From the first few moments it took my breath away.  

So incredible. My heart… I don’t know how to feel. So beautiful.  

Gut wrenching. The music just takes you in there.

Considering the tragedy inherent in these stories this was a wonderfully uplifting and amazing experience…. beautiful.  

This is another level of experience – thank you for the journey, the senses are buzzing.

A sensory delight; informative, dream-like and profoundly moving. Thank you!

Totally immersive! I loved the creative use of space to tell a really engaging story. It will stay with me forever.

I was so moved by the whole experience… Thank you for putting together such a sensory odyssey. Will tell everyone about this.  

I just spent three weeks at [international arts festival] being bombarded by art from around the world. This was a breath of fresh air.

The Other Journey is a unique art work: a multi-sensory, immersive storytelling experience.

The work is centred around honest, intimate stories from three people who fled a war in the villages of Sri Lanka to settle into the largest city in Australia. Set to a luscious score mixing South Asian and Western influences, the music and stories are played through portable audio players and headphones. During the work, the deep listening experience takes place in varied, beautiful settings: on a boat ride; under bird sculptures; amidst fire and oil lamps on a river bank; amongst whiffs of cinnamon and jasmine; surrounded by elegant, large-scale, outdoor video art. We like to think of it as an arts adventure.

The movement of refugees and immigrants across the world is usually 
relayed through statistics, news bites, policy and campaign. Through
 these channels, public responses generally alternate between scorn and
 pity. The Other Journey instead relays the intimacy, dignity and compromise that surrounds the decision to flee: and the courage, risk and transformation it takes to belong again to a new community.

The show is always adapted to its local environment and is most suited to quiet, reflective places (ideally by a river) just next to highly-visible, public meeting points. In special circumstances, the content itself can also be adapted to different cities and towns, with stories from the local Sri Lankan or a local migrant/refugee community in that place incorporated into the work.

Contact the director Shakthi Sivanathan to discuss further: shakthi@curiousworks.com.au.

Video footage from the Parramasala preview night with the community and collaborators (courtesy of Guido Gonzalez and Matta Media)  

Click here to view the embedded video.

News story from SBS (an Australian TV channel) of the Parramasala preview night with the community and collaborators

Click here to view the embedded video.

Image from Parramasala closing night

Images from the Parramasala preview night with the community and collaborators (courtesy of the festival Guido Gonzalez and Matta Media) 

The Other Journey is created and presented by artists Shakthi Sivanathan and Aimée Falzon

How would our cities change if the most disastrous effects of climate change were to take place?

Overflow investigates what might happen to Melbourne’s iconic city centre were it to go underwater.
It is a playful, meditative piece about a serious issue.

Asi developed this short animation for 2008 Melbourne Fringe and Urban Screens Festivals.
It was projected onto the giant East Shard building in Federation Square for 3 weeks.
View the photo-diary on Flickr.

Illustrations and motion: Aimee Falzon
Assembly, edit & post-production: Shakthidharan
Sound: Quarterbit, under a creative commons license

On “Burn Them All”, acoustic folk grows into a beat box romp. “The Waiting Turned” is 22-beat indie rock, followed by classic singer/songwriter folk with the carnatic-infused “Kurinji”. The down-tempo, lush sounds and harmonies of “Older” and “Worlds Were Here” lead into the epic, final track of the album: “The Crooked Path”. “The Crooked Path” takes you on a 13 minute ride, moseying through found-sounds, ambient, trance and rock’n'roll before building into a thundering wall of trans-global percussion.

Listen to full tracks and download from Bandcamp
Stream the full album and download at your chosen price

Preview excerpts and download
iTunes
Amazon

Buy the CD
Online from CD Baby
In person at CuriousWorks

released 22 November 2009

The ReGenerating Community Conference was held September 2-4, 2009, at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. This video is a mashup of snippets from the first two days of the conference that was shown on the afternoon of the third day of the conference.

The ReGenerating Community Conference addressed ways in which global issues are being addressed locally through collaborations between artists, communities and local government. Issues of community identity in an environment of globalised culture; issues of energy production in the context of climate change; issues of indigenous sovereignty on leasehold land; issues of country becoming city and changing identity; issues of aging; issues of schooling; issues of imaging futures, issues of having a future…

Performers:
Jai Cummings (didgeridoo)
MEB (rappers – Daniel Ammouri, Mohammed Malti, Rached Raad)
Grace Vanilau (body percussion, leader)
Beau O’Brien (beat box)
Anmol Vellani (india Foundation for for the Arts)
Rawcus Theatre (performance of ‘Montage’)

In November 2010 Shakthi joined ten other Australian artists to devise a rockin’ new media show for the people of China. Called On the Edge, the whole thing was pulled together by the wonderful Kate Croll and supported by the AICC. Here it is in pictorial form.

Check out the On the Edge website to learn more about the show and the totally amazing artists I worked with.

In Beijing, our screen was a massive LED screen. Our show was in a public place, so I made an opening piece that slowly drew a crowd in. It was a mashup featuring images from remote Western Australia, iron ore trains, ships coming to China, the people of China, all to Monkey Marc’s beats.

MC Mantra did spoken word over the top. He weaved in and out of the show with words, raps and some of his own music thereafter, the voice of the work.

The show was placed in a piazza within a big shopping mall. After an intro sequence, a calligrapher began painting in water on the ground. His calligraphy stick was tied via a wiimote to a synth patch, so he painted in sound as well as water as he moved. Richie Allen set this up.

The AV crew consisted of DJ Wasabi and Monkey Marc (pictured) and Robin Fox and I (seated). It was cold. They both rocked it throughout the performance.

Really cold.

My role after the beginning was VJ. I used Isadora and was really impressed with how sophisticated it was. It was very fun, throwing up content on such a massive screen. Some fantastic portraits were shot by Poppy van Oorde-Grainger, that went up as a database controlled by movement of the mouse. In the final show, in Chengdu, I jumped on the wiimote bandwagon and made with Richie an app that let people VJ as they danced, controlling the colour and size of a live camera feed of themselves based on their movements.

We did night time shows in Beijing too.

At one point Davros (stunning graphics/design/post-production man who also contributed heaps of fantastic visual content to the show) threw up work, again with Richie’s wiimote tool doubling their visual movement for sound. In Beijing, calligrapher man joined in, an amazing moment as it was his first non-calligraphy moment and he rocked it. In other shows, Tanya El-Gamal also joined in.

Towards the end of each show Rhys Turner rocked it with his iPhone audience VJ app – people could use an iPhone screen as a canvas to draw processing-style shapes and flows of images drawn by young Chinese people, and have it show up on the big screen. This is some raw footage of it in action as MC Mantra and DJ Wasabi freestyle to words that pop up on the screen.

Robin Fox blew everyone’s brains at the end of each show with his audio-controlled laser work. This is in Chongqing, a small warehouse performance. I’m a fan of his emergency stop button.

]]> http://digitalasi.com/archives/photo-diary-august-2010/feed/ 0 http://digitalasi.com/archives/video-mashup-sold/ http://digitalasi.com/archives/video-mashup-sold/#comments Sat, 31 Jul 2010 05:02:47 +0000 shakthi http://asi.allaroundyou.com.au/?p=82 “At birth we cried for the rope of our mother’s navel…”

This video is the trailer for CuriousWorks’ first feature, This City is a Body: The Migrant Project Film.
It’s a mashup of excerpts from the ‘This City is a Body’ conference in 2007 and a song from our debut album called ‘Sold’.

I was inspired by the opportunity to take excerpts from two amazing speeches at this conference – by Dr Richard Greenthun and Dr Ross Gibson – and give the ideas within them a more mainstream appeal by putting them to a beat.

The conference was held as part of The Migrant Project, CuriousWorks’ first initiative, which brought together 50 Sydneysiders with cultural and artistic ancestries from across the planet to develop cross-platform projects about Sydney as a city built on a history of migration.

Credits:
Edited by Shakthidharan.
Featuring footage shot and edited during The Migrant Project by Elias Nohra, Shakthidharan, Vincent Tay and Iqbal Barkat.
Live drawing by Aimee Falzon.
Stills found by Mahesh Radhakrishnan courtesy of National Archive.
‘This City is a Body’ conference was held at The Mint, Sydney.

Music by Asi
Vocals – Shakthidharan & Aimee Falzon
Guitar – Shakthidharan
Samples, Beats and Production – Shakthidharan
Drums – Alon Ilsar
Tabla – Iynkaran Kantharajah
Bass – Marc Chee

It was the first time the CuriousWorks warehouse at Randle St, Surry Hills, opened publicly.

Below are pictures by the lovely Alex Vaughan from the night. You can see more of Alex’s work on her website.

View the entire photo set on Flickr.

CuriousWorks

Support act was a dance item choreographed by Paul Cordeiro (right)

L to R: Shakthi, Marc, Iynkaran, Aimee (live drawing) from Asi

Robin Dixon

Aimee on the live drawing

Shakthi appearing thoughtful

The lovely audience

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