Oracle

From GizmoGarden

[edit] abstract

A collabrative installation piece. A 250 Kv Tesla coil charged a 3' evacuated nitrogen lightning chamber. The lightning bolts/streamers would run from one end of the tube and activate photo-sensors at the other end of the tube. The bolts were affected by electromagnetic coils. The coils were charged by an apmplifier fed by a microphone. A French Horn player played music which "invoked" the oracle. The light sensors actived "random" snippets of verse projected on the screen along with video segments. The viewer would be given a message from the Oracle.

[edit] reviews

Bill Wolter Daily Lobo

Creative collaborations can be messy business as strong-minded artists butt heads with their uncompromising ideologies. But there were no conflicts of egomania in Oracle by Design, the collaborative effort of Greg Perry, Justine Flynn and Aaron Davidson, which I witnessed last Friday at the ARC gallery.

The performance was an effervescent multi-media milieu leading into a powerful statement on contemporary themes that included technology's interaction with humans, social upheaval and a global world.

The effectiveness of this performance might have been due to the mix of three different disciplines: music, video and computers. When create people are pushed outside their specialized comfort zones, great things can happen.

Technology usually is associated with homogenization and mass production of identical items. But in this show, the composition of the performance used technology to advantage of creativity, producing an ever-changing flux of prophetic sentences and narrative video clips. To really grasp the impact of this project, it helps to realize how all the computers, laser discs, word banks and musical interments are linked together. So here it goes. Read carefully:

Ideally, it all starts with sound. Sound created by French horns, chimes, gongs and other instruments interact with arcs of electricity, altering the flow of the electricity, which is generated by Tesla coils and vacuum tubes. This electricity is needed for divination - to give out oracles, setting the video and words in motion.

The musicians have a special place in this creative process. "The French horn and the music become the snake charmer, the element that elicits, that is trying to elicit messages from the oracle," Davidson says. "Musicians have always had this legacy of summoning the gods."

Once the sound has interacted with the electricity, the human element has entered, and the questions are posed. Now it is up to the complicated computer programs linked to text and video to answer the call of the sound. The electricity in the vacuum tubes, altered by sound, triggers photoelectric cells that are linked to word banks. the text programmed into the data base is derived from prophetic sources such as the Bible's Book of Revelations. These words are then organized.

"Text is generated from a program, which draws words related to their parts of speech. It crates sentences by properly sequencing parts of speech," Davidson says.

While the resulting sentences are projected on the wall, certain words trigger video material stored in laser discs. A 'narrative video stream' is correlated with the appropriate word that triggers it. All the while, the musician is still playing, reacting to all these images and words.

Here is the most interesting part: The creative process of this piece is an interactive loop. The musician plays, causing the electric oracle, by design, to spit out esoteric messages indeterminately. Then, the video and the prophetic sentences appear, thus influencing how the musician plays. As a result, the human element and the technological element have consumed one another, meeting each other on a near equal symbiotic plane. Each video scene tells a story: pictures of Tibetan culture, campus scenes of violence from the 1992 UNM Persian Gulf War protests, black and white movies of American Indian ceremonies and sci-fi images from the depths of the Los Alamos laboratories. All these and more are included in the 30-minute performance.

Too much of what is considered art today is removed from its social context, either by length of years or by stale idioms. Several of the video clips in this piece make this collaboration socially relevant to the viewer's place in New Mexico and in the world. By combining video, purple electricity, music and words, this collaboration has created fresh idioms of expression.

For future performance dates, call the ARC Gallery at 842-8016.