Jacqueline Felstead's three-dimensional photographic works reintroduce absent subjects that once were – that can’t be seen and are no longer – back into the collective consciousness. Challenging the perceptual distinctions of traditional photography, here mappable territories are defined through positive and negative space, thinness and thickness, forms and edges. The works connect three-dimensional photographic technologies with propositions for future personas, future politics and loss.

This public walk took place live online for the Walkative Societies International Walks in Lockdown. We walked the periphery of Melbourne's Mantra Bell City Hotel at first light, while speaking to surreptitious footage of the hotel's inner workings taken by day. Formerly a hospital, the 1950s nurses’ swimming pool within apparently transports one’s mind away from the six lanes of traffic at the hotel’s suburban entrance… Until very recently Mantra had been a prison for over 60 refugees detained indefinitely on its third floor. These people were transported from Australia's offshore detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru through “Medevac” legislation. This legislation, now repealed, gave doctors the authority to send asylum seekers in medical need to Australia for treatment. Refugees were detained at Mantra for 16 months of their 8 years in continuing detention. The daylight refracting from the hotel's glass exterior contributes to the concealment of the workings inside, whereby a private institution has been used to conduct public business so contentious that it typically takes place offshore. During COVID lockdown the hotel was within the 5km radius I could walk. In a period in which public protest has been largely impossible, walking this perimeter and engaging with this politics live as an international community has both gravity and credence.

In the past museums built universes that were miniature representations of the world but these microcosms were limited and limiting constructions. This exhibition takes the theatrical methodologies of dominant museums as a jumping-off point to launch a creative intervention. Four installation artists respond to the idea of universe building, commenting on the impossibilities of constructing a complete or neutral representation of the world we inhabit. These artists critique and pose alternatives. Through their works and experimentation we access multiple perspectives as if looking in at the world through a microcosm of speculative lenses.

The radical disruption of live performance that began in 2020 and continues in 2021 raises a fundamental question regarding the presence of the present in the time of performance. If sound design for live performance is captured and rendered for technological distribution such as streaming (and can be paused, rewound, fast-forwarded, and re-recorded as necessary) for both real-time and asynchronous audiences (who can likewise pause, rewind, fast-forward, and re-view as necessary), how does this manifest in a ‘liveness' of performance? Performance is constantly in relation to and in constant consideration of its audience – necessarily imagining that audience prior to constitution as Audience. As a sound designer and performance maker, I am confronted with the fragility of both audience and performance: as a constituency of bodies threatened by pandemic disease, as a community of practice threatened by restrictions on gathering together, and as an art form threatened by economic collapse. In this essay, I examine my own sound design and the evolution of a pandemic-restricted solo practice as a site in which a ‘post-pandemics’ of performance might become possible. If 2020 in its upheaval and chaos showed the all-too-narrow limits of our care for others, what is the role of performance design in the recovery of that care? I engage a poetics of care and consent in performance design through notions of Pirate Care, xenofeminist action, and the relation to Other proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy. I reflect on and dissect my own response to pandemic time and space, and the shapes that vulnerability, fear, and uncertainty build in our performed worlds. Deploying this knowledge I look to a way forward for performance design and live performance, real-time and asynchronous, physically distant and present, that can engender this ‘post-pandemics’.

This article navigates an acoustic ecology for performance as it incorporates modern technologies, modern cities, and modern crises. Gernot Böhme asserts that “the characteristic experience of a lifestyle, of a city’s or a countryside’s atmosphere, is fundamentally determined in each instance by the acoustic space.” By examining the acoustic worlds of two key independent theatre venues in Melbourne, La Mama Theatre in Carlton and fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne’s Central Business District, I ask that if ‘theatre noise’ is the characteristic sound that emerges in our performance spaces – from the performer’s breath to audience laughter, air conditioning, the crash of bottles from the restaurant next door – is the role of sound design to make this more meaningful, or less? Are our performance spaces immune to ‘noise pollution’ or should we bring the sonified world to the work of sound design as a response to ecological reality?”

Phenomenologies of sound are, in general, phenomenologies of listening or performing—that is, they privilege the moment of sound’s making or the moment of its hearing. This chapter broadens this to include the process of the sound designer, integrating the experience of the audience in an account of the complex temporalities and intentionalities of the full experience of sound in performance, rooted in our intersubjective understanding of other beings in our world. It argues that sound design and other design disciplines within performance are an integral part of the performance, not an afterthought. Further, the work of design is figured as a work of phenomenology itself, as an intersubjective transcendence of designer, actor, director, audience as individual hearers—a coming-into-being of ‘listener’ and ‘listened-to’ in the time of a work’s creation as well as its presence on stage. In the work of sound design for performance, the designer must be open and turned towards an audience that does not yet exist—the designer must render the thinkable imaginary of design as the knowable of performance. The philosophies of Badiou, Heidegger and Nancy are brought together with leading theorists of sound to address notions of truth and the temporality of performance in the role of the designer in theatre, exploring the movement of meaning between listener and listened-to, and positing that the rules and conventions that are shaped in the rehearsal and performance process are unique systems of meaning which imagine an intersubjective audience for an other.

Project Anywhere is a vehicle for illuminating the existence of art potentially located anywhere on earth. Using a peer reviewed global exhibition model and dedicated website, it is specifically designed to evaluate and promote artistic projects presented outside traditional exhibition spaces and circuits. A key feature of Project Anywhere’s innovative evaluation model is the substitution of the figure of curator with a democratizing blind peer evaluation system. Significantly, this peer evaluation model differs substantially from traditional research evaluation systems, which typically endorse the quality of project “outcomes”. Instead, by emphasizing evaluation at the proposal stage, our double-blind peer review process privileges speculation, discursive thinking and risk-taking over project “realisation”. Representations of projects hosted as part of Project Anywhere’s global exhibition program are featured on the homepage for one year, updated throughout the hosting period, and then made permanently accessible in the exhibition archive. Project Anywhere accepts both individual and collaborative proposals from artists, curators and researchers working anywhere in the world. Projects can be highly speculative or discursive in nature and can extend or contradict existing methodologies. Project Anywhere affords independent validation, feedback, and international dissemination across a range of platforms for art and artistic research at the outermost limits of location-specificity. At the cessation of the Project Anywhere annual global exhibition hosting period, all selected contributors are invited to develop a short page-based response. These responses are then presented in our biennial publication Anywhere. All the contributions featured this edited publication have been developed in response to artistic projects originally selected for inclusion in Project Anywhere’s 2019 and 2020 exhibition programs. The contributing artists, curators and researchers were all invited to develop a text/image piece that is neither straightforward documentation nor scholarly text. We are delighted to share these extraordinary ‘re-imaginings’ in this our fourth issue of Anywhere, and the second designed by Ella Egidy. Acknowledging that it is not possible to wholly explain or describe an artistic project, the contributions featured in Anywhere iv should instead be seen as alternative portals into their respective worlds.

In his influential book, historian Geoffrey Blainey coined the term The Tyranny of Distance (1982) as a descriptor that continues to influence the psyche. For the first time in 2019, the three leading performing arts schools in Australia approached the design for the student exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) as a collaborative project. The theme of isolation and its influence on current Australian politics shaped not only the conception and development, but also the curation and realisation of the exhibition. The student exhibition presented the opportunity to explore the creation of a site-specific installation but required the navigation of distance in conception and realisation as installation of the various elements could only occur once on site in Prague. Distance also needed to be negotiated between cohorts, timelines and requirements of the different institutions. The tyranny of delayed international shipping was overcome, as with all other obstacles, by the application of a distinctly Australian sense of humour in the formation of a temporary installation–ShippingWrecked–to hold our place until the full exhibition arrived. PQ presents the opportunity to overcome our physical isolation but also test the benefits that isolation extends to our artistic practice.

Artistic research, like the world of a work of art, is presented in multiple ways in its often-uneven passage from conception through production to dissemination. And like a work of art, it can manifest across a complex distribution of materialisations. This complexity invariably presents challenges. Given the indeterminate nature and material manifestations that might constitute a single project, it can be particularly difficult to determine how and when it is best represented. This state of affairs can invite the question: are there more or less appropriate moments in the passage from conception to “realisation” in which to evaluate and represent artistic research? Although most established models tend to focus upon evaluating a project at its perceived point of realisation or conclusion (documentation/experience), Project Anywhere’s focus is instead directed toward the task of evaluating and representing artistic research at the proposal stage (speculation). Significantly, Project Anywhere regards a project’s potential produce new knowledge as something that might indeed. exist in its imagined or hypothetical potential rather than any tangible or measurable outcome. Moreover, by removing direct aesthetic experience as an evaluative mode, a very different sense of a new knowledge capacity is potentially introduced.

The Ghosts of Nothing, a collaboration between Australian artists Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre, recently generated a series of imagined and mime-based performances within the conceptual architecture of a ‘world tour of abandoned music venues’. This ‘tour’ formed part of an ongoing project titled In Memory of Johnny B. Goode (2014– ). Through mimed street performances and other performative iterations such as a radio play, The Ghosts of Nothing have continually and radically re-medialised the original ‘rock opera’ that launched the project to form an unpredictably ‘open’ work, to use Umberto Eco’s well-known label. From a literal viewpoint, the ‘work’ In Memory of Johnny B. Goode exists nowhere at all. But that is not the same as suggesting that it might exist everywhere all at once. On the contrary, The Ghosts of Nothing seek to articulate a ‘work’ that is both highly individuated and unfolding over unspecified spans of time and space. To be sure, the ‘work’ is performative, as we elaborate below. If it exists anywhere at all, it is located—if that is the right term—within the differentiated cognitive worlds of individually idiosyncratic interpretations, memories and meanings as embodied in members of its audience.

This chapter explores Internet-based and Internet-activated approaches to curating art through both established and non-traditional exhibition circuits. Today, new curatorial approaches are emerging in tandem with digitally-activated modes of presentation and dissemination distinguished by perpetual reproducibility, multiple intersecting temporalities and materializations, and the subsidence of physical space. Accordingly, this chapter will discuss networked, distributed, and modular approaches that variously disrupt, democratize, antagonize, institutionalize—and in some cases altogether bypass—the figure of the curator. Significantly, many of these approaches are no longer necessarily connected to singular events or spaces and are perhaps better understood as omnidirectional movements between modes of conception, production and dissemination connected through the screen as a communal space. This communal space might offer either access to new works, illuminate the existence of works understood to be elsewhere in time and space, or offer multiple or alternative materializations, versions, attributions, interpretations and representations of existing works.