This project is a programmed video installation that I co-created and directed in 2012 for the Laguna Museum of Art, in collaboration with visual artist Antoinette LaFarge.  The installation runs on a semi-randomized cycle over 70 minutes; and together with an associated live performance, it models the problematic nature of collective memory as a bulwark against ideological corruption. For this reason, it never runs the same way twice.

On opening night, the actor seen in these video stills gave a live performance as a nameless government functionary while interacting with a video environment. When he was done, the automated installation was triggered to constantly assemble and reassembled videotaped fragments of his monologue into a montage with still images drawn from a large library. As time passes, these assemblages become less and less coherent and more and more degraded, signaling a breakdown in the personality of the government functionary. After 70 minutes, the installation resets and begins again.

We are constantly amazed at how the program is capable of throwing up images of  dramatic potency and aesthetic interest at any point in the cycle. Of various images grabbed at random intervals, here are a few culled from attempts to document the project. You can clearly see the degradation over time in these images, and how this is not simply a question of things becoming less distinct or confused. Instead, it actually creates a new clarity that speaks about the theme and content of the piece: moral corruption and the subsequent loss of one’s humanity.

Galileo in America is an original theatrical work that I’d been working on intermittently for about eight years when it finally premiered in 2012 at the Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL) at UC Irvine. It started out as a project with a group of Los-Angeles based actors and writers that I gathered together to conceive a project about the German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s exile years in Santa Monica, when he worked on a new production of his play The Life of Galileo with British actor Charles Laughton while being subjected to close surveillance by the FBI as a suspected communist. Materials gathered for the piece included Brecht’s own war-years journals as well as the FBI files on Brecht, released under a Freedom of Information Act request. After bringing artist Antoinette LaFarge into the project as scriptwriter, we workshopped an early version of the piece in 2004, at the Goethe Institute, Los Angeles, as well as at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades.

By the time we opened the full-length work in 2012, it had changed a great deal. In Galileo in America, clowns and inquisitors share the stage with Brecht and his daughter Virginia, Charles Laughton, and Galileo himself. Equally cabaret and courtroom, it is nominally set in the 1940s, when Brecht fled to Santa Monica to escape the Nazis. But in the surreal time-space of the piece, Brecht meets both characters from one of his own plays and the FBI agents who had him under surveillance as a suspected communist. We see him working on the new production of his play about Galileo’s struggle with the Catholic Church and wrangling with the noted film actor Charles Laughton over the translation. Meanwhile, Brecht and his friends are being bird-dogged by some inept FBI agents, while Brecht is having trouble with Galileo’s daughter Virginia, who is giving Brecht grief wover his rewriting of her life story. The denouement comes when Brecht is forced to testify before the inquisitors of his own day, the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee.

For the premiere in the xMPL—a brand-new high-tech black-box space—we designed a Brechtian event that constantly undermined any sense of immersion or illusion. The onstage and off-stage areas were blended, the set was minimal, the theatrical technology was highly visible, and the audience was seated tennis-court fashion, close up to the action and staring straight at one another through the actors who occupied the middle ground. In addition, over the stage we hung a row of three off-kilter, double-sided projection screens that became a space of meta-action for the piece. At one point in the piece, live cellphone transmissions were used as a 20th century equivalent for the revolutionary far-seeing invention of Galileo’s own day, the telescope.

I co-created and directed this new media performance work with visual artist Antoinette LaFarge at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine, March 2003. In this hour-long mixed-reality piece, we wanted to take a close, hard look at the American political scene in the period since the enormously controversial 2000 presidential election. In particular, we were inspired by the 37 days at the end of 2000 when votes were being recounted in Florida, the Supreme Court was chewing its fingernails, and no one knew who the president was going to be. We felt that for maybe the first time in our lifetimes, the mandatory scripting of American politics had come unstuck and an element of geuine uncertainty and forced improvisation had entered.

This project was a sequel to a piece of a similar title that we did in 2000 (The Roman Forum), and it used the same central concept of characters drawn from 1st century Rome and plunged into the maelstrom of 21st century American politics. Including the orator Cicero, the actor Quintus, the writer Petronius, the empress Poppaea, and a slave named Germania, the characters brought their individual experiences of a Rome wavering between republic and empire to bear on our contemporary situation. We dressed them in white clothes and whiteface makeup, as if they were marble statues come to life.

An unusual feature of this production was two parallel casts of characters: one that performed in an online, text-based world, and one that performed in the physical space of the Beall Center. The two groups communicated using telematic technologies, so that the online group was present to the audience in the Beall Center via projections and audio (through text-to-speech synthesis).

We designed the set without fixed seating, so that the audience circulated among the various stations of the performance like citizens at a political rally. Platforms were built along  the walls of the space, creating a frieze-like effect that echoed Roman art. In addition, there were multiple projection surfaces activated throughout the piece, in some cases providing backdrops to the actors and in other cases serving as the primary medium of the performance. There was also a green-screen area with a live video-camera, used in one scene to create a live vide montage (seen in the image shown above). A square platform was set up in the center of the space as a kind of boxing ring to manifest the contests of politics. All of the technology of the piece was made as transparent as possible, with lighting, projection, and sound control boards set up along the edge of the central boxing ring, allowing the audience to appreciate the technicians as part of the show. The actors’ dressing room was also included in a corner of the performance area.

Some performance videos:

“Apologizing for Everything”

“Counting the Ballots”

“The Committee on the Supreme Court”

“Lament of the Repubocracy”

“Montage”

Playing the Rapture is an original hour-long theater work created with Antoinette LaFarge at the Baltimore Theatre Project in March 2008. This two-person show examines the peculiar American evangelical belief in the Rapture—understood as that instant when every real Christian gets suddenly snatched up from  earth, leaving the rest of humanity in a state of chaos and catastrophe dominated by the Antichrist. We wanted to investigate the the social and political implications of “end times” theology and its echoes in some scientists’ interest in colonizing space: basically, the idea that it is ok to just abandon earth when it is ‘used up’.

Playing the Rapture features two characters who are gamers; they are beta-testing a new game about a post-Rapture world while arguing over everything from game mechanics to ontology.  We started by playing a computer game that was made from the “Left Behind” novels, a series of popular bestsellers about a post-Rapture world. It is a really terrible game: dull to play, socially retrograde (in game, women can be nurses but not doctors), and theologically controversial. The gamers’ conversations found their way into our script, and we grabbed video footage of game play (“machinima” video)  to construct a virtual set for our two characters.

PROJECT CREDITS

Concept and set design: Robert Allen and Antoinette LaFarge

Direction: Robert Allen

Video editing, script, and programming: Antoinette LaFarge

Actors: John Mellies and Jay Wallace