The photographs have been produced, in part, through three distinct, water-borne performances by Smith and his collaborator Colin Beatty (Boston USA). The performances feature the two men engaged in a series of push and pull activities coordinating the machinic action of chartered Niagara Falls helicopters and New England tug boats.
The coordination of these activities has been based on the measurable force(s) exerted by the human body with and against the machinic force of the helicopters and tugboats. The images also feature the texture and colour coding of communication between machine and human body. These forms for communication include coloured smoke, wind shear, momentum, and wireless/ mobile speaking and recording devices. The performer’s bodies can be seen in moments of extreme struggle but also at times of smooth, synchronized, coordinated movement and connection with the machines that sustain them.
The research context for this exhibition includes recent theoretical and historical publications on the 1966 installation, peformance and collaborative exhbition entitled: 9 Evenings (NYC Armoury, USA). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's List Visual Arts Centre published a catalogue of essays and image reproductions focused on this 1966 event in its 2006 exhibition entitled: 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre and Engineering (curated by Catherine Morris and supported, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts). 9 Evenings was a multiple-day series of performances utilizing physical action including dance, tennis and the playing of music by artists collaborating with technicians from Bell Laboratories (USA). Their collaborations aimed to produce multi-sensory experiences for the viewer, combining the aesthetics of the live art event simultaneously with that of a visual art exhibition.
In all of these new and contextual foundations for the exhbition, the images the performances coordinating human and machinic forces propose a differentiation of strictly land-bound or terrestrial modes to explore site-specificity and endurance artworks. Thus, the atmosphere (helicopter) and the water (tugboat) have been employed as two areas in which the human body is ‘immersed’ through the action of performance. Immersion becomes a category for classifying and formalizing the integration of human body and machine at the time of the action as well as in the context of an exhibition of contemporary, visual art forms. The result of producing ‘immersion’ as a new contextual or classification category for contemporary performance and visual art will be realized in a published monograph accompanying the exhibition. This monograph will feature articles developing a literary articulation of ‘immersion’ and photographic reproductions of the performances to further illustrate and clarify this contextual category.
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