DSM - Don't say maybe

DSM UNIT#4
Institute of Contemorary Arts ICA The Mall,
London SW1Y 5AH

August 19 - August 30, 2000 open: 12 midday - 7pm Expanded Site Testings: 21 Aug: 7:30pm-11pm; 24-26,30 Aug: 7:30pm-1am

Over 10 days in August 2000 the ICA's theatre is transformed into an open platform for live audio-visual experiments and multi-sensory performances, created within the structures and environments called UNIT#4.

UNIT#4 evolves as a production site for various artists, providing room for interventions by an assortment of guests and visitors, encouraging collaboration and exchange. UNIT#4 is designed as a model of a city consisting of several communicative szenarios. It has not a fixed form, but finds a temporal structuralisation within changing contextual conditions. The space gets defined by activity and provides room for dwellers and visitors. A fragile balance between one's individuality and production in conjunction is necessary. A mere assemblage of individuals does not seem appealing!

The live web broadcast links provide more detailed information on dsm & direct interaction with the dwellers is available from this web site.

...................

UNIT#4 is a village which initially did not physically exist.It existed in virtuality, in fractions, in the head of 13 people, all invited by Heimo Lattner and Daniela Swarowsky to participate in a journey. UNIT#4 started to take form as soon as the dwellers met for the first time (16/8/00) at the ICA. Through e-mail communication, established b'ween the 13 participants over the course of the past 5 months relationships developed through the exchange of ideas, visions and how to approach UNIT#4.The ideas vary from an inflatable which fits into a travel case and which is the first prototype of a portable shelter [rescue] for homesick travellers, as well as other inflatable structures, to radio transmitters creating silent soundscapes spread out through portable radio units, to audio and video webcasts as well as documentation, capturing each ephemeral moment and thus engraving it into memory. To intrusions of electronic sounds, spontaneous performantive interventions, to public billboards with magnetic letters, to ....

The goal is to develop a functioning social system, a basis enabling the dwellers to create moments/performances in conjunction. In it's best it will become an entire piece, a unit deriving from the daily collaborations. Through the experience of what a performative environment can be, an environment which is kept in constant transformation /mutation through the manifold expressions and personal statements, tensions and experiences, the finding of points of reference become the challenge.The improvisational character and the open structure moves towards a karthartic point of magic, the finding of a mutual language and through the creation of a space inside/outside space. This as a reflection of the desire for space during a time of disappearance of the public domain in our culture, with the exception of virtual culture.

The performances have no clear structure. Structure develops over time. Failure is part of progress! During the performance nights only a fraction of the process will unfold.

DIARY Day 1 Wednesday, 16/8/00

At 3pm we first meet at the ICA Live Art Space [they call it Theatre]. Heimo, Pinzo and his "team" have arrived some days earlier. It's exciting to meet all those people after such a long time of only virtual contact via email.

The space is completely empty, except for Heimo & Ruthard's "Inflatable Dome". It looks like a silver 'Germknoedl'- and is beautiful. The inflatabel is attached and comes out of an orange travel box which also contains the fan. So it's a compact travel unit - Heimo's idea of a portable 'village in a box for modern nomads' becomes partly true.

The inside is much bigger than expected and it has a very contemplative atmosphere. Silver the floor, white the dome's cuppola.

All dwellers are present [ella arrives a bit later the same afternoon] as we gather inside the dome, the heart of UNIT#4, as it seems now. Introductions follow, everybody presents his/her ideas and projects. Although we got familiar and friendly with each other over the past few months of email exchange, most of us are perfect strangers to each other, and this uncertainty is noticeable.

Charlie's attempts to expand the space to the backstage area or to the exterior of the ICA get frustrated as he's confronted with strict theatre regulations and rules which don't allow most of his ideas. That's where most of the artists involved [and none of them aren't used to work in a theatre environment] realize that they aren't in a gallery or art space, but are subdue to other codes:)

Lee, the ICA's technician puts [understandable] pressure on us to define everybody's terretories inside the theatre, which puts us in the strange position to make decisions before everybody knows what he/she will exactly do. Strange friction between our intensions to engage into a process, where things slowly evolve with time and this sudden request from Lee to take clear decisions.

We try to understand and everybody marks his/her position inside the space, after some discussions.

Later on Simon admits that he, apart from all his excitment, is also disappointed, as he thought that we would create everything together and there wouldn't be a seperation b'ween the different units, after reading the press release and some of Heimo's and my texts. Everybody has brought in his/her piece. Again a group-show? Sure, I agree, that's exactly what we tried to avoid. Where is the unit? How will all these different parts merge together? It's still hard to imagine at this point how and if all the different ideas will form UNIT#4, one environment.

DIARY Day 8 Thursday, 23/8/00

The day starts quiet - too quiet. The dwellers are beginning to inhabit the space now. The cross-currents in the soundscapes are starting to acquire coherence, but there is not much scope for experimentation as everybody is increasingly exercised by the technical limitations of the ICA servers. When is the web site going to be ready is the question that must never be asked - especially of Simon who is making a heroic effort to sidestep the obstacles while simultaneously having his wallet stolen and having to sleep on the street. Perhaps he should take up residence in Gernot and Charlie's cave - we all need a cosy home from home at this stage. Why would the dwellers want to subject themselves to two weeks in a darkened room in the middle of August anyway? Light deprivation we can stand - it's audience deprivation we're feeling today. Of course it will build as word of mouth gets around but today we work on the ICA for a bit of press attention and it pays off. 6.45 on London Live, we have a radio interview. Frantic running around, setting off without an address, but we make it to Bush House, 6 members of the DSM band. Luna on bicycle bell, Adrian with his phono earring - ready to be plugged in direct, Janine and Leif on soft furnishings, Ella plays video and Charlie adds percussion with popping bubble wrap. We bring along the magic sonic wand and a minidisk for good measure. Heimo hangs out with the rest of the crew in the ICA theatre. Interview over, Leif having done the business, we're in the lift, and Jason, the producer, gets interested. He gets a flyer. Highlight of this dweller day - Adrian's vocally challenged performance of WILD THING, auto-accompanied by electric quitar and hipster speaker, playing to cafe and dweller space from inside the waiting room. Wild thing we think we love you!

///DWELLERS///

CARLA HLANDER, D/S
She mainly works with photographic images, but also develops site specific work, as well as action-based works. In her latest works she combines photographs to create a new, third visual notion and also creates narratives by reorganising images.

CHARLES ERRINGTON, UK
His practice is broad - video, installation, performance, photography, computers all feature, but sculpture is the core discipline. He's drawnto ubiquitous, urban stuff - the kinds of materials with which many people already have a direct, functional relationship. His aim is to construct active, participatory channels of engagement. The objects he makes are often temporary; sometimes they are inert until activated in performance. Then they exist on stage - to be assembled, rearranged, destroyed - in the public arena.

ADRIAN FISHER, UK
Is concerned with intensities in spaces, both acoustic and visual, the absurd and magic. These take form through live-art(often with other performers including musicians and dancers), installations, sounds and video. The process is organic and explores characters, objects, mental states, rhythms and their relation to bodies, places, moments, poetries. The work attempts a layered, contradictory movement, dissolving appearances, seducing the unpredictable, de-centered experience.

SIMON HAEFELE, A
Webdesigner involved in multimedia projects. He supplies the networking expertise for the DSM_Remote Music Tool [RMT]. DJ as well.

HEIMO LATTNER, A/USA
His work may be classified somewhere between sculptural articulation and complex environments. He performs a balancing act on the dividing line between art, entertainment and subculture. He designs units to live in, and travels with his ever-growing 'village in a box'. http://www.thing.at/orfkunstradio/ao3

LAERKE LAUTA, DK
Works with a number of different mediums: installation, drawing/collage, sound, video and film as well as script writing. She often combines the different media to a collage of fragments that suggest a narrative, "a scene". The work has elements that draws a line from fashion to design and scenography.

OLIVER MAKLOTT, A
Studies computer music & new media at the University of Music and Performing Art,Vienna, and is student at ELAK - Institute of Electroacousitcs. He is programming synthesizers. He created the interface for the DSM_Remote Music Tool [RMT] and is heavily involved in composing electo-acoustic music.

ROBERT PINZOLITS, A
Studies computer music & new media at the University of Music and Performing Art, Vienna, presently student at ELAK - Institute of Electroacoustics, Vienna. He initiated the concept for the DSM_Remote Music Tool. Several collaborations with local artists, e.g. Hans Joachim Roedelius.

ELLA RAIDEL, A/D
Is a video artist, discovering social relationships in which both intimacy and the opposite urge to exhibit oneself are regarded as a parallel phenomena. The question 'who is observing whom and who is the voyeur?' is stylised into a mystifying process of playing with standardised modes of vision and thought.

LUNA ROJAS, UK/RCH
Her work often generates a social space of celebration, a place of interaction in which some ritualised activities are performed by the group that has developed it. She is interested in the 'absent', the mind amnesia, the loss of public consciousness, limbs in dance and the fragmented. Sometimes her work is a homage devised for some dead artist and their work.

©Inhabit/JANINE & LEIF ROSTRON-LIEBENSCHÜTZ, UK/D
Are working as an artist pair from London and Berlin. They see their artistic work as an attempt to voice a radical position of cultural production, which seeks neither an essence nor an existence within a common identity, but can in this sense be only pure exposure.

ADRIAN SCHIESSER, UK/D
His work engages with the ever increasing formation of structures and processes imposed upon the social dynamic of contemporary life. Ripped out of their Ônon-place1 context and formally reshuffled the structures and processes are broken loose from their original, singular meaning, resulting in a possible new approach for the individual.

GERNOT WIELAND, A/D
The vulnerable, sometimes tragic-comical individual of the nineties looking for his own identity has often been the subject matter of his work. Following this line of work, he uses video, photography and installation as media.

///GUESTS///

RICHARD CROW, UK AM
master technician of the art of the abject and the emotive fragment. He has developed an uncanny practice located somewhere between contemporary performance and installation, often working in non-gallery based locations.

RUTHARD MIKSCH, A/USA
He focuses on three dimensional, kinetic objects and installations. His projects with hydraulic and pneumatic elements deal with adaptation to an ever changing environment, through the use of contained pressure and circulation.

ANNETTE WORKS, UK
www.wuk.at/among-others-3/

///REMOTE CONTRIBUTOR///

DANIELA SWAROWSKY, A/USA/NL
has a broad background in producing, curating and conceiving visual- and music-related projects. Especially interested in process-oriented work, as well as old and new media. Always in reflection of the present culture in an attempt to bridge the past with the future. Long-time co-conspirator and co-traveller of Heimo Lattner.
www.wuk.at/among-others-3/
v2.nl/deaf