It's Show Time

Am I ready yet?

Finally the expected moment when breaking a leg is the least of your worries, it is in fact a welcome omen!

I decided to post a slideshow, given that there are many pictures of different moments, from the preparation before the show to pictures showing the actual marionette, since many people believed that it was a pre-made video agains which the performance took place.

As I had discussed with my mentor Deborah Aschheim, this was going to be an experiment to see if the concept worked. The concept being that The Creator represented, among other things, an omnipresence that we took for granted, whose reality was ignored. The pervasive surveillance and control that is now an accepted state in the life of so many people who fail to question some very basic assumptions.

This presence whose control was embodied by the environment itself could become simply entertainment, a surface to which we have become fully accustomed and to which we in fact give our compliance voluntarily.

So perhaps conceptually the experiment worked, since as a "show" it was considered fascinating by most of the audience I had a chance to speak with. But I think that I would like to eventually construct a full scale marionette as originally planned (5 mts. tall). I am more interested in telling a compelling story that can directly connect with the stored archetypes that we carry in our brains and , because of scale and the amazement associated with seeing something so out of the ordinary, our defenses are suspended, letting the images and sounds seep undetected into our psyche.

Later on, perhaps,we will encounter in our dreams or nightmares, or worse in our waking reality, images,facts and ideas that evoke that inexplicable and uncanny feeling of the loss of our mythical innocence. Optimistically I would hope that this would result in recognizing like Pink Floyd says "the writing on the wall".

The Creator was born in Germany as a concept, or rather as a nightmare that my wife Lorena had. As artists we become attached to the object of our creation, even if it represents something as terrible as to what a post-apocalyptic scenario suggests. We treat the creator and the creature with loving care and feel both awe and compassion for them, or perhaps for what they represent. A loss of our own humanity.

It is fitting, and part of the mystery of our lives that we simply accept things as they happen. The performance took place in Linz, of all places. Linz, the birthplace of Hitler bears everywhere you turn and in spite of the efforts to conceal it, an atmosphere of sadness which even the clowns and street performers and musicians who entertain tourists and passerby s fail to diffuse. At our graduation ceremony, Virgil Wong had invited a pair of these street musicians to perform for us. It was interesting to see how the director of the Institute felt so uncomfortable as they sang beautiful but obviously sorry laden songs filled with nostalgia for what is not, sang in a language which nobody spoke but which everyone understood.

Re Cycle beneath the wheel

The Creator stage in progress

People, myself included, talk about reducing our "carbon footprint", a term about to disappear from overexposure the same way any word repeated over and over loses its meaning as it is replaced by noise. At the same time we blog about it, consuming terawatts of carbon producing power exacerbated by the inefficiency of bloated operating systems, the apparently innocuous white screen of Google, by the energy consumed by the avatars in virtual worlds that need to be kept virtually alive by the server nodes and the computers around the world that hum incessantly without any hope of ever being silent.

Our self-made society has plugged a cannula into our collective vein, to transfuse itself into the mind of the machine, which like a life support system we cannot disconnect, or at least we think we can't, that is, until the plug is pulled by the system itself when no longer needs any more information, other than the one it itself generates.

WW II direct interhuman syringe.

That is the story of The Creator with which we are trying to portray, using puppetry as a transference medium, the stark reminder of our self-dependency. Who or what controls who or what?

On to the practicum.

Since I detest plastic and the many woes and sickness that has come as a result of its indiscriminate use, I try to target it as a primary candidate for recycling, which is just a palliative approach to the real problem. In any case, I took the vacuformed package of the "energy saving" bulbs that we use nowadays, and just as I was about to send it into its recyling path, I noticed a form which reminded me of ancient alchemical apparatuses which I needed to create for the robotic-marionette stage. So here is the process:






The background, built over the "hardware cloth" is semi-translucent, with the most translucent parts being the "genetic" containers which will transmute common information into a panacea.

A digital projector, fed with data generated imagery will fill up the vessels as well as create the fluid digital environment where the Creator lives.


Here is the very first test as seen from behind, where I am trying unsuccessfully to line up, scale and correct the angle distortion. As you can see I missed the mark by a few centimeters. I am now in the process of positioning the elements as close as I can to the target, given the limitations of inexact everything.