FSM/Platform; Jewell Station

 Forum of Sensory Motion have been invited by Ilana Russell at MoreArts to curate a series of performances 

to take place on the platform at Jewell Station in Brunswick, Victoria.

We are also embarking on a few short trips up the Upfield line, for some localised art adventures.

https://www.facebook.com/platformMoreArt/

FSM Greece 17

Outcomes;

Forum of Sensory Motion Testing Grounds Residency November 17

Melbourne, November 2017: Earlier this year I took a group of artists to Greece for a nomadic residency program, run by myself and Dylan Martorell, called Forum of Sensory Motion. We received funding from Creative Vic and were accompanied by Michael Candy Nic Dowse AKA Honeyfingers, Belle Bassin, Benjamin Hancock andNathan Gray and our kids, Inez and Xavi. We saw the sights, shared houses and laughs, moved around, made new friends and new artworks and now we are doing it all again at Testing Grounds in Southbank, Melbourne. I will unveil more details of the full 3 week program shortly but for now...Trims Bagus and I are performing as Kelp D for the opening party on Nov 3 and I hope you can join us for bells, baths and bubbles. #forumofsensorymotion

http://www.testing-grounds.com.au/upcoming-calendar/#forum-sensory-motion

Honey Fingers

Belle Bassin

Bodyclock, above, filmed in Kythira Greece, 2017

screening at Testing Grounds, November 2017

Benjamin Hancock with Kelp D/J

Kelp D/J are; Lichen Kelp, Dylan Martorell and Jason Hood

Michael Candy

Nathan Gray

Melbourne, August 2017: Nathan Gray presents an early draft of his video work from FSM Greece 17.

Hosted by West Space and Liquid Architecture, Nathan Gray presents new speculative films and narrative works that collectively occupy a space between performance lecture, essay film, sci-fi novel and personal journal, including The Anti-Kythera Mechanism, The Black Iron Prison & The Simulation Hypothesis, filmed during his residency with Forum of Sensory Motion.

An ancient Greek astrological calculator discovered in a shipwreck in 1901 continues to reveal its secrets today via a series of technological promotional events. This live essay examines the development of technologies of war and control going back to Hellenistic Greece and the strange device’s uncanny resonances with the paranoid philosophy of Philip K Dick.

image above: 'The Antikythera Device, The Black Iron Prison and The Simulation Hypothesis', Video Still, Nathan Gray, 2017
 

FSM GREECE 2017

Kythira, Serifos and Athens

June/ July 2017

Athens, July 2017: Join us for a night of outcomes from nomadic artist residency group Forum of Sensory Motion. For the past 6 weeks, Australian artsits Michael Candy, Nathan Gray, Benjamin Hancock, Belle Bassin, Dylan Martorell, Nic Dowse and Lichen Kelp have been travelling thoughout Greece, developing works and collaborations.

FSM 2017’s emergent themes include notions of the body and materiality apprehended in movement. Dylan Martorell’s practice, for example, scavenges discarded objects and activates them kinetically via robotics in order to explore their auditory potential. Rather than simply broadcasting sound, as through a sound system, these sonic automata are arrayed throughout spaces allowing audiences to venture inside these complex acoustic environments. These works are presented as collaborations with the other artists in the group.

Belle Bassin presents works using the body as a sculptural form, merging bodies with landscape and architecture in aesthetically driven experiential works. Developed on Kythera, Serifos and in Athens, her recent work questions how to preserve the ethereal space of visions in accessible material formats and complications of the creative process.

Dancer Benjamin Hancock will present his new solo work WITCH an attempt at using shape shifting and possession as strategies to disrupt gender binaries and explore new potentialities of the body.

Both Michael Candy and Nathan Gray present new works that question technological determinism through mixed strategies of documentary and speculative fiction. Candy will show documentation from recent interventions in Kathmandu that explore the spiritual life of robots while Gray presents a new lecture performance entitled The Antikythera Device and the Holographic Universe that looks at a 1st Century BCE Hellenistic Era analogue computer, discovered in a ship wreck, in the light of recent claims by technologists including Elon Musk that we exist inside a simulation. Both of these works create histories of simulation and artificial intelligence that move the future back into the distant past.

Another area of enquiry for FSM 2017 is the way that movement occurs across material, biological and phenomenological boundaries. Lichen Kelp’s work uses improvised thermal and chemical reactions from materials such as botanical samples, oils, ice and ouzo to generate live imagery and sound. Liquid imagery with its floods, waves, ripples, tides and flows provides a rich source of metaphors for economic and geopolitical thinking into the early 21st century (waves of migration, economic ripples etc.) Closer examination of these actual phenomena can lead to a reinterpretation or replacement of these metaphors with ideas of greater utility. 

Nic Dowse’s work moves across biological and authorial boundaries in his ongoing collaboration with bees and beekeeping. FSM 2017 sees him present a series of works that have been installed in beehives in the foothills of Athens and embellished by colonies of bees, furnishing his works with honeycomb, pollen and honey.

Address 1-7 Evmorfoupolou, Psiri, Athens July 4th. 7pm-11pm

View more images #forumofsensorymotion

Image above: There Are No Words, by Nic Dowse from Honey Fingers Collective

As part of tonights program in Athens, Belle Bassin presents her work, using the body as a sculptural form, merging bodies with landscape and architecture in an aesthetically driven experiential work. 

Belle Bassin, pictured above in Serifos, Greece with robotic instruments by Dylan Martorell.

Nathan Gray will present a new lecture performance entitled The Antikythera Device and the Holographic Universe that looks at a 1st Century BCE Hellenistic Era analogue computer, discovered in a ship wreck, in the light of recent claims by technologists including Elon Musk that we exist inside a simulation. This is a live presentation of research writings undertaken in Athens for FMS Greece 17. The accompanying footage; shot in Kythira and Athens and later Berlin to be edited in his home city; Berlin.

Performing to a live soundtrack by Dylan Martorell in the streets of Athens, Benjamin Hancock presents his new solo work, WITCH; an attempt at using shape shifting and possession as strategies to disrupt gender binaries and explore new potentialities of the body.

Michael Candy, above, will present his DIY VR goggles offering an immersive and personalised viewing experience in collaboration with Belle Bassin and Honey Fingers

Animals Dancing, by  honey_fingers

Background Information ..

..Forum of Sensory Motion

2017 is the inaugural year of FSM, the nomadic iteration of KochiAIR, an artist residency established by Lichen Kelp and Dylan Martorell in Kerala, India in 2014. 

In June of this year FSM will travel with artists Belle Bassin, Nathan Gray, Dylan Martorell, Lichen Kelp, and Michael Candy, dancer Benjamin Hancock and writer, curator and publisher, Helen Hughes.

They will be based in Athens, Kithera and Serifos where over a period of six weeks these diverse practitioners will engage collaboratively with the public and each other creating improvised communities and radical experimentation.

These artists and musicians will use streets, airwaves, gallery and digital media to create a common noosphere of sensory activity incorporating robotics, interactive electronics, public lectures, wearable art, kinetic sculpture, performative chemistry and workshops.

Lichen Kelp

Lichen Kelp (nee Kemp) transforms localised flora and domestic ingredients into otherworldly, liquid landscapes. Accompanied by live soundtracks, she creates multisensory site specific performances that fuse science, art, alchemy and music. 

Her practise also encompasses art/science workshops for children, edible ikebana, and hosting and curating exhibitions and artist residencies. 

With an interest in adventurism, vernacular ecologies and alternative ways of everyday living and a methodology based on process and action/ reaction, her work is propelled by a desire to create happenings and forge diverse communities, both locally and internationally. Along with her partner Dylan Martorell, Lichen has thus developed the Forum of Sensory Motion; a responsive, open ended, experimental, travelling group residency that offers participants, audiences and collaborators an exciting way to work and interact. With artists shared experiences of relocation, exploration, research and development, site responses, collaboration and interaction, the resulting works as well as audience responses and resulting improvised communities are informed by the sensory nature of movement. 

Nathan Gray

From a background in experimental and improvised music, Nathan Gray’s continued interest is in the restrictions and rules within which improvisation happens. He uses brevity, precision and humour as artistic strategies to highlight the unspoken conventions of form and to open possibilities within the restricted materiality of the everyday.

Gray’s works take common restrictions as their starting point: curatorial briefs, self-imposed and group negotiated rules, as well as the various physical, legal, economic and material restrictions of exhibition, performance and contemporary life. He explores constraints in order to stimulate a variety of effects on the content, structure and narrative of his works and employs a variety of strategies to firstly make visible, and then to disrupt the various structures within which we co-exist

Nathan Gray’s 2014 work Species of Spaces was the winner of both the Substation Contemporary Art Prize and Substation People’s Choice Awards and is now part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

He has shown at the 19th Biennale of Sydney and the 2012 Tarrawarra Biennale. My work Score for Dance was shown at Open Archive in 2011 and ACCA in 2014, and has had numerous solo shows including Work with Me Here, 2015 at RMIT DesignHub, Things That Fit Together, 2014 at Utopian Slumps, Theorist Training Camp, 2012, at Westspace and ACTS, 2012, at Utopian Slumps. During 2016 Liquid Architecture, Melbourne, The Audio Foundation, Auckland, and North Projects, Christchurch, have presented his recent film The Shakes.

He curated the exhibition The Object as Score, based on his Masters thesis of the same name, which he completed in 2014. He has attended residencies in Japan, Brazil, New Zealand, Indonesia, regional Australia, and Germany.

Dylan Martorell

Benjamin Hancock

Belle Bassin

Belle Bassin’s works explore the ‘affective dimension’ of colour, form and bodily movement.  Simultaneously working across a range of mediums, she translates shapes and ideas across two and three-dimensional modes, and across still and performative images, so that rather than in one fixed state, her forms are always evolving and interconnected - much like living things.  Her oeuvre is characterized by the use of biomorphic abstraction and visions gleaned from mystical animist practices.  Resulting in highly emotive works that aim to simultaneously exist beyond their materiality on a plane that is more felt than seen. 

Bassin has been exhibiting for 10 years in urban and biological spaces and within galleries and museums in Australia, Asia, and Europe. With recent highlights including: Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, (curated by Marco Pasi and Lars Bang Larsen), On Campus, curated by Raimundas Malašauskas, MUMA and in 2016 Bassin’s work, It’s Easier to Look at Your Skin, was the inspiration for a group show titled Dancing Umbrella’s, at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, where she also exhibited a temporal ‘esoteric social sculpture’ (a one-hour sculptural choreography) in their gardens. Her works are held in numerous state, national and private collections.

Michael Candy

Michael Candy pursues a nomadic practice, working and producing internationally through residencies, commissions and exhibitions, exploiting physical technologies to impart theories of complex systems on ecology and sociology, constructing and presenting devices that empower and translate closed systems into tangible medium.

Candy produced the large­ scale kinetic light installation ‘Big Dipper’ (2014) while on residency with KochiAIR. This initial prototype of Big Dipper has since lead to re­commissions for exhibitions throughout India, Europe and Australia, finally winning the Polish Biennale Prize 2015 (Wroclaw, Poland) and Le Cube Prix 2016 (Paris, France).

A selection of his previous works include: ‘Synthetic Pollinizers’, robotic flowers that pollinate bees in the Netherlands (Bio Art and Design Award Finalist, 2015); angelic machines created on residency in Huepetuhe (HAWAPI Residency, 2015); Altertruism, a three part series of installations, performances and seminars with artist collective Golden Solution, commissioned for Melbourne’s Next Wave (2014) and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and a sound installation which uses an array of sensors and analogue components to make the environmental changes in the earth and air audible atop Indonesia’s Mt Merapi Volcano which led to restaging the work at the National Gallery of Victoria (Instrument Builders Project, 2013­2014).

It is through these experiments that he honed his skills in development, production and investigation, giving rise to a unique approach of instinctive engineering techniques responding to the limitations of each environment or idea (whether it be physical, lack of materials or social).

RESIDENCY PROPOSAL

"During the Forum of Sensory Motion ReMAP Residency I will be exploring the use of interactive light networks to activate vast areas of the city scape, creating a web in which resence space and time have a profound impact on the audiovisual textures of an epicenter." 

Helen Hughes

Helen Hughes is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and publisher. Her research focuses on late modern and contemporary Australian art and the historiography of contemporary art in a global context. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Melbourne in 2015, and now works as a Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Practice at Monash University. Helen also co-edits the journal Discipline, and publishes books on contemporary art theory and criticism through the Discipline imprint. Recent publications include: Three Reflections on Contemporary Art History in 2013 and The Importance of Being Anachronistic: Museum Reparations and Contemporary Aboriginal Art in 2016.

During the ReMAP residency, she plans to develop a more creative piece of writing and experiment with different modes of its presentation - focusing on the possibility for a text to function as an artwork, rather than a mere exegetical tool used in the service of explaining art.

Honey Fingers

Honey Fingers is a creative and dynamic project that explores the connections between farming, food, art, history, design and education. Nic Dowse who heads the Honey Fingers Collective trained as an architect before starting up the small batch honey business that also comprises a creative projects studio and public engagement platform. In Melbourne and around Australia, Nic works with artists, musicians, photographers, architects, chefs, ceramicists and writers to realise his projects. Revolving closely around a localised backyard apiarist community that he has fostered, this work has wide reaching implications for our eco systems and offers a gently radical approach to (agri)culture. Having researched and written extensively around nomadic beekeeping and European beekeeping traditions, Nic is returning to Greece to work with a local beekeeper, musician and audio engineer as part of FOSM 17.

Future FSM art adventures in development

May 2018 Whyalla, South Australia

By means of planes, cars, buses, boats and scuba gear, Forum of Sensory Motion will helm an art trip to the outer reaches of South Australia to witness the mating rituals of the giant cuttlefish. These incredible creatures will provide artists with untold levels of inspiration in their metamorphic abilities to change colours, gender, shape and size all while putting on electric lightshows. Throughout this research and development trip we will devise performances, soundscapes and treatise based on our encounters with these polymorphic rainbow hued visitors to our shores.

Off Grid Victorian Residency

FSM has been lucky enough to secure a site for artist residencies to be held in The Western Volcanic Plains region of Victoria that we wish to share with our extended art community. Situated in a fertile laval flow valley, the tiny off grid house and bell tent offers shelter for one to four artists at a time. Life on the property is idyllic with camp cookouts, open fires, a dam and river with waterholes and platypii all with in a 2 minute walk from the front door. Ideal for writers, composers, painters, and those in need of short stay sabbaticals or research and development time, especially those wishing to switch off for a few days. Views of rolling hills of native grasses, sheep and kangaroos with incredible vistas of night skies. Taking expressions of interest from January 28th 2018.