DRHA 2024 Banal Devices Exhibition: Coombe Hill or High Water

Coombe Hill or High Water (2023) is normally accessed by two online participants from their separate homes in remote locations. But for this DRHA exhibition two laptop terminals, complete with webcams, light rings, and headphone/mics were installed across the Reaktorhalle exhibition space in Munich. Each laptop was calling a computer in Brighton, via WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications) to access the Coombe Hill or High Water programme, incorporating their live audio and video calls in the Coombe Hill or High Water composition. The composited video and audio programme output was simultaneously returned to the laptop computers in the gallery allowing the participants to communicate and interact with each other in real-time. The composited output was also streamed at full High Definition quality on YouTube Live, which was presented on a large format screen above the exhibits in the exhibition space, allowing the gallery audience a complete view of the installation and the live interactive performance.

Coombe Hill or High Water (2023) is an interactive tragicomedy for two online performers, set in a dystopian climate catastrophe. It presents two telepresent participants (actors) trying to carry on as normal, waking up in flood water, reporting their own news, distilling fuel, and driving into the hills to escape with no real plan, only to find themselves back where they started, but worse. The work is a dark absurd satire on ecological ignorance told through a symbiosis of storytelling and telepresence. It exploits techniques in online video chat and streaming media, such as virtual backgrounds and networked video production, combined with green-screen compositing and virtual set design to superimpose and composite remote participants. The work engenders a sense of intimacy and closeness through telepresent touch and empathy, played out in environmental, social, political, and domestic contexts, accessed purely via a webcam, light ring, web browser, and computer screen. But the screen is not watched, it is entered like a portal to a coexistent third space, and in doing so the participants leave their physical vulnerabilities behind, along with self-conscious inhibitions to engage in the specular image through the observation of the self as the other.