Capital and Darkness
2020 — Adhocracy, Vitalstatistix, Adelaide
For Adhocracy 2020, V Barratt and Lauren Abineri did a mini-residency at Hart’s Mill in Port Adelaide, experimenting with sound, streaming, coding and writing to create a performance work for one night only — a guided speculation on labour and the material body.
Capital and Darkness is an improvised sonic writing process, a song cycle and a deep listening, responding to labour, exiting the labour body, machines of production, automation and essentialism. The collaboration emerged unexpectedly during an online co-performance in the initial weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown — making with and staying with the trouble whereby crisis creates the conditions for the emergence of difference, novelty and diversity.
Performance Excerpt
Excerpt from a live and remote performance across platforms for Vitalstatistix event Adhocracy in 2020, the result of a creative development and micro-residency in Hart’s Mill. The projection is an OBS window with @jemisahologram live performing a text written in realtime by Virginia on their Twitch.tv channel; a streaming video of a 3D animation and cam and images also by Virginia.
Capital and Darkness, Adhocracy, Vitalstatistix, 2020.
These are some of the experimental outcomes from the residency.
Soundboard
The soundboard maps 26 QWERTY keys to spoken-word samples forming the poem:
immanence becomes imminence, the ash of annihilation lands softly on lungs of those watching the sun darkens in its brightness, I am already word without end
Press keyboard keys to play samples, or let the auto-play compose for you.
Interactive soundboard — press QWERTY keys to play, or let it auto-compose. Download samples on GitHub.
Instagram Filter & Poetry Generator
A bespoke Instagram face filter was created for Capital and Darkness (no longer active on Instagram). The poetry generator shows fragments of the poem drifting in Brownian motion.
Filter demo (no longer active).
Poetry generator — words in Brownian motion.
Collaborators
- Lauren Abineri (jemisahologram) — sonic fermenter, astral automater
- Virginia Barratt (mouthhouse) — Twitch channeler, performer, automatic writer