battery opera

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David McIntosh

Flirting with volatility since 1963

David McIntosh is a writer, singer, and the artistic producer of battery opera.

In 1995 he co-founded battery opera with Lee Su-Feh, whom he began collaborating with shortly after he was run over while on his bicycle somewhere between Kuantan and Kota Baru.

About My Current Cycle of Work

I started making work unaware of the proscenium and away from it’s chairs, but then spent a good 15 years working within it, under various levels of protest. My current cycle of work is outside of that context but is inevitably informed by it.

This cycle of work focuses on site specific intimate experiences for small audiences. These works have moved from the historical center of a city (my last major work, “Lives were around me.”), to the anonymous, uniform hotel rooms along a city's major arteries (my current major work  M/HOTEL), and is next moving outward to the “rest stops” in between settlements.

The works explore certain themes. These themes deal with a history of colonialisation and settlement, and an individual’s transient relationship to environment and community. The works also encourage and constructs methods of furthering audience investment by such simple means as making it a little bit difficult to find the show, directly negotiating the fee or price of a ticket, and offering direct methods of feedback like my web based interactive art project as a feedback forum liveswerearoundme.com

-I also teach Bagua and I'm training to be a Sommelier

To read David's career suicide blog go here.

but enough of that shit- can't access it anymore anyway. Artists are citizens, and we should all be good citizens, but art is not citizenship. It's something else. Not a career either. More of a curse. On with it.

David in Paris

A Holiday Messages from the 1980s with Five Year Fuck at the Railway Club:

David McIntosh reciting "t'were", a poem brought to his attention by Adrienne Wong, who got it from her sister Karen, who got it from a  boyfriend (now former), to whom it was given by an acquaintance he soon after stopped associating with. -Anonymous, as it t'were, and yet it spoke to him.