In 2020 Vivid Projects and Vivid Live were pleased to announce VLTV, a series of Live Art works made to be experienced digitally and available for seven days on our Vimeo channel. A new artwork was presented each week every Friday at 7pm.

Curators Introduction:

Hello.
What is VLTV?

Drawing from the public access tv stations of 1970’s America and the current experimental live art scene of Birmingham and beyond,  VLTV allows artists to make mistakes and play with the notion of what live art is and how it can exist virtually.

Last year I looked at the format for Vivid Live and decided to change things up. I wanted to make live art more accessible to those who can’t make it to a physical gallery space while providing artists with the necessary support to experiment and  make work for different platforms.

Then Covid 19 hit and the world changed.

Suddenly every gallery was streaming everything they could find. Which kind of meant I needed to rethink VLTV for this new landscape. The focus shifted from the audience who are now dripping in glorious art and moved to supporting the artists. Ensuring that they are able to continue making art as they emerge from this global catastrophe.

I’m delighted to bring you glimpses of these wonderful artists’ practices.

Stay safe,

Alex Billingham

Vivid Live Curator

VLTV EPISODES:

VLTV 001 | Es Morgan | between our wants, our need 

this is a performance for one

i invite you to watch it from your bed

it remembers the first time we slept together, in october

when we were interrupted by a falling glass of wine and a potted plant.

Legs thrown overhead, my chest explodes in a shower of red wine and soil. We jump up, making an instantaneous pivot from full body immersion to awkward flapping; shock transforms into apologies, embarrassment into laughter.

Nine months later, we share this bed each night, a global pandemic rendering us temporary roommates. Together, we return to the memory of our first fuck and imagine it anew through a series of performance experiments.

‘between our wants, our need’ is a text and video work which emerged from a daily practice of automatic writing. It imagines what I might say if I had the chance to return to that moment, turning to poetry to unravel the co-constituting nature of desire and gender, subjectivity and objecthood.

VLTV 002 | Rosa Postlethwaite | Green Scream

Disappearance

Relationships with other species

The edges of subjectivity

My nose

Green Scream developed from a daily practice of automatic writing and a desire to express what an awareness of the climate crisis feels like. This resulted in a series of loosely connected narratives told from my position surrounded by the green screen – a physical site of performance and focus for cultural and personal research.

Rosa Postlethwaite is a performance artist, dramaturg and producer working across Visual Art, Live Art, Theatre, Dance, and Cabaret/Club contexts. Their practice is informed and driven by socialist, queer and feminist movements and is interested in the relationship between macrostructures and daily life. Their performances are often site-responsive, and explore the ways places elicit or demand particular ways of behaving.

website: rosapostlethwaite.com | twitter: @rosapossy | instagram: @rosapossy

VLTV 03 | Elly Clarke | Performance Anxiety

A doubt-riddled monologue to the sound of pleasure.
Shot on Zoom and Quicktime; mixed, performed & recorded via DJ Pro.

Am I taking too long?
Is this taking too long?
Are you comfortable?
Is this good?
Am i good?
Does this feel good?
Is your arm ok?
Was it a good investment?
Am i?
Does it feel like the right decision?
Are you glad         ?

What good can yet another video do in this oversaturated world?

Is it too rushed?
Am I rushing you?
Am I keeping you from doing other things?
Am I too fast?
Am I too slow?
Should I speed up?
Should I catch my breath?
Should I allow you to catch yours?

Elly Clarke is an artist interested in the role, performance, value and burden (‘the drag’) of having and being a physical body in a digitally mediated world. She explores this through photography, video, music, writing & community-based projects and #Sergina, a border-straddling, multi-bodied drag queen who, across one body and several, sings and performs songs online and offline about love, lust and loneliness in the mesh of hyper-dis/connection. Some of these songs make it onto records released by Berlin-based record label Wicked Hag. Some performances are participatory; many are live streamed. Clarke is a current Chase DTP funded PhD researcher in Art at Goldsmiths and has shown work at venues that include The Lowry; Franklin Furnace, New York; Kiasma, Helsinki; Milton Keynes Gallery; ONCA, Brighton and Galerie Wedding, Berlin. #Sergina (plural) was also supposed to perform at the Roskilde Festival this summer – but that didn’t happen for obvious reasons. It will happen hopefully in full fleshy physicality next year instead.

website: ellyclarke.com | twitter: @elly_clarke | instagram: @digitalb0dy

VLTV 004 | Demelza Toy Toy | URLology: 21.03.2020 – 31.03.2020

URLology: 21.03.2020 – 31.03.2020 was sonic investigation of noise, disruption and vulnerability. Composed live using Zoom and simultaneous readings of the participant’s web browser history from the first 10 days of lockdown in the UK.

Demelza Toy Toy is a London based multi-disciplinary artist engaged with performance, sound and collaborative modes of practice as strategies of resistance to narratives of cultural dominance. The purpose of her interventions through art making is to disrupt and interrogate power dynamics and challenge cultural biases.

She considers her works as tools to activate spaces for the potential of the audience to reflect upon their own complicity in the systems and structures that maintain and produce systems of dominance. These works also take on the form of self care and protection against violence enacted within these structures and systems.

website: www.demelzatoytoy.com | Instagram: @demelza.toytoy

VLTV 005 | Bridget Coderc | Storm

Storm explored feelings of melancholia as well as the links between reminiscence and wallowing. The piece depicted the artist’s family gathering filmed in the early 2000s. Taking inspiration from Walden (1968) by Jonas Mekas, the piece is influenced by the artist’s childhood memories. Taking a personal, first-person perspective, Storm magnifies mundanity and tradition, highlights how the brain distorts the past and questions if that is the reason for sadness. The soundtrack imitates the same motives as the moving image. Audio from the original VHS tapes is distorted and manipulated into an unpredictable synth based soundtrack.

Soundtrack by Lee Roberts.

Bridget Coderc is a lens-based media artist working in Manchester. Her work focuses on introspection and draws from personal experience to create artwork which reflects upon mundanity, childhood memories and everyday life. Concepts are realized via media including photography, video, performance and installation. The artist often combines archive footage with self-portraits filmed on low-fidelity cameras. Layering these together Coderc distorts the images even more. She brings back the outdated technology and questions how it impacts our memory.

Coderc is heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory, including Sigmund Freud’s theories on the unconscious and Donald Winnicott’s transitional object. This allows the artist to enhance her exploration into how one can acknowledge what is suppressed and unconscious within them.

website: www.bridgetc.link | instagram: @bridgetimage

VLTV 006 | Pierce Starre | Fragile

“We are not as broken as we might believe” Dathan Horridge, Glimpse, 2020

Fragile was an online live performance art work that takes time to explore the fragility of the human mind. According to a survey carried out by NatCen Social Research, in collaboration with the University of Leicester, for NHS Digital, 1 in 4 people will experience mental health difficulties of some kind each year in England. The same study found that the overall number of people reporting mental health difficulties has increased significantly in recent years.

The word fragile derives from the old Latin frangere which means to break. A vase will be held, until its weight can no longer be physically endured, at which point it will fall to the floor.

Vase, from the Latin vas, means “container”, or “vessel”. Human-like curves suggest the parallels of the containing function of the vase, with our own capacity to contain; to act as a vessel for our feelings, emotions and experiences and those of others.

This work took place within the context of collective and personal experiences of trauma, loss, isolation and grief, resulting from a global pandemic. According to the charity Mind, more than half of adults (60%) and over two thirds of young people (68%) have reported increased difficulties with their mental health due to the current COVID 19 pandemic.

Fragile explores the limits of our capacity to hold and contain and takes time to connect with the moments in which we let go.

Pierce Starre is a Liverpool based artist with a practice situated in performance. Pierce’s first language is British Sign Language, as both of their parents are profoundly Deaf. Previous works have explored their experience of growing up as a hearing individual in a predominantly silent household. Pierce has explored through their work the territory which they occupy between the Deaf and hearing worlds and has further critiqued intersectionality in broader social and political contexts; highlighting the restrictive nature of the institution, institutional boundaries and oppression and the spaces between self and other.

Web: piercestarre.com | Facebook: @piercestarreartist | Twitter: @mypiercestarre | Instagram: @piercestarreartist

VLTV 007 | S A B O T A G E | neurotransmission

S A B O T A G E engaged audiences from within the spectacle of a 24/7 news culture, reflecting and amplifying the chaos of contemporary politics and events. The project invited its audience to consider the audio/visual overload that is produced by a media within which news channels have moved towards sensationalism, entertainment and opinion, and away from traditional values of verification, relevance, depth and quality of interpretation. It highlighted Kovach and Rosenstiel’s “Journalism of assertion” which focuses on how putting a claim into the arena of public discussion as quickly as possible undermines the accuracy of responding to the source of the report. This dissonance echoes the artist’s own neurological complications that resulted from a head injury occurring in 2014, forcing the artist to take a hiatus before returning in late 2017.

For VLTV, the artist presented a new iteration that appropriates public domain video and audio footage covering West Midlands surveillance operations and reports on organised crime investigations with the focus of illegal drugs. In July 2020, police arrested more than 700 suspects, seizing £54m in cash and tonnes of drugs in the UK’s “Biggest and most significant” operation ever against organised crime. The extent of the reach of these activities becomes newsworthy once the distribution happens over the county lines, effectively associating the working class alongside the more affluent classes. This often goes unnoticed when the epidemic remains contained within deprived areas, and leads to an almost sciophobic reaction to the cliche of the hooded drug dealer; a symbol of fear within suburban culture.

website: www.jassingh.org |  instagram: @sab_o_teur

VLTV 008 | Eothen Stearn | SUDS

A newly commissioned 20minute performative video set in Eo’s Glasgow flat.

SUDS was a contemporized stream of consciousness approach to writing & image making as narrated by AI, in homage to Virginia Woolf and modes of automatic and free writing. This work explored themes of autobiographical thought, domesticity, object-hood and sentience.

There is a blurring of authorship between the life model and objects that cohabit. We meet the washing machines, the fridge, the bed, the kettle, the boiler, house plants and other instruments.

Heat and humours are ignited through the playing of drums and singing. A kind of mundane eroticism is brought about through projections onto Eo’s flesh alongside the everyday phenomenon of the sunset.

All material written, performed and filmed by Eothen Stearn. (with guest appearance of Rachel Aggs on violin). Note this work contains some nudity.

Eothen Stearn’s art roams between the intimacy of personal relations, the detail of everyday life, music, feminism, queerness and science fiction. Eothen is interested in craft, memory, emotions and modalities of speech. Within Eo’s practice a space is made to dissemble hierarchies, so to look into the conditioning of bodies. The work produced questions social responsibilities and the intersections between private and pubic. Eo’s practice incorporates sculpture, performance and sound, which although appearing different from each other in their materialities and temporalities, they are made of the same attitude; one that looks into everyday politics. Sharp, intimate, touching, vulnerable observations are brought top the forefront using all kinds of materials: ceramics, textile, drawings, performance, song, all come tougher by Eo’s hand. Each bleeds into each other’s territories with a minimum of effort; as if they are each other’s magnets, hosts and extensions. Part of Eo’s practice is playing in bands; “NIGHTSHIFT” and “2ply” in Glasgow and Netherlands based band “Difficult”.

website: eothenstearn.com | instagram: @eothenstearn

VLTV 009 | Exodus Crooks | Break Bread with Me

Break Bread with Me was an exploration and reflection of how performance and text exist on various bodies; how the words that one individual has written resides in the mouths of those who did not write the words but live them. Break Bread with Me celebrates Blackness, investigates organic performance and uncovers fellowship through digital devices.

The text was an amalgamation of automatic writings entitled Aisle 15 and Second-generation-ness written by the artist in January 2020. Although this began as an opportunity for Exodus to appreciate and understand how their work is interpreted by and resonates with their peers, the work became symbolic of intimacy, respect, and love amongst Black womxn.

Using a collection of words Exodus was apprehensive to call poetry, seven individuals unpack themes of migration, belonging and intersectionality in a collective Zoom reading. The selection of each participant is a deliberate representation of who they are in relation to the artist. To read in this way, with these individuals is personal, exposing and replicates the way in which members of Exodus’s childhood church would read a bible passage together; it was in this Pentecostal church that Exodus first explored their voice.

Exodus Crooks’ practice revolves around the integral conversations that require a contemporary vehicle of communication. Generally, investigating large topics such as identity politics, but focusing on the strategically unexplored areas, they use the necessary media to critique social constructs, the value of belonging and colonization as currency. In most cases her practice, and the outcomes are a result of play and the process of playing.

As an artist-educator, much of their current work considers the collaborative and collective value of others. Viewing theirself as a critical partner to their students, they began to use their pedagogical experience outside of the formal classroom space; considering their practice as a form of activism; existing beyond the role of artist and/or teacher. Exidus considers their art to be a calm and collected delivery of unapologetic, deliberate and fervent explorations of a problematic society. In truth, Exodus feels like this is a love letter to marginalised groups of people whose voice is often disregarded. If, through their art, they can represent and relay a fraction of one’s experience, then they feel that their art has done exactly what art is supposed to do.

website: www.linktr.ee/exoduscrooks | instagram: @exoduscrooks

VLTV 010 | Kühle Wampe | DETHKWUEST

A (DEATH) meditation (for Samhain(proper)) on the idea of death (and the death of ideas (and the death of reality/capital))

The fuzz (of interference (crackle (morphological beast (oral transmission(Shape-shifting)chthonic)))old wives tale) of everyday KWUEST – for the last days of digital DARKAGE – NOFUTURE/NO REAL PAST/NO OBJECT/

The material is dead/Words of flesh and slime/DUNGEON DREAMS

A digi-offering to the underworld /Trapped in outdated TV-TRANSMSSION FORMAT

Cyber-STYX incryptION

Watch narrative die over and over for ur viewing pleasure

Remember

DETH is not the end

KÜHLE WAMPE IS AN AWFUL ENMESHING OF SHAMBOLISM-TIME-REPROBATES/HORRIBLE COLLABORATIVE EFFORT/SERIES OF SUSTAINED FAILURES/OCCASIONAL WRESTLERS/EURO-DANCE NIGHTMARE

kühle wampe is a horrible collaboration between amelia seren roberts, dinosaur kilby, craig david parr, joshua heathcote & james poyser. spread eagle across the midlands.

in 2016 kühle wampe was formed from the simple ideas that: we could get more work done together, we could support and crit our work, we enjoyed working together. we wanted to wrestle.

life intervened. working together is hard. we learned how to organise DIY projects/events. we tried to professionalise. we tried to be something that we weren’t.

currently. we don’t want to do admin. we are making work together. we entered the black hole (club.) the world is currently a dark age shit show, mummers farce, apocalypse so our early DIY mutual support intentions are more necessary for us to look out for each other.
2020 kühle wampe pulled a stone from a sword and became a band of merry knights.

instagram: @kuhle_wampe