Visual effects made in Quartz Composer. Audio built in Audacity 2.

The Cheshire Cat Strikes Again

Stop the Greed

Derive through 68

Head to Head

Solidarity

Strike

Reflected Action

Strike 1

Regardless of what they are doing I think the series captures the tone of the Oakland Police Department quite well. Dystopian thugs hellbent or terrorizing the populace through intimidation and violence.

Below are some stills from the video.

What is the connection between casually pepper spraying cop and the woman who assaulted a fellow human during a crazed shopping spree the day after Thanksgiving? Perhaps there is no connection and they just happened to use the same tool. Or perhaps they are both a manifestation of the same disregard for human welfare and show how fundamentally corrupt the moral structure of our culture has become. How else can Fox News commentators claim that such a weapon is “essentially a food product?” Of course when we enter the moral universe where pizza is a vegetable and corporations are humans all bets are off.

As an artist I have honestly been stunned by these events. Artistically stunned. The utter horror I have witnessed as violent disregard for human well being is seen as the legitimate response to people asking for a corrupted system to be fixed has made me at times physically ill. The violence here in the US is nowhere near the violence in Egypt, yet, the Egyptians are taking their cue from us in firing on civilians. These sequences of events shock me. The shock I am feeling is in large part making it impossible to create. As such it is forcing me to confront the role of the artist in times of upheaval.

Picasso’s Guernica is an amazing depiction of the horrors of war. What is the equivalent work for our time? In a world so heavily saturated by consumerist thinking is it possible to create a work that can stand in critique of that culture and its resulting violence without falling victim to recouperation itself? Perhaps Banksy and his ilk are the only ones. I have seen a number of new Banksy, or Banksy derived, works cropping up all over my Oakland neighborhood recently. For a cultural battle being waged in the streets, perhaps its truest artistic form must manifest in those very streets.

Or is it the rough edges of citizen journalism? In a world where moral and ethical obligations are not even considered in the dominant cultural narrative why should refined aesthetics have center stage? The rough unedited livestream documentary is the film. Not whatever reified and safely packaged docutainment Michael Moore shoves out of his studio in a year or two. The poets are on Twitter. The performance artists are hurling teargas canisters back at the lines of riot cops.

I listen to the narratives on twitter and the theater world appears functionally unaffected by the world around it. For a medium that lays claim to immediacy and the visceral experience, there is no larger conversation happening about how theater can engage this world. Sure there is the isolated individual. There is even a petition on line for #occupyBroadway doing free performances in Times Square. But how will that challenge the system? How will that stand against the dominant modes of power and control? How is that dangerous?

Merely doing a play about characters that embody the 99% misses the point. Willy Loman has nothing to do with the status quo problems. He is a product of mid-century American Capitalism. Sure it shares themes with now but we have moved past that. To do that play is to speak to the world before September 17th, 2011 when tents were set up in Liberty Park. We are on the verge of war. The powers that be have declared war in their violent repression of peaceful protestors. Now we see who will stand up.

Antigone is a play that speaks to now. The lone voice standing up for what is right against the entire force of the State apparatus. A friend of mine is currently working on a stage adaptation of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. But when we were talking about it, during the November 2nd General Strike, he mentioned that Little Brother was a post-9/11 story and that Occupy Wall Street has shifted the narrative into the next phase. Even a play that has not been finished yet is already outdated.

Theater is alive not because it is live. Peter Brooks wrote eloquently on the deadly nature of much that passes for theater. Theater is alive only when it connects directly with the world around it. When it plugs into the larger cultural stream and manifests, in physical form, our subconscious and our struggles. The Brecht and Weill debut of The Mahagonny Song Spiel caused riots in the streets. That is theater that is alive.

We do not need any more dead plays. Willy Loman is the champion for those who have not yet woken up to the radical inequalities this world faces. Willy Loman embodies the underbelly of an America we long ago sold to the highest bidder. Willy Loman died with the repeal of Glass-Steagal. Willy Loman died with Citizen’s United.

Antigone refuses to die. Antigone lives wherever the just are repressed. Antigone speaks truth to power wherever the marginalized have their voices taken from them. Antigone stands against the State whenever the State stands against its people. Antigone refuses recouperation into the dominant narrative. Antigone lives another day to chant “We don’t die/We Multiply/Hella hella Occupy.”

The use of fluorescents was obvious once I made it but my reasoning behind their use in that piece was a little different than “I want cold and mechanical.” If you look at the color spectrum of an incandescent light it is a gentle wave with peaks in the amber range and valleys in the cyan, but soft and gentle slopes define the nature of the light emitted from those sources. Fluorescent light is something else entirely. Like other discharge sources the wave form of the light spectrum is comprised of sharp 90 degree peaks and valleys as well as violent spikes in certain sections of the visible spectrum.

It was this digital quality that I was interested in. And while the fluorescent is an explicit example of digital light, behind the scenes it is all digital. With the exception of the most primitive lighting systems every light used in live performance is controlled by a computer. We see intensity values in the human friendly 0-100% range but this is just for ease of readout displays. The computer sends 0-255 hex values across a digital network to dimmers which convert those values into percentages of a 10v sine wave that gets chopped at various points depending upon the value received. map(0, 255, 0, 10); map(0, 10, 0, 100);

But light, especially incandescent light, is intensely analog. Anyone who has tried to do a zero count blackout and been frustrated when a zero count really takes about 0.5 seconds to reach complete darkness knows this. The problem is made worse dealing with larger lamps like a 5K where a blackout can take upwards of ten seconds.

Working in this digital medium for a while now I have seen points of interest come and go. I will find myself obsessed with color for months or years on end and then spend long periods of time only working with monochromatic palettes. I will explore texture or angle or the very quality of light itself in similar fad like ways. Yet two currents of aesthetic inquiry remain constant in my work. One is an interest in natural and organic forms and movements. The other, and deeply related to the first, is an inquiry into random chance and chaotic events.

Light provides ample opportunity to explore both of these ideas. Most digital lighting control is sufficiently sophisticated to get decent random effects tried out and there is as much or more technology available to explore ideas of organic forms.

At the same time there are distinct limitations. The scale of many of the ideas I want to try are cost prohibitive in the lighting realm, certainly on my own meager budget. While I can try out a handful of ideas on various shows, most shows I design do not lend themselves to the kinds of explorations that I am truly interested in. Thus it becomes a game of waiting for that one show to test that one idea.

Enter the world of computer graphics. It only takes a couple minutes to copy the code for John Conway’s Game of Life. From there, myriad parameters can be explored and manipulated for interesting results. Even the largest lighting rig does not contain the complexity to look at emergent forms and patterns in chaos at any scale of interest. Yet just a few lines of code can do all that and more.

The world we live in is technologic and interconnected. For art to truly capture the spirit of the world it must engage directly with that reality. Embracing and exploring our increasingly digital lives is both obvious and obscure. It is easy to put a cell phone on stage, or build a sculpture out of used computer parts, or paint with pixels. But doing that in such a way that furthers our understanding of our own humanity is the difficult task.

With the addition of a single color and a slight blur effect the Game of Life evolves from blinky computer simulation, to lifelike organic drama. It is turning a microscope on bits and capturing their millisecond of life. The line between the analog nature of life and the digital nature of computers is thin if not outright illusory. The shifting pixels on the screen become a life and death battle for supremacy. Survival of the fittest. Light and dark become life and death.

Having been in the business of creating fantasy worlds my entire adult life, I never would have thought that moving on to such a small stage would open up so many possibilities.