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LCS: The Live Set


An exposed reality-TV film-set in collaboration with Chong Lii
2020

Presented at Supernormal as part of The Open Workshop, for Singapore Art Week


LCS: A Tease, on Vimeo.


Imagined to be an amorphous and sustained enquiry into the conditions of creative labour in Singapore, we presented LCS in its first iteration as a Live Film-set - open for public viewing throughout the duration of The Open Workshop.

A fermented lovechild between the Japanese ‘slice-of-life’ hit reality TV Terrace House and the classic surveillance microstate show Big Brother, LCS is an exercise in parafactual entertainment, mimicking the premise and borrowing the tropes of reality TV. A variety of recording devices are set up to follow 3 artist-creatives as they inhabit a co-working studio for two-and-a-half weeks, documenting their daily activities, interactions, and tensions in the space, all in service of a manic attempt at witnessing and accounting for that historically elusive form of labour - creative labour. Mystery guests are invited and activities are carried out as stimuli for our hungry Creatives, all of that providing footage that will be weaved into an intricate piece of episodic docu-fiction.








Live Creatives Show: The Live Set, set documentation and film stills



Text by Kia Yee Ang:

“For Zhiyi and collaborator Chong Lii, the term “creative” is a site of dispersal. Originally tied to notions of divine design and creation, which implied a final product, it now refers to a class of people engaged in varying degrees of artistic or aesthetics-oriented work. Zhiyi and Chong note that within this social paradigm, “creatives” are no longer subjects, they are projects that are constantly refashioning and redefining themselves. The demarcations of creative labour are unclear as everyday interactions bleed into the work of making work.

‍Live Creatives Show is a response to this phenomenon. It is reality TV, is a film set, is a co-working space for “creatives”, is “a microcosm for relationships and activities to ferment”. It is an experiment that interrogates creative labour through strategic complicity, one which orchestrates a state of performance through spatial and filmic framing. By demanding the active and documented presence of its participants, Live Creatives Show underscores the social labour of being a “creative”, which asks that you, amongst other things, show up, employ keywords, engage in discussion, meet the right people, nurture needed relations.

However, for them, the work is also an attempt to decouple labour from implications of economy, to turn to what they call an aesthetics of labour. The linear confines of labour as a process leading to a product or end goal are to be disrupted. Footage is recorded in the present is thus an end in itself, until uncertain (dis)use in the future. Joy is reintroduced into being together.”




Cast
Zhou Zhao
Sher Chew
Divaagar


Crew
Johann Yamin
Rifqi Amirul Rosli
Xindi Ye
Ryan Benji Lee
Rohaizah Binte Abdul Rahman
Amrit Dhillon
Ed Khoo
Faraz Hussein


Special thanks to
Ong Kian Peng (Bin)
Margaret and Kelvin from Growth Catalyst
Anathapindika Dai
Shawn Chua
Art Naming
Guo Leibing as Jimmy Chiu
Mark