WinterSpace
Performance /installation 2001-05

"A snowy interactive installation during the day, gives way to a star spangled performance during the evening. Heavenly effects subtly transform the venue to create an interstellar frozen wonderland"

'A conceptual/installation performance piece involving live bodies and digital and film imagery. The space is pitch-black, nocturnal. A vision materialises on the screen of what is constructed as a galaxy,or snow. Something white sparkly and evanescent. A feeling of a rather delicious confusion as star bodies appear, discernable human shapes , diamond glitter bodies. Dark on dark, save for the shiny parts. Three performers begin moving up and down, swiftly amongst each other, creating a sparkling beauty. This becomes a non-human clouded amoeba-like image, streaky, like a pretty hail storm or underwater pyrotechnics.

The dancers wear pointillist costumes covered with tiny dots of Scotch- Lite. The dots are picked up by infra-red lighting and vision mixed with an identical star background. When the dancers are still they disappear into the background ( camouflaged) and when they move they create a shower of moving particles. Duets happen where one dancer is in costume, one is not. At times the dancer (without costume) becomes, a shadow, a negative space, an absent yet silhouetted human shape. This dancer is lifted and once in the air disappears, attention is then drawn to the physical energy of the supporting, partnering ( costumed) dancer, we catch his subtle weight changes, his transferences of energy whilst carrying. We can detect his tiny shifts of motion under the strain. The look is fragmented and alien as the struggle is evident, no illusionary grace and usual flow of energy we are accustomed to when witnessing contemporary dance, there is no hiding of effort which one expects from virtuosic dance. The supporting dancer's physicality can be seen perfectly even his breathing. Yet when the partnering roles are reversed one loses sight of the un costumed dancing figure and focuses on the star body dancer elevated and flying, defying gravity seemingly unsupported, an of effect of weightlessness turning in the night sky. So the presence and absence of the costume portray opposites within the framework of a contact dance duet. The trio of dancers costumed in close proximity creates a collected force, a giant rolling ball of stars as the outline/human shapes are confused, the edge of the bodies indiscernible, continually moving and bleeding into one another and the background.'
( from Journal for Patterns Recognised )

Martelli likens this visual concept to 'animation boil'. In an interview with Miraupaul ( NYC Times online 1999) he discusses his ASCII trio from Igloo's WindowsNinetyEight Cd Rom where the letters and numbers are in constant flux, the player can type into the figure whilst it is dancing. This accentuates the idea of performance/'liveness" in interactive digital media. Though recorded, the figure can change position with a mouse click and with a players input it becomes essentially alive again. In Winterspace the same happens again, a toying with the idea of live and recorded, but it is taken a step further by Gibson's choreography which highlights the virtual and real, the animation is this time driven by the dancers themselves. Their positioning, configuration and choreography make the work appear 2D though it is of course 3D. On one occasion there is a silence in the sound score when you can hear the footfalls of the performers, suddenly the apparition becomes real, not what we assume is a projected recorded video, we are witnessing a live work. This constant revealing and concealing of what is true and what is illusion is the way in which Martelli and Gibson encourage their audiences to think in the moment, by posing questions and provoking us to look a little further. They accept tricks and gimmicks as a deliberate choice and execute them exquisitely. They reveal and mask simultaneously, offering us the banal and surreal side by side and at the same time enable us to make our own minds up defying usual codes in the process of taking us on a journey and understanding subtle nuances in the language of perception.

Read about the installation here