Friday, November 19, 2010

Artist Lecture #1 - Mark Tribe

Mark Tribe is a digital media artist who has had many exhibitions over the years.  He talked about a theory that while human beings are Homo sapiens, they are also Homo performans.  His idea is that people are self performing animals, and that we as a species perform in everyday life (such as an audience staying quiet and applauding at the right moment.)  He said that in this way, we will reveal ourselves to ourselves.  The first one of his projects that he talked about was called Carpark.  This was a performance art as well as a sort of social experiment. He and two other artists collaborated to create this performance, in which he organized all the cars in a university parking lot to park in different sections based on their color.  The performance was a media spectacle, and it showed the power of a performance as art.
Tribe also talked about protest as a public performance of politics.  he had a project called the Dystopia Files, which was a compilation of footage from protests and the police actions against the protestors.  The video was projected from inside a room onto a frosted glass door.  The video could only partly be seen, and the footage was backwards.  Once the door was opened, a motion sensor was activated and the lights would go on as the projector turned off.  Inside the rooms, there were cabinets with the names of different protest groups written on the outside of each drawer.  All of these drawers were locked.
There were a few other projects that Tribe talked about, and each had their own uniqueness about them.  I enjoyed each of his projects because they were so innovative, and were unlike traditional art forms.  His works were very creative and inspiring, and I enjoyed encountering them.

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