ABSTRACT

In 2003 in collaboration with composer Alistair MacDonald, I mounted a large-scale interactive installation entitled Sensuous Geographies. When the visitors stepped into Sensuous Geographies’ central (interactive) space they found themselves generating and modulating a complex multi-layered sound environment in real time, which emerged as a response to the direction and speed of their movement.1 After much deliberation we decided to call Sensuous Geographies a ‘performative’ installation, on the grounds that it simultaneously generated a new sonic environment in response to the behaviours of each grouping of visitors as they engaged with the installation and an emergent choreographic event as they moved through the space in response to the sounds they were generating. The use of this term concerned critics such as Ellie Carr (2003) who had not encountered the term ‘performative’ before, nor indeed the term ‘immersive’, which is also regularly used when referring to installations of this kind. That this is so is, perhaps, unsurprising, for installations such as Sensuous Geographies are developing a new mode of choreographic practice, one which might result in performative events but does not entail what is conventionally considered to be performance. This raises questions for artists and critics concerning, on the one hand, the nature of the works artists are developing in this field, and on the other, ways of describing them.