CROSS-DISCIPLINARY RESIDENCIES AND LIVE DEVELOPMENT

Colliding Lines runs a rolling programme of residencies that bring together artists who have never worked together before. Each residency pairs at least two practitioners from different fields — a sound artist with a choreographer, a poet with an interactive filmmaker, a musician with a lighting designer — and gives them a shared space, a small production budget and a short but intense period of development. We are not interested in polite fusion. We ask collaborators to disrupt each other's habits, to argue, to fail out loud and to find a third practice that belongs to neither of them alone. Many residencies take place in borrowed or underused buildings: empty shop units, former industrial warehouses, school halls outside term time. The roughness of these spaces becomes part of the work.

At the end of each residency we host a public sharing that is more than a scratch night and less than a finished show. These events are deliberately unpresentable: cables visible, scores on music stands, performers still negotiating the structure on stage. Audiences are invited to respond in writing, and their notes are passed directly to the artists before any further development. This feedback loop has produced some of our most durable touring pieces, including a 40-minute performance for two cellos, a reel-to-reel tape machine and a dancer with a headlamp.

PRINT, EDITIONS AND THE PUBLISHING ARM

Colliding Lines publishes artist editions that sit somewhere between a score, a book and a souvenir of a live moment. Our print work is deliberately low-fi but considered: risograph in two or three inks, folded A3 posters that unfold into performance instructions, saddle-stitched chapbooks of text scores, letterpress cards for one-off sound pieces. We favour processes that leave physical traces of making — misregistration, ink drag, the grain of recycled paper — because they mirror the liveness of the performances we document. Each edition is produced in runs of between 50 and 300 copies and is numbered by hand.

The publishing arm does not only document past events. Many editions are made before the live work exists, as a set of constraints for other artists to interpret. We commission writers to produce instruction poems, composers to write graphic scores, and visual artists to design maps for impossible walks. The resulting editions are then distributed through independent bookshops, artists' fairs and our online shop, and are often used as starting points for new live commissions elsewhere. In this way the print and performance sides of Colliding Lines feed each other continuously.

INTERNATIONAL PARTNERSHIPS AND TOURING CIRCUITS

While Colliding Lines is based in the UK, our projects are built to travel. We work with a network of small venues, festivals and artist-run spaces in mainland Europe, North America and Japan, prioritising relationships over one-off bookings. A typical international project might involve a two-week exchange: a sound artist and a dancer from our network travel to a partner city, live and work in a venue for five days, then present two public events before returning with new collaborators. This model keeps touring affordable and allows work to adapt to each new context rather than arriving as a fixed product.

Because our performances often rely on portable equipment — contact microphones, battery-powered amps, hand-held projectors, printed scores — they can be remade in almost any space. We have presented work in basement clubs, church crypts, public libraries, and once on a ferry between two islands. The set-up time is rarely more than an afternoon, which means we can accept invitations from places with no established arts infrastructure. In return, we share documentation, technical riders and production notes freely with our partners.

• Artist swaps between two cities, with no fixed outcome required
• Shared residencies where four practitioners from different countries co-create for one week
• Festival micro-commissions of five to ten minutes, made from a single printed score
• Touring duos or trios that travel with everything needed for a show in one suitcase

ARCHIVING LIVE WORK AND AUDIO DOCUMENTATION

Everything Colliding Lines does is recorded, but not necessarily to produce a polished album. We treat documentation as a creative material in its own right. Every public event is captured with at least two room microphones, a stereo pair for the space, and a handheld video camera. These raw recordings are then edited only lightly — no overdubs, no punch-ins — and released in batches as limited-run cassettes, digital downloads and printed vouchers with download codes. The goal is not to replace the live moment but to give it a second life that can be revisited, shared and remixed.

Our audio archive is open to any participant or audience member who wants to make new work from it. We have released compilations of field recordings from residencies, text scores read aloud by their authors, and improvised sets captured in stairwells and car parks. The archive also feeds our public workshops, where we invite participants to re-perform old material, re-edit existing recordings, and add new layers using cheap domestic equipment. This ongoing recycling keeps the collective's history active rather than sealed behind glass.