A Model for Staying With
"A Model for Staying With” is a multidisciplinary art project broaching climate breakdown, ecological theory, and environmental communication. Skating the edge of personification and actualization, four people from a future-past dance a score for staying with that involves natural history, popular science, memory, loss and communication. They are projected simultaneously alone yet together, each with their own role and voice within the disconnected network. They carry on and continue, offline from one another.
Projection surfaces will be living themselves. The installation will live in and on three dimensional objects that simultaneously resemble industrial waste, fault lines, and cenotaphs. Inside of the objects lives a meeting of steel that softly murmurs ‘tree’ in shape, while gently cradling a speaker at its base and living vegetation at distal ends.
The music is composed with a suite of Moog semi-modular analog synthesizers. As these various instruments are patched together, they create sounds that are interdependent and indicate feedback within the system. Contrasting sound elements and musical gestures throughout the piece underline both the vulnerability and resilience of living systems, bringing voice to individual and community. The sound is designed so that each person’s voice is localized to their projection, then spatialized to prioritize the center of the space as the most resonant part of the installation.
The space and the people call to the audience; sometimes one at a time, other times in a full chorus. The close arrangement of the Anthropocene remnant projection surfaces forces the viewer to choose; who to listen to? Who to be with? Who to stay with? The ever-changing nature of the piece propels viewers into different states of being - turning in circles, finding fringes to witness to as many as possible, to sit with one.
“A Model for Staying With” finds its final form as an installation package suitable for community space, gallery, building lobby, or breezeway. This involves creation of projection sculptures, continued video and sound development towards final deliveries, and context materials including exhibition text and digital literature. Also, the team will generate a fully digital version of the work for access via web.
Credits
Producer, Director
Director of Photography, Video Editor
Composer
Scenic Design
Associate Sound Designer, Technical Director
Associate Producer
Videographer
Production Assistant, Documentation
Performers
Research Contributors
Britta Joy Peterson
Robert Woofter
Derek Blackstone
Kim Lusk
Evan Anderson
Olivia Weber
Aaron Tucker
Lauren Jessica Brown
Malik Burnett, Annie Peterson, Vyette Tiya, Zoe Wampler
Cast of External Organ – Emily Ames, Amanda Blythe, Malik Burnett, Carolyn Hoehner, Gabriel Mata, Dylan Lambert, Vyette Tiya, Zoe Wampler; as well as Mike Alonzo, Kourtney Clements, Joe Knelman, Robert Priorie, and Chris Titus
Intersections
External Organ
External Organ is a cumulative creative research body yielding methodologies, workshops and performances grappling with organs, organisms, and organization through the lens of sustainability and the climate crisis. The project engages matters from philosophy, biology, sustainability, literature, poetry, and visual art while activating body as method. Flesh is approached as the conduit between the world, our experience of the world, and our organization within and throughout our worlds. Therefore, the body is necessary when processing sustainability and climate change in order to instigate action. Questions are posed and embodied by performers, workshop participants, and audiences: how do we see ourselves inside of extinction as well as part of growth? How can we do away with human as savior versus participant in destruction and healing? How do we muster reluctant optimism in effort to reframe demise?