WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT

Rib Summer labs residency research documentation, 2023
3 month period

Click images and links to further explore.

Contents:
-Opening public event documentation (10th July)
-Residency conversations, invited works, publications and research logs
-Closing public event documentation (2nd Sept)
-Residency and research Post Script (to come)

Steven Maybury’s residency proposal reflected on artist Mathew Kneebone’s work, Power Relations. Maybury asks: “what do we do if there is no electricity? No digital? No Grid? No virtual? How we might cope without the ease of recalling a memory instantly?”.

Maybury seeded Rib’s project space with a small selection of his own memory objects to open the space for dialogue, public participation, moments (in the dark or light), invitations and public conversations all acting as a live document for the duration of the residency. Using the digital world as a context, referencing where our intimate moments are stored, connected and shared, he made Rib a physical hard drive of sorts, displaying old and new methods of remembering and storytelling. Art historian and curator Pádraic E. Moore was one of several people invited by Maybury to present their own research at Rib. For this event Moore presented a lecture on superphysical phenomenon entitled The Seventh Ray.

Artist Bart Lunenberg was also invited to discuss Maybury’s research and his publication This Creaking Floor and all the Ceilings Below and this conversation manifested in creating an atmosphere by literally inviting fire into the room for Pádraic’s lecture and also inviting a work of his to be installed for the duration of the Rib residency titled: A house with two shadows

A house with two shadows, 2020
sculpture series, oak wood and charcoal.
(Invited artwork)

The Seventh Ray lecture by Pádraic E. Moore, with a candle lit atmosphere inspired by conversations with Bart Lunenberg

Closing residency event

On the 2nd Sept at 18.00pm we were joined by artist Samboleap Tol who contributed to my research by presenting a public workshop/ lecture titled: Experiencing Sonic Synchronization – Exploring Khmer End-of-Life Rituals. Samboleap Tol has crafted a concise workshop/lecture to delve into her fascination with Khmer sonic end-of-life rituals.

In addition to this workshop/lecture, the manifestation of an ongoing conversation between artist Junghun Kim and myself was also contributed to a dialogue during the workshop where

we engaged with memory using our imagination and guided bodily movement.

Contributors:

Samboleap Tol:

Is focused on creating space for herself to be semi-public about her personal socio-historical and political grievances and expressing ways for reckoned closure – with her peers as her primary witnesses. Her practice of reckoning is derived from her ongoing investigations into Theravadin Buddhist traditions and Indiginist Khmer animist practices as well as her conversations with her peers and their respective religious practices. In line with her Khmer arts lineage, she tries to make sense of her different sets of investigations through performance and storytelling, using music and drawings, and hopes that anyone listening recognises she is telling tales of willpower, faith and dignity.

Junghun Kim:

Is a multidisciplinary artist. His work researches the effects of economic and technological development on humanitarian and ecological consequences in relation to the restless techno capital world. Kims works are conceived as activation systems where poetic, spiritual, and political gestures reveal the dimension of causalities that have remained invisible to our anthropomorphic vision. While searching for regenerative ecological care and its distribution, his work guide audiences into interactive and collaborative environments.

“An idlew mind is the devil’s playground”

Samboleap Tol
2021 – Digital drawing

Ongoing documentation of this residency, conversations, works and references below.

The invited conversations have been circulating around the topics of memory, digital systems and what it means to remember digitally in the face of upgrades in the infrastructure of new technologies that support new accelerated paces of digital consumption and extraction. With my own personal memory objects, invited artworks and selected publications and various versions of light all present in Rib for the duration of the residency, these have all been used to help, focus and support dialogues. A focus on new technologies and old ways of being and communicating together have been central to the reimagining and repositioning of what it means to use digital technologies today.

. . Sam Wilson Fletcher