Ground On Ground

Ground On Ground is a site-specific three-part performance that uses the movement of celestial bodies as a structure for exploring technological and improvised performance by artists from Hong Kong and Australia. Debuting at Australia's premiere performance festival Liveworks!, this work brought a number of Hong Kong artists to Australian audiences for the first time to two sold-out crowds over two nights in the Track 3 and Track 8 venues of the renowned Carriageworks Sydney venue.

On arrival, audience members were offered a choice between two small etched plexiglas tokens: one marked with the sun, one with the moon. They were not told what the tokens meant. Sun holders were guided to Track 3. Moon holders went to Track 8. In Track 3, Evelyn Ida Morris performed alone against a violently deconstructed piano housed on a spinning platform, flanked by high-powered fans and a totemic stack of speakers. Her performance began acoustically and gradually absorbed Davor Vincze's digital sound processing: low-frequency drones, resonant textures, warmth accumulating into physical pressure. The fans pushed air across the audience. This was the Sun. An emitter. In Track 8, Karen Yu worked with a large rock-cut sculpture developed by Shan Turner Carroll and Emily Parsons-Lord, using EBows, contact microphones, and the dense materiality of stone to generate a cold, percussive field. Dry ice clouded the base. Lazarus Chan's stochastic AI-camera reduced the space to machine tokens, replacing colour and optical information with crude object-recognition data. This was the Moon. A reflector. At some point during the performance, without announcement, it began to move. The Moon procession left Track 8, passed outside through the barn doors, moved down the side of the building, and re-entered Track 3 from the exterior. When it arrived, the illusion of two separate performances collapsed. Current.cam's projections reorganised the space into electron hellscapes and impossible merging perspectives. A laser traced a circle around the piano and cast orbital tangents across the room. Smoke flooded both spaces. The audience, temporarily blinded, orbited one another carefully. When the smoke cleared, both performers had gone. Vvzela Kook's animation of migrating herds rose slowly into visibility as Davor's sound returned to a low, sustained tone and then withdrew. Taurin Barrera held the image. The doors opened out into the Sydney night.