NYC: Livable Futures: Climate Gathering and Performance Ritual

Livable Futures is headed to New York City to kick off our national tour. We will start at Barnard College at Columbia University’s Motion Lab from January 12-17, 2020. Read more about this event here.

Recently, I was awarded a Livable Futures Grant for collaboration. I was asked to respond to three questions on the community page. Visit the Livable Futures website here.

Here are my responses:

What makes more livable futures for you?

For me, a pursuit to re-imagine justice, resiliency, and love against the current oppressive or destructive ways of living would be a start in making the future livable. I believe it is crucial to create a realm of care, ethics, and compassion to work towards balance in our overly consumptive world. These liberal acts help to reconstruct/heal dilapidated structures in our social, economic, and industrial ways of living but prioritize these acts within the environmental sphere. As an artist, I think creating performative/experiential environments in a community of co-creation kickstarts the imagination needed to unlock the potential of our future.

A livable future responds to crisis, injustice, and inequality.

A livable future is continuously adapting.

A livable future makes and holds space for all.

A livable future is a possibility manifested through imagination.

A livable future redefines freedom.

A livable future is not always polite.

A livable future is transparent.

A livable future thrives in equity.

A livable future redefines love and care.      

What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017), Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019) by adrienne maree brown

Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology by Jennifer A. González

Black Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (2009) edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley

Dawn (2012) by Octavia E. Butler

On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Ahmanson-Murphy Fine Arts Imprint) by Ronald Rael

What practices are sustaining you?

Sustaining my practice is daydreaming, hyper creativity in co-creative environments, performance as protest, and ritualized self-care.

Sun’s kiss on my skin

The desert

Aesthetics in environmental design

Home

Community

Daily improvisation

Mi Familia

Napping

Sustento

Artmaking in all its capacities

Conversations

Immersing into books/movies/shows

Truth

The moment when I am told something is impossible

-LROD 

©LROD

Intermedia || Interactive Audience

For our last study this semester, we were thinking about how the audience can participate while also folding in the first two studies and reshaping the work. We considered taking an easy approach to lighting and technology limiting down to what and why we use tech, light, sound, and movement. We chose to begin with making a dinner table set with place settings digitally. This work was inspired by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-79), a monumental feminist work of its time. Then, we decided to interact by having our cell phones engaged in the work. To talk through with the audience, to text other performers, and to capture video of the event. We also set up an interactive movement study to see if the audience would pick it up and – they did!

Feel free to skip through:

In reflection, this work seemed to be the easiest to complete, and we found a balance between interactions, technology, and movement that seemed to create a holistic environment. While it is important to consider what Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message”… well, we are responding to the message (Dixon 2004). A couple of key questions sit on my mind: What are we saying with the technology we are in collaboration with? What are the stakes that surround this interdisciplinary landscape? The work feels open, free, and uncontained to a specific genre. In a sense Intermedia is freedom.

While maintaining a sense of freedom, I turn to Faye Driscoll’s (2014) Thank You For Coming: Attendance has been a huge influence on the work I do in considering interactivity and connection with the audience. I referenced Faye’s work in the earlier blog post. So when we talk about the community making the work and co-creating, co-authoring, and co-generating the outcome – we are interested in separating from technology for a moment to connect. This is a driving part of the work created in the final study. However, we demonstrated the interference technology has in our daily lives. The way we connect through media to interact has certainly come in full force.

Take a moment to enjoy this work and commentary:

 As the semester came to a close, Norah Zuniga-Shaw asked us what Intermedia is. I responded:

Intermedia is a radical space that allows for interactive engagement that activates the performers, technology, and audience to explore a liminality of openness. This interdisciplinary space transforms the environment to teleport all parties to a sub-dimension of the unknown. Intermedia creates a visual distortion and appetite fostering the collaboration of technological humanness.

Intermedia moves without a container and allows your imagination to run in any direction possible. I gained more insight into the importance of light/projection, how to formulate collaboration within this setting, and how to build a structure around integrating technology. While also learning the array of equipment and programs in the MOLA lab. I am leaving this course with more questions than I entered, but I feel ready to engage and continue the exploration forward. Digital self-signing off for now.

Sources:

Dixon, Steve. 2004. “The Digital Double.” New Visions in Performance: “The Impact of Digital Technologies. Ed. Gavin Carver. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2004. Print.

Driscoll, Faye. 2014. Thank You For Coming: Attendance. (Film) Walker Art Center. Published 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlB3MrBr2_M

©LROD

Intermedia || Media First

Archive Date: December 14, 2017

Texture inspires movement, environment, and sound were the starting point for our next study. Our next task gave us a moment of pause to reflect on how we can enter into a work from a different starting point. We recorded and photographed various videos with movement in them to project throughout the campus. Then, we had a full day of sifting through the material and trying different captures on different placements within MOLA.

After selecting the images our next task was to see where they were going to be installed in the space. So we used the arch of mesh to create a container for the work, as well, as using the scrim and wall to project on. Next, came the movement of invention and exploration. This project was challenging since the majority of our group needed to be behind the scenes working on Isadora, MaxMsp, and the lighting. However, the goal for us was to accomplish a welcoming environment in a fluid space for the audience. To me, this was our most challenging study, but it paid off in understanding how to merge movement when media comes first.

Developing the movement to suit moving images takes awareness, quality, and timing to not overload the audience’s visual capacity. We found it helpful to juxtapose the images with more movement with stillness, and the more static images with more movement. Mimicking movement from the screen was also a good way to be informed by the media.

Overall, a more developed version of the media first study would be projection mapping. I have listed here work by Dandypunk who puts the movement in response to the media to create a narrative. This is a different direction than the space we created, but, the work is a good example of a fully realized form of media first that shows the multiplicity of choice within the Intermedia work.

©LROD