Conceived, designed and co-directed by André Lepecki and Rachael Swain

Music and sound by Paul Charlier

Edited by Greg Ferris

proXy was Exhibited at Performance Space, Sydney, 199 Cleveland St Redfern December 2002. Funded by The New Media Arts Fund of The Australia Council and supported by Performance Space, Sydney. proXy was initially supported by Das Arts, Amsterdam

On September the 10th 2001 Rachael Swain flew from Sydney to New York to spend a month collaborating with André Lepecki on a dance video project. As we all know, on the following morning the ‘terrorist attack’ on the World Trade Center and other parts of America began.

Abandoning our previous project we began collaborating on a new work as a means of survival.  We have titled this project proXy.

While dealing explicitly with formal oppositions (the living and the dead, East and West, carnage and poetry, language and image, dust and static), we hope to convey the sense of political fluidity and ideological fuzziness informing the dialectics of east and west, perpetrator and victim, living and dead, memory and event -- all cornered, crunched, and vaporized by the dizzying impact of history on the living body.

In proXy, we are proposing an installation where surfaces receive as well as evacuate images saturated by media and ideological noise. We use image, motion and sound to build an architecture of dizziness and impact -- an architecture where the line of contact between two distinct planes of reality undermines their eradicable separation.

The onset of the peculiar overlaying of coincidences, accidents, unforeseen plannings, geo-political strategies, devastation, personal dramas, historical forces, hauntings, media noise, reproduction technologies at full throttle, violent acts and traumatic shocks on the edge of hallucination is the reason why we feel proXy must be seen both as a response as well as a calling.

André Lepecki and Rachael Swain, December 2002.