Hangmen Also Die – Electronic Art + Design

still from “Hangmen Also Die”, 2010

OSCENE 2010
Laguna Museum of Art
Feb. 20—May 16, 2010

Studio Art faculty member Antoinette LaFarge is premiering a new project in the OSCENE 2010 exhibition at the Laguna Museum of Art. Hangmen Also Die, created in collaboration with director Robert Allen, is a performance-video-installation programmed in Max/MSP/Jitter that models the problematic nature of collective memory as a bulwark against ideological corruption. In the installation, video clips of an actor’s monologue are montaged with other visual elements in a semi-randomized way. Over the course of a 70-minute cycle, the piece is programmed to gradually break up and degrade, triggering successive attempts to salvage meaning by re-interpolating material.

The monologue used in this piece is a poetic text LaFarge wrote, incorporating text fragments by Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, Arthur Koestler, and others. The title comes from a 1943 movie directed by Fritz Lang and written by Brecht, Lang, and John Wexley. The main videography is by Amy Kaczur.

There are associated live performances taking place on the opening and closing days of the installation. The second of these is scheduled to take place at noon on Sunday, May 16 (it will take no more than half an hour). There is an admission fee to the museum itself, but apart from that the performance itself is free to all museum-goers.