What the F*** is Happening Now?

Saturday 19 July 2008 12noon – 9pm

What…
What the F*** is Happening Now? was a day of art and music set in the grounds of a large country house in Falmer Village, Brighton.

Reconsidering artistic explorations from the 1960's to the present day, under the ubiquitous, or perhaps passé, banner of 'the Happening', the event brought artists and musicians together to turn an old-fashioned English countryside Mansion into a contemporary arena of ideas, attitudes and activities, forming a matrix of durations and spatial live and installation works.

The majority of the selected works were significantly extended across space and time. The presentation of works in parallel, spread-out across space-time, emphasised a non-linear and non-hierarchical structure, allowing the audience a more distended and free engagement with the works. The opportunity to circulate around the works dipping in and out, in a manner that reflects the free-movement of the mind at play, encouraged the audience members to actively make their own connections between events and ideas. There was also a programme of shorter performances across the day.

Works about time are often related to endurance; mental and physical difficulty and strain, physically embodying the 'concept', as it were putting oneself actually into the ideas. We were interested in reconsidering what the 'spatial' equivalents of this are, and to see what will take place when the temporal and the spatial are brought together. Beyond Time-space is speed and movement, (of ideas and around the festival) and beyond this it's actually about meeting, connecting up a network of ideas.

'What the F*** is happening Now?' emphasised the effects of space-time on the performer, the performance and the audience. The mental and physical effort of concentration brought a sense of time and space grounded in the body: as expanses; as the passing 'here and now'; and the distant 'there and then'.

The audience was included; they too could have the opportunity to feel this, as not only were they there the whole day, but they were also invited by one artist to join an on-going discussion of the event (and way of experiencing it) through text message. The event happened in an incredible country manor house – so it was an enjoyable as well as an interesting experience – It was a strange setting though, throwing up another relationship which was resolved somehow as the event panned out – between the [art] and the English country village Mansion and gardens. The incongruity between tea cakes, barbeques and lawns and linen suits and panama hats with hard-core artistic experimentation threw up some interesting aesthetical situations.

What the F*** is Happening Now? was collaboratively produced by protoPLAY, Beatabet and Vole.

Time
12noon to 9pm, Saturday 19 July, 2008
Performances start at different times

Artists
Didymus
Fred Monnoye
Becky Bowley
Grant Newman
Lady Kitt
Xahdrez
Vole
Anna Casey
Lulu Allison
Orion Maxted
Jules Arthur
Bunty
Aharon
Joseph Young
Lori
Paul Matosic
James Topple

About the organisers:
ProtoPLAY, Beatabet and Vole have a common orientation towards multiple media or transdisciplinary work. I.e. an interest in bringing different forms of expression and creativity together in order to test new possibilities for the artist and for the spectator. Hand-in-hand with this, is a common desire to bring different artists to work together. Hence the work focuses on creating networks of activity along with intense periods of shared experience and collaboration, often inviting new artists to join in with the work.

And lastly – an engagement with 'process' in art at least as much as finished work.

The triple focus of transdisciplinarity, collaboration and process, aims to create a whole which is capable of transformation, evolution, or free-association, ultimately reflective of the individual mind at play, and a microcosm of society.

ProtoPLAY: Founded in 2004, protoPLAY is a transdisciplinary art group focusing on collaborative approaches and experimentation on creativity processes. protoPLAY is a platform to turn individual practices into a collective process, exploring the concepts of evolutive displays, cultural recycling and dissolution of authorship. protoPLAY stress the process over a particular end result, during which raw creative energy is unleashed by and framed within the art event. www.protoplay.net
protoPLAY doesn't make videos, installations, paintings, photography, music, Sound Art, sculptures, textiles, dance, nor Performance Art. protoPLAY makes ART.

Beatabet: Beatabet, founded in 2002, is a collective artists and musicians from a broad range of disciplines who provide a network of skills, resources and opportunities for each other. With an emphasis on improvisation and collaboration, Beatabet seeks to offer wide-ranging artistic opportunities that might not otherwise be possible or affordable to it's individual members. Beatabet's main focus is an annual peer-to-peer artistic summer residency programme. The backbone of the schedule comprises of group workshops, group criticism sessions, improvisation sessions and creative games; participants are encouraged to share skills and explore their own practice through the development of new work both collaboratively and through individual expression. Beatabet is also a record label, and regularly puts on large-scale multiple-media events.

Vole: Found some years ago in disused spaces, abstract group vole make music with visual art, film, theatre and dance. Recent and forthcoming work includes improvising with contemporary dance, the ongoing vole radio sessions, 'my tinnitus' - an acclaimed installation which renders disturbance serene, comedy impro theatre and as soon part of 'What The F*** Is Happening?' - Volathon an improvisation for the duration of the festival. With mixed abilities, trying to escape patterns, surrendering to curious harmony, plaintive, odd shapes, complex, lyrical, simple, abstract ...