Author: stevegreer

The possibility of a private sale of the Third Eye and CCA archive calls into sharp focus the status of archives as public resources.

Archives can sometimes be challenging to access: necessary measures to preserve the physical condition of records or protect data privacy run alongside institutional norms (real and imagined) which create barriers to access, or create the impression that special, privileged permission is required before a single box can be opened. In practice, though, archivists extend what I’ve experience as sometimes profound forms of generosity to those who arrive at their door: the work I’ve undertaken as part of the Live Art Scotland project – particularly in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic – would not have been possible without their support.

The Third Eye / CCA archive was exceptionally accessible, in large part owing to the work undertaken to catalogue the collection during the Glasgow School of Art and CCA Glasgow Miracle project but also to the generosity, knowledge and skill of the staff who have led its custodianship, most recently archivist Kristen Nelson.

Working on the borders between established art forms, live art can too easily fall into the cracks of conventional archival practices (either present but invisible, or ignored as marginal to the ‘true’ work of programming and curation). Working with collections such as the Third Eye / CCA archive where experimental practice is central to an organisati0n’s history offers powerful means to challenge and expand existing cultural narratives – most especially in calling attention to the presence and contribution of work by queer, disabled, Black and global majority artists in Scotland.

Reporting in the last few weeks suggests that the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Culture and Gaelic, Màiri McAllan, has been given ‘concrete assurances’ that the archive will not be sold privately, will be retained in whole and kept available to the public. Efforts continue across the archive sector to find a secure, public home for the archive. Though I’m not involved in the process, I know that this work has been quietly ongoing since the start of the year, involving local and national partners.

The language of liquidation and auctions can lead us to think about archives in terms of financial rather than cultural assets – but it’s by thinking about collections like that of the Third Eye and CCA as public resources that we can understand their greater value. Archives like the Third Eye / CCA collection need custodians but they belong to the communities of artistic practice, culture and location in which they reside.

Falling soon after the sudden closure of the CCA, threats to Glasgow arts hub Trongate 103 in the form of unsustainable rent rises advertise the precarity of Glasgow’s arts ecology – and a persistent failure to understand the essentual role played by its physical and social infrastructures.

Opened in 2009 with public funding from Glasgow City Council alongside support from the Scottish Arts Council, Scottish Enterprise and Merchant City Heritage Trust, Trongate 103 is home to a range of grass-roots (and widely-celebrated) organisations including Transmission Gallery, Street Level Photography and Glasgow Print Studio. 

The building’s landlords, City Property – Glasgow City Council’s “arm’s-length” management company – have maintained that no organisation will be evicted and that the new rents are still substantially cheaper than commercial rates. Cheaper or not, the new proposals for rent and service charges reportedly amount to a more than four-fold increase in overall costs to the building’s charitable tenants. And as GMAC (Glasgow Media Access Centre) have argued, ‘a four-week deadline to accept significantly increased costs or vacate is, in practical terms, an eviction notice for a charity’. 

A major dimension of the ongoing dispute is whether the city’s authorities – or its appointed surrogates – see Trongate 103 as a revenue-generating commercial asset or as a vital element of publicly-funded cultural infrastructure equivalent to the performance venues, galleries and other public buildings managed by Glasgow Life. And, in turn, whether the logics of commercial viability should apply at all given the number of empty office spaces and buildings in the city.

Faced with risks to its equipment and film archive, GMAC has already made the move to the Pyramid community centre in Anderston. As a report for the BBC observes, leaving the building is far more challenging for other tenants – not only risking livelihoods and accessible working space but scattering an established community at a moment when there are few affordable, high-quality spaces for artists across the city.

Infrastructures are frequently invisible – or, rather, visible only when they stop working: a power line falls, a pipe bursts or a road closes. And so they are often seen as less important that the work which they enable – a view which fails to recognise their essential role in creating literal and figurative spaces for diverse communities of practice to gather, offering continuity and some measure of stability in fiercely uncertain times. Glasgow’s art scene and the creative city at large doesn’t need such spaces to scrape by and survive – it needs them to thrive if that ecology is to have a future.

This week at University of Glasgow, the Immersive Experiences Lab is hosting practitioner-research and performance maker Yaron Shyldkrot.

‘Misbehaving Machines: Performing Robots and AI Narratives’ (James Arnott Theatre, Gilmorehill Centre)

This talk explores how contemporary performance and digital practices unsettle dominant imaginaries of robots and artificial intelligence. As these technologies advance rapidly, common representations continue to blur the boundaries between science and fiction. Despite their cultural saturation, AI and robotic systems are still largely framed as either compliant tools or looming threats. These figures are shaped by persistent anthropomorphic fantasies and economies of speculative fear. In response, Shyldkrot foregrounds moments of malfunction, error, and unpredictability. Such “misbehaviours” are approached as productive glitches that disrupt the fantasies driving AI development and media hype. The talk probes some of these enduring myths by examining how recent theatre and digital performance, sound art, and screen-based works mobilise portrayals of robots and AI, resisting familiar depictions in order to foster alternative understandings of technological projects.

Please book your place for the research seminar here.

Yaron Shyldkrot is a practitioner-researcher and performance maker. His research and artistic practice explore the blurred boundaries between the natural and the artificial, relations with technology and with one another, and the thresholds of sound and vision. He is a Lecturer in Scenography and Design-Led Performance and Programme Leader for the MA Performance Design at the University of Leeds. He was co-convenor of the Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Research Working Group at IFTR (2021–2025) and his monograph Misbehaving Machines is forthcoming with Bloomsbury

A final call for DIT (Do It Together), the latest edition of the Live Art Development Agency’s long-running programme of artist-led professional development opportunities – with the basic premise being that artists are best placed to imagine, propose and lead training or engagement with other practitioners. DIT (together not yourself) places emphasis on collaborations between individual artists and organizations or institutions across the UK so as to foster more joined up (and perhaps more sustainable) forms of support. This year, two calls are based in Scotland.

Gillie Kleiman’s BUZZCUT x Take Me Somewhere project Disciplined. Gillie Kleiman on the project:

We often talk about Live Art and experimental performance as not belonging to any discipline. Nonetheless, we are still engaged as a field in various infrastructures, training schemas, sensibilities and audience frameworks belonging to one or more ‘disciplines’ of artistic practice. This DIT project will explore the ways in which relating to existing disciplines can be a curse and an opportunity, attending to questions of craft, education, audience, resource and cultural value in relation to this theme.

Stacy Makishi’s Scottish Sculpture Workshop x Take Me Somewhere project Campfire Disco!

A three-day residential led by Stacy Makishi at Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Aberdeenshire Scotland, offering time to connect, with ourselves and with each other.

We need to gather. Now more than ever. We need to turn towards each other; make good and bad art; laugh, cry, swear, pray, bear witness; dance badly; forgive; make our curiosity larger than our fear; remember that there’s something larger than ourselves. 

The initial deadline for applications to both projects is Monday 23 February 2026.

The University of Glasgow’s Immersive Experiences Lab is hosting two free events this Friday in partnership with Take Me Somewhere festival.

WORKSHOP: asses.masses: Workshop on Democracy, Immersive Practices and Performance 

09:30 am–12:00 pm @ Concert Hall at the University of Glasgow

Do our practices and systems within the performing arts sector support or hinder a strong democracy? Led by two of the artists behind asses.masses, Patrick Blenkarn and David Mesiha, participants in this workshop will collaborate to answer this question and to playfully imagine new experiences, stories, games, and processes that might foster new forms of democratic practices within the performing arts and our society at large.

PANEL: Politics of/in Immersive Performance Experiences 

3:30pm – 5.00pm @ Concert Hall at the University of Glasgow

Immersive performance invites us to step inside the story—sometimes as guests, sometimes as co-creators. But what happens when we think about the politics of these experiences? How might immersion itself be mobilised as a tool for critique, resistance, or complicity? Bringing together artists Tania El Khoury (Cultural Exchange Rate), Patrick Blenkarn (asses.masses), and Jack Lander, this panel will explore the possibilities and limits of immersive performance as a political form, consider the shifting role of audience engagement within it, and reimagine what it means to be part of a performance.

LADA have launched their open call for proposals for Do It Together (DIT), a peer-to-peer professional development programme created to reactive DIY, a flagship series of projects created by artists for artists which ran from 2002 to 2020. LADA writes:

The crucial shift for 2026 is that each project will be supported by two national partners instead of one. By increasing the support at a time when both independents and organisations are struggling to resource artist development, DIT ignites a nation-wide support network for process-led experimental practice.

Each selected proposal will have a budget of £2,250 to deliver the project, with producing and hosting support from a partnership duo to develop and lead the project in their location.

For 2026, there are two proposals based in Scotland:

BUZZCUT x Take Me Somewhere

In April 2026, BUZZCUT Festival returns to Glasgow and will be hosting artists who make raw and challenging work in an encouraging atmosphere. As part of their DIT partnership, BUZZCUT and Take Me Somewhere are looking for proposals that feel well-positioned within a festival context like BUZZCUT. They’re interested in what it means to host the lead artist(s) and the participating artists/practitioners within the festival, and what possibilities emerge in this context that might not be possible elsewhere. How can BUZZCUT Festival be in dialogue with your proposal? We invite you to consider this in the broadest sense.

Scottish Sculpture Workshop x Take Me Somewhere

Scottish Sculpture Workshop and Take Me Somewhere want to hear from artists and practitioners who are interested in working together with landscape, objects and materials. The DIT project should happen in or near Scottish Sculpture Workshop.

For more details, visit LADA’s Call for Proposals.

The latest version of the Live Art in Scotland Practitioner Directory is now available to download.

Updated annually, this free resource lists artist residencies, funding schemes and professional development programmes open to interdisciplinary artists working in Scotland. This year’s edition reflects the outcome of Creative Scotland’s multi-year funding portfolio announced in spring 2025, with a larger number of organisations now able to offer longer-term development support for artists working across the sector.

I’m delighted to share that a new special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review – Live Art: Radicalism and Complicity in a Scene of Constraint – has now been published. Initiated during the pandemic and co-edited by me (Steve) with Phoebe Patey-Ferguson, this issue has taken several years to develop – with the usual challenge of editorial processes and timelines made more complex by significant changes to live art’s own ecology over the past several years. Click here for more on the issue’s contributors and an excerpt of the editorial.

It’s the spring which means it’s time to update and share the LAS practitioner directory – a free guide listing artist residencies, funding schemes and professional development opportunities for live artists and interdisciplinary performance makers working in Scotland.

Along with refreshed entries to reflect new and changing support schemes, this third edition includes new information on creative sector support offered by organisations including We Are Here Scotland, Creative Dundee and Creative Edinburgh.

I’m deep into writing, working on a new book based on the LAS interviews and archival research. It’s about culture, curation and the ways we might enable interdisciplinary experiments and creative risk – and the histories and communities of practice that have become what might get called live art in Scotland. It’s too raw to excerpt at the moment – trust the process! write then edit! – but I’m looking forward to sharing some of the project in future months.

Away from my desk, I’ve mainly been at Take Me Somewhere festival, Glasgow’s biennial international festival of radical performance. Above is FK Alexander’s The Problem with Music – a wall of noise and deliberate destruction named for Steve Albini’s essay on the state of the music industry, first published in 1993 – and below are some details from Eve Stainton’s large scale work of suspenseful choreography-with-welding, Impact Driver.