Martin Coutts
Susanne Kennedy
istheatre ltd, White Trash Medium Rare
photo Bruce Miller
istheatre ltd, White Trash Medium Rare
Martin Coutts has just received a RUN_WAY grant to attend the Transmedial media festival in Berlin next year, which he won on the merit of performing, writing and video making with Ryk Goddard (istheatre ltd) for Freezer (a performance installation in a dance party). The artist sees Berlin as the best place to explore his interest in new media works that include performance, particularly in the unique nightclub environment. Lamp is a collaborative project with Tricky Walsh (a visual artist and animator who works in claymation, she is interested in optical and filmic experience). Their “badly made box” using a lens, light and a body—“all that TV is really”—is a proudly “low-tech media” collaboration to these artists. Transparency is important to the artists who believe that being open about the (simple) mechanisms at play means the audience will be less preoccupied with unraveling the way it all works and hence freer to experience the piece. Lamp has been funded to attend the Next Wave festival in Melbourne. Coutts is not averse to ‘higher’ forms of media in his performance. Spect, a new collaboration between dancer Bec Reid and multimedia artist Matt Warren, involves manipulating live feed in an environmental installation. It’s an exploration of site and space and an attempt to resolve one of the challenges of performing with media. Concept and media artists often move out of sync in the developmental process: Martin Coutts is interested in bringing it all together again.
RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 6
