Barbara Ellison

HEROPERA is an improvised, ‘ad-lib’ performance deconstructing the opera medium and challenging traditional ideas about heroism and storytelling. Sparked by speculative fiction and rooted in various disciplines, TRICKSTERplays around with the cultural and visual codes of opera, practising the relational, the messy, the spontaneous, the unpredictable. Instead of tragic heroines who sacrifice or annihilate themselves, this opera stages five women who can conjure up something on the spot, and are not afraid of not knowing (yet). Non-heroism and the unseen therefore also earn their spot in this collective 'work' (operare). While venturing into a post-normal future, all TRICKSTERs are collaboratively and simultaneously the actors, singers, writers, scenographers, composers and technicians of this show. Tourdates 2018 3 june: Ostade A’dam 4 june: Ostade A’dam 8 june: Extrapool, Nijmegen 9 june: Concordia, Enschede 29 september: Zaal 3, Den Haag 13 october: Vrijburcht, Amsterdam TRICKSTER is a performance collective of five artists trained in various disciplines (theater, music, visual arts, scenography) an

2009-2017 ongoing | Trickster is a performance art collective. We are currently developing an adlib 'Opera' project .

2015-2017 ongoing | This particular installation triptych was created for a Solo exhibition. It is a triptych Audio/Visual HD Projection with 6 seat recliners in the gallery space with sound projection underneath each recliner. This large scale video installation forms part of my ongoing ‘Underwater Phantoms’ body of work exploring phantoms in the natural world (Phantasma Mundana). These are a series of pieces within this realm exploring the phantom-producing polphony of magical underwater natural and artificial constructed environments. Each piece is created from multi-layered original source material of hydrophone and video recordings in various erupting and bubbling underwater environments. underwater environments, natural and artificial.

2014-2017 ongoing | This piece plays with the creation of interoperable digital avatars, which are now growing in use online, being deployed in virtual worlds, online games, social networks, video clips etc. In computing, an avatar (usually translated from Sanskrit as incarnation) is a graphical representation of a user or the user's alter ego or character. In a space we see two imagined, created and projected Avatars, Java and Kyoko, entirely fictional characters which I ‘created’ from a collage of different eyes, ears, head etc. from sections of photos and paintings of face parts from a variety of sources. These image fragments were scanned and blended together to become new digital faces with their own inherent character. They were then crudely and simply animated to move and ‘speak’ using a text-to-speech utility and despite their obvious artificial nature, they are somehow brought to life. Once images frozen in time, they are now moving phantom portraits of a digital presence. Their artificial nature is obvious but my interest is in the attempt to ‘incarnate’ to bring them to life and to explore their unique ability to ‘speak’ sample-accurate copies of speech / sound patterns, allowing an exact repeatability of any text or audio fragment. The sonic part of the ‘Vocal Phantoms’ pieces are composed using a computers ‘text-to-speech’ TTS utility

PMMA Acrylic Blocks (240 blocks /each block 200x200 cm), Wire rope suspension, Edge lighting, Stainless Steel Brackets, fabricated Swing frame. Public Sculpture commission for the Raadzaal of the Capelle Aan Den Ijjsel Gemeente. 240 PMMA acrylic blocks with embedded objects. This is a Time Capsule Wall comprising of 240 PMMA blocks with embedments.Each Block 200x200 cm contains an object donated by members of the Capelle community to represent something in their life at this moment in time.

Through this exploration, I am reminded of the presence of particular forces, which are perpetually, though imperceptibly, at play. Working methods used aim to make sense of the world through an enquiry into the forces that dictate its physical presence. Light rays , capturing the presence of the humble and mundane fragments of dust particles whose indetermined paths act as an air-bound reflection of some kind of microscopic universe.......

2011-2017 ongoing | Drawing phantoms (drawing ‘OVP’ ) is an entrancing sonic/physical performance using drawing as a medium to trace and transform shapes on amplified surfaces so to manipulate the perceptual auditory image and to lure out vocal sounding sonic phantoms. In the spirit of the phenomenon popularly known as EVP ( ‘Electronic Voice Phenomenon’ ), I call my own drawing process ‘OVP’ ( ‘Object voice Phenomenon’ ). I like to play with perceptual ambiguity and exploit its potential for producing some strange and curious emergent features. Despite the relentless repetition of the drawing process, the fascination for me comes from the emergent patterns that appear in the foreground and disappear randomly and spontaneously, shifting and repeating with repeated listening.

2014-2017 ongoing | Automatic drawing rituals | This is an ongoing series of works. As a premeditated and deliberate action, I have spent hours upon hours drawing circles on all kinds of surfaces, during which time I often have the illusory feeling that an external force is driving the pencil. This uncanny phantasmatic sensation can be explained by what is known as the ‘ideomotor effect’13, a movement caused by the idea of its realisation, but it nonetheless is felt as being very surreal and even supernatural. The main objective is in any case to engage fully and completely in the process of circle drawing, without an end result in mind, and ‘to inhabit’ the movement as the pen moves freely over the drawing surface.

2014-2017 ongoing | Our brains do not give a truly objective and accurate representation of the world but a human one – full of pattern recognition – sometimes real, sometimes forced. Humans naturally and regularly experience Pareidolia (the psychological phenomenon of perceiving patterns in randomness) and in way so can computers. These Phantom Portraits are created from a process using software to generate generations of random polygon structures and then employing face detection algorithms to scan the polygons until the computer “sees a face”. These polygon structures are then worked with in subtle ways to heighten the illusion. From up close, they are quite abstract and blurry, but from a distance they can appear to be strangely lifelike. They are called Phantom Portraits (and the series is subtitled “Through a glass darkly” ) because of how ghostly they appear and due to the way they are produced. I am exploring this domain in many ways and am working on a a series of prints ( large scale and multiples of smaller scale works) which can also be presented as slowly transitioning dynamic images.

2014-2017 ongoing |The ‘Natural Phantoms’ pieces have been created using original field recordings as the source material: ‘Natural Phantoms’ series of audio/visual pieces is composed with recordings from environment recordings (Baffin Island, South Africa, Cambodia, Chile, Australia, Amazon,Brazil , Borneo, Bolivia,Utah US, Nepal).

2016- in progress |The sonic tapestries will be large-scale woven pieces spun from spectral patterns (spectrograms) of various extracts of sound recordings of traditional and machine ‘work songs’ (the modern ‘song’ of the computerised loom).The large scale woven pieces are planned to be 160 -200 cm wide and between 160 and 200cm in length. They should be visually very striking, abstract, vibrant and saturated with colour. Beautiful visual tapestries, spun from the song of the weaver/worker. The selected sound fragments from the recordings are analysed by special software for their spectral information and then these visual spectrograms which are a representation of the varying spectrum of frequencies in a sound are the images which are precisely colour mapped and matched, each colour pixel to each thread, made possible by the use of the very high tech computerised Jacquard loom. The work songs selected for this body of work are recordings of the loom at work ‘singing’ its own mechanical worksong. I think of them as audio time capsules, with repetitive tasks woven in pieces.