3-A Gallery, CICA Museum
June 8 – 12, 2022
2022.06.08-12
Humanity: From Survival to Revival
Humanity: From Survival to Revival is an interactive/participatory cinematic game that merges with a live improvisational performance on the violin and or cello. This solo exhibition features artworks are made by the actual outlines of the live audiences and or artist’s faces along with the live improvisational performance which affects the real-time shaping of the digital human face sculpture (software programming: Martin Ritter). Some artworks are only digitally modified without live performance/interaction.
Overall, this work depicts the transformation of the dystopian state of humanity to utopianism in both the visual and sonic realms by inviting audience participation as part of the performance. Not only do audiences play the characters in a film-like context, but the collaborative efforts are meant to represent saving humanity through collective transformation, healing, and renewal. This work will culminate in a participatory experimental performance where audiences and live music improvisation synergistically drive the work’s visual storytelling framework. This performance is divided into three movements. The first movement depicts how humanity can survive a crisis through the participatory efforts of audience members. In this movement, audiences will play an interactive survival game. They will be invited to stand in front of the camera installation for a brief moment. When the audience member walks up to the camera, his or her face will be captured and projected onto the screen in the form of a facial outline and the sound will be simultaneously triggered. Each time a person walks in, it will trigger different sonic responses. Survival can relate to varying aspects of the human condition of the present time; for instance, it may involve survival from a trauma, survival from a mass psychosis, survival from depression, survival from illness, survival from global social chaos and crisis, etc. The first movement is a chaotic, solemn, idiosyncratic sonic maze.
In this movement, audiences can strive to resuscitate human lives and spirits. This will happen in two symbolic gestures. Audience members can either exhale a breath into the microphone, signifying giving CPR to another person to save a life. Audience members also can openly say anything that will save humanity or human life. Audiences will thus have the platform to freely share what they think will help the survival, dystopian time in the society. Generally, this may involve speaking a positive word to affirm the power of speech, imitating a scenario where people in crisis can lift other people’s spirits to help them stay alive. However, it is a platform for audiences to express their thoughts as well. These gestures further affect the video in an interactive way. When the members of the audience blow air or speak into the microphone, their facial outlines will gradually brighten and transform. To this effect, audience participation will have a gamifying aspect, whereby audiences are working together to save and transform humanity through the literal act of helping one another to survive.
While audience participation primarily drives the first movement, in the second movement, the audiences are seated but can still continue to personally engage with the work. The survivors of this game will be able to view their own facial images on the screen (not everyone will “survive,” since this will depend on the efforts of participants). In the second movement, the chaos gradually calms down, and the healing process begins, at which point my violin and cello performance will start and drive the visual and sonic narratives. In the third and final movement, humanity revives and imagines the peak utopian state. Each individual face will transform from an individualized self into a physical state of non-identification. The visual aspect will showcase the metamorphosis by creating a 3-D human sculpture (made with participants’ faces) via my musical sound. The underlying meaning of the work is loosely inspired by Eastern philosophies. What would be the visual and aural process of an individual transcending an egotistical self to a point of non-identification? Taming our individualized self is difficult in a competitive modern society since rewards are often associated with the development of the “ego.” At first, the narrative of “who I am” is of critical importance; however, as one moves through the progressive, evolutionary process, the participant will ultimately turn into a beacon of light without personal identification. In this final stage, the performance celebrates humanity at its peak utopian state. * Tentatively, this exhibition will feature the artwork made by live audience participants and performance from the “Humanity and Creative Arts Festival” (April 8th, 2022) at Miami University Regional (OH, USA) but this may change due to the uncertain situation.
