Carriage

Background: 'Carriage' is a live art interactive performance installation over four days duration as part of an annual harbourside festival, The Performance Arcade, where the artist inhabited an open shipping container inviting public audiences to enter and engage in a live encounter. The work extends from two significant international fields of research in contemporary art practice: 'socially engaged art' involving public participation, and 'live art' that explores the imbricating co-presence of artist and witness. This practice research builds on these fields to engage a public in the frisson between locality/globality and ecology/sociality to foster awareness of living within systems of circulation. Contribution: 'Carriage' demonstrates how live interactive performance can provide audiences with intimate, embodied experiences that incite contemplative engagement. This work developed a responsive experiential aesthetic encounter enabling critical learning through the convergence of three levels of awareness: the co-existence of locality and globality; the inter-relationships of ecological and social exchange systems of circulation; and the situating of the pubic individual amongst these systems. The format of interactive and situated public performance provides a methodology to engage audiences in the expansive scale of contemporary production and consumption systems, the dynamic nature of ecological and social systems, and provoke awareness of human livelihoods being dependent upon understanding ecological systems. Significance: Carriage was selected as an international contribution to The Performance Arcade (an annual curated program of live art practices on Wellington Waterfront), presented by the performing arts company The Playground NZ. Douglas subsequently published reflections on the artwork in the leading international journal in the field of performance studies: 'Carriage notes', Performance Research, vol 16: issue 6, 2014, pp46-53.