Prologue:
This digital artist x digital jockey theatrical art piece can be modified in accordance with available budget, time, and resources.
Description:
A ‘stage’ is set up made of a large ‘cinematic’ LED screen/ projected screen, ‘throne’, DJ booth. The Dj booth is ‘made’ of LED screens. In front of the DJ booth is the performance space for the VR artist-dancer. The front of the stage is painted with a mural.
The cinematic screen displays a 3D audioreactive, morphing, dancing mermaid in an underwater scene. The mermaid is sometimes immersed in a live ‘virtual reality’ painting. Close-ups of the mermaid’s features are displayed on the DJ booth LED screens.
The digital ‘jockey’ is on a raised dais with a throne made of the horses of Selene, and waves (the horses are waves). The ‘wavehorses’ also hang over the LED screens.
The digital jockey is wearing metallic scales and a headpiece that pays homage to the bodhisattva cultural background of Dj Mattana (a London Dj who is creatively influenced by water and the bodhisattva goddess Guanyin).
Thesis:
A unique collaboration between a digital artist and jockey- a dialogue between music and art.
The digital artist has created an audioreactive morphing mermaid (self-portrait-based) who’s movement’s and features go through an evolution during the set- a ‘hero’s journey’. The stages of evolution include states of fear, doubt, resilience and an ultimate state of courage.
In each state, the mermaid’s form reacts to the music of the set, her shape, colours, tattoos, and hair are all reacting directly to the music.
The Dj set 'tells’ the story of the mermaid’s emotional journey, in an uplifting manner which has clear phases/ moods of the songs. The inevitable negativity of the mermaid’s (aka human) experience is contrasted by the relentless joy expressed in the DJ set. There is a narrating voice integrated into the Dj’s set which adds a clear theatrical form to installation.
Intermittently, the digital artist performs virtual reality dances, during which paintings appear in the world of the mermaid on the LED screens.
Context (co-written by Dj Mattana):
Proposal
This installation brings together the VR dance-art performance of myself, Vaidehi Bhargava [put in a link to your page here!] and the music performance of DJ Mattana in an empowering and immersive art piece that celebrates the power of dance and community through the imagery of the water goddess and the sensuality of dancehall music.
Creative potential
This dance and art installation piece will be an interactive, immersive call to fellow dancers and creatives, bringing others into a joyful and imaginative space where they can journey with the artist and DJ to beautiful and empowering places. Inspired by the power of water gods and creatures, the installation embodies the concept of ‘flow’ through music, dance and imagery. Bringing in ‘water goddess’ imagery, the installation is a fusion that brings us back to nature and our roots, whilst amalgamating technology and the future, and also empowers women and marginalised genders to fill a dancefloor with movement, art and feminine energy.
Water goddess
This installation is inspired by the imagery of water goddesses and creatures: a way of connecting to the roots of creativity and flow. Water and spirituality have been linked across cultures and time, and as such are away of uniting communities and linking with our ancestors. The imagery of water encompasses both great power (e.g. the Kraken, Hokusai’s Great Wave) as well as the softness of gently flowing streams. Artistically, this combination provides an empowering celebration of the gentleness, creativity and sexuality that has been present in water imagery throughout the world which has partly inspired this project:
-The sequined mermaid art of Haitian artist Roudy Azor
-African goddess Mami Wata
-Chinese goddess Guanyin, who is central to DJ Mattana’s upbringing
VR Dancing
I am a VR artist whose recent work has explored using dance in collaboration with VR art to create more energetic and visually exciting performances.
My first creative collaboration with a DJ was during DJ Lois Browne’s set at ArtSect Gallery: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Co2kHqtoSz1/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
This is the art I made whilst ‘dancing’ to her music: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Co91Kylo6cr/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
For this proposed installation, I will be using my dance performance combined with live VR painting alongside DJ Mattana to produce an immersive visual world that brings the audience into an empowering place.
Music: DJ Mattana
I first encountered Mattana performing at The Jago on 29th October 2022 (you can listen to a part of her set here). I found her creative practice highly evocative, powerful, healing, cathartic and empowering, blending together sounds from different parts of the world in a way that blended musical style and social performance as a ‘tropical water baby’. As a woman who goes clubbing as a solo female for the thrill of dancing in an environment of genuine human excitement, passion, hope, fear, strangers and potential new friends, Mattana’s music and performance was a clarion call of female strength – a true validation of me, in that club, dancing by myself and expressing my feminine energy. The expressive drawing below depicts how I felt witnessing Mattana perform.
The song she was playing was ‘Bumper Police’ by Cooyah. The song set my soul ablaze: it is full of adrenaline-raising energetic thumps, slow controlled build-ups, rhythmic instructions that tell you move just as the music compels you to. Dancehall has long been my beloved genre of healing music, a core part of my dance practice and a friend in my loneliest days, and has been a creative fuel and research subject for my academic expression.
However, I find that, like all great art, dancehall can present me with a challenging conundrum. On the one hand I hear excitement, resistance, optimism and joy – lifting the human spirit to make you sing and dance. On the other hand, the assertive eroticism can also trigger feelings of discomfort; with myself and many other women having experienced negative situations of being pressured sexually, reduced to our sexual availability and being subject to harassment and/or abuse.
“Hold up, freeze! This is the Bumper Police!”
Mattana’s performance practice provides me with a personal creative evolution. In this image, she is standing in a victorious stance: both fingers on both hands raised, with a look of pure triumph on her face. She mouths the words ‘Bumper Police’ with pure joy: the joy of a DJ who has moved the crowd to dance, and who has successfully moved the ‘bumpers’ (aka the backsides of the crowd and ‘arrested’ their attention’. Rather than sanitizing the song of its sexuality, she has reached the emotion of exhilarated ecstasy of the song, of which sexuality and the human body is a mere mode of expression.
There is an indomitable spiritual tenor to having fun in the midst of a world which would rather you did not, and I found joyful resistance in dancing to Mattana’s music. This is a core theme of my personal creative practice as an extended reality artist: I make worlds where you can fly on unicorns and comb their manes and feed them roses. I transform my face into fantastical moving creations using augmented reality. I paint worlds in virtual reality whilst dancing. I creatively code audio-reactive scenes which respond to and express ‘music’. This collaboration will bring the ecstasy, joy and creativity of both the dancefloor and the world of VR together, using the imagery of water as an empowering symbol of the human spirit.
