KHOROS ECOS

Credits
Project Lead / Creative Director - Orlando Mee
Dancer and Choreographer - Jade Brider
Videographer - Adam Plant
Project Support - Gulsara Kaplun
Developed using music by FINEM and Clara Hope.

Introduction
Khoros Ecos is a multidisciplinary project combining dance, film and digital art, inspired by the natural environment of the Sunshine Coast. It was developed over the course of two artist residencies at 2nd Space studios in Nambour from 2022-2023, and culminated in an exhibition and film screening at 2nd Space on the 29th of November, 2023.

Development
Over the initial two-week residency in September 2022, the Khoros Ecos team produced a huge amount of content. We developed, filmed and iterated a wide variety of experimental movement pieces, incorporating recycled materials such as tulle, spandex, and string to manipulate video projections via the human body. Additionally, we collected footage of local forests, rivers, wetlands and mountains to incorporate into the work.

This library of assets was then expanded into a full-scale multimedia exhibition over the course of my second residency in November 2023.

Short Film
A Lively Stream is a collaborative video work and the primary work in the exhibition. Inspired by writings from Jane Bennet (Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things) and Hito Steyerl (In Defense of the Poor Image), this film seeks to challenge the boundary between human bodies and their environments. The title was taken from Bennett's comment that objects like landfills produce “lively streams” of chemicals.

In this film, I have chosen to represent the forces of waste, pollution, and the wider climate crisis not as some dark force opposing ‘pure’ nature, but as audiovisual static, errors, glitches, compression artifacts. In other words, simply as mess. A mess to be dealt with, or to be reconfigured into something useful.

Interactivity
Our Resolution Was To Dance is an interactive multimedia work which reads input from a dance mat controller to manipulate visuals of a dancer onscreen.

In response to the movements of audience members on the mat, the dancer will move in different directions and perform a variety of different behaviours. In addition, the audience member can control the colour of both the dancer and environment separately, and increase or decrease the level of distortion affecting the image.

Ancillary Works
Other hybrid media works in the exhibition, such as Between Two Figs and Beyond the Jank Rainbow (pictured) seek to embrace the inherent humour of messiness, glitches, ‘jank’ and the unintentional.

Acknowledgements
Special thanks to my mentors Jude Anderson and Melissa Stannard, and the team at 2nd Space.

These residencies were a part of ArtsCoast Project 24, and were supported by DANCE.HERE.NOW and Country Arts South Australia.

Filmed and developed on Kabi Kabi / Gubbi Gubbi and Jinibara country. Sovereignty was never ceded.