Mike Cooper and I performed our “Outback and Beyond: A Live Australian Western” project recently at Southern Cross University’s multi-arts performance space, Studio One29. We got a fantastic live edit of the gig through Ian Slade’s magic working the multi-cam studio – I’ve put up a brief snippet of the show below.
The HOME Project
October 18th, 2011I’ve been involved lately in a project being run by academics and students in my school, the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University, in collaboration with this fantastic performing arts group, NORPA. The project is looking at issues of home and homelessness, and seeking to address the public perceptions of homelessness via a series of “creative investigations”, in whatever form or medium seems most appropriate. Our first foray into this area comes in the shape of an exhibition, “A Place for Everything”, which arises out of film and photography we shot during National Homeless Persons’ week in August 2011. There’s a short video below where I’ve edited together some of the materials.
Our intention is that this first exhibition sets up some ground for future collaborations with community members and organisations. What we’ve done so far is generate some media, build some relationships and gather some community stories around the issues, so our intention is that this can work as the seed for future more theatrical and performance-based public work. So, watch this space…
Kellerman: EXPANDED
June 25th, 2011I performed a new work recently at the 2011 SICRI Small Island Cultures Conference in Airlie Beach. This work is “Kellerman: EXPANDED,” a meditation on the undersea films of Australian champion swimmer and silent film star, Annette Kellerman. In this show, I’m mixing some Kellerman films (one starring her from the 1920s, and another one that is a biopic from the 1950s) plus other footage, to a soundtrack mixing excerpts from Mike Cooper’s “Rayon Hula” CD (available on Room40: http://www.room40.org) with songs from Phil Hayward’s “Tidelines” CD on the music of the Whitsunday Islands.
The show also features audio recordings of conference attendees talking about their experiences underwater, AND, even more exciting, it features live silent-film inter-titles provided by the audience using RSS feeds; I’m using a re-jigged version of the RSS Quartz patch in VDMX to capture blog comments written by the audience in real time, and I’m mixing them in to the film as they arrive. So, all the inter-titles you see on the video below have been supplied by the audience in real time.
Trystero System: Mike Cooper and Grayson Cooke
October 12th, 2010I have collaborated on a bunch of projects with Rome-based sound artist and improvisor extrordinaire, Mike Cooper, under the Trystero System moniker. Mike plays lap-steel guitar and crazy electronica, and has been described by Room40′s Lawrence English as “post-everything.”
One of our shows is entitled “My Tragic Second Life” – we’ve performed it in a bunch of places: Wellington, New Zealand: Bundaberg, Queensland: Lismore, NSW; University of Gloucestershire, England; Noise=Noise, London; Angelo Mai, Rome… It features deconstructed drum-n-bass beats and a visual set shot entirely in Second Life.
Excerpts from a performance of the Trystero System “My Tragic Second Life” project with myself and Mike Cooper, at Sound Crucible at the Italo Club in Lismore, April 2010. Big thanks to the Sound Crucible team Rex and Vaughan, and to Clive Best and Jesse Neilson for the camerawork.
Footage from the first performance of the show, at Happy Bar in Wellington, New Zealand, February 2009. For this gig, Mike’s surrealist aleatoric strategy was to borrow the crappiest guitar he could find, and refuse to tune it….
See Hear Now
October 12th, 2010In April 2010 I was a participating artist at the See Hear Now festival of improvisation in Townsville, where I did a bunch of live performances, including live audio-reactive visuals for fantastic Sydney-based bass player Mike Majkowski. I was playing a VVVV patch with audio-reaction driving multiple parameters of a series of wire-frame spheres. Footage courtesy Music Centre North Queensland.