DEADTIME II

Through a two day intervention on the way into Earth Day and facing forward to May Day and Labour Day, DEADTIME II combines installation, sculpture, moving image and performance to explore ideas drawn from digital ecologies and ecologies of the digital. Conceived as a long awaited but unexpected sequel, DEADTIME II builds on the themes, myths, and subterranean reverberations of the original, adapting its immersive environments, entangled narratives and cultural residues for a contemporary audience.
Continuing its predecessor’s interest in life from death and seasonal renewal, DEADTIME II looks back to look forward. Finding hope in digi-eco hybridity and fictions which become futures, the event draws on speculative realities which drag ritual and craft into the present, taking an optimistic approach to new technologies and burying deep roots to steady itself against the prevailing winds of techno-pessimism. It hopes to find a new structure of feeling in the sensation of the spring breeze through grass pixels, the ecstatic flicker of a woodland glade displayed in liquid crystal.
The second instalment finds uncanny resonances in the concept of ‘deadtime’ as it exists today, theorised by Tung-Hui Hu as the delay between our actions and the expected result. Best thought of as a moment of pause, of perceived inaction masking unseen labours, deadtime is the spinning beach ball loading icon; the necessary downtime of a winter’s hibernation, of whiring cogs and electric fire-ups hidden inside the chassis, the photosynthetic reactions of a snowdrop about to break open.
The descent into the Crypt and into the event marks a crossing of thresholds, a burrowing into the earth, into a space of the potentialities. The crypt becomes the sacred cave, catacombs for undead promises, the basement for the production of virtual worlds, and the burial sight from which to be reborn as optimistic digitally assisted live quantity taking form through euphoria drenched pastoralism and collaborative cross pollination.
The events enacts its techno-bucolic fantasies through sly performative presumption. Instead of asking its audience “what-if?”s, the artists insist “as-if” participation, attempting to incubate and inculcate imaginative changes by behaving as-if those changes were already here, if only for a weekend.