return

BACKGROUND: 'Return' is a live art interactive performance installation over five 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 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. CONTRIBUTION: 'Return' demonstrates how live interactive performance can provide audiences with intimate, embodied experiences that incite contemplative engagement. Using a unique self-customed ensemble of megaphones, the artist modulates the capture and transmission of live found sounds from the situation, creating uneasy sonic fields that fold back into their context. Looping, layering and re-sounding micro-actions produce non-linear experiences of time-space, calling forth expanded senses of attention to the enfolding of the temporal present and an eternal dynamism characterising the ecological. Return explores intersections of the sonic, the oceanic and the radio-phonic, deploying simple 'off-the-shelf' sound technology to recast human perceptions of - and yearnings for - connectedness beyond the realms of the human. SIGNIFICANCE: Return 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. It was the third year Douglas' work was included in the annual program, forming the last work in the 3-part cycle of durational performances with 'Container Walk' 2013 and 'Carriage' 2014.