Working Towards Open Studio: Judd/Mark Update
We returned this weekend from performing a work in progress of The Precession in Providence and went straight back into our studio. We are now working towards two open studio showings scheduled for Friday June 18th and Saturday June 19th from 2 - 4 p.m The two open studio times will be an opportunity to open up our process to the HPAC community and to show what we have been working on these past few months in our space. The two open studio times are also a culmination of the first part of our two part residency we have at HPAC. We will return to the studio again starting September 1st.
For the open studio showing we are working towards presenting approximately 40 - 45 minutes of material. This past week we have begun to sequence and structure the material we have been generating. We are beginning to see what fits in the overall system and what doesn’t. The sequence we mapped out is what we are now drilling in the studio each day.
We have 6 fragments of material all together that we are sequencing. We are imagining that the text based net-art that Judd has been building will be projected onto the wall of the studio space and also act as a time-keeper for the first section. Following Judd’s latest text and code experiment, RC_AI, he has created Cliff Notes: Agape Threw Froths, a large-scale panoramic visualization/re-composition of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a text obviously emblematic of the depression era and cited ubiquitously in times of economic struggle. The panorama grows over time to a width of 11,676,636 pixels which translates to approximately 12,974 feet and will work well with the 10-screen / 80 foot expanse of the HPAC facade. Along this horizontal trajectory are stations consisting of re-writings of each chapter of the novel by a basic machine-writing algorithm. These are sometimes written on-screen and sometimes read by our text-to-speech synthetic-voice collaborator, Ivanka.
We have also continued to work with the two young artists André and Evan Lennox. Here is an instruction that we gave them on June 10th to come to the studio with on June 13th:
Make 5 LINES of Dance.
Each Line should be in 10 parts.
Each line should last at least 30 seconds
Consider looking UP and DOWN / Different Speeds / Intensity
Take moves from Busby Berkeley’s ‘Pettin’ in the Park.’ Consider The idea of The Precession with the way you make the lines in the space. Consider your moves wobbling and on an angle.
Following the last HPAC e-newsletter “I Sing the Body Electric,” we realized that electricity has actually emerged as a major element through the imagery, choreography and use of objects in the work.
We will leave our studio this coming Sunday, June 20th. We will return to the studio on September 1st. Throughout the rest of the summer we will be still be working on The Precession and having opportunity to show the work. On June 26th we will present at NOISE! 2010 at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater space in NYC.
We will also be presenting two showing’s for the Printers Ball here in Chicago on July 24th @ HPAC and July 30th @ Columbia College.
In August we will back at HPAC for 4 days whilst the current Spatial City show is being taken down so that we can have an opportunity to work in the empty large gallery space at HPAC for our closing exhibition performances in March. These 4 days will give us a time to begin to integrate the performance material with the exhibition space and facade.
We will also be artists in residence at Catwalk, Catskill New York from August 17th - 29th and during this time we will be presenting a tutorial / performance on Governors Island in NYC. Our artist friend Mary Walling Blackburn has organised a summer series of performative tutorials titled Radical Citizenship. We will use this tutorial as research for a large-scale participatory performance sequence we plan to integrate into the exhibit at HPAC. Here is the tutorial we will be presenting at Governors Island:
Trials With an Overhead View
In this tutorial, we will generate a collective performance in which participants’ occupations, labor histories, skills and fundamental concerns will be used as material for a choreographed sequence of movement and text that acts as a dedication to its own ephemeral construction. Based partly on studies of New Deal-era labor histories, aesthetics and monuments, the moving images generated will be informed by sources including the dance-music numbers of Busby Berkeley, and the placement of performers will correspond to the positions of visible stars above our location on the date of the event, according to a catalogue of star data that we will use as a score.
