room2 live

Patrick Hase and Anuraag Bhatia

Presented in Season 2 2022

Commissioned and produced by Arts House as part of BLEED 2022.

Sunday 25 September
2pm – 7pm

Quite Space available and Sighted Guides in attendance

Duration
300 mins, drop in any time

Tickets
Pay if you can $35
Standard $20
BLAKTIX $10
A small transaction fee will be charged per order.

Warnings
Haze

Arts House
North Melbourne Town Hall
521 Queensberry St,
North Melbourne

Assistance Animal

Assistive Listening

Wheelchair Accessible

Quiet Space Available

room2 live is a hybrid in-person and online digital performance space and event with live music, visuals, and written prompts that creates an analogous experience with participants able to respond via their mobile devices.

You can choose – buy a ticket and come to Arts House, or join remotely from wherever you are online. room2 is a digital performance space centred on the curation and interplay of artworks across disciplines. It operates as a novel interface for simultaneously streaming live audio, video, performance, and written content.

For BLEED, room2 will also run as a hybrid online and face-to-face performance event. With this hybrid event, room2 seeks to disrupt existing expectations towards face-to-face versus online events. The in-person event will run across one afternoon and consist of live musical performance, and projected visuals with written prompts displayed. Attendees will be able to respond to these prompts through their mobile devices at the event.

The event will run in a format similar to a ‘listening party’ – people will be encouraged to treat the space as a social space and mingle. With live performances from Yuin musician E Fishpool, visuals from game developer Mohamed Chamas and sound works from interdisciplinary artist Tahlia Palmer among others, room2 is a contemplative journey undertaken together. The online event will operate similarly, with people streaming visuals, sound, and written works through their web browser and seeing prompt responses from people attending both in-person or online.

room2 live the live accompanying work by Patrick Hase & Anuraag Bhatia of room2 presented as part of BLEED – a biennial live event in the everyday digital – featuring contemporary arts commissions across multiple IRL and digital platforms. BLEED runs online and in person from Monday 29 August to Sunday 25 September.

You can explore Patrick and Anuraag’s full digital work, room2 async, here.

Set List

2pm: doors
2 – 2:30pm: j (DJ)
2:30 – 2:45pm: Welcome to Country
2:45 – 3:00pm: j (DJ)
3:00 – 3:30pm: amby downs & Joel Spring
3:30 – 4pm: j (DJ)
4 – 4:40pm: Hei Zhi Ma, Panda Wong, & Wei Huang
4:40 – 5:00pm: j (DJ)
5 – 5:30pm: Mohamed Chamas and Aarti Jadu
5:30 – 6:00pm: j (DJ)
6:00 – 6:40pm: E Fishpool and Sam Miers
6:40 – 7:00pm: j (DJ)
7pm: venue closes

About the artists

Patrick Hase is a digital media artist and creative practice researcher whose focus is exploring the cultural and emotional impacts of extending ourselves through digital processes. His recent projects have used a mix of custom digital interfaces, experimental web design and collaborative a/v systems to create playful non-mimetic experiences across a range of offline and online spaces.

Anuraag Bhatia is an curator, artist, and DJ working in sound and community contexts. They have been Creative Director of Melbourne-based multi-art event series Cool Room since 2015, and their work builds community resilience and knowledge-sharing through curation and platform development, and explores the possibilities of digital tools to shape and modulate attention.

Artist Statement

“Can digital platforms spark reflection and awareness, rather than be anaesthetising? Are there still to-be-explored ways of being together, apart? How much of the jubilance of togetherness in-person is transferable to being together online?”

room2 was born from our shared experiences of the transformative power of anti-commercial digital spaces from early internet days, and a desire to create a digital space for collective reflection, sharing, and vulnerability. We both bring a fluency in the language and format of a range of digital spaces that is grounded in extensive experience in do-it-yourself/do-it-together organising across experimental music and the arts. We sought to recreate some of the feelings and modes of interaction of the early internet - modes moved more slowly, and simultaneously were more personal/intimate while not requiring your online identity to be linked to your in-person one. We sought to channel some of the specificities of ‘live’ performance - in particular, the give-and-take between dancer and DJ, between performer and listener, between listeners or dancers and each other - and how the listener or dancer’s response informs the performing artist. We wanted to recreate that symbiotic enmeshment while looking at the specificities of a digital context and look at modes of interaction that can only happen mediated through tech or devices, while also subverting the hierarchy of in-person events being the ‘real’ event and online streamed versions as an inferior analogue.

Credits

Lead Artist, Co-Creator - Anuraag Bhatia
Lead Artist, Co-Creator - Patrick Hase
Commissioned Artist - Mohamed Chamas
Commissioned Artist - E Fishpool
Commissioned Artist - Ruby Kerrison
Commissioned Artist - Scarlet McClure
Commissioned Artist - Sam Miers
Commissioned Artist - Tahlia Palmer

room2 live and async is commissioned and produced by Arts House as part of BLEED 2022.

BLEED (Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital) was conceived by Campbelltown City Council through Campbelltown Arts Centre, and The City of Melbourne through Arts House. BLEED 2022 is produced and presented by Campbelltown City Council through Campbelltown Arts Centre, and City of Melbourne through Arts House, Taipei Performing Arts Centre and Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. BLEED has been supported by the Taiwan Ministry of Culture and Cultural Division, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Sydney.