hypha_e (mycelium)

hypha_e (mycelium) is a collaborative project where sound artists, musicians, choreographers, dancers and the general public respond to a 3 dimensional score installed at Blindside Gallery. An open approach would encourage rich exchanges, bringing together creative sectors that may not otherwise meet. This belief has been reinforced in Tina's art practice as she moves between visual art and sound performance.

The project builds on Tina's most recent collaborative activations with professional musicians and sound artists and visual scores. This score would encompass the whole room - operating in three dimensions. The project would also include cues which incorporate words, and encourage a broader participatory audience such as the general public, choreographers, dancers, explorers of body and movement which I haven't explored before.

‘mycelium’ is the circle which is formed by underground hyphal threads.The mushrooms that grow up from this circular underground mat form a similar pattern above ground. Gradually the underground mycelium at the centre of the circle dies out. I felt this was a nice analogy for dispersed groups coming together to create a surface form.

Schedule for Collaborative Performances:

Thursday 27th March from 7:00pm

Friday 28th March from 6:00-8:00pm

Saturday 29th March from 1:00-6:00pm

RSVP for the event HERE.

Tina Douglas' Collaborators for this upcoming project are:

Colin Hodson

Colin Hodson is an experimental improvise filmmaker and used to be based in New York City and was an associate member of The Wooster Group. He was a technical director and occassional performer with the avant-garde playwrite/director Richard Foreman. In New Zealand, he has created numerous performances and video installations.

Eamon Sprod

Eamon Sprod works to re-contextualise collected and recorded sounds and objects, working towards shaping new speculative sonic spaces with and within architectural forms.
Sprod has presented performances throughout Australia, Asia, South America, North America, and Europe and participated in Festivals including Liquid Architecture (AU); The Totally Huge New Music Festival (AU); Tsonami (Chile); Reheat (Austria); LUFF (Switzerland); Activating the Medium (US).

He runs a small self-publishing label Sonic Rubbish, including a newly founded series of printed newspapers plus digital audio releases called KINDLING.

Ernie Althoff

Ernie Althoff has worked in the sonic realm for 45 years, and has thoroughly enjoyed it. Ernie is based in Melbourne, Australia.

David Palliser

David Palliser is an artist based in Naarm,Melbourne ,Australia. His work centreson painting and works on paper and maintains a long standing commitment to improvised and experimental music. He has exhibited regularly since 1988 and performed music in various scenarios since 1981. His visual and aural practices deeply inform each other. Over the last decade and continuing he travels to Europe regularly to perform with the dance group Playground Berlim and various other collaborations. He was an integral part of The People with Chairs Up Their Noses and The Donkey’s Tail and continues to play extensively with The Charles Ives Singers and many other individuals and groups. His website contains a broad archive of his visual and music work www.davidpalliser.com

Anna White

Anna White’s has an extensive background in Fine Art (Painting). In 2016 she revisited an interest in movement and her art practice has since expanded to include performance, dance, photography and film. Her primary artistic interests are movement, improvisation and colour. www.annawhite.com.au

Gemma Horbury

Gemma Horbury is a musician, storyteller and transdisciplinary artist. She uses art to imagine radical futures, working as a Peatland Sonification Researcher in RMIT University’s Soil-Atmosphere-Anthroposphere Lab, in collaboration with international partners including the Borneo Orangutang Survival Foundation. Her groundbreaking spoken word album “The Story of Here” was a national finalist in the 2024 APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards, and she was a co-recipient of the Melbourne International Women’s Jazz Festival Recording Prize (2019). Gem has appeared as a featured performer with groups as diverse as the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, RockWiz, Yana Alana and the Paranas, and the JazzLab Orcheztra.

Sandra Fiona Long

Sandra Fiona Long is a writer, theatre artist, producer, maker and mentor across forms working with multi-sensory vocal and sound based performance, design and installation. Multilingual, words with music, building bridges, crossing divides. https://www.sandrafionalong.com/

Ria Soemardjo

Ria Soemardjo is a Melbourne based musician with a passion for collaborating with artists across diverse range of genres and artforms. Her  distinct, haunting vocal style reflects her Australian/Indonesian cultural heritage and she draws on her fascination for Indonesian musical traditions in her song writing and collaborative projects.

Kirri Büchler

Kirri Büchler currently resides on the stolen lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. She is a multi-instrumentalist (violin, double bass, piano, synthesiser and accordion), across Hungarian/Romanian/Balkan Gypsy and folk music, trad jazz, Manouche, free jazz, cabaret, indie rock, classical, experimental/new music, pop and ambient.

Carolyn Connors

Carolyn Connors is a Melbourne based vocalist, composer, pianist, and accordionist who creates a diverse range of new works in the fields of contemporary music and theatre. Carolyn is also active in ensemble settings, be it new classical, avant-garde, and improvisation practices. She regularly creates compositions and performances with local and international musicians and theatres.

Alex Hamilton - SHADOW TRUMPET

“Not selling place to itself, we’re listening to what it might be saying.” Many visual artists play music while working.  I make sounds on instruments to disrupt, or like film, to have layers of movement across surfaces in my mind's eye.  Sound/visual forms are wandering causes of connection to one another.

From playing in bands to trumpets made of ice, sometimes heavy as human bodies, nowadays I adhere beard stubble to change qualities of surfaces, from appearance to function.  Words in visual work become notes I code from music I dream then score, invading surfaces of illustrated pianola roll operas as reciprocated gifts.

Snacks

"Quiet sounds for hungry ears ~ Allanah Stewart / Dale Gorfinkel / Jen Callaway

Dale Gorfinkel

Dale Gorfinkel is a musician, artist and facilitator whose stylefree improvisational approach informs his multi-instrumental performances, instrument-building, kinetic sound installations, videos and animations. Dale’s work aims to reflect an awareness of the dynamic nature of culture and the value of listening as a mode of knowing people and places. He is interested in finding fresh ways of presenting and making music, bringing creative communities together and shifting perceived boundaries of scenes and artforms.

Jen Callaway

Jen Callaway is a Naarm/Melbourne based sound practitioner, theatrical performer, and photographer, raised in various parts of Lutruwita/Tasmania. With a special interest in psychodynamics, hauntology, conservation and documentation; current/past projects include bands Is There a Hotline?, Propolis, Snacks, Deep Sneeze and Hi God People.

David Brown

David Brown has been involved in the Melbourne avant-garde, art rock/punk rock scene since the mid-seventies with such groups as "False Start", "Signals" and "Dumb and the Ugly". Subsequent projects include punk jazz band "bucketrider", "lazy" an improvising duo with percussionist Sean Baxter, improv/sound art group "Western Grey" with Baxter and Philip Samartzis, psychedelic electronic group "Terminal Hz" with KK Null from Japan, prepared improvisational group "Pateras/Baxter/Brown, electric free jazz group "Embers", the duo "culture of un" with Sydney pianist Chris Abrahams, the prepared instrument duo "Hakea" with saxophonist Rosalind Hall, the duo "Helium Clench" with Melbourne guitarist and microtonal instrument builder Tim Catlin

Chloe Sobek

Chloë Sobek is a composer-performer based in Naarm, Australia. Her work is currently centred on the development of a post-anthropocentric sonic practice that encompasses a diversity of enquiry from acoustemology through to noise music. She is invested in what creative practice can do to deconstruct and reshape the way we conceptualise our collective futures.

Chloë’s practice is built around the Renaissance precursor to the double bass, the violone. Her creative process couples maximalist and musique concrète sensibilities such as audio-montage and electronic processing, with a handling of sound as a senate object, unlinked and undefined by its source.

Steph O'Hara and Emma Bathgate (BATHHARA)

BATHHARA is duo Steph O’Hara & Emma Bathgate. They respond through their music improvisation to the micro human experience within this vast interconnected universe.  They make this offering  - to take you the listener on a journey.  Bathhara on bandcamp

Steph O’Hara is a composer, violinist/musician, interactive sound designer artist Steph O’Hara has an output that is prolific.  His is a radical democratic approach to creativity, music, performance, empowering audiences through his sound design for performance engagement and interactive web/audio design.

About Blindside Gallery Activations:

This is a Blindside Activation period. As a counterpoint to our regular exhibition programming, Blindside has introduced Activation Periods in 2025. Gallery Activations allow for projects that are experimental, with varied timelines, a focus on public-programming, and possibilities for collaborative practice and exchange. These periods sit as alternatives to our conventional 4 week exhibition periods.