In this installation YesYesNo teamed up with The Church, Inside Out Productions and Electric Canvas to turn the Auckland Ferry Building into an interactive playground. Our job was to create an installation that would go beyond merely projection on buildings and allow viewers to become performers, by taking their body movements and amplifying them 5 stories tall.

[watch the flash on the website - it's gorgeous]

[dawn]

we had a few queries from people asking whether copies of the images we used at the solstice are up for sale… and now they are! I’ve put all the images into 2 low res pdfs here: solsticeweb and solsticeweb2 [about 4mb each], but if you’d like to see one in a higher res, let me know. The quality of the images is quite lovely… Mike and Blythe are remarkable photographers. i’ve labelled each of the images in the pdf, which would obviously not be in the final print…

The rectangular images are available in two sizes – approx 30 x 20 inch [A$50 each + p&h], and approx 22 x 16 inch [A$35 each + p&h]. The square images are available only in 20 x 20 inch size [A$35 each + p&h]. The prints are on photographic paper.

Anyway, if you’re interested, let me know by email or in the comments, and we can take things from there…

Craig responded to my last post about this by saying that it’s a good thing to use the installation to talk about baptism and death and things like that – and he’s right. Of course it’s fabulous to use things of culture to bring the great christian themes to life… it’s brilliant, and the more it happens the better. I’m working on a workshop for Thursday, and half the material is about that…

I do hope though that it doesn’t end there. I know this is more about the space i’m in at the moment [i don't spend a lot of time talking with christians], but i’m really interested in exploring how someone outside the church interprets ‘Ocean without a shore’… Sometimes we’re so grateful for things that we can use in a christian context that we forget they have meaning outside our context that perhaps is worth exploring. What does ‘Oceans without a shore’ say to people who aren’t christian about life and grief and death and transcendence and reality [and whatever else?]… What do they do with the emotions that it evokes? And then if we’re going to use it, how do we shape worship or sacred spaces to honour and speak into those emotions and experiences, not just describe our own story?

I’m not sure I’m explaining that very well yet.

Watching yesterday, we were sitting next to these two men. The four of us were the only ones there, and after about 30 minutes, one of the men got up and went to leave the room. ‘Too fucking beautiful’, he said as he walked out. ‘It’s too fucking beautiful…’

Rebecca, who is curating the exhibition, talked about a conversation she had with Rachel, a Muslim, who is also going to be part of the steering group, about the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, and her discomfort with the way the story plays out for Hagar. Rachel’s reply was that it’s not how the story is understood by Muslims, that from their perspective, what happens to Hagar is a necessary part of the divine plan. Hagar exits stage left from the Judeo-Christian story, and ends up centre stage in a whole new story of faith.

I wrote here once before about those in our stories of faith who are abandoned by the side of the road. I think i need to rewrite that…

In a few weeks time we’re beginning some work with women in Dame Phyllis Frost Prison, exploring some of the stories from the bible that will have particular resonance for them… the rape of Tamar, Lot’s daughters, Hagar’s story, Dinah’s story… These are characters who have largely been left abandoned by the side of faith’s road. i hope we can find the faith they might take centre-stage in…

it’s finished now, but Ecstatic City at the ngv was simply superb. Due to the water crisis in melbourne the fountains in the moat at the front of the gallery have been switched off, so Chris Doyle made a fountain by projecting images of melbourne people jumping onto the front of the gallery. It was beautiful.

21:100:100 is still on… it’s a sound installation in at Gertrude art gallery, 100 works by 100 sound artists… everything ambient, electronica, drone. i was a little underwhelmed when i walked in – i wanted images, or darkness, some way of getting lost in it – but after a while i felt like a kid in a candy store. It’s an overwhelming collection of works, best consumed in medium sized doses over repeat visits. we were there for a couple of hours the other day. i’d really like to do more with sound in the stuff we do. it’s always the thing we think of last, the accompanying soundtrack rather than the central piece…

i kept meaning to blog about man on wire when i first saw it, but couldn’t ever find the words. It’s an extraordinary film, one i still think about. a couple of friends have said they won’t see it because they’re terrified of heights. i’m not good with heights [i'm not scared i'll fall, i'm scared i'll jump], and it didn’t bother me at all when i was seeing the film. oddly though, later that night i was lying in bed, and i felt almost paralysed with fear as i thought about what Philippe Petit had done. he was walking – dancing – on a tight rope, a quarter of a mile above the earth. it’s a film about passion and courage and the pursuit of dreams, but more than that, it’s about wonder and awe and defying the hypothetical and real laws of gravity that would keep us pinned to earth. i loved it.

tonight we’re having a between the spaces dinner to plan a christmas ‘moment’… and then i’m off and away for a week. see you when i’m back.

We’re also going to poke around Ecstatic City for a while on Saturday, and the 21:100:100 sound exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space sounds fantastic [go read the description!], and if the stars align right i’ll get to the concert performance. Melbourne’s great during the festival – lots of street art and performances. If your budget’s tight, there’s a page full of free stuff here.

This isn’t connected to the festival, but I’ve put it into my diary for next week. From the Irfan website:

irfanspace: an exploration of the pathways and spaces between people, cultures, past, present and eternity. sound, images and poetry from islamic cultures and traditions around the world invite reflection and engagement locally, globally, internally.

irfanspace is a mixed-media exhibition featuring photography, sound and video installation, poetry, and interactive online media presented by Mark Pedersen, Natalia Gould and Nazid Kimmie at Kinross House, 603 Toorak Rd. throughout October 2008.

The opening was last night, but i unfortunately couldn’t get there. Nazid Kimmie, whose poetry is part of the exhibition, wrote about it on his blog. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

from here, exploring Walter Benjamin’s book ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

i’ve been playing around with a few ideas about next year’s UK trip today. they’re still consolidating, but they’re based in the belief that we need to be finding new ways of offering encounters with stories that are bigger than our own – and that doing that is at least as important a conversation for the church to have as what new communities of faith might look like.

i’ve been thinking about who communicates the essence of faith best to people who are disinterested or disenchanted with Christianity; about who offers a moment of hope, peace, redemption, grace to the world, and who enters into the world’s agony, tragedy, ecstasy. it’s largely artists, musicians and poets. we know that, alt worship emerged from that reality. but often, even in alt worship, we’re simply using art as a way of explaining what we already know and what we think others should believe [the same theology in a different wrapping].

i’ve been reading a lot about the process of creativity recently, mostly interviews with artists and authors. so many of them talk about not knowing when they begin how something they create will end. the shape is uncovered in its making. the artwork’s creation is a revelation, and the artist is shaped by the artwork as much as the artwork is shaped by the artist. i know that my theology and shape has been changed dramatically since i started to write about it [someone told me once that i would believe anything if it made good poetry, and there's more than a little truth in that]. i wonder if it’s one of the reasons why anything beyond straight descriptive art is so terrifying to many christians. – that, and that we lose control of meaning with art, where we had control of meaning with words [well, we thought we did - i've got a whole other post about that coming up!]…

none of this might make sense. it doesn’t quite to me yet. but i’m putting it up in case it resonates with someone – and whether you can push it a bit further for me… but back to the original point of the post: next year’s trip I want to be a kind of hothouse for a group of people who want to explore this in very practical ways – and preferably because it’s in their blood, not because they think it will be good for the church…

The collection is open to the public this Sunday as part of the Sydney Road Street Party.

It’s lovely stuff, well worth going [and the Sydney Road Street Party normally isn't bad either!]. The church is on the corner of Sydney road and Merri St in Brunswick.

From 26 July – 7 August there will be an opportunity to spend time at Chapel on Station Gallery reflecting through the ancient Meditation Prayer path, Labyrinth.

This guided meditation opportunity will be complemented by Art and specific reflection.

Gallery Hours Tues – Fri 11:30 – 3:00
Sat 1-4 :00
Sun 4:30 – 7:00
Chapel on Station Gallery
cnr Station St & Ellingworth Pde, Box Hill 3128
ph 9890 5810

i did like this quote from todays paper about the Pixar exhibition: “People ask us all the time: ‘My child’s interested, so what computer programs should they study?’ What we always say is: ‘Study drawing, study your observations about the world – and study how to tell stories!’ Because storytelling is what it’s really about. Then it’s a matter of how to tell those stories visually, so those traditional skills that have been around forever are the foundation of what we do. That’s in spite of the fact that, yes, we’re innovators. But if you don’t have the foundations, it doesn’t matter. A computer is just another tool.”