THE OPPOSITE OF A BLACK HOLE: A PARTICIPATORY SCREENDANCE LAB

MAY - JUNE 20223
MOSKOSEL CREATIVE LAB, SWEDEN
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CREDITS

Rebecca Douglass & Tasha Hess-Neustadt: Concept, Performance, Camera, Editing

Rebecca Douglass - Sound

Thanks to Jake Burgess and Louis Caspar Schmitt for technological assistance!


Additional Support: Gerardo Salas
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This project was created in residency at Moskosel Creative Lab, Sweden, as part of Northern Sustainable Futures’ iM KONSTHALL commission.

It received funding from Northern Sustainable Futures and will be shown in a portable gallery container around Northern Sweden as part of a remote touring network throughout 2023-24.

Please read more about Northern Sustainable Futures’ work with iM KONSTHALL and additional projects at: 
https://www.northernsustainablefutures.com/

Digital Permaculture is an immersive work incorporating dance, poetry, voice, & digital intervention. It’s a continuation of a shared artistic practice & an interest in the crossing of lexicons when talking about bodies in natural vs. digital spaces through eco-glitch feminist perspectives.

Through World Building practice, desires & fantasies for a new world are fed into a Google Doc using a co-writing score & they begin to manifest. The boundaries between physical & digital blur. A typed script/archive of the world building process unravels. A digital world is born from embodied/danced imagination, morphed environments & the collation/fabrication of stock footage from the infinite content bank of the post-internet, hyper-aestheticised online space.

Natural imagery is taken from the surrounding area, blending real & digital. Inspired by geographical placement, Digital Permaculture has absorbed the nature & wildlife of Moskosel, documenting the interconnectivity between creative process & natural world.

We hope this work sparks personal reflections on the relationship between nature & technology as we dream of ways to deal with modern catastrophes by manufacturing an escape into digital utopia. We’re questioning the impossibility of achieving ‘utopia’ outside of digital software, cyclical patterns & throwaway culture in which old worlds can be ‘Moved to Trash’ & new files opened.

ABOUT THE COLLABORATORS:

Rebecca & Tasha’s artistic research centres around cyberspace as a container for & extension of multi-selves beyond the material world. Within the digital sphere, they’re interested in queering the representation of bodies, gender, identity, & story, imagining a poly-form digital dance practice.

They use DIY methodologies; re-appropriation of rudimentary technology (Zoom) as self-recording tools, amateur SFX & co-writing on Google Docs. This is a source of empowerment & escapism, imagining alternate universes & ecologies & morphing the digital body, inspired by Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism.