Daniel R Marks/DRM presents PILOT, a takeover of Temperance Hall encompassing an exhibition and two evenings of solo performance, incorporating sculptural installation, video projection and an original audio score.
text
PILOT is the final outcome of DRM’s practice-led PhD project Protagonist: a choreography of queer digitality. This project has sought to find a critical inter-relation between queer politics of withdrawal and illegibility, and hidden techno-ideological complexities of digital capture and algorithmic aesthetic. DRM’s research follows in the footsteps of radical body art and underground queer performance, and weaves this history into that of cybernetics and the visual-choreographic logics of surveillance. Through this research, they have developed gestures of queer encryption and decryption: an eroticism of regress, limits, and ambiguous control.
PILOT adapts DRM’s choreographic research archive to the architecture of Temperance Hall. A labyrinthine installation of work produced throughout the four years of the PhD project, including sculptural ephemera and re-sampled digital and audio material, serves as a score for acts of endurance and leakage which complicate the bounds of anatomy, visual perspective, and the performance event. The live component of PILOT incorporates a re-staging of DRM’s work TELLDRILL/Sniffer Dog, which has previously been performed/screened at RMIT The Capitol, Collingwood Yards and Pleasure Planet.
Drone, dog, diva, saint. Listening through the walls and floorboards. A returning glance lingers in the dark. A slow reveal and an unheard command. A forensic poetics. A snaring of the orifice. Noclipping. A fallen bloom, a soft-shelled camera. A tracing of the unreachable.
PERFORMANCE & EXHIBITION DATES
OPENING: Wed Dec 6, 6–8pm, please join us for opening drinks
EXHIBITION: Wed Dec 6 – Sat Dec 9, 12-5pm, Sun Dec 10, 12–3pm
PERFORMANCES: Thurs Dec 7 & Fri Dec 8, 7–8.30pm, registration essential
LOCATION
Temperance Hall
199 Napier Street, South Melbourne
DURATION
3hrs, audience may come and go as they please
ACCESSIBILITY
Temperance Hall's Main Hall is wheelchair accessible. Our Upstairs Studio is only accessible via a stairwell
TICKETS
FREE! Registration is only required for performances on Dec 7 & 8, please register your attendance here.
Contact our Program Producer Anna if you have any questions or queries: program[at]temperancehall.com.au for more information.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
DRM is an artist and researcher, working with experimental and critical modes of choreographic practice which engage surveillance, digitality, and the queer body in public space. Their interest in choreography is a means toward unpacking and performing complexities of where queer political agency meets with systems, codes, and processes of circulation. They work primarily in hybrid modes between performance art, digital/screen-based formats, sculptural installation, experimental text, and electronic sound.
DRM is a PhD candidate at RMIT University School of Art, set to complete their practice-led doctoral research project in 2024. They are also an educator in RMIT School of Fashion & Textiles and have worked in several supervisory and artist mentorship roles. They have shown work with Liquid Architecture, RMIT Gallery, Foreign Objekt, Midsumma Festival, and several artist-run initiatives in Naarm/Melbourne, alongside performing in programs at NGV and ACCA. DRM is a research affiliate with ACMI X, Performing Dress Lab (RMIT, Aalto University & London College of Fashion) and the Posthuman Art Network (Foreign Objekt).
PILOT is supported by Temperance Hall. Previous iterations of PILOT have been supported by RMIT Culture, Liquid Architecture, and City of Maribyrnong Arts and Culture.
Hero Image: Wild Hart
All other images courtesy of the artist DRM
Temperance Hall acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land in which we dance and create, the Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, and pay our respect to Elders both past and present and, through them, to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.