28.7.23 - 100 Videos offers audiences the rare chance to experience a large body of video work all at once and in person. The event hinges on an unusual exchange; each audience member agrees to become a collaborator in the event’s creation...
Artist duo Rowland’s Leaving (Darren Nixon and Rowland Hill) came together through a shared interest in club culture, world building and the tropes associated with live performance. Publishing a pair of short videos to Instagram every Friday evening for over a year the pair decided to mark the release of videos 99 and 100 with their first live event. They approached Lauren Velvick having attended Resonant Structures previously in the Cultures of Sound programme. During the summer, in between academic years, University spaces are often empty and unused which provided the opportunity to stage this experimental event within Sovereign Design House.
100 Videos offers audiences the rare chance to experience a large body of video work all at once and in person. The event hinges on an unusual exchange; each audience member agrees to become a collaborator in the event’s creation, surrendering their smartphone on arrival to present one of the 100 videos on a loop for one hour. In this way the event seeks to test the limits of resource sharing, encouraging a temporary offline community to emerge.
100 Videos made its debut on Friday 28th July at Bath House Galleries where we hung 100 smartphones throughout the gallery space, each playing a looped film on full volume. The resulting audio effect was something similar to walking through a video arcade, whilst the small-scale visuals demanded a more up-close, intimate encounter. To create a sense of pacing and focus during the event, the artists performed a number of live one-minute adaptations of the videos, which occurred spontaneously and unannounced. One audience member commented that these moments felt like 'live-action breakouts'.
The audience response to the event at Bath House Galleries was something that will feed into Rowland’s Leaving’s ongoing project in a number of ways: ‘We were so pleased at the ways in which the audience allowed themselves to really fall into and immerse themselves in what was a pretty intense audio/visual experience. The extent to which people engaged in the moment, without the comfort of their phones to retreat into, is something we want to explore further in the future.’
Follow the development of the work via the artists' instagram accounts: