An interdisciplinary collaboration between violinist Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, visual artist Paul MacIntyre (both London, UK) and musician/composer Liam Ross Gibson (Nanaimo, Canada).
The artists spent half an hour every week each creating an artwork using the most recently submitted piece as a point of departure. In the current rotation, Aliayta responds to Paul on Mondays, Liam responds to Aliayta on Wednesdays, and Paul responds to Liam on Saturdays. They work in any medium, especially if it causes them to step outside of our habitual methods.
No matter how clear and direct, communication is coloured by the medium through which it passes. Something indefinable is always lost, but often, things are added as well. Emergent entities, ghosts, mutations inhabit the periphery of our messages, arising from a momentary lag in a video-call, a muffled voice in the background of a recording, the faint reflection of a face on a screen. As messages are passed back and forth, reproduced once-twice-three times, these minute intruders grow and change shape, assuming comic or frightening proportions.
THIRTYMINUTES has always thrived on this process: cannibalizing each other’s ideas, stepping on each other’s toes, responding to one another by mutating. So far our collaboration has proceeded in a circle of responses, limited by the half hour we each spend working on a piece, and the strict one minute time-limit for any audio or video produced. We are now in the midst of creating a piece on a larger scale, allowing ourselves the luxury of engaging more deeply with our material.
The finished piece will take the form of a mixed audio/video presentation, built out of composed and improvised instrumental sounds, field recordings, found-footage and visuals culled from the hours we all spend glued to our screens in these strange times. The piece is a seance, or summoning of sorts; an attempt to invoke the unintentional beings that emerge from our endless game of telephone. It will be shown as a long-loop on Sunday, 21st June during From Boom to Bust.