Eudaimonia (from the Aristotelian concept) is a sculpture-installation for two performers using the idea of the daimonic to play on the idealisation and deconstruction of the human body. The live body is surrounded by a set of cameras connected to monitors, magnifying, fragmenting and re-framing it. Electroacoustic feedback emanates between camera mics and TVs. It is altered by the movements of the performer in the centre, who in turn responds to the electroacoustic environment. Feedback is perpetual as well as static in the way a sculpture or a painting would be. Moments of ephemeral beauty give way to drastic and sometimes pornographic images, failure follows achievement and embrace follows collision between the soft machine of the body and the dependant hardware. Working between choreographic score, projected text and tone recognition software the performance of Eudaimonia is a self-contained system in which digital technology appears part of an extended nervous system, both contradicting and supporting the human effort at its centre. 

"it has the freshness of a question mark so fitting to the subject and of its treatment by this innovative multi media company."
Simon Persighetti, tEXt Festivals

An ongoing investigation into the defining moments that make us long to be more.

This work has so far been manifested in two parts. The initial performance of this work in studio theatre environment presented the audience with a kind of engine room of ideas as if the material of the performance was being excavated from an archive of ephemera. The performance space: part reference library, part kinetic sculpture, part techno science lab, became an ever-changing arena for an exposition on Heroism.

“There is an elusive, eliding quality about the whole performance which skillfully collides nostalgic tourism, contemporary rural like and personal history. It is an atmospheric, touching and thought provoking piece, a quiet moment of reflection and intimacy.

The audience is left with fragments of lives and landscapes; past holidays and future fears. Blind Ditch have a light touch and something to say. A rare and valuable combination."

Barbara Bridger, Bloodaxe Writer of the Year, May 2003