Chat Room at the Feast Festival

And we have come full circle.

Chat room on its Feast Festival Spreading the Love tour has come to an end.

I have learnt so much about love. So many people have shared with me honestly and openly. So many people have listened, shared their views, and considered those of other people's.

This is OPEN LOVE!

Love has been spread thickly and lavishlishly.

To watch Chat Room at the Feast Festival click here

Chat room in Goodwood

Aren't the kids gorgeous in Goodwood?

I met a diverse crowd at the Goodwood markets, from Breadman to a man with a crocodile and a tawny mouth frog.

Chat Room was another lovely adventure into love!

Click here to watch it

Chat Room in Marion

Yes, Chat Room has also been to Marion! Jen and I set my bed up in the Marion Cultural Centre and ate cupcakes with some insightful people.

Click here to watch it

Chat Room in Norwood

Check out Chat Room on its Spreading the LOVE tour in Norwood.

Click here to watch it

Chat Room in Semaphore

Check out Chat Room in Semaphore.

Click here to watch it

Chat Room at Vic Sq and Feast backstage tour

See Chat Room on its Spreading the Love tour at Victoria Square, Adelaide, and the Feast Festival backstage tour.

Check it out here.

Chat room at Feast Backstage Tour

Sister Ikea, Cat, Daniel and I got snuggly on friday night.

Although Chat Room was supposed to be ME in a bed with one other person - people keep joining us!

So the beautiful people who come and join my in my bed for Chat Room on its Spreading the Love tour with the Feast Festival are showing me that LOVE wants to be shared more generously....


Sister Ikea, Daniel, Cat and I had a beautiful reflection on love at the Feast backstage tour (preview of the Feast hub - big party tomorrow!). After this, I jumped out my bed and went to find Gabrielle Griffith who wanted to come in (but couldn't fit - where are you Gabrielle?). The clouds were so full! So pink and gorgeous! But noone noticed. Everyone was too entrenched in their drinks to notice. But I felt full of their beauty, I was so blissed out on love.

There was one other person, standing like an idiot in the middle of the square, gazing up at those delicious clouds. Cat! She had just left my bed, and she too, was drenched in LOVE.

'LOOK AT THE CLOUDS!' she cooed.

'I know. Amazing huh?'

This spreading of love is actually filling me with love.

Thank you.

Chat room at Feast Festival Opening Night Party!

While 3,000 people doofed around us, we stayed in bed

Here are Megan, Cary and I (see the close-ups of Megan and Cary on telly?) doing some radical relaxation at the Feast Festival Opening party.

Bands and DJ's and drag kings and queens, party-people and ravers all around us. We are the calm in the storm. We are safe and snug in bed.

We are taking a moment to reflect on LOVE.

Wait till you see what Megan and Cary offer us on LOVE!! These grrrls have created their own language of love (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, eat your heart out!). In fact, they don't even call it LOVE, it's something quite different that they speak of....

LOVE with John and Yoko

My performance of Chat Room will draw on this tradition of LOVE in BED performances

Love is real, real is love

Love is feeling, feeling love

Love is wanting to be loved

Love is touch, touch is love

Love is reaching, reaching love

Love is asking to be loved

Love is you

You and me

Love is knowing

We can be

Love is free, free is love

Love is living, living love

Love is needing to be loved

Dear Greg Evans, I'm trying to learn how to love

Dear Greg Evans,

I'm trying to learn how to love. I thought you might know? You seemed to get it right so often in the 80's.


I don't think I'm doing it properly. I never got taught how to love. Or maybe I just forgot. Is that possible? I never used to feel unloving, it's just that lately, I've thought about it a lot cos I think I used to get it wrong. Like love the wrong people. Or in the wrong ways. Or maybe I was the wrong person? Like, maybe I just don't know how to love.

To make it more clear, this is what I think of as to be loving:

1. really try to listen, even if they say stupid things
2. work with this person as part of a team - understand that you are woven together through your love
3. be really really honest, even if it's embarrassing
4. make them feel a bit special sometimes by treating them like a princess
5. even if they're a cow sometimes, let them get away with it

But Greg - this isn't working. My track record is pretty bad. We always end up hating each other in the end. And now, well I think I have the chance to love again - but better.

Could you more clearly outline love for me?

Thank you in anticipation,

Aurora Murphy

PS - I have also been reading Romeo and Juliet and The New Faber Book of Love Poems. They however, seem to have it as arse-up as me.

I'm bringing my bed onto the street

Remember John and Yoko and their media interviews from bed - well I'm doing it too!

However, I am briging my bed out and onto the street to chat with people. Here's me doing a media interview with the Messenger from my bed in Victoria Square, Adelaide.

Intimacy Online?

I started Chat Room with the assumption that virtual worlds drive us apart. That a world so technologically-driven as ours leads to lower degrees of intimacy between us. We are too afraid to actually chat with someone face-to-face, so we so we go onto chatrooms and meet people virtually.

But now that I have found intimacy online my performance is somewhat different. It's so nostalgic to believe that the internet is a social evil.

I think it's fantastic.

Chat Room Research - Public dancing

Today I popped on a wig and my disco outfit and danced to Whitney Housten's I Wanna Dance With Somebody in Marion Shopping Centre. Check out my shameless display of public dancing.

I am researching for Chat Room, and looking for ways to create moments of intimacy and joy in busy and disconnected public spaces.

Check out me getting kicked out of the mall!

Chat Room - Staying Safe in Bed

Soon I will be going out in my pyjamas, taking my bed into busy public spaces, and inviting people into it.

Do you think that's provocative?

I just wanna talk. About intimacy. And play. Playfully. I don't wanna be treated like a travelling sex worker.

How do I keep myself safe, but create dangerous performance that has the ability to transform?

1. Don't wear pyjamas. They're see-through.
2. Don't talk to drunk people. They won't remember anyway.
3. Have some rules, like 'Don't embarrass yourself, you're on camera'.

Any other ideas....??

Review: Anastasia Klose's 'i thought i was wrong but it turns out i was wrong'

Today I went to the opening of Anastasia Klose’s i thought i was wrong but it turns out i was wrong at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide. This piece of performance art asks who is performing, and who is reflecting? It looks to the role of the artist in contemporary life, and the position of art in a hectic society.

i thought sees Klose sits in her single bed, writing her autobiography on her laptop. The text she writes is projected onto the wall behind her. Klose writes that she likes a patrons’ shoes. She writes that she needs a drink, and the bathroom. She writes about the bright pink brothel near the Croydon train station, with the small sign out the front: ‘looking for work’. She writes to her Mother, apologising for not ‘going deep enough into the work’. She grapples with writing something interesting, something reflective, something worth coming out on a 7 degree July evening for. She struggles to entertain us, to remain interesting. We watch her not wanting to be watched. We watch her prefer to pretend she is not being watched so that she can be more authentically reflective. We watch as Klose reveals words that emanate from her silent body, and our quiet watching.

Throughout her artistic career, Klose has worked variously with video, performance, and instillation. In 2007 she was awarded the Prometheus Visual Arts Award for a video in which she walks around the streets of Melbourne wearing a white wedding dress and holding a sign which says ‘Nanna I am still alone!’. Yet perhaps more infamously and provocatively, Klose is known for her lo-fi film In the Toilets with Ben, in which she is having sex with Ben in the Victorian College of the Arts toilets. A second film then features Klose sitting on the couch with her mother and watching In the Toilets.

This most recent performance, i thought, which takes place on a bed, may also be seen as evoking the erotic and the confrontational. Within the tradition of ‘bed performances’ also sits John and Yoko’s days of bed-bound interviews, Tracey Emin’s messy bed art, and even the Freudian couch. Yet Klose’s bed is more comfy than erotic in i thought, and more reflective than revelatory.

In fact, i thought is more reminiscent of Marina Abramovic’s House with an Ocean View. In this ‘living instillation’, performed in 2002, Abramovic lived on stage at the Sean Kelly Gallery, inviting spectators to sit with her, and sleep in a ‘dream room’ next to her. Abramovic created House in response to the attacks of September 11th. She wanted to give citizens of New York a place to mourn, to be still. She wanted to give people time.

Like House, Klose’s i thought gives spectators time. Time to reflect, to stop for a moment and think. Yet unlike Abramovic’s House, Klose does not search for intimate connection with her audience, even writing that she cannot ‘look into anyone’s eyes’. Instead, Klose’s reflection is personal; we do not connect with her , but with our own act of reflection. As Klose reflects, we are invited to reflect with her. Klose reflects on the act of writing, of performance. This reflection is not pre-conceived, but immediate, and so we are invited into the act. Klose writes that she’s already used all her best material, and doesn’t feel prepared – hence we receive the un-premeditated and the un-rehearsed. We receive the art as soon as it is created.

Klose writes and writes for two hours (other than a break for speeches). Her focus invites spectators into her world. An inner world attempting to reflect on an outer world. i thought allows spectators time to think, an opportunity apart from the chaos to pause, and wonder.

Is sharing a bed intimacy?

This is Tracy Emion's bed.

Check out Anastasia Klose, performing in a bed this Thursday at the Experiemntal Art Foundation, Adelaide. She will be writing her autobiography as she lays there, and we can watch.

Maybe she will write about us? Maybe we will censor her? Does she perform for us? Or do we perform for her?

Bed Art

Sharing a bed is so intimate. Tracey Emin did her bed as art.

Some people have been concerned about me doing a performance in a bed. they say it is too sexually suggestive, too potentially erotic. But I think so many things can and do happen in bed, not just the erotic.

People look so lovely in bed, so cherubic, so relaxed. I love watching people in bed.

Marina Abromovic did some photos of kids in bed. She usually makes risky live performances, like Rhythm O, in which she invited audience members to do whatever they wished to her passive body with a set of given objects. After several hours the performance had to be stopped as the audience ended up forcing Abromovic to hold a loaded gun to her own forehead.

Here's Abromovic's photo of kids in bed

beds and art can be dangerous too

Perform in bed

Lots of people perform in bed, not just me! Perhaps you do too?

John and Yoko started something.......

What intimacies can we allow in bed, that the footpath, the boardroom, the office, the dinner table doesn't allow?

Have you seen Annie Spinkle, and her partner Elizabeth Stevens perform in a big bed? They invite people into their bed for a sandwich cuddle.

What are your happiest, saddest, most unusual bed moments? (I'm having a bed-moment now, it's raining, well, it was).

Pillow talk

Perhaps, at the conference I'm speaking at on Thursday July 1st, I'll speak about my new show Chat Room?

Chat Room will take place around Adelaide. I'll be placed on a large bed in my nightie, in very public environments, like Rundle Mall for example. I'll invite people to join me on the bed, and we'll role play intimate relationships and conversations.

It's like street pillow talk.

It's revealing untrue secrets.

Or lying so intimately

It's an antidote to souless cyber connections.

People sharing in the same space, rather than virtual space.

Lying together and lying together.