Vault: The Non-stop Performing History of Circus Oz (2014)

Since 1978, Circus Oz has been bringing circus with a distinctly Australian bent to audiences around the world — no animals (or, just a few) but plenty of skill, wit, grace, satire, and sometimes the fine art of stupidity. Along the way they have filmed their own performances, as have others.

Vault draws upon the videos, facts and mysteries of the Living Archive to present a multi-layered history of Circus Oz as a series of digital circus acts — tricks made of light, sound, code and memories.

Exhibition by: Reuben Stanton, Chris Marmo, David Carlin

Exhibition Design: Kat Bond

Vault was a 24 hour, 7 days per week ‘performance’: an interactive digital video exhibition that ran at the Arts Centre Gallery One, Melbourne, Australia, as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2014.

The exhibition was built off the back of the site of my PhD research: over 1000 videos were collected and transformed into an online platform for reflection, discovery and storytelling — the Circus Oz Living Archive. The affordances of this digital platform were then used by myself, Chris Marmo, and David Carlin to explore different ‘histories’ in playful, creative, and eye-opening ways.

Our approach to ‘performing’ the archive was to eschew the allure of so-called ‘big data’ approaches to the archive. Instead of taking our data set and examining, analysing and visualising it in terms of its aggregate — as is the temptation — we decided to use the gallery space to represent the archive by showing its individual items, fragmented, and juxtaposed. The circus itself is made up of fragments, (whether circus acts, or tricks, or gestures, or sounds). And the archive is comprised of these fragments too, each one unique and important. Our performance in this space is an act of representation, revealing what was already ‘there’ in the data. What the digital material of the archive offers is an opportunity to play with juxtaposition and scale — to perform a new history of Circus Oz by re-composing elements of their history as recorded.

We want you to think about what digital traces mean in the context of remembering and forgetting. Think about what is being told, and what is missing; what lives between the gaps of the videos, text and screens you see, just off the corner of the screen, or in the frame after the last in a loop. It is in those gaps that another history of Circus Oz is being performed. There’s no mistaking that there is something remembered here, though. By walking through the exhibition, you are both witness to and participant in a certain form of data-history. The database is being assembled into representations, and those representations perform around you. But recognise, too, that it’s your interpretation of it that makes this a history with any meaning.

– Chris Marmo