Project title: Btw Lf & Dth - interFACING disAPPAERANCE

CHAOSMOSIS mAchInes. 28. September, 2019. Toronto

What you can expect:

A rice-flinging robot loosing and collecting time
An absurd Koan triptych interface emitting questions for you, involving Pepper's ghost
The memory of 1000 grains of rice/1000 first steps embedded in an archeological multi-media site
A banker reading Gao Xingjian's "Between Life and Death" in Mandarin while wearing a clown's nose
A red-dot data devouring prompter, navigating you through a time-scape

Creative Team

Antje Budde - creative research director

Gloria Gao - performer

Jianing Lu - volunteer

Montgomery C. Martin - collaborator

Don Sinclair - collaborator

Richard Windeyer - contributor of the data performance piece Red Dot Prompter 'gxjprompt'

1000

Gao

Makers

Repetition

The installation performance consists of 5.5 inter-faces, all interrelated.

1. Red Nose live reading in Mandarin - performed by Jianing Lu, concept/directed by Antje Budde

2. ||: CoHrAdOeSr :|| - robot repetition by Don Sinclair

3. between dead metaphors and digital life: a triptych inter/face - by Montgomery C. Martin

4. Red Dot Prompter - data performance by Richard Windeyer

5. 1000/1/5 – A consideration of 1000 first steps and the number 5 - by Antje Budde

5.5 QR code installation - by Antje Budde

Metaphor

Play

Time

Story

Project description

We built a walk-in interactive performance-installation, in which the users become performers/investigators/observers.

Our team walks/talks interested spectators through the arrangement, sharing stories of making, shaping and faking. Our multi-media installation is inspired by the Chinese-French multi-disciplinary artist Gao Xingjian and his play "Between Life and Death" (1991). French: "Au Bord de la Vie". Chinese: "生死界". Gao considers this play one of his Chan-Buddhist plays (in English often referred to as Zen play).

Installation users/participants can explore aspects of time, space, energy, numbers, absurdity (koan), and endless beginnings/vanishings when engaging with five distinct but intersecting interfaces, all of which play with aspects of disappearing and reappearing technology, visual histories, and sound. Grains of the grass species Oryza sativa or Oryza glaberrima, commonly known as rice, also feature prominently. Rice grains serve as a metaphorical reminder that life needs to be sustained, and that one grain of rice can be a starting point.

The questions we often ask start with "what if"? With this approach we question "as if" modes of storytelling/dramaturgy/interactive design and offer critical playful alternatives for open and curious minds and bodies.