RIMA
durational performance, installation and digital media work
As you tap your message from the other side, I think this is the closest we will ever be, between us a wall a trillion skins thick.*
RIMA is a creative exploration that challenges you to sit with the long minutes and share the experience of a reduced world where there is no real human contact. A 23-hour-long performance and digital media installation, RIMA inhabits both the physical and virtual worlds. The durational part of the work makes explicit strategies for survival within an interminable passing of time. Confined to a 2m x 3m metre area, the average size of a solitary cell, Vulcan’s movements, alongside incremental environmental changes, trigger sensors that in turn simultaneously dispatch a correlated text stream onto the wall and out to the twittersphere. Scott combines live and pre-recorded sound to at once accentuate time passing and disturb the space. Working with details from her research into political prisoners and solitary confinement, Vulcan has developed a number of physical responses, which complement and underlie the text explored in RIMA.
RIMA is influenced by Vulcan’s research into the psychological and physical effects of solitary confinement. The short missives of text build over 23 hours into a fictional narrative that hovers somewhere between an indistinct present (#rima) interwoven with a speculative parallel sci-fi future (#rima3).
* RIMA © Julie Vulcan
In 2016 a 16-page A5 artist booklet, expanding the research and ideas in RIMA, was created. Essays, images and contributions from the artists, Dr Theron Schmidt, Professor Anna Gibbs and Charandev Singh.
You can download the pdf e-booklet version HERE
Photo Alex Talamo
“RIMA, with gentle and eerie grace, emerges from an inquiry from several years of dedicated practice, research and experimentation. Its fruits are rich in complexity, intellect and insight and the minds and bodies of Vulcan and Scott, having relentlessly pursued this dark and uncertain space of the human psyche, hold up a rare mirror into a realm of our suffering and a humanity that we have somehow passively accepted.
This work will leave you unsettled in the best way possible.
4 stars.”
Nithya Iyer – Consciousness confined; TAGG Aug 3 2016
Follow the text stream on Twitter @squidsilo
or on the webpage HERE
July 30 – 31 2016
Arts House Melbourne, Australia
August 6 – 7 2015
The End(s) of Electronic Literature
Electronic Literature Conference, Bergen, Norway Aug 4 – 7 2015.
RIMA was remotely hosted in Sydney by Contemporary Culture Art and Politics a research group of the National Institute for Experimental Arts UNSW Art & Design
The physical actions in Sydney prompt the live text feed projected onto the wall of Lydgalleriet. Bergen.
RIMA was developed during Artist in Residence programs at the Lock-Up Newcastle NSW and Bundanon Trust NSW 2013.
RIMA – performance, installation and digital media work – timelapse documentation from MzVulcan on Vimeo.