Machine Atlas

Shopfront's 2011 Integrative Major Project
August 25 - 28, 2011
Kogarah Town Square
Directed by Caitlin Newton-Broad
with Sarah Emery

As part of Shopfront's annual major project we collaborate with schools and youth services to build work alongside a core ensemble aged 16-25, creating a project that is multi-disciplinary and richly layered with many voices and stories. Machine Atlas engaged over 120 young people in collaboration with 13 community organisations across St George, Sutherland and Western Sydney.

If you could invent a machine to assist your life - what would you make? Over the course of Machine Atlas young people invented, created, built and animated a range of machines and devices that have given insight into their day to day experience.

Walking backwards through our lives, we remember major moments of change. Remember when we changed course, something was lost, a door opened, we turned our back, an ideal was hunted down. We began with a question, if you could invent a machine that would help you in a time of urgent need what would that look like?

We began dreaming up utopian machines.

And then things quickly dominoed, we invented slapstick, make-do machines and peered into the dark arts of consumerism and useless machines. We toyed with the conflict of digital versus analogue and when flesh meets metal. We got fluid in the world of post-industrial thought machines and tapped into the history of the futurists and pop machine memories.

So Machine Atlas is made from these fun tensions - the ideal, ridiculous and the rapacious machines in our lives. A world of function, form and physics. A world of nuts, bolts and sticky tape. A night market dedicated to DIY play for audience to come away with their own vision of the future....

more info visit the project blog
www.machineatlas.shopfront.org.au
video edited by Cindy Rodriguez

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Event;
• Live
• Performance;
• Kogarah
• Town
• Square;
• Community;
• Youth;
• Arts:
• Dance;
• Animations;
• Song;
• Music;
• Shopfront