We host a range of free and ticketed Performances, workshops, screenings, talks, and other. Focussing on experimental and marginal sonic and performance. time based art practices, collective learning,
FUTURE:
+Saturday 29/03/2025:7pm
DRM/ Daniel R. Marks
Aegis/ Tailor
$10/$20/First Nations Free
Tickets (or cash+card on the door)
‘Aegis/Tailor’ consolidates a selection of actions and assets from DRM/ Daniel R. Mark’s recent choreographic, sculptural and audio experimentation into a short-form residency, with performance at Conduction on Saturday 28th March, 7pm.
A sensorial language of rubber, wax and tar (extracted biological materials) meets with camera lenses and digital artefacts (the material of visual extraction), through acts of ‘tailoring’ the senses toward a mythic endgame. Conduction is stagecrafted as a site of live production, and the homoeroticised figure of the tailor enacts a secretive mutual tension within the blueprinting of publics, bodily relations, value relations, and the logics of visual perspective within image production. Monumental and fetishistic forms are created through these choreographies of tailoring/imaging.Aegis/Tailor borrows material from recent residencies with GalleryGalleryInc and Run Artist Run, as well as from WIP showings at ACMI and Out of Bounds.
DRM (Dr Daniel R Marks) is an artist and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne, working in an interdisciplinary choreographic practice which engages intersections of imaging, the queer body and surveillance technologies. They work in a hybrid practice incorporating performance, experimental audio-visual media and sculpture. DRM completed their PhD Protagonist: A Choreography of Queer Digitiality at RMIT University School of Art in 2024 and lectures at RMIT School of Fashion & Textiles. They are affiliated with Performing Dress Lab (RMIT, Aalto University & London College of Fashion) and the Posthuman Art Network (Foreign Objekt).
PAST:
+Saturday 15/03/2025:7pm
Geoff Robinson-
Resonant Pollution
$10/$20/First Nations Free
Tickets (or cash+card on the door)
‘Resonant Pollution’ is a sound performance which focuses on listening as a mode of attunement with intertidal ecologies and their entanglements with plastic pollution held on Saturday 15th March at 7pm.
This iteration will respond to the physical conditions of Conduction as an underwater tank through turning the windows into a resonant surface through contact microphones, and using plastic waste as instruments. Through submerging the audience into the acoustic ecologies of ocean plants and beings we speculate a world of accumulating resonant plastics, giving voice and agency to these muted+noisy materials of pollution.
Resonant Pollution is developed out of the offsite project ‘Polyphony for Intertidal Ecologies’ as a part of The Ecologies Project at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, made at Monmar/Point Nepean on Bunurong Country.
$10/$20/ First Nations Free. Light Hospitality provided.
+Sunday 08/03/2025:1-5pm
Wheel 2 Wheel
Launch Party
$0/Donations Accepted
Come by Conduction on Sunday, March 9th from 1–5 PM for the Wheel2Wheel launch party, cassette open decks DJ mega mixer
Through their open-source cassette archive, Wheel2Wheel offers a fresh approach to DJing, both philosophically and sonically, breaking away from the rigid, over-quantized norms of today’s dj software and decks. There will be an open decks DJ policy, so anyone can play any cassette that they like. We encourage you to bring your own, however Wheel2Wheel’s physical collection will be freely accessible for everyone, for everyone to create improvisational mixes.
There will also be select international cassette DJ sets from Monoton Stream, Jahan Xanlü, Kieffaiiry, and a special Hong Kongology w2w set between co-hosts Steph and Buibui. Plus, you’ll be able to purchase cassettes from a range of local musicians.
While the event is free, donations to help maintain Conduction as a space and support Wheel2Wheel’s ongoing archive efforts are greatly appreciated.
-Thursday 20/02/2025:8.30pm
Offsite at Seventh Gallery. Free
Danny Butt-
Born in Flames: an Aesthetic Education (2014)
Para/Site + Publish. “Born in Flames: an Aesthetic Education (2014)” by Danny Butt, screening and publication at Seventh Gallery cinema.
While planning a screening event of “Born in Flames” with Danny Butt, we rolled into synchronous resonance with the program at Seventh Gallery. So we are adding a parasitic publishing element to their screening: a specially produced publication which re/presents Danny’s blog/ essay from 2014 “Born in Flames: An Aesthetic Education” made freely available to audiences.
Revisiting the 11 year old essay, which traces subcultural- experimental political subjectivities, via intersectional media theory, gender, race and into a reflection of Spivak’s “An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation”. This echoes the decade of post revolutionary world of Born in Flames, where battling oppression through mass media.
Come along to this free screening of this brilliant film at Seventh Gallery, alongside “Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali (Tobacco Embers) (1982) by The Yugantar Film Collective.
Many thanks to Kori Miles and Lucie Loy for curating a powerful program, and for allowing this addition to their event.
An edition of 100 publications will be available for free to audiences at the screening, remainder at Conduction. Designed by Debris Facility
+Sunday 23/02/2025:4-6pm
$10/$20/First Nations Free
Tickets Here
Victoria Perin & The Contemporary Art Society Archives-
Future Ex-Landfill: what to do with your artist archive.
What’s an archive that’s been given away three times? Almost landfill.
The artist Ronald Greenaway was the President of Victoria’s Contemporary Art Society between 1963 to 1965. Disliked by the Heide faction of the art scene in Naarm / Melbourne, Greenaway was a loser of history. He attempted to write a history of the CAS in the 1960s. These are his papers.
Dutifully passed down from Greenaway to various librarians and art historians, this private archive has been largely unexamined, unadmired and unloved (much like Greenaway’s paintings). For one week, the art historian Victoria Perin will be in-residence at Conduction , to give the archive one last chance. What will the papers say about this important period of local art history? Does anyone want them? Why is history so cruel?
Visit Victoria during her archive residency at Conduction between the 17th – till the 23rd of february, to help, hinder, get your hands dirty, catch the archive feverAt the end of her residency, Victoria will give a presentation called Future Ex-Landfill, which will offer suggestions for what to do with your artist archive (historical or present!) on Sunday February 23rd at 6pm. tickets $10/20/ First People’s Free.
+Thursday 06/02/2025:3-7pm
Free.
Access Lab & Library (ALL)
–Access Clinic.
For an afternoon at CONDUCTION, Access Lab & Library (ALL) will host Drop-in Access Clinic & Library: free 20 minute access consultations for artists, producers, and anyone looking to embed expanded ideas of access in their creative works.
Bring your project or practise in for a discussion with us. Make a booking, or come in for a chat when you can. There are ten consultation slots available, which can be reserved online.
In addition to these one-on-one discussions, we’ll open our library of access texts for reading in the space, and offer experimental tactile prints for sale.
—
Image: Lloyd Mst / ALL
Image description: A screen of many layered captions in a caustic soup of fizzing, golden-puke static. In tomato red, top left: ‘twinkling of keys catching embankment’. Spread out across the way, strawberry on fuschia: ‘a burbling, a trotting … a motion to signal movement’. Fragment: ‘elevated closeness’ and elsewhere, ‘calculated pulses of regularity’. The eye rounds the bend, comes to the bottom of the frame and finds a subtitle, sensible white type on black: ‘is like a tiny amount of time. If the world just spontaneously combusted, I wouldn’t know about it for like …’ – and so it trails off into a future duration. The largest letters are plum against purple: sonorous pulse of crisp bytes and bits. They’re fading into the soup, eroding. Deeper in the fuzz, ‘the dance of electrons, creates a looped sequence’ and barely there, repetitions of the word ‘still’. And then it’s just static, and what lost language is dissolved therein?
Access: There is a 9cm step into the space. A range of seating options will be available. Air Filter and Air conditioning will be used. Masks available for use. See full access information on our previous posts and our website.
@accesslabandlibrary
Access Lab and Library is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria
+Thursday 6 February. 8-10PM
$15 cash/card on the door.
Shu-Lea Cheang- I.K.U. (2000,72 min)
Curated by Anabelle Lacroix
“Bodies are packages made to be opened, minds are penetrable, sensations communicable, orgasms collectable.”
I.K.U is artist and filmmaker Shu-Lea Cheang 2000’s overwhelming cyberfeminist sci-fi feature about hacking in every way that transcends categories, “trans-genre as it is transgender.”
I.K.U. chips are coders to collect orgasm data and introduce massively profitable orgasms. Shu-Lea Cheang says “it’s a porn film that takes up where Blade Runner (1982) left off. The elevator door that closed now re-opens”. This queer film follows Reiko, a sex robot who returns to the company to download her accumulated info.
We invite you to a special screening of this film as it is the pendant of the artist’s acclaimed new feature U.K.I (2023), inspired by the artist’s series of internet performances of the same name (2009-2014), collapsing film, gaming, art, pleasure, criticism and activism.
Shu-Lea Cheang is a Paris-based Taiwanese artist, experimentalist of all genres, pioneer of net art, video, radio art and film. She was the recipient of the 2024 Guggenheim Award and represented Taiwan at the Venice Biennale in 2019.
The film will be introduced by curator Anabelle Lacroix at 8.15/8.30pm
Please Note: this film contains explicit sexual content. In Japanese and English with English subtitles
https://cargocollective.com/anabelle-lacroix/Info
+Saturday 08/02/2025:8-10pm.
$10/ $20/ First Nations Free.
-Dylan Martorell & Morris Worm
Conduction is pleased to announce our second performance event with Dylan Martorell alongside Morris Worm, on Saturday 8th of February at 8pm.
Dylan Martorell utilises improvised engineering to make solar powered robotic instruments which generate polyphonic sonic environments. Dylan’s performance at Conduction utilises improvised assemblage techniques to make sonic sculptures which inhabit the terrain.
Morris Worm is a dweller of peer to peer piracy websites who disfigures media for pleasure. Worm also makes use of field recordings and sparse instrumentation. The resulting music and film is an energetic document.
Tickets are $10 unwaged, $20 waged, First nations free.
https://www.dylanmartorell.com/
Access: There is a 9cm step into Conduction. A range of seating options are available. Lower sensory space available to use. Air filter and Air conditioning will be used. Masks available. See full access information on our previous posts and our access page on this website.
-Saturday the 15th of February. 8PM
Rosie Isaac – Bathtub Analogy.
$10 unwaged, $20 waged, First Nations Free. Light hospitality included. Cash/ Card on the door.
Bathtub Analogy is a performance lecture about altered plant growth, landfill chemistry and quarrying at the Darebin Parklands and across Naarm/Melbourne. The lecture is structured like a fasciated sheoak leaf, accumulated cells growing in a twisted spiral. A cycle of images from the site and archives are played on loop to form and reform relationships with the lecture text. The performance runs for 35 minutes.
An installation of litmus test-prints “tip tests” will be installed in Conduction during the week, for the presentation of this performance, and available for sale.
Bathtub Analogy spirals out of the artwork “total dissolved solids” presented at West Space in 2024 as part of “Stranger Than Fiction”, and was presented at the Stranger than fiction Symposium, co-curated by Helen Grogan and Joanna Kitto.
+Saturday 25/01/2025 :5-7pm.
FREE.
INTRODUCTION/ LAUNCH:
Inspection and Induction. Social modes. Light Hospitality.
+PREMIERE PERFORMANCE EVENT 25/01/2025: 8-10pm.
Mara MacDonald (live coding) and D-Beam (live band; Mara MacDonald, Amy Rogers, and Lucie Coffey).
$10/$20 Tickets. First Nations Free. Limited Capacity.
Conduction 