A collaborative performance with 3D animations, text, live electronics & guitar, dance
2018, 50mins
Alysse Stepanian: concept, research, text, 3D animations, performance
Philip Mantione: concept, music and sound design, live electronics and guitar
Mallory Fabian: dance, choreography
PERFORMANCES:
Coaxial Arts Foundation: Workshop performance – Downtown, Los Angeles, September 15, 2018
Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques Festival: Work-in-progress presentation – Marseille, France, November 9, 2018
This work will be expanded and further developed for presentations in 2019.
#MemoryoftheUniverse | Bayesian Poisoning
Long-time collaborators, Alysse Stepanian and Philip Mantione perform together in a new work that incorporates Mantione’s music, Stepanian’s #MemoryoftheUniverse series of 3D animations and her critical analysis of American culture and politics. Choreographer and dancer, Mallory Fabian, whose work has been described as “very physical, intrusive and confrontational” (LA Dance Chronicle), adds a powerful voice to this quirky hybrid performance that fuses art and poetry with the factual language of history.
Mantione’s music includes live synth and processed guitar, prerecorded electronics and samples of vocalist Jan Opalach. He uses found text culled from examples of Bayesian Poisoning, an email spammer technique that undermines spam filtering by inserting nonsensical and often poetic paragraphs in the body of an email. The live sound is intertwined with the soundtracks from Stepanian’s 3D animations, in which a mythopoeic cowwoman that embodies the memory of the universe, surveys the destructive human legacy from a posthuman world. Stepanian performs with poetic and political messages juxtaposed with personal memes that dance on the screen to the rhythm of Mantione’s music.
This performance alludes to the amorphousness of truth, to selective memory in constructing historical narratives, and suggests an optimism that something positive can emerge from the chaos and the often-malevolent mien of humanity.
images from work-in-progress presentation at the 31st festival of Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques At Les Plateaux, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, France (November 9, 2018)
(Closeup Photos by Pierre Carrelet, others by friends – click to enlarge)
images from coaxial arts foundation workshop performance, Los Angeles (Sept 15, 2018)
(Photos by Robert Bauer – click to enlarge)
