Ebensee Rising
arrivals & departures
2011
Please download our Questionnaire∞!
Would Joseph Beuys have used Powerpoint?
9 to 5 at Foundry Studio, Aberystwyth, 1 October 2010, 7pm.
Speak Low as part of Emergency∞, green room, Manchester, 1/2 October 2010.
When we decided to make performance work under the name “random people”, we thought this name would account for the collaborative nature of our artistic practice, and hopefully convey our desire for a demystification of artistic production. In the 1960s and 70s, many artists propagated a democratisation of art, a position paradigmatically expressed in Joseph Beuys' statement that “everyone is an artist”. This desire to collapse the boundaries between art and life has today been incorporated by Capitalism: values of what used to be a “distinctively artistic lifestyle” (Boltanski & Chiapello), like the pursuit of self-fulfilment, creativity and autonomy, are no longer exceptional but have instead become a demand posed on everyone – both in their work and in their everyday lives. What has really been blurred, it seems, is the boundary between work and life.
In order to participate in today's economy of attention, we are all constantly involved in various forms of self-presentation, and the site of these self-presentations is often the internet (social platforms, blogs, www.random-people.net). The democratisation of information attributed to the internet therefore also attains an element of control: Future employers google their prospective employees, as do funding bodies with the artists they might support.
When you search “random people” on-line, you get about 1 300 000 hits. Only very few of these hits refer to performances we have done - with the project random people do random things this changes, and potentially every hit could become a random people performance.
For random people do random things, we treat descriptions of the (everyday) activities of random people we find on-line as performance readymades, or, probably more precisely, as instruction pieces, that we then in turn (re)enact. Through our enactments, we frame these activities as performance art, and other random people all over the world become our unsuspecting artistic collaborators.
photo.random-people.net
A selection of photographs∞ that is regularly updated and changed.reviews & materials
Review for Versions 1 - 5 on the Experimentica blog∞Review for Versions 1 - 5 on the Artsadmin Artsblog∞
Photographs of Sunny Beach Project as part of zerlegt & verspielt∞ at the Festival of Regions in Linz.
venues, festivals, conferences
Aberystwyth Arts Centre∞Alles anders? (Wiener Festwochen)∞
ANTI festival∞
Arnolfini∞
The Basement∞
Chapter Arts Centre∞
Exeter Phoenix∞
Festival der Regionen∞
Forest Fringe∞
Fundus Theater∞
Garage X∞
Kampnagel∞
Living Landscapes Conference∞
National Theatre Wales∞
Norwich Arts Centre∞
Nuffield Theatre∞
Nutopia Symposium∞
opa 0.2 festival∞
PAN Vienna∞
Platform∞
PSi #14∞
PSi #15∞
PSi #17∞
Performer Stammtisch∞
Performing Science∞
play!Leipzig∞
Tanzarchiv Leipzig∞
Theater Oberhausen∞