ArtCast in association with moves08, Week 4
 Released 1st May 2008
The final podcasti in this series, released to coincide with moves08, takes a more descriptive or observational approach to the theme, addressing both verbal and visual approaches to commentary and the act of description, in one audio and two contrasting video pieces. Image: still from Human Cosmic by Jessica Curry & Monica Fernandez. Image credit: Monica Fernandez |
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Programme:
Audio Podcast:
First Person Theatre: Figurehead (8 min 38 sec)
Video Podcast:
Visakh Menon: A short social commentary on dancing in Second Life (3 min 30 sec)
Jessica Curry & Monica Fernandez: HUMAN COSMIC (5 min 45 sec)
Further information:
Audio Podcast:
First Person Theatre is a company of theatre makers and sound artists who use portable mp3 players and headphones to create interactive theatrical forms. Each participant experiencing a First Person Theatre work hears a voice through headphones and receives a set of instructions, suggestions and encouragements. Headphones guide participants on their own personal journeys through a place or space, prompting encounters with others. Participants receive a series of simple actions to perform, and perhaps words to say. The headphones also provide a narrator, an internal monologue, and an immersive sound environment. Listening through headphones gives participants a montage of sound, music and song. Any audience in a First Person Theatre work or event is active, physically, emotionally and sensorially. All participants are simultaneously each other's audience and each other's performers. First Person Theatre see participants as collaborators, creating worlds, environments, stories and journeys.
The solo performance “Figurehead” is for one person on a free-standing park bench, anywhere. First Person Theatre's compositions and recordings have been developed to suggest and infer, rather than impose images and sensations, allowing opportunity for participants to activate their perceptions and imaginations.
Video podcast:
In this podcast, Visakh Menon's “A short social commentary on dancing in Second Life” has been paired with Jessica Curry and Monica Fernandez's “HUMAN COSMIC”
Part machinima, part documentary, “A short social commentary on dancing in Second Life” aims to give a glimpse at the mechanical nature of our virtuali lives. Narrated from the point of view of the artists avatari on second life, a conceded old man, this short video critiques the practise of using dance pods on Second life as a means to earn linden dollars. Complaining about the lack of choreography and the time wasted, the narrator here views the dancing with contempt and offers a smattering of the expected advice. The act of a useri patiently sitting at his computer while watching his virtual avatar dance and earn money when viewed from an real world perspective, is a contrasting physical activity which requires further discussion.
As a keen observer of life, Visakh Menon's work focuses on the rhythms and hues of our everyday existence. In its design and display the short experimental videos in Visakh's projects are born of considered form, content, and concept with the human nature and its mundane rituals as its basis. Its in the mundane that he finds beauty and the closer one looks at our everyday actions both in the real world and the virtual worlds we occupy, a seemingly complex array of abstract patterns emerge from those. By turning the camera onto these sparingly noticeable human actions Visakh hopes to engage the viewer by providing a mirrori of self awareness.
Visakh Menon was born and raised in India and moved to the USA a few years back. He is a graduate from the MFA graphic design program at the Maryland Institute College of Art . Currently he splits his time between working as a graphic designer and creating video / interactive art. Visit his website at www.vmenon.com
HUMAN COSMIC was made by digitali artist Monica Fernandez and composer Jessica Curry.
Jessica Curry is a composer, sound and installation artist. Her works take many forms including performance, radio, video, installation and public art. As a classically trained composer, her work fuses traditional instrumentation with innovative applications of digital technology, and often enables people to perceive everyday situations, sounds and objects in a new way. For more about Jessica Curry visit her website: www.jessicacurry.co.uk
Without looking for explanation or judgment, Monica Fernandez frequently wonders and feels intrigued by people’s behaviour, habits, dysfunctionalities, excesses, obsessions and disorders. She observes and artistically re-interprets these mundane scenes, where the ordinary becomes the extraordinary and the grotesque and the beauty might hug each other.
HUMAN COSMIC is an exploration of the possible effects of zero gravity on living creatures. The notions of elasticity and plasticity invite the audience to get lost in the human universe and re-interpret the structures of our bodies. The film was made in conjunction with Locostandu Dance Company and features dancer Peter Shenton.
