PLENUM - notes by Nancy Mauro-Flude

#DEATH TO MANIFESTOS, (a call for HOW TO guides (especially transparency of funding proposals of all artists

# why is there a denial among the new media artists of a star system when they are fully subscribing to one and is this star topic important?

#To some extent patterns correspond and underlying principles appear as parallels in disciplines, in peoples and in geographies - be they geological, emotional, academic or another category.

# Anchoring and impassioned dialogue.

# The project began a dialogue between new media artists and members of Node/l exploring the possibilities of a genuine exchange between different performance traditions grounded in experience of place.

#Is it theatre, is it new media, is it community cultural development? Rejected by Node.l as the official wrapping up event the story of Plenum is also the story of the fruitless efforts artists go about to require the necessary funding and endless ingenuity in finding ways to make do without.

# even if it can be maintained that Plenum as a model for communication/a practice is concerned with ontological rather than social and political issues. i would wish to argue that a profound shift in ontological awareness is what is required if we are to confront human legacies. Changing the way people thing and feel about art practice, providing even a few people with a deeply felt, embodied experience of the complex interconnections between a specific place, its food and drink, its sounds and its human inhabitants may have a more profound impact in the longer term than many more overtly political acts. If the practice of Plenum affects our way of seeing doing, understanding and being in together in a place, then it clearly has important political and cultural implications for us at this stage of history as we begin to learn to live with greed induced crosses.

#What is performance in this context? I'm immediately struck by the juxtaposition and layering of ritualised action and thinking, meeting nebulous shifts. Formality folds over into a loose informality which responds immediately to the moment with a shrugging functionality of need - real, blatant and irreverent.

#Archaic space coexists with everyday time. The drift that is responsive. The unsharp line. A blurring and a jigging between form and non-form. And then the question of the frame. Is it the frame that creates everything, the portal of perception?

#The sound ruptures and the comparative rates of flow, multiple levels and viscosity's relative to the determining elements communication. Sound was the breath, maintaining its fundamental position in the map of agendas and questions which have manifested themselves in its winding through the evening. At one moment it was unplugged as if then the evening would die.

#The acts began to fold-back into the experiences, agendas were repeated and as a fold-over to perspectives engendered by the questions.

#The invitation to audiences to "inhabit" along side each other is pivotal to the nature of the experience. New media artists inhabit a space to create a shifting performance environment. Sound was an information environment tracking a dictionary of atmospheres, tracing tangents and pursuing the pointers in the network talking back to itself. A dynamic and responsive environment peopled by performers, audiences, visual artists, poets, sound artists, writers and theorists engaged in a series of actions and dialogues which uncover paradoxes and collisions between the globalised and local environment. the particles, the dots, the atoms. a dance of the molecular constant exchange between sensitivity and form raw bones of necessity dictate a point of being wrought by an instinctive relation hollow at times tremulous deep and wild coexistence.

# what are the models of our being? Again it's the dots from the map of the order of events or the PLENUM script that swarm in multiple directions at varying speeds and in a moment of fluctuation form is perceptible. Multiple realities sift between each other, in momentary progressions. I was a part of a community where experiencing beings (sometimes vexed) penetrated and resonated through the membrane.

#This self-servicing proto-structure, created new considerations and challenges for those of us already with marginal orientations within the arts/social sector. The reactions from the participants ("this is a boot camp", "what the hell is going on here", "i just don't get how they thought staying up all night and drinking loads would lead to interesting discussion", "wow this is really amazing experience") revealed that perception is not value neutral; the sensory order is bound up with the social and cultural order in ways which render it resistant to change.

#The PLENUM set-up was at times misunderstood by some participants its model was intentionally autocratic. For me to honour the tasks that Plenum asked of us, was not to accept authority, but to realise and understand the indication of the meaning of operating systems in the larger society. It is a question that can only be acknowledged in commitment, torture and suspension of judgement. it is recognising that the malady of one belongs to us all. The main space in the LIMEHOUSE town hall we occupied fore-grounded the body through deep contemplation and endurance with critical analysis, cleaning, drinking, eating, and so on. All space was held in common.

#The digital media universe is structured differently than in dominant modes of thought, which results in the popular conception of a three-tiered universe, with the human world in the centre. In wireless area networks, the various entities that populate the universe, and the places they inhabit, are conceptualised as lying on a continuum between matter (meat world) and machine (virtual presence). The overriding focus was communal, socio-centric rather than individual, and indeed, one of the highest compliments that can be paid is that a participant sticks it through to the end and places the interests of the collective in the service of the project above their egocentric self. And it's in this that "fluidity" "meander" and "drift" start to have a real meaning and possibility of a new way of engaging.