LAND performance projects

Andrew Marcus and John D. MItchell

2006-2008

Description

LAND Performance Project demonstrates an approach to mediation of the biological and technological in performance. Motion detection systems are infrastructural, serving dispersion of the body as psychic projection within its spatial container. The nature of interactivity is examined in its capacity to express issues of performed embodiment; the simultaneous reception and transmission of sensed data as a language of perpetual impermanence. Interactivity implies integration: The unification and interchangeability of the subject and field, the body and space, is the conceptual endpoint.

The artists have designed and built a system which assimilates the individual within the ensemble and the ensemble or “community” within the environment. The performers build a psychological and physical space on the strength of their ability to listen; to themselves to each other and to the environment, which contains them. The environment is alive with a programmed intelligence, and has the ability to respond to the performers’ actions. In this work the performers do not impose themselves on each other or on the space they occupy; they are each an essential component of a unified field; container and contents seek to become indistinguishable.

The body of the performer is integrated into an intelligent space via a new collective: body/mind, sensing apparatus and computational mind. The mind of the performer is both revealed and transformed by a space which is living and responsive but finally deterministic in its limitations. Ultimately, it is the limit of the body that is in question.

LAND performance projects video

low land 2006 performance video