PILOT – Daniel R Marks

PILOT

Daniel R Marks/DRM presents PILOT, a takeover of Temperance Hall encompassing an exhibition and two evenings of solo performance, incorporating sculptural installation, video projection and an original audio score.

EXHIBITION & PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

Opening night: Wed Dec 6, 6–8pm, please join us for opening drinks 
Exhibition open: Wed Dec 6 – Sat Dec 9, 12-5pm, Sun Dec 10, 12–3pm
Performances: Thurs Dec 7 & Fri Dec 8, 7–8.30pm, registration essential

ABOUT PILOT

PILOT is the final outcome of DRM’s practice-led PhD project Protagonist: a choreography of queer digitality. This project has sought to find a critical inter-relation between queer politics of withdrawal and illegibility, and hidden techno-ideological complexities of digital capture and algorithmic aesthetic. DRM’s research follows in the footsteps of radical body art and underground queer performance, and weaves this history into that of cybernetics and the visual-choreographic logics of surveillance. Through this research, they have developed gestures of queer encryption and decryption: an eroticism of regress, limits, and ambiguous control.

PILOT adapts DRM’s choreographic research archive to the architecture of Temperance Hall. A labyrinthine installation of work produced throughout the four years of the PhD project, including sculptural ephemera and re-sampled digital and audio material, serves as a score for acts of endurance and leakage which complicate the bounds of anatomy, visual perspective, and the performance event. The live component of PILOT incorporates a re-staging of DRM’s work TELLDRILL/Sniffer Dog, which has previously been performed/screened at RMIT The Capitol, Collingwood Yards and Pleasure Planet.

Drone, dog, diva, saint. Listening through the walls and floorboards. A returning glance lingers in the dark. A slow reveal and an unheard command. A forensic poetics. A snaring of the orifice. Noclipping. A fallen bloom, a soft-shelled camera. A tracing of the unreachable.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DRM is an artist and researcher, working with experimental and critical modes of choreographic practice which engage surveillance, digitality, and the queer body in public space. Their interest in choreography is a means toward unpacking and performing complexities of where queer political agency meets with systems, codes, and processes of circulation. They work primarily in hybrid modes between performance art, digital/screen-based formats, sculptural installation, experimental text, and electronic sound.

DRM is a PhD candidate at RMIT University School of Art, set to complete their practice-led doctoral research project in 2024. They are also an educator in RMIT School of Fashion & Textiles and have worked in several supervisory and artist mentorship roles. They have shown work with Liquid Architecture, RMIT Gallery, Foreign Objekt, Midsumma Festival, and several artist-run initiatives in Naarm/Melbourne, alongside performing in programs at NGV and ACCA. DRM is a research affiliate with ACMI X, Performing Dress Lab (RMIT, Aalto University & London College of Fashion) and the Posthuman Art Network (Foreign Objekt).

PILOT is supported by Temperance Hall. Previous iterations of PILOT have been supported by RMIT Culture, Liquid Architecture, and City of Maribyrnong Arts and Culture.

ACCESS AND SAFETY

Temperance Hall's Main Hall is located on the ground floor of the building and is wheelchair accessible via the Napier Street Main Entrance. Bathrooms are for all genders and wheelchair accessible. Temperance Hall's Upstairs Studio is only accessible via a stair well. 

Please do not attend if you are feeling unwell.

For more information, please visit Temperance Hall's website here.

If you have any specific accessibility needs or any queries regarding the event, please contact Temperance Hall Program Producer, Anna McDermott program@temperancehall.com.au

Hero Image: Wild Hardt
Image 2: Courtesy of the Artist DRM

Temperance Hall acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land in which we dance and create, the Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, and pay our respect to Elders both past and present and, through them, to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.