Transact Flesh/Skin/Bone (2002)

An interactive video installation for a single user that used an interface based upon the tessellations found in nature. Different paths through the script created differing combinations of a video triptych featuring minimal performance actions shot from a range of perspectives. The work was accompanied by an interactive stereo sound-scape and an artist book.

SHOWINGS:
1: The Wild New Media Project, Wild 2002, 2–17 February, 2002, The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Australia, curated by Antoanetta Ivanova.

TEAM: Keith Armstrong (Director, the Transmute Collective) with The Transmute Collective: Lisa O'Neill (Performance), Guy Webster (Sound), Gavin Sade (Code)

PARTNERS: Arts Queensland, Australia Council For The Arts, QUT Creative Industries.

MORE: Transact (Flesh/Skin/Bone) was a three screen interactive video installation for a single user with a visual interface based upon the tessellated, interlocking honeycomb structures commonly found in biophysical lifeforms. Participants could navigate the work by ‘moving’ along numerous differing paths through the cellular script, thereby creating unique combinations of video triptych material that featured minimal performance actions by Lisa O’Neill. The work was accompanied by an interactive stereo sound-scape experienced via headphones and a full colour book that detailed the research behind the work.

Transact (Flesh/Skin/Bone) was strongly influenced by principles drawn from the Japanese 'Suzuki' actor method of training that builds its concepts of performance through seeking dynamic balances between 'Skin' (a performer's outward appearances), 'Flesh' (that which results from a breadth of disciplined training) and 'Bone' (a performer's inherited bodily characteristics). By drawing allusions between these interconnected imperatives for movement and the processes inherent within biophysical ecologies a novel interactive scripting map was devised - which became the basis for Lisa O Neill’s improvisations – and therefore the video snippets subsequently selected to recombine and juxtapose in real time. In this way the work recreated a body of work possessing varying sensations of balance, counterbalance and exchange.

The aim of the work was to create a "poetics of bodily fragility” established via these interacting processes of dynamic ecological exchange, therefore drawing strongly upon principles of ecological and human movement sciences. Transact (Flesh/Skin/Bone) was a key precursor to the significant work Intimate Transactions (2003 onwards).