Intimate performance, extended voice and embodied tactility: from performance to artist's book

This project begins from an existing piece of live art work, entitled 'Soie soyeuse' (meaning, as an aural pun, both 'Silky Silk' and 'Be Silky'). The audience consisted of one to three spectators at a time. The devised piece is psychophysical, theatrical, and extensively uses extended vocal techniques. The piece was meant to literally bring an intense experience of silk to the audience in a very specific visual space, and was devised in collaboration with a designer.

This research intends to experiment with taking the ideas behind, and performance of, 'Soie soyeuse' to another level. In a social context where live performance - unmediated by mass electronic transmission - is becoming increasingly seldom consumed, I am interested in how notions of active, tactile and aural sensation and direct, intimate relationship with artwork might provide audiences with unique, literally 'touching' experiences.

In today's artistic environments, documentation of process and product in performance have become de rigeur, for creative research, marketing, and academic research purposes. This is usually done exclusively via various digital image/sound capture technologies. In the world of live performance, particularly in devised, interdisciplinary, contemporary performance, which is by necessity fleeting and intangible, there is a concern with how we might 'remember', reexperience, or hold onto the experience of temporal liveness, and with how these temporal performances effect our bodies.

These concerns underpin the practical and reflective exploration this practice-led research project involves. The exploration in question consits of:

1. Documenting in detail, using a variety of means, including audiovisual recording and performance writing, the a performance of 'Soie soyeuse', in the space for which it was made.

2. Creating a performance score, or instructions for performance, for an innovative kind of experimental, performative, textile-based 'artist's book', based on the documentation that has taken place in (1) above.

3. Using the materials in (2) to collaborate with three textile-related artist-designers. The collaboration will involve each of these co-desiging and manufacturing a different page for the artist's book. Some of these pages will include audio recordings. The process of creation will remain under my artistic, creative and conceptual direction, and I will act as co-designer/devisor of each page, and designer of the project as a whole.

4. The resulting pages would be bound by a publisher into 50 copies of a fabric-
based, multimedia textile art book, which would have been conceived not merely for its visual qualities, nor merely its text, video, or audio elements, but also for its tactile qualities. The book will be intended to be felt with the fingertips, and include elements such as raw spun silk, silk wadding, wood fibers, and other such sensation-generating materials. The artist's book will be formally published and distributed.

5. The process and product underpinning this artistic project will be documented and analysed, paying particular analytical attention to Didier Anzieu's theory of the skin ego and and the phenomenological approach of psycho-organic analysis to understanding the skin, the eardrums and the retina as forms of sensual membrane. The experience of making the book, including comparison and contrast among the different collaborative artists' approaches, will also be an area of focus. This will lead to the writing of an academic article called 'From voice to touch: from extended voice to artist's book', which will describe and reflect on the artistic discoveries made and will be submitted to a web journal, so that multimedia documentation can be incorporated into the article.

The project includes the creation of a wide variety of disseminable end products.