Ritual, Performance, Visionary Consciousness, and the Videophone 2021
CO-CURATED AND DIRECTED BY ULYSSES JENKINS AND DEBORAH OLIVER
Kit Galloway external sites: Net Art Anthology, Electronic Cafe
The Art of Performance had its first virtual performance and media event held in the xMPL Lab. It presented the pioneering work of Ulysses Jenkins, Kit Galloway & Sherry Rabinowitz of Media Image, and Barbara T. Smith focusing on the artists’ inquiry into the past, present and future of telecommunications through performance and dialogue in a cultural context.
Ritual, Performance, Utopian Consciousness and the Videophone (2021)
Press Release & News
Featuring Barbara T, Smith, Kit Galloway of Media Image, and Ulysses Jenkins.
This event focuses on the artists’ inquiry into the past, present and future of telecommunications through performance and dialogue in a cultural art context.
Program Details
The evening will present excerpts from Barbara T. Smith’s two-year long durational performance work The 21st Century Odyssey (1991-92) initiated at the same time as the opening of Biosphere 2 near Tucson, Arizona. During those two years Smith’s partner Dr. Roy Walford conducted his scientific experiments on life inside the Biosphere bubble with seven other “Biospherians” while Smith traveled the world, exploring it with a new nascent internet technology — The Videophone. In collaboration with Kit Galloway and his partner Sherrie Rabinowitz at the Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica, CA the Videophone allowed her to share her performance in real time with Walford and others in the Biosphere, as well as the Electronic Café’s audience.
Fittingly this evening will also feature Hole-In-Space: A Public Communication Sculpture created in 1980 by Kit Galloway (and Rabinowitz) of Mobile Image. In this ground-breaking experimental public work life- sized video projection systems were set up in windows in Lincoln Center, New York, and Century City, Los Angeles facing out to the sidewalk. Unobtrusively placed microphones and speakers provided the audio component. At 8:00 p.m. New York time the two installations were connected via satellite to create an open channel via ‘picture-phone’ linking the two cities. Anyone passing either window became a participant “performer.” Arguments on the relative merits of the cities broke out between shivering New Yorkers and T-shirted Californians. Phone numbers were exchanged and trans-continental rounds were sung. Subsequently Mobile Image founded the Electronic Café International, a cafe networking center, performance and workshop space, and art hub in Santa Monica, CA.
The evening will also include Ulysses Jenkins, a pioneer of early telecommunications art projects, whose primary concern as an artist has been technology’s role in building community. Jenkins’ earliest video works were made with the collective Video Venice News, which is best known for its video vérité portrait of the Watts Festival of 1972-73 celebrating Black power and resistance, and a community bond. We will present Talking Hut (1994) a videophone performance and video documentation of telecommunications artworks that embody various contextual forms of communications. For example — an experimental virtual ritual based in part on contemporary issues, and 1994 transmissions between Ulysses Jenkins at The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA and visual artist Daniel J. Martinez outdoors on the Fourth Street Bridge above the L.A. River.
Barbara Smith, Kit Galloway, and Ulysses Jenkins were seminal experimenters in the use of the new still-frame videophone technology of the early1990’s. The evening will incorporate the artists remotely in a live Zoom with live mixing of the pre-recorded performances happening through the technical support of he xMPL Theater. The evening will also include an introduction presented by Deborah Oliver.
Short intro to the artists:
Barbara T. Smith is a UCI Alum from the 1st MFA Graduating Cohort in 1971; she co-founded F-Space an artists run performance space in Santa Ana with Chris Burden. Smith is best known for her performance work in the late 1960s that was at the forefront of feminist, body, and performance art.
Kit Galloway is one of the first artists to begin exploring tele-collaboration with satellite technologies in the 1970s. Kit’s commitment to using technologies to enhance community interaction led him and his partner Sherrie Rabinowitz to establish the Electronic Café, a cultural incubator located in Santa Monica where it became internationally known as an influential hub for dialogue, exhibition, and performance dedicated to networked (virtual) art.
Ulysses Jenkins’s video and media work is a fusion of forms to conjure vibrant expressions of how image, sound and cultural iconography inform representation. Beginning as a painter and muralist, Jenkins was introduced to video just as the first consumer cameras were made available to individuals, and he quickly seized upon the television technology as a means to broadcast alternative depictions of African and Native American cultures—his own heritage— as a way for to black filmmakers to control their subject-hood by controlling the media depicting them.