Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
Closed Circuit
Closed Circuit was performed at Stara Elektrarna Ljubljana (28 August 2010), commissioned and funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia as part of the international live art festival Mladi levi. It consisted of a live, simulated press briefing staged in front of an audience. Actors delivered a script (of montaged fragments from state press briefings) that simultaneously scrolls up large screens positioned on either side of the audience like oversized visible autocues. It presented an innovative performance mode in which the screens competed with the actors for the audience’s attention. This dual viewing experience was informed by an analysis and development of the conventions of documentary theatre, deploying a version of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffect that unsettles the usual relationship between presentation and audience. The set for each performance was carefully designed to foreground the particular iconography and staging of state press briefings, complete with a platform, lecterns, flags, drapes and all the presentational tropes associated with this type of event. The use of a live re-staging also re-positioned the actual moment of delivery as a scripted event performed to fulfil the conventions of news media, creating the critical distance Brecht judged essential to understanding the rhetorical power of established conventions.
Closed Circuit was also performed at The Showroom Gallery, London (14 January 2011) as part of a 4 day event, Signal:Noise, which investigated the conventions and often malign logic of feedback in contemporary culture with contributions from other researchers including Professor Charlie Gere (Lancaster University), Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths) and Richard Hornsey (Nottingham). Closed Circuit reveals the press briefing as a perfect, self-confirming media circuit that exists solely in order to be mediated. It was a major development of the video installation Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, extending Dickinson’s critique of contemporary media and politics.
