Arts House presents local and global works for BLEED

Building on the success of the online 2020 program, the Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital (BLEED) is back this month with three works being presented at the Arts House.

The festival is a partnership between the City of Melbourne and three organisations across the Asia Pacific region, with the underlying intention being to strengthen the city’s creative global ties.

In addition to the Arts House, the organisations involved in premiering the works of 17 artists are the Campbelltown Arts Centre in Sydney, the Taipei Performing Arts Center and Taipei’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

“We are building a creative resurgence and we’re proud of establishing an incredible collaboration between Melbourne, Sydney and Taipei to showcase our homegrown talent and create immersive content through BLEED,” the council’s Creative Melbourne portfolio lead Cr Jamal Hakim said.

“Our creative industries are going beyond borders this year – connecting people no matter their background and taking art-lovers on a journey like no other.”

The focus of BLEED is to explore how art can be consumed, experienced and translated across various formats and locations, and three diverse works will be showcasing this at the Arts House.

While the first two works of Running Machine by Australian and Japanese artists, and Toe fai! by Studio Kiin will be using dance in their multidisciplinary works, room2 will be heavily relying on live music, visuals and written prompts.

Presented by digital media artist and creative practice researcher Patrick Hase and curator, artist and DJ Anuraag Bhatia, room2 is an interactive work that is accessible online and in-person.

Coming together following their similar experiences with the internet and digital spaces growing up, Patrick and Anuraag started developing, refining and independently streaming an online version of room2 last year before getting the attention of the Arts House.

The online version of the work is still active and has a similar philosophy, but being in-person has allowed the artists to explore the work in more depth.

Disrupting existing expectations of face-to-face versus online events, Patrick and Anuraag’s work revolves around providing people a space to communally explore certain topics through anonymous written and drawn responses.

“Something might come up on the screen asking something like, ‘what kind of feelings does this track bring into your body?’, and people can write or draw their response,” Patrick said.

“The responses are purposely anonymised so people can share how they are feeling about something while in a communal space, but retain anonymity.”

To engage with different artists, the interface they built allows for attendees to respond to prompts during the artists’ combination sets.

For this specific event a mobile app version has been created to allow people to easily interact with the work in-person, but Patrick said attendees would still be communally engaging as the responses would be projected on the wall.

Ultimately, room2 allows people to confidently explore their feelings towards what is happening around them, but to also bring the online into a physical space.

“It’s about changing how people think about that boundary between face-to-face and online events, and collapsing and changing that boundary,” Anuraag said.

“It is giving people new tools to understand their own internal experience and communicate their feelings, thoughts, and memories around that like a piece of art.”

Anuraag and Patrick’s live work will be presented at Arts House as part of BLEED on Sunday, September 25 between 2pm and 7pm, with people encouraged to drop in at any time.

Of the remaining two works at Arts House, Running Machine will be first from September 14 to 17, and Toe fai! is on September 23. •

artshouse.com.au/events/bleed-2022

Caption: Anuraag Bhatia Photo by Hannah Alexander.