JUXTA

In the first weeks of lockdown in 2020, like most other artists who depend on actually being in the same room as others in order to develop or perform our work, I wondered how to deal with this new reality.

Almost immediately I thought of trying to gather artistic colleagues and friends who could create works in their own spaces and share them for others to interact with: a filmmaker and composer perhaps being the most obvious pairing.

I had just finished directing a play in Sydney and was keen to work again with the show’s producer Katrina Douglas, though I was of course now under lockdown back in London. But, as so many people discovered, Zoom was about to bring the world together for meetings, drinks, parties, and for developing new international collaborations. 

With the help of a bit of money from the City of Sydney arts fund we developed Juxta.

This was initially an interactive website ‘game’ whereby filmmakers and composers could create short (2-minute) pieces based on themes (Water, Fire, Earth, etc.), then upload them to Juxta.net, an interactive, game website. On the main screen were two dials, one selected videos, the other music. The aim of the ‘game’ was to see how music and moving visual images affected each other. To play Juxta you simply chose one of each – video and music – and pressed Go. At any point you could change either music or video and see the affect this new element had on the other one still playing.

We launched Juxta in Sydney in early 2021 but setting up an interactive website like this required a lot more money than we had or could raise, given the lack of any obvious commercial potential. So we developed Juxta Jam, a live version of the website. Audiences enter a space of screens and loudspeakers, with a pair of control consoles in the middle of the room – one with buttons that select different music tracks, the other for video choices – and ‘curate’ the audio/video experience themselves. Juxta Jam was selected for the Sydney Festival 2022 and for the Bankstown Biennale of the same year. We are looking to push this across a series of festivals in the near future.  We are also developing Juxta as a therapeutic aid in both paediatric and aged care, as well as other health care arenas.