Archive
M:ST 2 Artists
TRILOBITES TRANSFORMED TO WOOD LICE
(INSIDE EQUALS OUTSIDE)
/ Chad Van Gaalen (Calgary,
AB)
LOCATION: Truck Gallery
April 2 / 2003
8:00 PM (Piano available
for interaction until April 17th)
Since its invention
some three hundred years ago, the piano has acquired a thick, layered coat
of dusty, crusty social meanings. For many, a piano is an intimidating
authority figure, a heavy rulebook, a long list of rights and wrongs covering
theory, practice, and posture. Chad Van Gaalen hopes to imbue the piano
with vitality and freshness by presenting a modern upright he has gutted
and reconstructed according to his own idiosyncratic vision and whims.
He believes that the piano’s most compelling feature is its responsiveness
to the player’s touch, and has chosen to heighten viewers’ awareness of
this observation by linking the keys to a cacophony of unexpected sounds.
The removal of the piano’s exoskeleton, revealing its modified and decorated
mechanisms will also provide a visual collateral to its acoustic effect.
In addition to making his piano available for public interaction for the
duration of the festival, Van Gaalen will demonstrate his own approach
to the instrument in an MST opening night performance.
Chad Van Gaalen is a soft-bodied animal with a columnar gastrovascular cavity partially split inside and outside usually by six tissue septa. Chads gastrovascular cavity communicates with the outside world by means of a central gullet opening located below his chin-ee chin chin. There are 2003 fleshy tentacles around his mouth. Everyone in Chads family has this same basic body plan, despite their different modes of life.
LOOKOUT
/ otiose (London, UK)
LOCATION: Olympic Plaza
April 12–16 / 2003
11:00 AM – 4:00 PM
(DAILY)
Lookout is intended
to be a site-specific forum for dialogue and observation, an opportunity
to question and investigate how public space is marked and shaped by different
interests and histories. A temporary enclosure in a pedestrian square provides
the site for interaction between the artist and interested publics as they
engage with materials describing the area in which the project is situated.
The materials, including tourist information, maps, and civic planning
documents, serve as landmarks, perpetually annotated by private and possibly
contradictory observations. Through this process, and the use of dictation
machines, a audio-based document, cumulatively marked by five days of different
voices, is generated and continuously played back, providing the project
with an immediate and accessible audio history. Summaries and key phrases
from each conversation, in agreement with the participants, are written
directly onto the found texts on a notice board.
The project concludes with
no final or definite text. The cumulative documentation (audio tapes and
annotated texts) rather than being an in-depth description of the actual
site, are the wake of live process drawing upon memory, actuality and metaphor
in the act of describing and defining what public space has been, is, and
could be.
Working under the name of otiose, John Dummett has been active in the field of 'live art' since 1997, with work shown at the National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), the Root festival (Hull), YYZ Artists Outlet (Toronto) and recently at the Spaces Gallery (Cleveland, USA). He lives in London, England.
Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival Society
P.O. Box 22056 Bankers Hall R.P.O, Calgary, AB CA T2P 5G7
PH. 403.837.6678 email: info@mstfestival.org