V.I.S.T.A Lab 2.0 :INTERFERENCE

Presented by TheatreWorks

A Process-Presentation by

Choy Ka Fai

In collaboration with

_Joavien Ng _ Mohd Fared Jainal,

_Patricia Toh _Ling Hock Siang

_Ng Yi-Sheng _Zulkifle Mahmod,

_Khoo Eng Tat _GraceTan/kwodrent,

_Lim Woan Wen _Torrance Goh/FARMWORK.

Date : 14-15 Dec 2007

Time : 8pm

Venue: 72-13

Admission: $5

For Reservations ring 6737 7213 or email : tworks@singnet.com.sg

**There will be a Q & A session after the presentations.

INTERFERENCE is about unwanted signals that disrupt or construct movements of nature. It is about the interventions of patterns in history, time, signal and noise.

INTERFERENCE explores the concept of listening to the noise of history: moments which are insignificant in our collective memory. This presentation researches our techniques of remembering and the recollections of irrelevant episodes of unrecorded history.

INTERFERENCE is a space as well as an organism. This mediated space functions as an interactive installation and a performance environment where moving bodies, electronic sounds, visual documents and light are interwoven into a constantly changing artefact of unhistorical events.

********

If history is signal, then time itself must be recognized as noise: an infinitely complex mess of data that resists interpretation.

Our project is therefore to listen to the noise of history, moments, which yield no discernible signal: the insignificant events.

Herein lies a paradox. As artists, as humans, we have a natural impulse to transmute chaos into art.

Is our goal then to reclaim the forgotten into the field of recorded time?

Or should we resist, in our representations of insignificant events, our instinct to render them significant?

********

Conceived and created by Choy Ka Fai, V.I.S.T.A Lab is a series of presentations

resulting from workshop and experiments with the 10 Singapore-based artist/designer across the wide spectrum of artistic discipline. This project is based on the central theme of re-looking at historical events that escapes our people’s memories, seemingly deemed insignificant in our invention of a vibrant, global city. We are interested in the lapses of our recent histories and the understanding of the past to imagine the future.

INTERFERENCE is the second of three presentations of V.I.S.T.A Lab Cycle 1; the third presentations will be held in February 2008.

**For more informations please visit

www.vistalabbers.blogspot.com (well, you're already here)

www.theatreworks.org.sg / www.72-13.com

Supported by

National Arts Council, Lee Foundation, Hong Leong Foundation,

72-13, Web-vision and Power98

With additional support by

Mixed Reality Lab, NUS

V.I.S.T.A Lab Presentations

V.I.S.T.A Lab cycle 1 is a series of 3 presentations resulting from workshop and experiments with the 10 Singapore-based artist/designer across the wide spectrum of artistic discipline. The project is based on the central theme of re-looking at historical events that escapes our people’s memories, seemingly deemed insignificant in our invention of a vibrant, global city. We are interested in the lapses of our recent histories and the understanding of the past to imagine the future.

V.I.S.T.A Lab 1.0: Impetus
Process-Presentation
21-22 Sep 2007
Impetus explores how insignificant events in our history are being recorded, forgotten and fabricated, focusing on the moments and impulses before they transpired. This presentation researches on the origin of data transmission and how information can be made consumable.

V.I.S.T.A Lab 2.0: Interference
Process- resentation
14-15 Dec 2007
Interference explores the concept of listening to the noise of history, moments which are insignificant to our collective memory. This presentation researches on the techniques of remembering and the recollections of irrelevant episodes of unrecorded history.

V.I.S.T.A Lab 3.0: Insignificance
Final Presentation
28,29 Feb &1 Mar 2008
Insignificance is about events that history forgets.
Insignificance events commonly overlooked by historian often reflect the true character of our time, and the promises of future drama. Based on the re-collections of events in Singapore from 1979 to 1991, in events that happen yet have become insignificance to our beings and becoming.

Talkback Session 2

Why does Ka5 keep introducing me as "a writer who wants to perform"?



Fun fact: the black dress Joavien wears has 1,392 points of stitching (all by hand). These were entered as data based on their X and Y-co-ordinates, which were thus translated into musical information on treble and bass respectively.

Poem by Machine01

That is, Paviter Singh, intern and multimedia technician for this show.

Caught in the circumference of a storm,
PI is no longer constant,
But it is.

Torrance (our set designer) noted that part of his rubric for this production was to allow the tech crew to be the stars for once. They're set in the centre of the space, with the audience sitting/wandering around them and the mad performers only inhabiting the periphery.

Lovely poem and very, very apt.

End of first performance!

And we got a standing ovation (of course got no chairs, so got not so many places to sit).

Now doing the talkback.


Some nuggets of criticism from director Jeffrey Tan:

"I loved the experience, but everything was in the words and the words were telling me something else. And yet I'm reduced to seeing full sentences. And that was very jarring. And if there's one thing you should change is not to have full sentences. Every day we're being given full sentences, being told what to think. We need to avoid that."

"This is very clean. This is very clear. This is almost like meditative. I would like there to be more interference."

R.I.P. Teh Cheang Wan

It's his 22nd death anniversary. To the day. Spare a minute of silence for the Honourable Oriental Gentleman, followed by 50 minutes of noise.

Because it's our first performance tonight. Wish us luck! Just had debriefing and some last-min updates regarding Fared's light tubes and Pat's Stephen Chow-esque laugh. Performance in a little more than an hour. Fared is calming us with sensuous massage.

Camaraderie

I do like the way we're emerging as a friendly/familial collective as well as an artistic alliance.



Don't we look sweet? Let's see some more from other days:

Torrance and Joavien in the green room.
Ka Fai giving us the new order of scenes.
Zul at the controls.


And Eng Tat at the controls.

Opening tomorrow! Debriefing now! Call-time at three! Yarrrrgh!

More WTFotography

Come see what it's all about!

Meet Da Interns!

Here's Pav and Bin, the interns from Ka Fai's video art class. Both super-skilled at electronics (watch them soldering wires and twiddling little knobs - so butch), and able to manipulate central controls while Ka Fai stands back and tries to be vaguely directorial.


The other day during debriefing I called them Green Bin and Curry Pav. :P Yeah, I'm immature like that.

My moustache brings all the boys to the bar

I'm supposed to act as the first Chinese historiographer Sima Qian in our next presentation. One of the orders from director Choy Ka Fai was that I would have to grow a beard.

I used to look like this:

DAY 0

DAY 2

DAY 4

DAY 5

DAY 7

DAY 8

DAY 9

Now, I look like this:

DAY 10

I think the ultimate intention is for me to look like this:

But then I went and checked a picture of Sima Qian on Wikipedia:


Basket! Of course he was hairless! He was a eunuch!

We has a video flyer

Wah lau. Joavien Ng is chioh, man.

Or at least, the shots we got from the photo shoot are:





There's a video coming up!

ROJAK 10: The Collaborative Edition

We're gonna be featured in the next edition of ROJAK this Saturday night:

Dear friends,

Welcome to ROJAK 10: The Collaborative Edition! (in conjunction with the Singapore Design Festival 2007 and the inaugural ArchiFest 2007)

Head down to the historic City Hall Building (Level 3: Chamber) this coming Saturday, 1 December at 8pm. The venue is kindly hosted by Singapore Institute of Architects.

This special edition of ROJAK will feature 5 works of a collaborative nature spanning the fields of architecture, product design, film, theatre, performance art and multimedia.

And they are Magical Spaces: Adib J, Yeo Jia-Jun, Rofan Teo, outofstock: Wendy Chua & Gabriel Tan, V.I.S.T.A. Lab: Ka Fai with various artists, Loo Zihan & Ruby Pan and syntfarm: Vladimir Todorovic & Andreas Schlegel.

The uber-cool invite artwork is by JUN from UFHO.

Like always, please bring drinks to share for the ROJAK dingy and spread the ROJAK sharing spirit :)

See you there! :)

Thanks for reading :)
FARM is a nonprofit Singapore society
that grows systems for the Singaporean creative community.
Visit FARM today!

Hot off the presses

Su-mei's just printed our flyers!



Just happened to be in the Theatreworks office when she did.

Today's workshop is brought to you by...

...the letters W, T and F. Which means that the production is coming along quite nicely.

The concept now seems to involve the characters as satellites orbiting the audience on a white catwalk. Heaven knows if we'll have enough money for the 2-metre styrofoam ball.

Omnis mutandis

The ground's shifted for me in this current edition of VISTA. Having written some conceptual text, I'm now placed as an observer, with the suggestion that I generate further text for print during the rehearsal process itself. No need for me to memorise the babble - I'm going to spend the entire show encased in a perspex coffin.


What's disturbing to me is how much the concept is changing behind my back - apparently, now Joavien is a Queen Android who evolves from being a robot to a human, Fared is an Animal Android who evolves from animal to human to robot, and Pat is going to be a Zen Android who examines our relationship with space by staring at walls.

They say they like my text better this time round - more him, says Ka5. Given me some homework on creating fictions to accompany each character. Me, I'm wary of having ANY text in this show.

Mo' Workshoppin'

We've got nearly the whole team in today. Eng Tat's strapping Joavien into the new electronic motion-detector sensors he's designed; they pick up on her blood pressure while she dances and translate the pulse into pitch. Ka Fai's been testing out his new sound design (Zul is abroad) while Fared and Pat improvise with their bodies - he thinks Pat's gained a new vocabulary of movement, but he's still hoping to translate Fared's inhuman jerks into smoother, more durational postures. Torrance is on his computer doing set design stuff, I guess - me, I'm rankled by the way I'm unable to upload any images, at all. Gmpht!

Pretty pictures and artist bios forthcoming. Woan Wen ain't here yet.

Winter Fashions from kwodrent

Thursday afternoon Eng Tat, the director and the performers went over to our costume designer Grace Tan's home studio. ET took these shots of Joavien in her December couture:

I like to think of this as her church organ/bell costume:


This one is her 80s polkadot costume:

And what the hell, one last view from the posterior:


Grace Tan gives good pleats. Mathematically designed, too!

Workshoppin'

Pat is investigating walking as a means of measuring time with the human body, inspired by Rebecca Solnit's "Wanderlust".


Joavien and Ka Fai are playing with the collision of the body with time-stimulated multimedia.


Fared's doing our programme.


Ooh! And we get to pick our photos for publicity!

VISTA Lab 2.0: Interference

Didja hear? We have a title!

Second installment of workshopping: we've been joined by a new artist: Lim Woan Wen, who'll be taking over from Andy as lighting designer. So far she's been working with Torrance to recycle the gazillion fluorescent light tubes from 120.

Unfortunately I didn't bring my obtrusive ol' camera at this session, so I can't capture everyone's faces while Ka5 shows 'em the mess of conceptual writing I did while they were away. I feel guilty for not being lucid.

Pat's hair has mostly grown back, but Fared will still have to trim his top to become her clone. (Ka5 has a soft spot for clones, I think.)

VISTA LAB 1.0: IMPETUS on Youtube

Our first workshop presentation, caught in rapid-succession photo stills. Check out Ka Fai's other Youtube trailers here.

*History/Time, Signal/Noise*

In many languages, the word for "history" is the same as the word for "story". In German, both are called "Geschichte", in French, they are "l'histoire".

History can therefore be seen as a science of storytelling: the process of recalling the semi-random events of the world and constructing an order in which they make sense: in which they have meaning.

Something similar happens in electronics. A radio, television set or satellite receiver must tap into a sea of electromagnetic waves to retrieve the pattern of a message: idea from chaos, a signal amidst the noise.

If history is signal, then time itself must be recognised as noise: an infinitely complex mess of data that resists interpretation.

Our project is therefore to listen to the noise of history, moments which yield no discernible signal: the insignificant events.

Herein lies a paradox. As artists, as humans, we have a natural impulse to transmute chaos into art.

Is our goal then to reclaim the forgotten into the field of recorded time?

Or should we resist, in our representations of insignificant events, our instinct to render them significant?

VISTA Lab 2.0

First workshop in preparation for the next installment of VISTA! Joining us to collaborate (i.e. not involved directly in the previous production) are engineer Khoo Eng Tat, fashion designer Grace Ng and traditional Chinese musician Lim Hock Siang.

We had a discussion...


A show and tell...


An improv...


...and a post-mortem. :D