Hi. We’ll be in ausland on December 9., together with plan b, at an event called Nearness. Info below.
Nearness — New Sound and Performance Works
Date: December 9., 2018 Time: 7pm Place: ausland, Lychener Str. 60, 10437 Berlin (map) Entry: €4–€8 Event links: ausland · Artconnect · FB
Nearness (Nähe) is an evening of new works by two artist duos — plan b (Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers) and Kovács/O’Doherty. plan b will present Together/Apart, a performative lecture and live video work, and Kovács/O’Doherty will present 1–100, a process-based spatialised sound work. The event is presented by Place Rhythm. Pulse, the ausland series focusing on performance, sound, and presence, organised and curated by Gretchen Blegen.
The works of both artist duos presented at this event share a common concern with the thematic core of nearness. Both works consider the possibilities of proximity and commonality — of matching without lining up, of the difference between the identical and the adjacent.
plan b — Together/Apart
plan b — Together/Apart — video stills
The work to be presented by plan b — Together/Apart — is based around the data that the duo have collected about their own lives and movements. The artists, Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers, both wear GPS tracking devices in their daily lives — a durational practice of ongoing self-surveillance, or ‘sousveillance’, that they have undertaken together for well over a decade.
The archive of personal data that results from this practice has allowed the duo to extract information about their lives and movements. Using this information, they can precisely map their past location in time and space. As a result, they can also trace the times when they have been together and apart, and this is the starting-point for a work combining live video, text, and data, investigating the ghosts of past proximity and separation — of time and space shared, and unshared.
Daniel Belasco Rogers and Sophia New (plan b) have been making a wide variety of work together since 2002. They have also recorded everywhere they go with a GPS since 2003 (Belasco) and 2007 (New), as well as every SMS text message that they have ever sent each other.
In 1–100, a hundred copies of the same seven-inch record are played, one after another. The sounds that result are looped and layered by the two performers, as they move within the room. The record used in the work is an artefact of a long-disappeared noise-rock band, now reimagined in a new context.
As the process unfolds — and, one-by-one, each record is used and discarded — the space is constantly rearranged, slowly creating an ever-changing spatial and acoustic environment. Through moment-to-moment decisions made by the performers, the otherwise-abandoned sounds from the records are altered. Recordings become fractured and remixed, creating an aleatoric collage of fragments of unpredictable sound — excerpts that are similar yet different.
