Watch again here  https://youtu.be/ODm3MfWnAQI

Archive X: Underperformance 

Archive X: Underperformance is a film essay compiled of personal archival material - electroacoustic improvisations, field recordings, found objects, self-made instruments and software, photographs, drawings, paintings, writings - from the last 25 years. It works in the zone of the unmade, the unready, the sketchy, the incomplete, the promising-but-unfulfilled, the fragment, the not-quite-good-enough, the is-it-on-yet?, the are-you-done-yet?, less the dis/orderly than the suborderly, less the performative than the underperformative. Through this, it offers a reflection on archiving and anxiety - anxieties of identity and purpose, anxieties of judgement and accountability, anxieties of completion and death - in the hope that out of all the mess something useful might come. After all, every sow’s ear contains a silk purse.

Archive X: Overperformance 

This autumn John Bowers, Paul Stapleton and Adam Pultz Melbye have been developing an improvising trio based around shared concerns for feedback networks, mixed materialities, performance ecologies, and shifting notions of agency and instrumentality. Archive X: Overperformance seeds their networks and systems with selected archival material of significance to the trio, bridging the archival and the improvisational. This is their debut performance.John Bowers (UK) is an artist-researcher with an academic background in the social and computing sciences, design, music and critical theory. As an improvising musician, he works with modular synthesisers, home-brew electronics, reconstructions of antique image and sound-making devices, self-made software, field recordings, esoteric sensor systems, and spoken text. He often combines performance with walking and the investigation of selected sites to research an imagined discipline he calls ‘mythogeosonics’. He has performed at festivals including the Venice Biennale, Experimental Intermedia New York, Transmediale/CTM Vorspiel Berlin, Piksel Bergen, Electropixel Nantes, BEAM London, Aldeburgh Festival and Spill Ipswich, and toured with the Rambert Dance Company performing David Tudor’s music to Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest. He contributed to the design of The Prayer Companion - a piece exhibited twice at the Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and acquired for their permanent collection. Amongst many musical collaborations, he works with Sten-Olof Hellström, Tim Shaw, Kerry Hagan, Paul Stapleton and in the noise drone band Tonesucker. He helps coordinate the label Onoma Research, works in Culture Lab Newcastle University, and is a Visiting Scholar at SARC, Queen’s University Belfast. He is a Director of Allenheads Contemporary Arts and a Trustee of Monkfish Productions.

Current work with Paul Stapleton: http://www.paulstapleton.net/portfolio/with-john-bowers

With Tim Shaw: I A Sitting In A Zoom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4KTmAc57TM

Radio show for Resonance Extra: Laboratory One. https://www.mixcloud.com/resonanceextra/flux-4-laboratory-one-sunday-the-5th-of-may-2019/

Latest release with Tonesucker: Memento Mori, https://onomaresearch.bandcamp.com/album/memento-mori

With Sten-Olof Hellström: Sine Cera, Manifest Award nominee, 2013. https://open.spotify.com/album/7iyuPiD8klvJZEmEbsFgUy

Edison’s Residue. https://onomaresearch.bandcamp.com/album/edisons-residue-free