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The University of Southampton
Archaeologies of Media and Technology Research group

Annihilation Event - Ian Dawson Event

Website screenshot
Date:
22 - 29 March 2017
Venue:
Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins London N1C 4AA

For more information regarding this event, please email Ian Dawson at I.Dawson@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

Annihilation Event has no singular origin, but many strands and streams. This is a project about copies, prints, scans, derivations, reconstructions, casts, and virtual models. For this event Ian Dawson, Lecturer in Fine Art (Sculpture) at WSA, has worked with WSA fine art students to restage J.G. Ballard's 'assassination weapon'. This experimental 6 day programme in the Lethaby Gallery will bring together a contrary group of artists, archivists, archaeologists, historians, technical experts and theorists from all over Europe. The scheduled events will operate as an experiment, an exchange, a chance to inhabit the Lethaby with a constellation of objects, machines, speculative processes and performances, an unprecedented opportunity for collisions and collusions.

Dawson will be working with the students to remake historic art objects, apparatus and events as a research and teaching methodology.

This is a piece of experimental performance work, an experiential piece which tests the current conditions of production in art school and reception in gallery scenarios.

The performance itself involves sound, both live and recorded, a script, and four projectors which throw a set of still and moving image clips onto a central, circular screen. The screen rotates to catch and disrupt the imagery. The audience are arranged as a mandala facing the central screen, with aisles for the projection. Performers wear an ad hoc uniform of altered crash helmets.

A learning play, in the Brechtian model: going over and over a script or a set of instructions produces new configurations and new techniques. 

Other contributors to Annihilation Event include AMT member Stephen Cornford.

More information about the whole event can be found at http://annihilationevent.com/Info

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