Stroboscopic Performance Installation ZEE Premieres 10/28 At 3LD Art Center
Exhilarating and meditative, Kurt Hentschläger's stroboscopic, mind-altering ZEE pushes the boundaries of perception and creates an intense audiovisual journey - complete with hallucination. This is the latest performance installation by Hentschläger, known for constructing immersive environments that fuse sound, video, performance, and sensory overload. ZEE will have its New York premiere beginning October 28 at 3LD Art & Technology Center as the inaugural event of FuturePerfect, a new citywide performance, media & technology initiative.
Entering ZEE, the visitor is immediately absorbed in a vortex of dense, odorless fog that completely obscures the walls, floor and ceiling. Individuals freely roam this environment with the help of ropes, while flickering light filters through the haze, inducing spatial disorientation and visual "distortions". All the usual cues that contribute to depth perception-texture, shadow, size, perspective-are erased, returning each spectator, as it were, to a state of "tabula rasa", where one's perceptual framework is reset and then recalibrated. A unique soundscape creates an almost tactile aural field, intensifying the experience and shifting dynamically according to changes in the color, light and frequency.ZEE runs Wednesday - Friday, 5-9pm; Saturday & Sunday, noon-9pm. Performance begins on the hour and the half hour; approximately 20 minutes. Admission: $10, $5 students/artists at door or in advance at www.3ldnyc.org or 212-352-3101. 3LD Art & Technology Center is located at 80 Greenwich Street (at Rector Street -- accessible from the 1/R/W trains at Rector Street). For more information visit www.futureperfectfestival.org.
BIOS:
For over a decade, Kurt Hentschläger has been exploring ways of enhancing and intensifying perception. Wishing to expand beyond the two-dimensionality of video and film projection, and the limitations of adapting to a given architectural space, Hentschläger has constructed his own
alternative worlds through live performance, installations, multi-screen projections, and recently through environments that disorient through stroboscopic lighting and shifting color fields, intense soundscapes and sub-bass. From the large-scale audio-visual events produced as part of the Austrian duo Granular-Synthesis, to collaborations with French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and vocalist Diamanda Galas, to his solo immersive installations, Hentschläger finds ways of collapsing the gap between viewer and work, image and reality, inside and outside. Offering a compelling contemporary version of the aesthetic of the sublime, Hentschläger's work insists that we not merely "watch" and "listen" to images and sounds at a safe distance, but that they penetrate, confront, and overwhelm us by their sense of limitless power and complexity. ZEE was originally co-commissioned by OK-Center Linz, and Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh in 2008.
ZEE is the inaugural event of FuturePerfect, a new citywide performance, media & technology initiative. Its mission is to research and present hybrid performance practices, media forms, and artistic ideas that continue to emerge as computer technologies and electronic networks mature and become inseparable from contemporary culture. In particular focus is the future of live performance and related visual culture. Wayne Ashley is the founding director and organizer of FuturePerfect 2011, a performance festival and exhibition, is slated for New York City during
Spring 2011. He was formerly the Director of Arts in Multimedia at Brooklyn Academy Of Music.
Gantner, P.S.122 has opened the curtain for more than 2,100 performances, welcomed more than 100,000 visitors, and supported the work of more than 1,800 artists, performers, choreographers, playwrights, directors and designers. P.S.122 is dedicated to supporting and presenting artists whose work explores innovative form and content and challenges the traditional boundaries of dance, theatre, music, and performance, and continues its steadfast search for pioneering artists from a diversity of cultures, nations and beliefs. 3LD Art & Technology Center is a non-profit theater and media group focusing on large-scale experimental artwork. Their work has been seen in New York City at such venues as the Kitchen, La Mama, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, PS 122, and Signature Theatre Co. Since 1994, they have become a mainstay in the experimental arts community and have been performing downtown ever since. 3-Legged Dog (ELD) is the first producing arts group to sign a lease in the Liberty Zone and the first to rebuild downtown. A cultural anchor for the Greenwich Street Arts Corridor, the new center provides complete production and presentation facilities for emerging and established artists and organizations that create large-scale experimental works, many of which incorporate and create new tools and technologies.
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