Mark Briggs

Mark Briggs will use the Creative Lab residency to write a screenplay. The screenplay will focus on models of characterisation, to use character as a device to push at the boundaries of social interplay while employing comedy to unsettle the subject's sense of drama and security within their constructed identity.

In part the screenplay will be a reinterpretation of Le ronde (Hands Around by Arthur Schnitzler 1897). Le ronde scrutinised the sexual morals and class ideology of its day through a series of encounters between pairs of characters (shown before or after a sexual encounter). By choosing characters across all levels of society, the play offered a social commentary on how sexual contact transgressed boundaries of class. Mark Briggs is interested not only in its reinterpretation and re-adaption, but in recreating the play’s series of ten comedy miniatures to provoke what could be speculated upon as today's transgressive boundaries.

Mark Briggs is an artist based in Glasgow working in the moving image. Over the last four years he has produced a series of works under the title of gas-tower. Gas-tower can be seen as alternative body to work independently and collectively. His work challenges subjective experience against the expanded theory of ‘liveness’ a willingness to speak to the present with immediacy and a sense of reality.