Part One:The Living Newspapers
From June 1st - 27th we have an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago.
This past Friday, Saturday and Sunday we have trained 33 performers to be part of this exhibition. The exhibition takes place daily Tuesday - Sunday. There are two shifts that take place daily. Each shift last for 2 and a half hours. Each shift has two performers. The performers are listening to a text to speech program via ipods that are connected to a wireless network. We workshoped the performers to speak the texts that are coming from their ipods aloud. The are having dialogues with each other through the ipod touches. Judd built a program that mines twitter texts that people have wrote. The performers then speak these texts aloud. In a database the twitter texts in real-time are structured as such that the performers enact scenes within the museum. The scenes are texts minded from twitters wrote in a mile radius of the museum, what people are ‘concerned’ about, the trends of the day - during rehearsal we learned of the deaths of Gary Coleman and Dennis Hopper. Other scenes are also actual archival Living Newspapers - from where we take the name. The Living Newspapers were actual plays that were produced during the last great depression putting writers and actors to work and were generally plays of the current times. Our exhibition is a re-enactment and re-imagining of A Living Newspaper of today. We each now in some respects have our own News Feed through our interactions with social media networks. The other part of the exhibition is the performers embodying the Winged Figures of the Republic. The twin figures that sit at the top of the Hoover Dam - we invited our artist friend Claire Ashley to make us wings that we could travel with, could be light and not take up too much room. Claire wonderfully designed her version of the wings as 15 feet high inflatables, inflated by a fan inserted into a backpack. We taught each performer a small choreography that also includes the inflating and deflating of the wings as part of the choreography. We enjoyed teaching / training the performers for the exhibit this past weekend. One of the favorite activities is seeing people laying down on the wings to deflate them and to let the air out. Part performance, part absurd, part ceremonial, part performing procedure. Please see rehearsal photos.
Part Two: Winged Figures of the Republic
At Hyde Park this week we wanted to begin to work with two other performers and young artists that we have approached to collaborate with us on The Precession. André and Evan Lenox are two twin brothers. They make work in performance and new media. We had been working with them during the fall last year on this project and we approached them again last month to work with us on the exhibition. With our initial research trip to the Hoover Dam on the Nevada/ Arizona border we were taken by the monument of the Winged Figures of the Republic. The Two Winged figures sit on top of a celestial map of the night sky on September 30th 1935 at 8.58 p.m. - the time that FDR dedicated the dam. On that night 209 stars were visible to the naked eye and the two winged figures sit on top of this specific sky.
In the studio we asked André and Evan to come up with 3 still movements in relationship to the mic stand and microphone. At the still moments they will be saying text aloud that we will insert. We also asked them to respond to few lines of text written by the poet Emily Dickinson. Earlier in the week we had been sent an essay by our artist friend in the UK, Kira O’ Reilly. A Dim Capacity for Wings: Angels, Flies and the Material Imagination can be seen here .
The lines of text that we asked André and Evan to respond to are here:
My cocoon tightens - Colors tease,
I’m feeling for the Air -
A dim capacity for Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear.
We are also including two images in this blog post of the material that they produced in the studio. We will be working with André and Evan in the studio every Monday and Wednesday.
We have also been in dialogue with Daniele Wilmouth to ask her interest in recording green screen footage of the work we have been developing post exit out of the studio in the first week of July. We intend of layering the material we have been producing physically in space on top of the textual work that Judd has been programming. mining and generating.
Away in Providence:
From Wednesday June 2nd to Sunday June 6th we will be attending the Electronic Literature Organization Conference at Brown University in Providence Rhode Island. The title of the conference is Archive and Innovate. We will be presenting a Work in Progress of The Precession. Judd will also be speaking on a panel as well as performing a new work he has been developing in response to the writer and his mentor whilst he was studying for his masters at Brown, Robert Coover. Link for the event here: http://www.brown.edu/Conference/Electronic_Literature_Organization/conference.php
