SISTER0 vs JESSE DARLING II: Baglady 2.0 & the ://localhost @PS²

Nancy Mauro-Flude a.k.a sister0 is an artist and researcher in the field of performing art and experimental media. Her art work is poetically invested with the electronic activist movement and she often highlights the importance of the internet and paraphernalia as a medium, meeting place and information source.

Jesse Darling is a multi-media sculptor, performance artist and "iFlaneur" who works with both old and new technologies. Trained in dance and physical theatre as well as fine art, she is working on a series of experimental collaborations both in real-time and online, exploring themes of collectivism and bricolage: set in the "spaces between places" where the ghosts get into the machine.
Sister0 and Jesse Darling, who have worked together previously on a number of projects in Vienna and London, will each bring a completed work to this collaboration: together and individually they will explore the possibilities and limits of these works. They will choreograph a new work for the space partially in response to these works, and partially as a result of experimental sessions @ PS2.

Sister0

*Baglady 2.0* is a customised electronic tool for live performance and the collection of signs, a bag with an antenna and an embedded board, programmed for live wireless broadcasting on the fly - of digital sound and images [motion jpeg]. It probes found wifi zones as a platform to pipe through this data. It highlights how ephemeral oral or folk histories on the street can be played out on the inhabited and ubiquitous WWW. Scenario: A nomad living in the wreckage of the new dark ages, baglady2.o tracks and inherits neo-liberal capitalist waste. She transforms it and plays with it. She is a hunter-gatherer of ephemeral moments. She finds it vital to collect omens from the everyday, seeing the beauty in the banal, validating the fragile and shifting world. She travels light, carrying only a bag with an antennae to probes the aeather and pirate the network... Jesse Darling: //localhost There's a place in between places, a portal: a middleworld, an antechamber. It's both exquisitely other and completely familiar. This is ://localhost, where you begin and end your journey ://localhost is the ephemeral [spirit] choir that will greet you there, caught between timespaces and embodied identities; they have a message for you if you can figure out how to decode it, but that might mean passing through to the other side... Using light projections, sound collage, live streaming and animated .gif images in an installation comprising hand-screened wallpaper made with a rubber stamp, ://localhost refers both to ancient symbols and brand new territories; the sacred ether, the domestic altar.
Text: the artist.

ISEA09 @ PS²: sister0 vs Jesse Darling II- *Be My 127.0.0.0.* 27/08/09 21:00 "Be my guest, be my host, be my ghost" - 1943 gallery invitation by Marcel Duchamp

Artists sister0 & Jesse Darling take inspiration from this provocation and present a new performance installation @ PS² Project Space, based on found debris, aphorisms [RSS feeds], & images captured on the fly by the electronic performance tool Baglady2.0. On 27/08/09 21:00 they invite the people of Belfast and ISEA09 - as guests and hosts simultaneously, ghosts in the shell of the white cube, in the shell of a city - for a BLACK FOAM PARTY [borrowing Sloterdijk's metaphor for a meshed socio-technical ecosystem], for the premiere of 'Be My 127.0.0.0'.

REVIEW  by Séamus Fox

,The show they put on was based in part around a strange electronic device named “Bag-Lady-2.0” which was basically a computer in an innocent looking handbag with a big brother style camera which could capture both video and still pictures and render them with added text to be blown up and played on half the wall of the arts space while Sister0 and Jesse acted out a very original performance which carried connotations of a dystopian society. While the space and the artists looked fairly modern the feel of the whole performance was other worldly like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. One corner of the room was packed with rubbish, empty cans, a busted cistern, broken wood and strangely new an untouched looking books. The scenes being played out on the wall via projector where still images from around the Belfast streets and the artists them selves setting the space up with unrelated and yet at times seemingly related random captions from headlines in the “Newstatesman”. Again I was to revisit my Tom Waits thoughts of the previous days as the strange music akin to metal being torn apart by robots played and Jesse Darling playing the part of some kind of slave toiled away frantically printing Christian crosses onto the wall by hand with a rubber stamp. Her Nemesis Sister0 looked like a modern version of an SS prison guard although her uniform was more colourful and 21 st Century looking in appearance her actions were anything but.'

Thank you :Peter from PS², John Dalton, Paul Perry, Mirko Tobias Schaefer, Pieter Sloterdijk, Belfast Westfield waste disposal staff, John Hewitt Hotel, Linen House Hostel.

This project is assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for Tourism and the Arts.
Open Sundays and 'Late Night Art is funded by Belfast City Council