Claudia Hart : The Alices (Walking), 201 – FESCH.TV

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The Alices (Walking)
Film by Artur Ratton

„Alices (Walking)“ is a sculptural fashion show and opera created and directed by Claudia Hart in collaboration with composer, musician and software designer Edmund Campion.

Costumes by Claudia Hart with Julie Robinson who also did production.

Alices App augmented-reality application by Claudia Hart.

Animated text by Claudia Hart as spun by spinabook.com/ designed by Alon Zouaretz.

The Alices:
#1: Claudia Hart
#2: Joon Lee
#3: Adrian Saich
#4: Julie Robinson
#5: Nayland Blake

Onstage audience: Doo-eun Choi, Kathleen Flood, Carla Gannis, Holly Hager Jane Harris, Mostafa Heddaya, Tiffany Holmes, Tom McGlynn, Jean Marie Offenbacher, Justin Petropoulos, Christopher Phillips, Ellen Sandor, Susan Silas, Elissa Tenny.

The performance was produced by:
EYEBEAM Art+Technology Center
The Moving Image Art Fair
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The Center for New Music and Audio Technology, University of California, Berkeley

Sponsored by:
BML-Blackbird Theatrical Services
KOREA SOJU HWAYO, INC.
Yamaha Pianos

The Alices Walking, A film by Artur Ratton, 2014, 15 minutes-13 seconds.
Directed by Artur Ratton; Cameras: Artur Ratton, Rui Hu, Lilka Hara; Editor: Artur Ratton; special thanks: Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, Pixel Playground. Filmed at Eyebeam, March 8, 2014 where it was presented as part of the Moving Image Art Fair.

The music and the soundtrack was by Edmund Campion, produced with support from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies with Jeff Lubow, and with Yotam Mann at Eyebeam, NYC.

Costumes by Claudia Hart with Julie Robinson who also did production
Alices App augmented-reality application designed by Claudia Hart.
Animated text by Claudia Hart as spun by spinabook.com/ designed by Alon Zouaretz.

Claudia Hart
The Alices Walking, 2014
A Sculptural Opera and Fashion Show

Mashing augmented reality, sculpture, cocktails and opera, The Alices (Walking) is an experimental fashion show about spectacle, looking and looking at others looking. It portrays a culture so addicted to the devices of high technology that it can only bear a world that is filtered through them.

Using the words of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a starting point, Hart expands the notion of madness to a live computational network. Steeped in the clichés of data-driven, punk and Romantic aesthetics, the live production is interactive and features five performers wearing “website dresses”.

Crafted from patterned fabrics designed by Hart, the dresses are embedded with visual content that can be read with a networked camera. During the performance, select audience members are invited to launch an augmented-reality application on phones and tablets, which recognize the inscribed patterns. “While the performance investigates breakdowns between the natural and the technological, it is also conceived as a means to create new experiences of human-computer interaction,” says Hart..

The Alices (Walking), crafts an Alice for our time with characters clothed in a cyborgian identity, one welded to the realm of smartphone devices. It is a system vulnerable to glitches and decay, as Carroll’s original narrative is spun into text graphics that evoke pop-up banner ads and trashy web design. The novel’s text evolves into animations of strobing concrete poetry. Phrases from the novel also form the basis for a libretto, sung and recorded by Claudia Hart with countertenor vocalist Mikey McParlane.

Edmund Campion’s score for the performance treats and adapts this libretto electronically. As each Alice on the runway is plugged into the system, a new code tree is activated. Tags and patterns of animated signage change, signaling the spaces of cloning, duplication, mutation and transformation. Staging an irrational cycle of haptic communication between the human and the machine, Hart’s production ultimately channels death, rebirth, and an ambivalent desire for eternal life.

This performance of The Alices (Walking) is part of a larger series of augmented reality sculptures, fabrics and live multimedia events by Claudia Hart. Still in development, this recent body of work is the subject of her third solo exhibition at bitforms gallery, opening May 1 in New York. Presently an Honorary Fellow at Eyebeam, Hart is a professor of Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Courtesy of Claudia Hart.

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