People You Must Look at Me, 2015
Description:
People You Must Look at Me, Performance, Kite, 2015. 15 minutes. Includes floor projection, quad sound, body interface.
People You Must Look at Me or Coyote and Badger Were Neighbors or The Origins of Eternal Death is an experimental improvised performance and installation project investigating the limits of mapping the Earth, mapping data, and mapping the body. Chiastically structured as a cocoon, this piece wraps itself around a recording from my biological mother’s funeral, telling and retelling the events with alternative stories, mappings, and levels of control over the sound. In performance, the interface effects the sounds differently in each section. This piece was my first attempt with the body interface and would lead to a deeper exploration of the problem of contextualizing my body, at the places where sonification fails to communicate, into the realms of truth, belief, and Lakota epistemology. The improvisations included in the recording are: saxophone by Matana Roberts, fiddle by Alicia Svigals, harp by Marilu Donovan, body interface and Serge synthesizer by Kite, singing by Loons of Turtle Island.
