KILL YOUR TIMID NOTION
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT Rosalie Doubal talks to the organisers and artists behind Kill Your Timid Notion, a festival that wants to provoke, excite and liberate you
K ill Your Timid Notion experimental sound and image festival has been disrupting the peace in Dundee for seven riotous, challenging and boundary pushing years. For 2010 however, the artists are seeking something straightforward from their audiences – participation. Handclapping and foot stomping theatrics will not be required. Instead the artists, improvisers and musicians are asking their public to actually materialise and complete their works. Using sound, film and dialogue as tools to provoke engagement, each artist will present a performance that uses responses as its very material. Painters use paint, musicians use sound and Kill Your Timid Notion artists use collective participation.
‘Films, paintings, sculptures – that isn’t art,’ declares festival organiser Barry Esson. ‘Art is the process that produces those things.’ Esson, and co-director Bryony McIntyre run Arika, the team behind experimental art and film events including the respected Glasgow music festival, Instal. Taking the ‘art is process’ opinion as a leaping point, Arika have curated a deliberately open-ended Kill Your Timid Notion (or KYTN)
this year. ‘Participants are going to have the chance to shape what artists do, test out their suggestions and even obviate the need for the artist to do anything at all.’ Artists making work that destroys the role of the artist? It makes the brain throb to consider it.
artworks, Like trying to conceive infinity or imagine what lies beyond the universe, thinking about uncompleted performances determined by audiences and sound art that’s got, well, nothing to do with sound, hurts a little. And unusually, one of the festival’s aims is to cause this unease – to de-stabilise our normalisation processes. Stripping back music and film to their core concepts, KYTN is urging a re-examination of the rules at the heart of different art forms, and the way we consume art.
Edinburgh-based illustrator Jez Burrows designed logos for each KYTN performance. The diagrams loosely show the relationship between artist and audience, where red = artist, grey = audience. Mattin’s event (second logo from right) shows the artist facing a crowd for example.
28 THE LIST 18 Feb–4 Mar 2010