We’ve become used to receiving our heart-lifting arts packages on the interwebs of late, but one festival was way ahead of the couch-bound curve.
Digital smorgasbord Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital – aka BLEED– is co-hosted by the Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) and Melbourne’s Arts House. It's a ten-week long festival presenting fascinating digital works via artistic collabs. As well as living online, these works also question what effect our increasingly digital focus means for all of us.
Conceived before performance spaces were closed, BLEED is the perfect solution while we wait for the majority of venues nationwide to join the likes of Darlinghurst Theatre Company in re-opening.
The line-up kicks off Monday, June 22 with a two-week run for visual artist Hannah Brontë’s mi$$-Eupnea, a series of live DJ sets set to video art encouraging mighty fine chill outs, with deep breathing and reflective listening. Brontë is the creative force behind femme blak hip hop art parties Fempre$$.
Week three-to-four sees curator Alex Kelly and award-winning artist, writer and filmmaker David Pledger team-up on part-performance piece, part-interview series Assembly for the Future. It's a series of participatory digital gatherings in which the public create new visions for futures that may be realistic, idealistic or utterly fanciful.
Vietnamese-Australians James Nguyen, an artist and filmmaker, and composer and archaeologist Victoria Pham’s Re:Sounding embraces Vietnamese culture and identity through a musical project inspired by the Đông Sơn drum. That drops in weeks five-to-six.
Paeonia Drive, the week seven-to-eight highlight, is an ongoing project by Sydney-based dancer and choreographer Angela Goh and Su Yu Hsin, a Taiwanese artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. The virtual experience dives into ‘the garden’ as a metaphor for the organisation and control of nature, bodies, and power in an age of mass surveillance and algorithmic orientation.
And the final two weeks see Melbourne-based dancer and choreographer Lilian Steiner and artist, filmmaker and performer Emile Zile collaborate on Becoming The Icon. A film project exploring debate and propaganda, intimidation and manipulation, it's just the tonic for our fake news days.
CAC director Michael Dagostino reveals BLEED has been waiting in the wings for almost two years, from concept to realisation. “At its core, BLEED is anchored by collaboration between organisations and artists finding new ways to work together. It’s no surprise that the environment that artists present their work in has changed dramatically over the last three months. But how does the online feel and does this feeling inevitably seep into our everyday?”
Arts House artistic director Emily Sexton says that, at heart, BLEED acknowledges the world as it truly is. “We live in an intimate digital world. A virtual co-presence is a normal part of our every day.”
All about leaning into the disruption, you can find out more about BLEED here.
This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.
