Conceptual artist duo Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert present The Artist is Elsewhere, an evening of remote-access performances. The event will take place on October 19th at The Performance Art Institute, located at 75 Boardman Place in San Francisco, California. Artists participating in the event include Linda Ford, Justin Charles Hoover, Second Front (organized by Scott Kildall), Sonya Rapoport, Roland Roos, Tiffany Trenda, Stoll and Wachall, Lee Walton, Gordon Winiemko, and Michael Zheng.
The Artist is Elsewhere is a one-night-only event. Admission is $10 in advance and $15 on the day of the event. The Performance Art Institute is a wheelchair accessible venue. Doors will open at 7:30pm and performances will begin promptly at 8:00pm. Seating is limited, so please arrive early. Space will be provided on a first-come-first-serve basis. This event will last approximately two hours. More information on tickets here.
The Artist Is Elsewhere is a juxtaposition of radically different ways of existing in time and space. The performers participating in the event examine notions of absence and presence, physical and virtual, corporeal and mechanical to create inter-subjective dialogues mediated by technology. With an evocative nod to Marina Abramovic’s famous retrospective (called The Artist is Present), Fletcher and Reichert assembled artists who will deliver live performances somewhere outside the confines of PAI’s exhibition space; in office buildings, apartments, malls, street corners – anyplace else in the world. Each performance will be accessible to the evening’s attendees through televisual devices like telephones, video conferencing equipment, web cams, and other remote access technologies.
In keeping with the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial’s theme Seeking Silicon Valley, contributors to The Artist is Elsewhere examine the notion of labor in an increasingly sedentary working environment. In Silicon Valley, “work” means developing concepts, programming, filing patents, or closing deals. The Silicon Valley labor market specializes in privatized ideas, while the physical labor of manufacturing their products is handled elsewhere.
In Babula Rasa, the performers in Second Front use a Google Docs spreadsheet as a digital arena for a live networked performance of text, numbers, formulas, and formatting simultaneously contributed by participants located in the US, Canada, Britain, and Italy. In Weltschmerz made in Germany, Klaudia Stoll and Jaqueline Wachall (a.k.a. Stoll and Wachall) use Skype to deliver a performance from Berlin where their mock business aims to sell us an emotional sense of melancholy.
The Artist is Elsewhere is the first of three programs to be held at The Performance Art institute as part of the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial. Additionally, The Future Imagined: What’s Next? curated by Hanna Regev will open on November 9th, and the panel discussion Women, Art, and Technology: an uneasy access organized by Hanna Regev takes place on December 13th.
