hopelab
Large
LargeArtist Statement
“Art is not a program but a promise.” (Derrida)
The most important thing to me is not art. It is finding the best way to be an effective human creature in service to the genius of this world. There is work to be done. To engage with art at a time such as this is possibly either completely self-indulgent, or completely necessary. This is the line that I walk. The moment art becomes unnecessary, I will walk away.
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The industry of destruction is so immense – day and night, in the forests, in the earth, in the oceans, in our bodies, in the radar systems of bats, in traditional burial grounds, in seeds – it can seem completely overwhelming. This is a trick. I do not think it is actually five hundred things that are wrong – I think it is one or two things working their way holographically through the world. I do not know what this thing is, but I know that art is the best medium for truth-finding and telling that I have found. For some reason, it has zero tolerance for falsehood. This is not to say false or meaningless art is not possible, only that it is not possible to lie. I have heard of chiefs who, in order to gain their position have to be wonderful dancers. In this way, dance acts as a kind of lie-detector test in the murky world of politics – because he either is, or is not a wonderful dancer, and there can be no charade.
Through my art practice, I approach a problem like a scientist or a detective – looking for the connections and clues that inevitably lead me back to the larger narrative we all find ourselves in. I never know what I will find. Truth is often the most surprising thing of all. It surprises us because we recognize it in a flash – but always in a place we didn’t think to look.
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The work comes as a response to an urgent letter sent off a cliff. By dropping it off the edge it functions as an offering, and for every offering there is a response-offering. It is not unlike prayer, which also involves shipping our most intimate and fragile cargo to an unverified address. “And like those who rise refreshed from prayers, their prayers were answered. For the purpose of the prayer was not, finally, to bring about intercession in the material world, but to lay down, for the time of the prayer, one’s confusion and rage and sorrow at one’s own powerlessness. So the purpose of [art] is not to fix the social fabric, not to incite the less perceptive to wake up and smell the coffee, not to preach to the converted about the delights (or the burdens) of a middle-class life. The purpose of the theatre, like magic, like religion – those three harness mates – is to inspire cleansing awe.” (Mamet)
If, in the process, some fixing of the social fabric takes place, or you or I wake up and smell the coffee in a whole new way – okay. It is not completely unlikely. I don’t know what will happen – and this is the very essence of performance and indeed of everyday existence. To engage in it with attention towards the hidden genius has a tendency to reveal, heal and transform.
Hopelab
Writer/choreographer/performer: Erin Robinsong
Composer/engineer: Manjinder Benning
Digital landscape: Justin Love, Jimmy Olson
A bare white mountain. A sweet blizzard plays. A strange tale begins.
Once there were creatures called homo sapiens. They evolved in two directions. They become part beast and part computer. On the verge of forgetting the animal in them they made the world unlivable for anything except wireless wires and tiny hard drives.
An animated landscape gathers and swirls. A mountain pulls away like a ship. The creature who lives inside stands before us. Silver horns unfurl from her head. A motherboard grows in her white fur. Music begins.
Hopelab is a story told by the last living creature on earth, a strange and lovely hybrid of cyborg and bighorn sheep. She lives in a future animated by music that was written a long time ago. She knows that when the music ends, she will disappear.
She inhabits a digital world at once rugged and virtual. The blizzard reveals itself to be composed of text. The tiny, skittering letters move out across the landscape like a flock of molecules, and configure themselves in formation after formation. In their original configuration, the swirling letters spell the story we have entered, and in this way the written story quite literally becomes the world it weaves.
The music functions as an auditory representation of the concept of destiny, or destination. If the world is composed of sound and vibration, then we are always living out the reverberations of what has come before. How then, are we to animate what animates us? Using 3-dimensional accelerometers strapped to the body, our heroine is literally able to bend the music and alter the landscape, thereby changing what was written.
But the music is running out…
Hopelab turns then from an eerie futuristic fairytale, narrated by what sounds like a child, into a laboratory that opens up between the future and the audience in the present. Here the audience is offered the age-old technology of making a very crucial wish, that if executed hard and strongly enough, might literally alter the score…
Hope is the technology.
LINKS:
www.mistic.ece.uvic.ca (Music Intelligence & Sound Technology Interdisciplinary Centre)
www.karmetik.com
www.navigammatron.org
