Feedback Chambers / Installation / The Great Escape Festival Sydney / Easter 2007
Image: Spooky Mens Choir with sound artist Dan Conway
The Feedback ‘Sound Chamber’ was an immersive, resonating environment created for sound artists to develop and perform site specific works. The installation drew on the chamber’s past as an armament store and it’s contemporary usage as a festival site – and relating it back to a broader social and contemporary context – the war in Iraq,which was underway during the time of the festival.
The Feedback Chamber project sat within a larger 3 day event called ‘The Great Escape Festival’. In it’s third year, the festival was a major music + arts event with 10,000 participants, situated within The Newington Armoury in Sydney. As Arts Manager, I was responsible for the curation and delivery of a diverse (and robust!) arts program – working alongside the Mixed Industry (Mi5) festival and production team which included curators, artists and installation assistants.
The Feedback Chamber project offered a chance to shift focus from the larger scale of the festival to the production of single venue or ‘room’. Acting as both curator at a conceptual / spatial level and (most importantly) as an artist /co-collaborator, this project placed me in unfamiliar territory. It tested my practice and methodology within a completely new context – providing unexpected outcomes and valuable insights.
It is in this project that I first discovered that a creative armature could shift in format depending on the circumstances – or could simply be the altering of spatial and experiential conditions of a room (in this case, light and acoustics) in which invited sound artists could respond to. The project underscored the value of seeking out other artists as co-collaborators – despite the risk of making the project vulnerable to failure in a very public arena. It provided the opportunity for artists to transform a space and engage with the audience in ways far beyond what was initially thought possible from a curatorial perspective. It is here that I learnt that mutual trust between curator, curator as artist and artist are key.
As curator and artist within this room context, I was able to investigate ways to engage with the festival participant on an empathetic and intimate way – as both an observer of other artists work and as a performer creating new sound works – reading and responding to a room and it’s occupants (like designing with spatial and emotive elements) in real-time. In this way, the project provided immediate feedback on the successes and failures of these investigations, making this the most potent and emotionally satisfying project within the Masters ‘Ephemeral Laboratory’ research.