The Art of Luv (Part 6): Awesome Grotto!

The Art of Luv (Part 6): Awesome Grotto! is a ritual performance based on the Ancient Greek Mysteries of Eleusis and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, channeled through the reperformance of a single unpopular shopping “haul” video posted to YouTube on Labor Day 2013 and later deleted by its creator. Central to this ritual is a live confessional performed inside a giant reverse camera obscura. Mediated only by a simple lens, this confessional ceremonially reimagines the now-ubiquitous act of looking into the camera and sharing a story with the world. Awesome Grotto! is a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human in the age of the global economy and social media. The videos shown here are reperformances of the original haul video by professional actors, using props purchased or recreated from the original, lost video. The Art of Luv is a multi-part, multi-year, multi-disciplinary series which addresses the mythologies behind normative 21st Century codes of romantic conduct. The products of their practice have taken a range of forms: public ritual-performances, video, sculpture, installation, lecture, and party. The Art of LUV (Part 6): Awesome Grotto! is commissioned by Abrons Arts Center.

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble [ROKE] is a musical priesthood that explores the metaphysics and mythologies of love, desire, and connectivity in the the VHS and Internet Ages. Formed by artists Tei Blow and Sean McElroy, and later joined by Eben Hoffer, ROKE generates contemporary ritual out of found media, synthesizing strategies of video, meme, party, opera, theater, social practice, and installation. ROKE has performed rituals in New York at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, Guggenheim Museum, Special Effects Festival at Participant Inc., Prelude Festival, AUNTS Arts@Renaissance, and JACK, and in Philadelphia at FringeArts. ROKE received a 2016 Creative Capital award for The Art of Luv series, and has been awarded a Franklin Furnace Fund grant (2013) and a BAX Space Grant (2014). They were part of the Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group and PS122’s RAMP residency program. They spent the summer of 2014 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and were 2015 CUNY Hunter Artists-in-Residence in ceramics.   

Video design by Hyung Seok Jeon
Performed by Erica Sweany, Alli Kelly, Sifiso Mabena, Tracee Rohde, Madeline Wise

Royalosiris.com

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Lincoln in the Bardo with Objects

Graham Sack, Sarah Hughes, and John Fitzgerald & Matthew Niederhauser (cofounders of experiential studio Sensorium) are artists from a variety of backgrounds – theater, film, photography, tech –interested in the intersection of live performance and new media technologies. At PRELUDE they’re surveying their work together, including everything from a theatrical VR short based on George Saunders’ hit novel Lincoln in the Bardo, filmedon location in Greenwood Cemetery; to Subject: Object, a VR short shot from the point of view of an object; to objects in mirror AR closer than they appear, an immersive Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality installation at Tribeca Film Festival and New York Theatre Workshop based on Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson.

Graham Sack, Sarah Hughes, John Fitzgerald & Matthew Niederhauser are artists from a variety of backgrounds interested in the intersection of live performance and new media technologies. They approach each project by considering what medium or combination of mediums (live performance, AR, VR) will best serve the story being told, and they seek collaborators who are interested in crossing boundaries of genre to discover the truest way into a narrative. Since 2016 they have collaborated on several projects exploring new ways to tell stories across multiple mediums, working with The New York Times, New York Theatre Workshop, Penguin Random House, Tribeca Film Festival, award-winning author George Saunders, and Geoff Sobelle, creator of the world-renowned show The Object Lesson, to develop hybrid works. Recent collaborators include Jenny 8. Lee, Plympton, The Molecule, SilVR, Arvore, Steven Dufala, Jecca Barry, Elliot B. Quick, Ricardo Laganaro, Joe Silovsky, Steve Cuiffo, Matt Romein, Keaton Nigel Cooke, Jake Hart, Sam Lilja, Mark Linn-Baker, April Matthis, and Pete Simpson.

Can’t attend? Watch Lincoln in the Bardo online as a 360 video here; Subject: Objectas a 360 video here, and a trailer for objects in mirror AR closer than they appear here.

Upcoming

Graham Sack & Sensorium’s production of VR Hamlet premieres soon; check out www.sensorium.works for more.

www.sarahcameronhughes.com/new-media; www.sensorium.works

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Virtual Water Fountain

A few months before her death, my mother and I recorded an emotional conversation about water, illness, motherhood, and climate change denial. Projected onto a vapor screen atop a glowing, oracular pedestal within an intimate viewing space, her ethereal presence is a record of facing unthinkable loss.

Lisa Szolovits is a Brooklyn-based director and developer of new performance with a particular interest in the relationship between digital and physical presence. She has made performance and multimedia work in New York at 3LD Art & Technology Center, Brooklyn Museum, Dixon Place, Trans-Pecos, and Ars Nova, in Los Angeles with the Echo Theater Company and Circle X Theatre Co., and also in living rooms and on the internet. She holds an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) from Brooklyn College. 

Interview with Dianne Foster (Mom) | Fabricated with Peter Szolovits (Dad) | Developed in & supported by New Georges Special Residency program | Vapor screen based on a prototype by Chris Weisbart.

www.lisasz.com

Groups will be admitted every 12 minutes. The piece is 9 minutes long.

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Brecht Forensics, Part 1: Drinking Brecht

Brecht Forensics is a new work in development, based on DNA extracted from a hat that used to be the costume for soldier number 2 in the Berliner Ensemble performances of Mother Courage. The hat has never been washed, because Brecht wanted it to stink like the war, and so it retains the DNA of those who interacted with it and wore it since 1949. Brecht Forensics will be created out of the DNA itself, growing onstage inside of live bacteria.

Sister Sylvester makes work, often essayistic performances, using first hand research and found documents. Sister Sylvester invite disruption into both the performance and the process, and look for dissonance and difficulty in text, image, and sound.

Science advisors and collaborators: Dr. Michael Flanagan, Orkan Telhan, GenSpace
Percussion by Mike Perdue and Jude Traxler.

www.sistersylvester.org; www.genspace.org