Since its inception as a mobile, discursive space
exploring the collision and collapse of screen, sound, stage and
social possibilities in public art production, Blackout Arts has
populated a diverse collection of social and institutional structures
with a wealth of intermedial and transdisciplinary projects and
programmes. Having grown out of the exclusively volunteer-run and
unfunded arts space The Cube Microplex, the root of this trajectory has
been a grounding aesthetic of expanded cinema, confronting the
materiality of the 'blackout space' and its associated technologies of
projection / conditions of reception with an expanded remit of creative exploration and public engagement. From 2010, while its
constituent partners pursue developments in their own creative
practices and collaborative relationships, Blackout Arts enters a form
of stasis, scaling back its activity to the point of contemplating
a single question: having rejected the model of a stable disciplinary landscape as a starting point, engaging and co-producing a network model of process-led ecologies
of research and production, what discursive potential does a basis in
expanded cinema represent for the post-contemporary ecologist?
