Michaela Gleave
The world arrives at night
2014
Performance delivered via email, website, bound document
22/02/14 - 27/07/14
night.qagoma.ql...
"Each evening at sunset a star will be sent to members of the audience. The star will be selected from those travelling across the southern sky that night, chosen intuitively, depending on the tone and colour of that day.
These stars will be both present and historic. They will rise and set with the rotation of the earth, conveying both time and meaning. Some will be visible and others invisible, with information expanding and contracting as it becomes available or disappears through time.
The audience will be unlimited. They may enter and exit the performance at any time. Precise locations in time and space will be both important and remain fluid.
Occurring over 156 days, this performance will last for the duration of the exhibition ‘Trace: Performance and Its Documents’."
The World Arrives At Night was a performative project commissioned as part of the exhibition Trace: Performance and Its Documents at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. The project will ran for the entirety of the exhibition period, commencing on 22 February and concluding on 27 July 2014.
Executed on a daily basis, The World Arrives At Night melded astronomy and astrology, cosmology and anthropology, referencing the poetry and romance of our astronomic imaginings to explore a very human relationship to the cosmos over time. Part astrological experiment and part scientific data transmission, the project examined the parameters of performative practice, extending definitions of physical gesture and audience engagement through an expanded experience of scale and duration. Filtered through with a wiki-understanding of the universe, the work used the web as its platform, exploring compressions and expansions made possible through this media via a daily experience of the motions of the earth through space.