Sam Derounian

Sam will be working on finding strategies for producing ‘prompt’ material towards the second part of a semi-collaborative project with artist Douglas Morland, concerned with theatricality as critical vocabulary & the fragility of language & communicative processes.

Following the first part of an artistic exchange in 2014, Sam and Douglas are embarking on the counterpart to that exchange, in which their roles in the production of new work will be reversed.

In the initial stage of the collaboration, Douglas created ‘prompts’, which were sent to Sam by email. These cryptic, typographic and image-based transmissions took on and parodied the form of a dramaturgical script, functioning as cryptic catalysts to prompt the creation of new work.

During this Creative Lab residency, Sam will create prompts for Douglas to respond to in the second part of the exchange. The nature of these prompts – chiefly their medium – will be negotiable, and will indeed form part of the investigation. Broadly speaking, Sam will be collecting, altering, re-composing, and re-contextualizing various kinds of found source material, as a general strategy.

As before, the prompts will play on the idea of the dramaturgical script, in a loose sense, without being confined necessarily to the medium of printed text. The prompts will consist of two adjacent types of information. There will be a deliberate disjuncture between the two forms, their connection ambiguous. This difficulty in reading the disparate information together will encourage ‘misunderstandings’ and subjectivity on the part of the respondent (Douglas) in the resulting work. This is intended in turn to reflect on shared conceptual concerns regarding the distortion of information & language during communicative processes.

For more information visit: http://samderounian.com/