Harvestworks in Association with Creative Tech Week and Abrons Art Center presents Why Why Always
Why Why Always is a new multidisciplinary project by Shaun Irons & Lauren Petty that will take place in the Underground Theater at Abrons Arts Center, April 29th and 30th. The project embraces a potent interplay between live performance, video installation, sound art, and technology. The piece is a re-imagining of Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal film Alphaville, a philosophical treatise on politics, alienation and cinema set in a future overrun by technology, where feelings (and the words that describe them) are not only against the law but considered obsolete. Trapped in a world of deep suspicion and isolation, citizens exist in a society with no use for art, poetry, love, or autonomy, and no concept of the word Why.
Why Why Always, will re-conjure this film of shadows and subterfuge as a unique, genre bending live cine-performance through the use of multiple screens, cameras and live-processed video and sound. The goal is to create a work that is wildly funny, unpredictable and yet deeply disturbing, spelling out apocalyptic doubts about the future of a technology obsessed society, where memory is increasingly outsourced to the digital realm. Although mining Alphaville for inspiration, the film will be approached as a cultural artifact, subject to reinterpretation and alteration, with the goal of crafting a multifaceted meditation on the ever-evolving relationship between technology, art, privacy, surveillance, and free will.
This project was sponsored by Harvestworks with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty are Brooklyn based multi-platform artists who make multidisciplinary performances, multimedia installations, single-channel works, documentaries and interactive video scores for live performance. Their video design work has been seen at St. Ann’s Warehouse, The Public Theater, The Kitchen, HERE, PS 122, EMPAC, the Pompidou Center, Prototype Festival, Holland Dance Festival, the Venice Biennale, and BAM.
Abrons Arts Center 466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002 Abrons Arts Center 466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
April 29th and 30th 2016. 8pm