BLEED – Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital

BLEED is a six year project exploring the live experience across platforms, conceived and presented by Arts House (Melbourne) and Campbelltown Arts Centre (Sydney). 

BLEED 2020 presented five new art commissions, dropping every two weeks between 22 June to 30 August.

Every day, every part of our lives is flooded with digital. This bolthole of the web is a space to consider why. And who, and how, and what’s missing. BLEED interrogates the digital that exists in our communities, consciousness and culture and is a response to the unfolding power shift in our digital existence. Featuring art that spans platforms, from URL to IRL and back again, these artworks greet audiences where they already reside: online, hyper-connected and virtually networked. BLEED encourages different modes of engagement, asking how does online feel?

The 2020 BLEED artists were:

Hannah Brontë, with mi$$ Eupnea

A lush new suite of audiovisual works and online events from acclaimed artist Hannah Brontë takes its name from the mode of breathing that occurs at rest – unconscious, unforced, meditative. mi$$-Eupnea asks you to take stock of the state of your own breath before inviting you to breathe with Country.

Alex Kelly and David Pledger, with Assembly for the Future

Assembly for the Future was a multi-platform exploration of futures to come in the era of climates changed. The public created new visions for realistic, idealistic or utterly fanciful futures, guided by provocations from Claire G. Coleman, Scott Ludlam, Alice Wong, Santilla Chingaipe and Anne Manne among others. 

James Nguyen and Victoria Pham, with RE:SOUNDING

RE:SOUNDING explores the changing meanings of the Vietnamese Đông Sơn drum. Vietnamese-Australian artists James Nguyen and Victoria Pham created a multi-faceted project exploring the drum from all angles: as spiritual objects, cultural icons, tokens of trade and instruments of warfare.

Angela Goh and Su Yu Hsin, with Paeonia Drive

Paeonia Drive was Angela Goh and Su Yu Hsin’s ongoing project, existing at the intersection of live dance, installation and performance. A scrolling landscape without beginning or end: Paeonia Drive was a 360 degree virtual space where the physical folds into the digital and horizons become unstitched, through a 360 degree virtual environment.

Emile Zile and Lilian Steiner, with Becoming The Icon

Becoming The Icon fuses movement and film to explore the ways in which politics manifests at the physical level. Artists Lilian Steiner and Emile Zile reveal the ways in which truth and conviction are more than abstract concepts, instead of finding surprising roots in our embodied experience. Both intimate and distanced, Becoming The Icon was a seductive realm with a hidden agenda.

BLEED Echo

In addition to the five major commissions, an exciting public program of talks, essays and ideas made up BLEED Echo.

Highlights include our Protocol series hosted by Areej Nur, exploring virtual co-presence, digital sovereignty, community activism, our relationship to devices and everything in between. Running Dog and Witness Performance were commissioned to create long-form critical pieces that situated the works of BLEED within broader historical and cultural contexts and the BLEED Reference Group created unique responses to the curatorial conversations in developing the program itself. 

Accessibility was a key focus of the BLEED online program and a full list of accessible services and provisions can be found here: https://bleedonline.net/access/

Revisit the full BLEED program at www.bleedonline.net. Follow BLEED’s Facebook, Instagram and subscribe for a special delivery to your Inbox