Using google cardboard, “Augmented Reality for Bad Days” allows you to experience an alternate space which becomes a counterbalance to your mood or the quality of your day.  By inserting and adding contextual content to a sampled environment, this google cardboard interface deals with an additional layer of reality mediated by the content that often fills it.

Intergalactic Immigration Office was a project where I and other performers dressed as aliens and created a mock spaceship crash in Shenly Park.  We attempted to issue intergalactic IDs to the public by creating 3-D scans that became “alien” to the participants, and was an attempt to negotiate a larger sense of intergalactic community.  This project incorporated 3d scanning, performance, CNC routing, 3D modeling, custom software by Zach Rispoli and assistance from Claire H.

intergalacticimmigrationoffice

Ben
by Intergalactic Immigration Office
on Sketchfab

Ben
by Intergalactic Immigration Office
on Sketchfab

Pioneering new media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson created a complex and fully established false identity as a longterm performance work that fully enveloped her life.  “Roberta Breitmore” was both a physical transformation as well as an experiment in documents, actors, legal arrangements, and the very foundations of identity.  Beginning by emptying her wallet upon leaving the Dante Hotel in the desert,a new identity was forged with false certificates, wigs, make up and new character attributes. She later hired three doubles to impersonate her as clones, wearing the same costume.  They were revealed several years later, during an exorcism at the grave of Lucrezia Borgia.  The project was manifested soley in interactions that consume the every day life of anyone, though documented through a fictive identity.  Later, in the later 1990’s, she became a interactive artificially intelligent web persona in both Second Life and through other social media.

Ryan Gander’s Locked Room Scenario invites visiotors into schedule an appointment to enter a large warehouse.  Scraps of paper, anonymous actors,  detritus or suspicious objects in the surrounding neighborhood engage with the visitor in and around their time visiting.  They are told to find a room in the warehouse but they are unable to enter.  They instead enter a fictive space where a unique experience is designed for them which punctuates their visit in the form of directions, clues, red herrings, hired actors, or narrative traces that exploit the gap between entry and exit.

TateShots: Ryan Gander, Locked Room Scenario

Ryan McNamara’s MEƎM was an experiment in expanded dance and theatre as a Performa commission at the Kitchen, NYC.  The audience was seated in chairs outfitted with casters which were rolled around different pockets of the theatre in a choreographed fashion, where they were forced to be incredibly close to solo or more complex impromptu and amateurish dance performances.  In doing so it attempts to evoke and mimic the experience one has of the internet as a fragmented, simultaneous and endlessly shifting, linked performative experience.  The audience is forced into close proximity with a variety of choreographed dances that reference the online culture of a person performing for a camera, essentially a real time version of surfing through Youtube.

YouTube / Performa – via Iframely