 All right, I guess we can move on. I'm just going to try to do a little bit of a speech in the last one. So then I'll be right here. I'll be right here. Everyone, welcome to our new Drunk Tourism Discussion. I'm here to introduce Peter Uppersol, graduate professor here at the community. Thank you so much. Thank you. Enjoy the panel. Thanks very much. Sorry, I've got a little bit of a cold. So I've got a bit of a husky voice. But if you can't understand me, please let me know. Because combined husky voice Australian accent, it's a bit of a problem in the United States. But first of all, I'd like to thank Frank and Andrew both and all the team at the Segal Centre for organising this event. I've just been to one of the other panels and it was sensational. So I'm feeling like it's a bit of a headache to follow actually. So anyway, we'll get down to it because we don't have a lot of time. So what I've been asked to talk about today is a topic which is around the concept of the relationship between media and performance. So what happens when you bring new media, principally new media, and by new media we think about things like not just projections, but also the effect of sound and also the effect of design, what I would call the kind of overt emphasis of visuality and audio effects into the theatre. What happens to the theatre dramaturgically when these effects become extremely strong, extremely powerful, and to some extent I would argue overwhelming. We move out of a kind of dramatic register, out of a literary register or a dramatic literary register and into something that is much more akin to the experience of attending perhaps an art installation or some kind of highly affective experience, an experience that impacts very directly on the kind of sensory mechanism of the spectator. And we see this quite a lot now. I'm very interested in recent trends in contemporary performance, not just in the United States, but principally I work on Japan and a little bit on Europe. And I'm seeing a lot of art where, at a certain point in a more traditional, dramatic structure, the text kind of drops out of the experience of the performance and some other modality of representation or expression takes over, typically a kind of overwhelming visual, audio, or even more recently this combination of laser and smoke you might have seen in some really interesting performance events. So we did a book on this. It's called New Media Dramaturgies and a very quick plug to, this is a book that's co-authored by myself and Helena Gray and Edward Sheer. And the three of us had a project funded through the Australian Research Council to investigate this phenomenon. And part of the outcome of that was the book and we coined the phrase New Media Dramaturgies to talk about the kind of, the way in which when we think about dramaturgy now, we're not just talking about the kind of dramatic structures of the play or the temporality of the play or the way in which a particular narrative within a play might be situated in relation to character or other narratives or the way it builds and so forth. But we're also talking about the presence of other material properties, the materiality of light, the materiality of sound, the materiality of visuality and the way that this transforms the experience of performance. The case study I'm actually going to talk about today, though, is not a theatre work per se. It's a work that I worked on as a dramaturg with a visual artist named Alexi De Sou. Alexi is a visual artist who works primarily in the medium of photography and film. And he's somebody who works between Belgium and Sydney. He's based in both cities. And through a long, circular route, I ended up in a conversation with him about a project that he was working on called Phantom Sun. And our discussion began with the fact that he was essentially doing a work that was in some ways a visual document of a particular geopolitical side. And he was visiting the landscape that is right at the top of the world on the border of pretty much Norway and Russia around the edge of the barren sea. And he's been up there in the last five years about six or seven times, initially photographing the landscape in the different seasons. And of course this is a landscape that is arctic. So in the winter it's extremely cold and it's extremely dark. And in the summer it has this brief midnight sun effect where the tundra appears and life frenetically tries to multiply in the kind of six weeks that the sun does shine in that period. Geopolitically this is a site that during the Cold War was extremely important because essentially you had the kind of border between these two, or not this big, between the east and the west. And this was one of the kind of geopolitical fault lines because there's a border there between Norway and Russia. It's also a site now that has become much more important for the purpose of... The great dream of shipping has been that you can actually go from Europe to Asia via the North Passage, via the Arctic Circle. And for most of my life and most people's life that was impossible essentially the ice never melted enough and you could put a ship through there but you needed a very big icebreaker. In 2014 four commercial ships were talking about oil tankers or other container ships went through the North-West Passage because essentially in the summer now the ice melts to the point where regular shipping can go through there or slightly reinforced shipping. In 2014 four ships went through there. In 2016 there were 250 ships going through there and there's no regulatory framework for this. There's no organization so there are attempts to set up organizations that will regulate the issues of safety but also the issues of what happens if there's an oil leak or an accident or in these pristine environments and it's also an area that is again a fault line because as Russia has become more prominent in its political nationalism the relationship between it and the Scandinavians has become much more complex. So Alexei was going up there photographing these sites and they're also very dystopian because there are many remnants of the prior industrial and political I guess concerns. So there's a lot of mining up there. There was a lot of mining that took place in the Kabul period. There was also reactors and in one particular instance there's a site there that is now an abandoned site where the Soviets had a scientific project to drill as deep as they can into the earth and there's actually a hole there that is now capped that is drilled further into the earth as far as we know anybody else ever has. So they've gone two kilometers down basically and this is now like a kind of dystopian science fiction film an abandoned site where people who live in the area have memory of this activity taking place and it's now capped off. There's a lot of stories that he collected in relation to all of the various geopolitical economic and ecological stories that I've been telling. And our conversation began how do I turn this into a film and so we had a series of conversations about well you could interview these people and make a kind of documentary or a kind of filmmaker he's primarily a visual artist and then we started exploring the idea of taking these texts that he got from talking to these people and interviewing these people and we wrote them into a series of little scenarios and that was my job as the dramaturg and then we explored the possibility of then employing professional actors to come and play the roles of these people and in the end we abandoned that idea and it ended up as a sort of slightly mysterious set of voice-overs that it's very dreamlike this piece that he's made Phantom Son and the voices come in and out and in that sense we're trying to capture something that is on the one hand extremely tenuous and extremely abstract and on the other hand obviously full of these kind of very dystopian overwhelmingly dystopian and atmospheric tendencies because the power of the environment here is extraordinary and in a way his practice is a practice that is very sensitive to the environment so his visual work his visual art is really powerfully enacting these moments and so I think I'll just show a little bit of Phantom Son this is a 20-minute filmic installation that was made in the kind of process I just described and in its showing in a gallery space it's actually designed and formatted for a very large format projection part of which happens on the floor so the viewer sees a two-part image on the wall and we can't repeat that here but let's have a look at a little bit of what's about five minutes I think of Phantom Son and see and then we'll take some questions for the circumpolar region an integrated system taking into account resource extraction with maritime and land based infrastructure a system that takes into account four key points of reference resources, reliability safety and pollution prevention these are all extremely important and need to be viewed as a big picture as an ecology, a new kind what is needed is independent modelling we need to visualise the overall system what is needed is to identify the many stakeholders a modelling that utilises computer data, anthropological studies and climate science a modelling that includes super tankers ice water fisheries and offshore logistical technologies all of this shows the urgent need for a financial agency to fund this expansion and thus we see the need for the formation of an Arctic Development Bank we have to see beyond the existing territories both on land and sea, we need to recognise these for what they are inflexible, outdated inheritances from old wars I would like to remind you all that the Congress of Northern Expansion does not promote or advocate the exploitation of the answer so the text here is actually taken from actual events we have changed the names but this is the kind of fantastic imagining that these people are involved where they want to essentially articulate a new political economic and industrial system to deal with the exploitation of the North and at the same time it is being led by conservationists because as they say these people they are like divided subjects they are activists who have been working for years to protect the environment but now they are actually trying to control the agenda but they know they cannot hold back the resource extraction and the shipping so they are just trying to get some actual regulations in place to try and control what is going on can we just fast forward a bit because it becomes much more abstract in some of the other bits and then we will there we go just from there just for another two minutes the Russians the world experts on high-spraker technology if you want to send a ship through ice go to Russia and the text is a little bit costly of course it could be anything else really and we will just move forward a little bit where are the times moving on try there now keep going forward there is one section one particularly of operative section just play it and just pause it please so dramaturgically we oscillated between three key stories the first one was the story of the northern expansion corporation who were trying to regulate the environment the second story was of this son of a man who had worked on the drilling project into the earth who had become obsessed his father had died the son had become obsessed with memorabilia of this and he had a lot of records and he had collected them and he had actually gone into the site and had legally taken them and he has now got them in his house and he is completely obsessed with this idea in a way that borders on a kind of dystopian science fiction imagination so the memory of this for him is it evokes the greatness of the Soviet Union that they would embark on this grand plan of drilling through the earth but it also evokes all these visions of what's down there what will be released and all of that kind of thing the third story which we didn't get to is a story that came out of a series of photographs that Alexei took in an abandoned warehouse where you see the floor and it's like the floor has got a lot of detritus and rubbish and then as you can see the detail you realise that on the floor there's just hundreds of old gas masks with the eye goggles and the little nose now and then we map into that a story that he was told by the woman who lives in the region who's producing this as an artwork up there for him about when she was a child living in the town in a compound of housing and they would do a drill where at various times the siren would go off at 2 o'clock in the morning or 3 o'clock in the morning the whole family would get up they'd put on their gas masks they'd take the windows then they'd go out into the hall and nobody would speak they weren't allowed to speak and then all the other families from all the other houses would stand in the hall and then they'd go down the stairs into the basement into the nuclear shelter an incredibly powerful story and these images are just remarkable they're quite striking and so we also added between if you like the scientific economic the dystopian science fiction and the kind of cold war memory of a real dystopia and interwoven a lot of other little stories as well so it's an attempt to present a certain kind of document about the region from very different perspectives and weaving them all together so I think we're running out of time so maybe I'll just take a few questions as you were talking the air conditioning came up underneath my legs I was just wondering if you considered or if you've considered playing with the temperature that would be very nice yeah yeah that's up to Alexi I guess I mean it's an interesting question more broadly because this work is normally shown in a gallery space where they don't have that kind of where in fact very often the temperature is regulated in order to protect the artworks but changing the temperature would be quite an interesting proposition yeah thank you from the structure of what I saw there was a passage from completely no humans I mean nothing human just nature and that into a more constructed built environment and I was wondering if there's a point that we didn't see whether actual humans or not just voices and text from humans right and those the moment the soldier they mentioned the dead soldiers was that an image of dead soldiers it's a recollection of a man who is preserving the memories of soldiers who died in World War II when there was a battle line there and there were his recollection is that enemy soldiers were found frozen in embraces to try and stay alive because they're freezing it's minus 30 or minus 40 so you can't survive without proper survival law and this particular is a Russian guy he's obsessed with collecting the remnants, the memory of this because the mainstream viewers disappeared these kind of little historical events certainly events where enemy combatants hugging each other is a powerful image and one that at least governments would likely repress unless they do it as a kind of nostalgia like they always talk about the time in World War I where the Germans and the Brits Christmas played a soccer game they made a film of it but I think that there's very careful prohibitions against humanizing enemy during the war curious about the name of that Panorama the what we were seeing right at the beginning the big panorama of all the shipping equipment and everything, where was that it's in a town called Murmersk and Kursk Kursk is the main town there's a big port there which was very active in the Cold War times because it was actually a military site a lot of spying going on between the countries there and then it went into incredible decline and now it's being reborn because now the shipping is going through that part of the world Kursk is on the make so yes I saw recently, I saw on a history channel where they talked about this and right now Russia is trying to claim that that area not just Russia so all the powers that have if you look at the top of the globe you've got Scandinavia you've got Norway and Finland Russia, Canada and Alaska in America all of them have according to international maritime law claims over that land and they're trying to constantly extend those claims and also under the ice so they try to claim rights to drill essentially under the water because there's a lot they they all perceive there's a lot of resources up there and they're they're constantly involved in the international court of arbitration over these matters and testing the limits of it but the suggestion is that it also could become a hot war at various times because people will fight for these the whole question of the border is something that we talk about constantly in this project because for the local people they go back and forth constantly, these people who are defined by living in a community of extreme isolation and extreme weather and so for them it's not important that the border is there, it's important that they have a community of people who share the resources that enable them to survive and actually the border is quite open but the border is there on the map and it becomes a legal thing and also the idea of a border in that landscape is also, I mean Alexi is very interested in the kind of way in which the visual experience of the landscape is incredibly precise so if anybody has ever been in a white out for example in the snow you know that there's no sense of depth, there's no sense of perspective, there's no sense of it's impossible to imagine a border in that situation you're just in a kind of an immense white where there is no location to space so that's also a kind of philosophical question or an aesthetic question that we've spoken about a lot and we've tried to reflect that in the kind of narrative dramaturgy of the piece in that these stories never continue to their logical ends, they always get interrupted they always flow into another one and there's a lot of memory going on here which is may or may not be real there's a lot of alcohol infected people here who have been living in and who knows by what else these are irradiated spaces, they're spaces with heavy industries and the presence of lots of toxic waste so there's a lot of stories of people getting really obsessed by things in the past that probably happened to a degree but may not have happened the drilling to the worth is a classic sci-fi piece great and on that, thank you very much to Peter for coming up the next corner of the Elgarash, there's a panel starting it's a hunt, can you make this panel with Jaffa Bacchus, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott Shepard for really amazing artists, performers, writers, about to start so if you're interested please make a career over there and then you can find us back here at 430 we're going to start our selections and then you can give us a few moments to clear the room and get set up for the next