dotdot dash
Hosea, Birgitta (2018) dotdot dash. [Animation, Drawing, Performance, Public art, Site-specific work]
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dotdot dash was commissioned in 2018 to be experienced by walkers in a series of site-specific artworks in Gravesend for the ACE-funded Night Walking North Kent festival by InspiralLondon, a collaborative artists’ project led by Charlie Fox of Counterproductions. InspiralLondon is based on a 300-mile walking trail around London in the shape of a spiral created by Charlie Fox and divided into 36 individual walks along which the group carry out regular walks and art works. Determining a route by chance through drawing a spiral across the city creates an unpredictable path through London that ends in Gravesend.
dotdot dash investigates whether it is possible to make site-specific, live animation and how that could be carried out through participation. Furthermore, following discussions with the InspiralLondon group about privilege and who is able to walk around freely in the dark at night, dotdot dash is a collective action to reclaim the night through light and noise and, thus, combat the vulnerability that women, LGBT and other minority groups feel about walking in the city at night.
During this live performance, each participant is given two laser pens and invited to follow Birgitta Hosea’s instructions as to what type of marks to make and colours to use. Conceived of as a concert of visual music, Hosea bases the orchestration upon a chance-based graphic score and encourages the audience to sing along. Although many other artists have used light painting as the basis for photography, such as PiKAPiKA and even Picasso (with Gjon Mili), this is not a set up for documentation, but about the embodied experience of taking an active role in the communal, creation of a live animation of lights with choral singing with results that resemble the scratched-on film, abstract animation of Len Lye.
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