Victory over the Screen

“the speed you see expressed if times two root teeth one put a coach of old boxes and sprinkles them with yellow sand yes … in the simplest case they collide into some that there pipe in an easy chair well, but if not? … all well’s it’s natural.””

— Victory Over The Sun (1913)

In the early days of what would become the Soviet Union (approx 1912-1924), a group of artists called the Russian Futurists tried imagine what meant to be human in the age of machines.  People at that time wondered whether people could get enough oxygen, moving as fast as they were suddenly able to move in cars and trains. They also felt that the jerky movements of pistons and the roaring sounds of tractors, would create a shift in human consciousness.  X-rays and telegraphs were also sources of fascination, there was a sense that the human as we knew it was being turned inside out and would never be the same.

Today, there is a similar sense that something may be changing, whether through associative internet clicks changing the wiring of our brains, or how big data and a host of new sensors are suddenly able to collect and transmit information about our patterns of behavior.

Where Russian Futurists ritualistic Opera, Victory Over The Sun (Победа над Cолнцем, 1913), the technology and performance group Kinetech Arts is experimenting with technology and performance as a way to both take advantage of new technologies and explore their meaning. In this series of blog posts, I will tell about my adventures at the Kinetech Arts Open Lab, during weekly exeperiments at the ODC dance commons, where artists of various types attempt to “hack” into new technologies  even as they explore questions about how these new technologies can change us.

Whoozh, thunk, ouside now, exhaust

Recognize, sliced into Female; sale, extra, cargo pants

Sources:

Photos from Kinetech Arts Open Lab

DOUGLAS, CHARLOTTE. “Victory Over the Sun.” Russian History, vol. 8, no. 1/2, 1981, pp. 69–89. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24652389.