Heatsick

In the second video instalment featuring Steven Warwick, aka Heatsick, the Berlin-based artist talks with John Bosco Burns about his growing body of work, key influences and the threat of digesting philosophical texts while on a hectic tour across the southern hemisphere to ones sanity. It’s an experience, though, that’s come to inform Warwick’s work such as his ‘Extended Play’ (2013-) live performances, along with their explorations of physicality and the abstraction of time and space.

Through this conversation the divergent line between Warwick’s range of interests and method of exploration becomes evident. As already demonstrated in his album Re-engineering, released on PAN in 2013, and the site specific response of Re-Engineering Villa Aurora (2015) –coming live and direct from the home of the “The Californian Ideology” –Warwick researches the conditions of ‘constructed space’. That is, the responsive and ever-permeating socio-political spaces of contemporary neoliberal existence.

However, in his own ‘spaces’ –those brought about to reflect and explore these ideas –are not as contrived as the subject matter might lead you to think. Warwick’s method is more akin to early participatory art practice and experimental theatre, where situations are open and allowed to ‘unfold’. It is through his juxtaposition of these parallel but wholly different means of producing space that Steve Warwick brings us to a very human moment in the alienation of mediated experience, with our firmly planted on the dance floor. **

Watch the video embedded above and see here for Part One.

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Produced in partnership with Video in Common. This project has been made possible through the generous support of Arts Council England.

Heatsick‘s Steven Warwick returns for the long-awaited London edition of his dance party, Extended Play, on May 25.

Extended Play is Warwick’s latest three-hour Casio improvisation, based around his Deviation EP, featuring a live, specially engineered audiovisual performance by the artist.

Influenced by early Chicago house mixtapes, musique concrète and psychedelia, Extended Play combines unusual sounds in order to expand the senses, creating a dizzying live show created in real time, while vocals and visuals loop around themselves in Warwick’s hands.

See details on the Facebook event page or buy tickets for the event here or here. **

Heatsick ‘Déviation’ (PAN 29) from PAN on Vimeo.