Last Friday, our latest exhibition with Sa Sa in Phnom Penh opened in the White Building, with an evening known as The White Night. The exhibition was at once at experiment in participatory process and a love story to the unique architectural qualities of The White Building . Rather than exhibiting within gallery space, the work was spread out throughout the entire structure of The Building, with videos projected in the makeshift lean-to cafes attached to the lower floors, and photographic displays in the passageways, walls and interstitial spaces.

We did this both to encourage newcomers to explore the block, and to engage with some of the locals who might not feel so happy visiting the gallery itself. More generally, it seems like a nice way to ensure that this work is seen not as something apart from its surroundings, but just one more thing amongst things – one more part of the colourful lives and poetics of the area.

It was a busy event, and throughout the evening, visitors wandered throughout the block, exploring the remarkable building and discovering work as they wandered through blind alleys and darkened spaces. Lina Sokchanlina and Khvay Samnang both took some excellent photography from this remarkable evening – featured throughout this post.

Some of the most affecting work was when the students decided to use portraiture of their own families as a means to communicate some of the challenges and joys of their lives in the building – a selection of which are included here. At theend of the night, we also opened up one room where any could paint on the walls, annotating the content of their exhibition with their own ideas and messages.

To find out a bit more about the approach and philosophy of the project take a look at one of our other recent posts.

This event was supported by:

Incidental Associate Victor Gama has been busy of late, working on new piece and travelling to Antarctica to do so. The work is called VELA 6911 and premieres on the 5th of March 2012 at Harris Theater. Written for an octet of musicians from the Chicago Symphony and Victor’s instruments acrux, toha and dino. Looks pretty good …

Tomorrow night is the launch party of the next phase in our ongoing collaboration with Sa Sa Art Projects in Phnom Penh. Here’s a quick overview of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it – taken from an essay written by David Gunn & Lyno Vuth for the exhibition.

Over the past 3 months, the project has worked with young local residents to provide skills in photography, sound and mixed media, and then mentoring them as they design and realise artworks and events that explore local culture and issues related to life in The White Building.

The White Building itself was built in the 1960s. It was one of most admired examples of affordable urban housing, and remains an extremely effective architectural structure. Although the building now carries a reputation as an unsafe neighborhood of irregular activities, its hosts a vibrant and diverse community of low-income urban residents. Like many structures in Phnom Penh, it seems likely that this building will be demolished in the coming years to make way for high profile development over this desirable stretch of land in central Phnom Penh.

The White Night is one event in a contuining series of collaborations called The Room, which began in Autumn 2011 with a series of live events and performances, when we collaborated with local residents to transform Sa Sa Art Project space into a large-scale interactive sound installation that took inspiration from traditional khmer instruments. We have also hosted a range of public events in the space – from film screenings and workshops to discussion groups led by local NGOs.

Sa Sa Art Projects and Incidental have worked upon The Room for several reasons.

Firstly, in a context where most artwork in Cambodia is funded by and answers to the interests of expats and the international art market, we wanted to explore a new kind of art that was developed in collaboration with everyday Cambodian people, designing art experiences that were accessible, relevant and enjoyable to them.

Secondly, we hoped to challenge some of the existing preconceptions about the White Building. This includes both highlighting the architectural value of the structure, but also connecting audiences across Phnom Penh directly with residents of the White Building. We have done this by hosting public events in this space that mix residents and city-wide audiences, and also by encouraging residents to communicate to the city via the creative works in this exhibition, where they explore both some of the complex challenges they face, but also highlight the positive value they feel towards the neighborhood.

For both Sa Sa Art Projects (based in Phnom Penh) and Incidental (based in the UK), The Room is part of an ongoing exploration into new types of international collaboration, and the role of cultural projects in development.

We believe passionately in the value of this kind of creative work, and seek to show how creative projects such as The Room can operate to both inform and critique processes of development, particularly the intervention of international funders and NGOs. With the creation of “strange spaces” such as the The Room, we seek to establish radically open environments where participating community members are not only seen as “stakeholders” or beneficiaries asked to contribute or voice opinions in a limited way. Instead, they are encouraged to be present in the project as “entire selves” – and are able to shape both the form and content of the work.

In this way, we hope cultural projects like The Room can work to resist imposed identities, to articulate more complex and multiple senses of belonging, to replace permanent communities of place with ideas of “temporary communities of action” and to surface resistance to established norms of engagement and development.

End of transmission. We’ll share more material from the show next week.

The White Night and its associated project is supported by:

Following the completion of The Sounding Room at the end of last year, we’re moving on to the latest stage of our ongoing collaboration with SaSa, titled The Painted Room. We’re working in exactly the same space as last year, but working with residents to create an entirely new project.

Building on the relationships we developed with people living in the Building last year, we’ve been running a series of educational classes in photography, music production and mixed media collage techniques.

Once the students had developed some basic skills, we went on some portrait tours of the Building – as the students visited their friends, families and neighbours, took portraits and then printed them off on the spot via a mobile printer to share with everyone. We were also asking residents about their views on life in The Building, and some asked to be photographed holding objects that symbolised these views.

During this week, the students are working to integrate these photographs into a mixed-media installation that will fill the walls of the space, to be titled “The Painted Room”. We’ll be posting in a week or so with the final results.

We’re moving fast towards a public launch of our FEED later this year. In the meantime, here’s a quick preview of what you can expect.

FEED is a piece of multi-touch software for iPad that enables complex, rich manipulation of a “live feed” of sound, drawn from the inbuilt microphone of an ipad or an audio file loaded into the app. This live feed can be anything – from a musical source (such as a voice or orchestra) to spoken word or “found sound” on the streets of a city.

Users can record, playback, loop and modulate this live feed in a variety of ways to spontaneously create their own compositions. Grounded in our experience of designing collaborative and interactive experiences over the past 6 years, the software is designed in a simple, intuitive way so that non-specialists and younger audiences are quickly be able to create rewarding, aesthetically interesting results.

We’re just getting started with this project, but we’ll be experimenting with FEED in a range of contexts – from new forms of electronic and improvised performance to reinvented music education classes, self-guided “performance tours” of museum spaces and new types of interactive soundwalk.

FEED will also be featuring as part of the Elemental project for the Cultural Olympiad, which we talked about a while back.

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And special thanks to Leigh Davies from the Incidental project team for putting together the video.

FEED is co-commissioned by Head For Arts and Arnolfini.

Last weekend, we were invited to host an event at the Arnolfini as part of their 50th Anniversary celebrations. The event, My Sound Museum, was the first public outing for the new multi-touch software we are developing (outlined in other posts on this blog).  The software enables you to resample any live feed of audio to create your own compositions in real-time.

For My Sound Museum, visitors to the Arnolfini collected ambient sounds from the gallery, wandering through the space picking up the sounds of murmured discussions, tarot card readings, footsteps and the clatter of the cafe. In some cases, the visitors even became their own performers, reciting, recording and resampling text from the exhibits of the show.

Great fun, and instructive – always interesting to see the gaps between how you think people will engage with it and how they actually do so. But all in all, a really encouraging first outing for the project. We’re currently working to refine the prototype and hope to a first version of the app for general consumption in the next few weeks.

A few pictures from our performance in The Sounding Room last Saturday featuring in the Sounding Room. This features celebrated Khmer Dancer, Belle, alongside myself and Oun and Sokun, two young musicians who live in the Building, and who we met and collaborated with as we started to develop this project. You maybe can’t tell from the pictures, but this was really quite a special night …