Chamber Made artworks challenge the shape and form of chamber performance, generating an ever-shifting spectrum of work, presented in an ever-evolving and variously (re)constituted—socially, technologically and politically—expanded chamber. This real and imagined space, both now and then, hosts and nurtures interaction (social, relational) between artists, company, audience and artwork. What value do we attach to this place in which forces intersect and the continuing activity performed within it?
Turbulence continues, morphs, evolves, season to season, with repetitions, this time and next, accumulating a rich tapestry of offerings. Another Other disrupts understandings of what is ‘real’ and ‘live’, forcing us into unfamiliar fields of interaction in which new experiential awareness proliferates.
These videos capture moments which, although constructed for the camera, were once live. They grew from conversations and artistic inquiry, that grew from a common point of inspiration, itself a film. And you are located within them. Your presence in this setting completes it. They are other to the selves they depict. They are other to yourself. You are other to the person sitting next to you. You are other to the performers. But the whole requires this assembling of self and other.[1]
Entering the research space, Agile Chambers reconstitutes the chamber as a curated space of participatory co-creation. Artists, company, public and artwork come together as researcher-creators, with ideas and knowledge cycling this way and that, guided by the activating force of art. How is the subjective transformed into the objective, the qualitative into the quantitative? What form of evaluative tool can gather metrics to measure and explain this social phenomenon?
Through the blunt lens of evaluative metrics, what value is revealed? With eyes focused on what can be converted to value this time, what do we see of the value created next time, or of value that accrues retrospectively, last time? Can we see the new knowledge and practice (social and artistic) generated through reiterative feedback and creation in this space between participants in the ecosystem of the chamber?
[1] Sam McGilp, “Another Other: 0:00 and 1:24,” Agile Opera Digital, January 2018
Photo credit: Pier Carthew