Interdigitate, the live perfomance based multimedia event that’s been a tradition in the Auckland arts scene for a decade was back at the St James theatre Auckland Friday Oct 3 as part of the AK03 festival and courtesy of Moving Image Centre. Sara Root and Hanne Bryde were there. This is their first review for Scoop.

Interdigitate alternates between, and subsequently merges the elements of live performance with digital representation. The event is an explosive and awakening experience, effectively collapsing traditionally constructed boundaries that divide different mediums of art.

Reloaded - Mika Haka

Comprised of five 20 minute pieces, Interdigitate navigates its way through heavily thematic commentaries of culture, gender, modern infrastructure, and sound.

The main focus is an interaction between rapidly advancing technology and the human condition – between nature and culture, and the intellectual, as well as physically constructed state of man.

The slippage between theme and the exploitation of medium is most evident in Mika Haka’s Reloaded. Mika explores historical Maori culture and its fundamental relationship to nature by combining live tribal dance with onscreen depictions of native land, sea and sky.

The progression into portraying Maori culture in the 21st Century dislocates the performers themselves onto the screen – unity with nature is essentially achieved through fusion with modern culture.

Past meets present, and there is a sense of an ‘older’ world meeting the ‘new’ - the relationship between science and art becomes inextricably woven; boundaries are blurred, and one feeds from the other in a shifting, mind altering physical and sensory experience. See also… About Mika, at the Moving Images Centre

The works of Scanner ( Echo Days), Rotor Plus and James Hutchinson ( Umbo), Janine Randerson and Substax ( The Machines are Restless Tonight), and Hye Rim Lee ( The Birth of Toki) combine image with sound to present works that transcend conventional standards of modern artistry.

Extend this collaboration of new age modernity with a sense of the historic into the general ambience of the theatre, and one finds themselves eerily becoming infused into the exhibition itself.