The first event to kick off the LA season for 2008 said it best with the site: the grimey, entropy-laden cells and halls of the Old Melbourne Gaol’s City WatchHouse.
Hosted by students from the RMIT Fine Art Sound Department, and members of the ‘Within Earshot’ collective, the night began with a series of installations and ‘in-cell’ performances located along the main hallway of the Gaol.
Performers and Installers pieces included the breadth of audio-visual exploration: from VVVV displaced video projections, analog-meets-digital synth opera, ‘lock-in’ personal performance, tv static walls of fear, noise rooms of doom, double-video relay of the prison itself and gentle candle lit spaces.
I got the feeling each cell represented the artists own cell somewhat, or perhaps the modern-day cell/studio – the bedroom – and that these rooms were in fact somehow a relocation and displacement of each artist own studios, paralleling into the context of their own, chosen penitentiary.
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