Testbed
5 - 7 July 2007
Leeds Met Gallery

This 3-day live residency (with the gallery open whilst in residence) offered the opportunity for the development of a collaborative endeavour between Dan Williamson and myself. An endeavour to combine the austere operations, that I use to comply with self-imposed rules, and the scrutinising of these actions by Dan through documentation, live cutting and replay. The activity utilised the space and opportunity provided by Testbed to trial and document several ideas, allowing us to both physically work through them.

The activity took as its starting point the work Redrawn, string – involving string pulled through eyelets on the walls of the space to form a grid that demarcates the volume of the space. As I paced the gallery in order to pull each length of string, Dan exploited the use of multiple cameras to allow continual cutting of footage taken, whereby these interrelated actions offered a layered process that divided and dissected the space.

This residency allowed further exploration of how this negotiated collaboration develops in a live scenario. As the video tries to explain the decisions behind the actions and attempts to detail them taking place, whereby we each have to physically sidestep each other to get the desired results, allowing these two concurrent processes to continually interrupt each other.