Negotiations.

Negotiations is a work exploring the nexus of avant-garde composition techniques, audio-visual technologies, and sense-making. Building upon Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully’s existing research into ‘open’ scores as a method of democratizing artistic production, the work consists of a text and image score designed for the creation of a new audio-visual work. Utilizing text and imagery that is both narrative and abstract, Negotiations seeks to invite its participants to construct ‘sense’ collaboratively: culturally resonant imagery jostles with visual code, emotive story-telling is contrast with obtuse language. Working with only basic over-arcing instruction, its participants are invited to create a new work for ‘5 prepared instruments’. Instructions such as ‘it is important to consider technology and use it poorly’ are balanced against more interpretative texts, in which participants are encouraged to ‘displaying our complexity, move through at different speeds, examine different colours’.

The work explores the utility of poetry as a performance tool. How might the resonance of language infer a weight to participants actions in a way that direct instruction cannot? How might more open language provide participants with autonomy as they struggle to collectively decide what a ‘sensible’ outcome might look like? Instead of listing a specific note to be played, or a specific action to be undertaken, Negotiations instead paints an emotive horizon from which action might later occur. Its directions, such as ‘retreat to the smallest room at the back of the house where we measure our children’s height at dedicated intervals upon the neck of a giraffe’, are not designed to lead to one definitive outcome; rather they provide participants with the means by which to collectively determine what might happen next.

Negotiations takes several forms: a text/graphic score, a series of compositions created by the artist, and an audio-visual realization.