Bloodbath

Bump Projects

in association with the Sydney Roller Derby League

At an all girl flat track roller derby game, Oct 2010, sensors on the helmets of players fed data to five artworks, generating digital elaborations of the moves and collisions on track.

BLOODBATH documentation will be exhibited in

genart_sys | a window on digital culture 
Australia Council, 372 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010 
4 Feb to 18 March 2011

Bloodbath is a collaborative distributed artwork by Bump Projects in association with the Sydney Roller Derby League. Bloodbath features five artists with recognised track records in new media, data visualisation, mediated performance and/or working with embodiment or violence.

Their job: to create a series of new artworks based around incoming data for a live event in real time.

The live event:

a Sydney Roller Derby League game on Saturday 9 October 2010 at the Hordern Pavilion, Sydney.

Artists featured:

Linda Dement, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Kate Richards, Francesca da Rimini and Sarah Waterson

All girl flat track roller derby is a raucous, irreverent game that usually results in minor injuries. It runs in bouts of 30 minutes, each bout being made up of 2 minute ‘jams’ in which one member of each team, the ‘jammer’, attempts to pass the pack and so score points.

For Bloodbath, the packs also have a virtual life, from robust wireless sensors (wiimotes) installed on the heads of players, collision, speed and rotational information is sent to a server and from there, on to data driven artworks. The artists are making their artworks live on site, in real-time, and these are projected as the game is played out.

As a sport, all girl flat track roller derby is enjoying a huge surge in popularity all over Australia - there are currently over 40 leagues in action here. July 2010 saw the biggest get-together in Adelaide - ever - of womens’ roller derby leagues, both national and international.

Bloodbath builds on investigations into our human tendency towards, and attraction to, violence - these trajectories creating technological elaborations of our delighted riveted engagement in battle and its dynamics of attack, revenge, defence, collapse, victory, deceit and subterfuge. The artists will be working with digital manifestations of speeding flesh and programmed digital activity. These works both follow and break the rules, embodying the generative repercussions of a fracas.

Multiple Notions of Desire: Roller Derby

Adele Pavlidis

"Just as the women who participate in roller derby are able to take on multiple, alternative subjectivities, so too can the sport itself. It is at once a sport, competitive, requiring discipline and training; while at the same time adhering to notions of play. The perils of playing are often disguised by saying that play is “fun”, “voluntary”— when in fact the fun of playing is in ‘playing with fire, going in over one’s head, inverting accepted procedures and hierarchies’ (Schechner 1995).

So the five artists of Bloodbath ‘play with fire’, taking up some of the ways that bodies can be mediated through technology, highlighting movement and transformation rather than permanence and structure. This emphasis on movement opens up spaces that were previously closed, making for new and exciting possibilities for art, technology, sport and women’s bodies—new ways of imagining oneself and embodying movement.

It has been said that ‘human beings live fragmented lives whose meaning always evade them’ (Tamboukou 2010). These fragmented lives can be brought together at some points through visual and textual narratives, mirroring the social and cultural world of the producer. In considering the multiple surfaces explored in Bloodbath—music and sport, women and aggression, embodied pain and visual representation, past and present— fragmented lives are brought together momentarily, creating conditions of possibility for women to imagine themselves becoming other and for them to actualize new possibilities.

Roller derby, in its present configuration, is an open space, not structured by old notions that separate sport and creativity, movement and imagination. It inspires creative work in a variety of mediums and creative platforms: music, fashion, crafts, writing, film, documentary and now, digital art. Each mode of expression interacts with roller derby in its own way, but almost always with women’s bodies, words and voices at its centre, expressing multiple notions of desire."

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Artworks

BRUISE

Linda Dement

The screen shows skin. A bump signal, from sensors on players in the roller derby game, causes a bruise to appear. The bruise fades through red to blue to green to yellow to brown, then morphs into a flower. The next signal triggers a new bruise; if it comes before the last bruise has finished its metamorphosis, the new bruise is stronger.

An ecstatic moment of fury inflicts injury, venting intolerable rising energies: obstruction, desperation, humiliation, need. Connection is made between the physical and the unendurable. There’s a sudden change in direction, speed, intention, strategy. Swelling starts and pain begins to throb. There’s a visible, tangible lesion in the flesh. The bruise can later be cleaned and anointed and take its time to heal. The pain will gradually fade to an itch. The body can process and transform the damage.  If healing is interrupted, the next injury is worse, compounding the existing haemorrhage. Either way, the body will never be the same again; trauma will leave its mark.

READ_RUN_EXECUTE_ : Pirating the archaic energy

Nancy Mauro-Flude

Pirating sensor data from the Roller Derby players to use as framework to trigger text feeds - past, present & realtime from skaters, audience and artists. Expanding the action on the track, the screen displays a data-mash: live tweets & text feeds, mapped with the cyclic rolling energy of the skaters, building vibrancy. A montage of conversation, description, conjecture & moments pirated from history and literature.

The fervor of the game and the text transmissions charts a poetic reflection of the spaces in-between, the status updating frenzy, augmenting live action with fragments of experience, a hovering layer of meta-reports unfolding over time, channeled into a new stream. Moments replaying, systems change states in the networked space, a place of release like a telepathic field. Tuning into the archaic energy: ecstatic movements, painful moments, and amorphous chaos. People meeting physically and virtually, sending data through nodes and cells, flows & currents, simultaneously transmitting and receiving. Sub-channeling direct & indirect action via the data feed. Excessive body states on the track, going into the zone, the triggering of intensity, the abstraction of energy, a rush, a stack smudges the line. Building up meaning together but remaining autonomous. Different entry points, we are inhabitants of many worlds and can appear in any one we wish. Do you want to add to the channel, a twitter bridge perhaps?

programming support Chris Neugebauer

AFFECTIVE RESONANCE: Jostle and Jam

Kate Richards

Roller Derby originated in Depression era America, and - like music, vaudeville and the chorus line - was a way for women to escape poverty and to work, survive and thrive. The Roller Derby revivals of the 1960s and in Texas in the 1990s were also fueled by women looking to empower themselves, to escape domestic drudgery and make some money. In Australia today the immense pulling power of womens’ roller derby remind us that playing, fighting, skating, jostling and jamming are intense, immersive experiences for both participants and audience - the roller derby is an event in which imagination, power and gameplay shift through the interacting bodies.

As an artist I am interested in intense embodied experiences and connections across time and space, and in creating affective compositions that explore relations and flows within a fast moving, energised public sphere. By incorporating live resonant data from a contemporary SRDL game, and using it to manipulate, mashup and effect archival footage, I’m playing with similarities, connections and gaps between Roller Derby then and now.

I-ROLLER; the Screen of Changes

Francesca da Rimini

Girls, you are gazelles! The future lies beneath your feet. 
—Derby fragment

Two teams, warriors all, enter the great cycle of pain, humiliation, and exhilaration. Different women take the lead, driven by a new and ardent desire. Some come from the Furies, expressing the unappeasable anger of the dead, while alluring others are descended from the Sirens, liberated from their meadow starred with flowers. Streaming forward are the daughters of the Sibyls, each violent twist and collision triggering a momentary collapse in time through which their bodies can sing the future. Fragments of ecstatic prophesies spit out through the screen, interrupted by an occasional image of life at its most minuscule, revealing universes within universes. We struggle to make sense of the formless, the imperceptible. We struggle to name our fear, yet once we recognise it, we become liberated. Over time the women’s power and courage increases. They are formidable, licking the future into shape. As they fall to their knees, the Invisible emerges through a bed of skulls into the yawn of radiance.

I-Roller programming by Ali Graham

AXLE GRIND

Sarah Waterson

Axle Grind borrows the electric violence of the roller derby pack and transforms it into noise, vibration and the rock power chord. Axle Grind maps the collision data from the roller derby players to Joan Jett’s I Love Rock n’ Roll. A robotic pink electric guitar hangs in the space, activated by the ramming of the derby blockers on track. Axle Grind is about jamming with the jam, generating a soundtrack of spectacle. As each hit happens a power chord is played to progress the song, a marshalling of stacks, a G-force Jam.

I love rock ‘n’ roll

So come and take your time and dance with me.

Owwwwww!

Axle Grind Max/MSP/Jitter programming by Jon Drummond

SRDL: Sydney Roller Derby League, established 2007, represents a dynamic, all inclusive, full contact women’s team sport striving for empowerment, athleticism and, above all, fun. The league is made up of strong, committed people engaged in a do-it-yourself approach for this fast growing, spectacular sport.

Venue: The Hordern Pavilion has hosted millions of people for live music, film premieres, gala dinners, product launches, awards nights, corporate parties and exhibitions. Bloodbath will be the Hordern’s first live and distributed media art + sport experience.

Adele Pavlidis is a PhD Candidate with Griffith University. Currently, her research focuses on women’s stories of becoming ‘roller derby grrrl’ and the ways that these women creatively manage this rapidly growing sport.  As an interdisciplinary project, it traverses theory in a number of fields, including: sport and issues related to women in sport, music cultures and collective identity, cultural  theory and writing, and feminist philosophy.

Thank you to Linda Dement and the Bloodbath artists for permission to reproduce text and images.