The Pendulum Continuum

The Pendulum Continuum saw the return of rave to CarriageWorks, and to a time when the site was neglected and abandoned by the forces of post-industrial progress. This was a site-specific installation comprised largely of documentary film footage of a rave party, recorded on location in 1996 when the group Meat Beat Manifesto performed as part of the underground rave Carnival of the Mind. The rave dancers returned to CarriageWorks in their states of ecstatic reverie for one night, but this time around they danced not to the charged beats of MBM but to a composition by late Romantic composer "ªJean Sibelius. The piece played with the mournful nature of Sibelius' late Romantic composition as a driving rhythm (and force) for late twentieth century dance music culture, connecting different expressions of musical reverie as part of a continuum of progress and modernisation and with it, loss. This presented a playful meditation on the continued dialectical exchange between order and chaos in the city" between Dionysian pleasure and Apollonian order" where the ever-present searching for liminal, indeterminant spaces of pleasure and escape in turn carve out new sites for play and abandonment, adding ever more value to the gentrified spaces of post-industrial Sydney today. The team here were Sarah Barns (concept and creative direction, with archival footage sourced through her residency with ABC Pool), Micheal Killalea (creative direction) and Ian Plowman (sound and technical direction).