2007) specifically for the video work, and go back to material (a description of the world as described by the 116 images on the Voyager satellites) from the process that we liked, but that didn’t fit into the final performance. Combining these starting points we will experiment in post production to create something new – a satellite project from the original performance.

Chris has got the footage in the edit suite, but has to finish off two other pieces, Technology and Benchers, for the screening at the Showroom this Friday first...