blake carrington art     projects:     performance, installation, print     video/sound work for screen     collaborative:     avalanche collective     urban video project     mail     bio     cv  

  009 You Would Do As Well...  

You Would Do As Well Never Moving From Here, an audiovisual performance for voice and laptop, is an investigation in perceptual detachment in an expanded time and space. The work’s central element is a single phrase sung by a group of vocalists, which is recorded and stretched to 60 times its original length. These grains of audio are then manipulated, resulting in sounds that are at times completely detached from the source recording. Each performance is improvised according to a pre-arranged structure, which is reinforced by projected imagery of a mountain expedition trapped in a blizzard.

The central phrase is taken from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. In the novel, the traveler Marco Polo speaks with the aging Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, describing each of the cities of the Khan’s kingdom. Kublai, vexed by Marco’s fantastic descriptions of impossible spaces, responds, “My gaze is that of a man meditating, lost in thought --- I admit it. But yours? You cross archipelagos, tundras, mountain ranges. You would do as well never moving from here.”

Click here to view documentation clip.

-posted Thursday May 8, 2008-

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