TUESDAY APRIL 7, 2009» 6:00 PM
» Gallagher Theater, Student Union
On April 7, 2009, 6:00 pm at the Gallagher Theater, Hilary Harp + Suzie Silver present a media presentation and lecture about their collaborative art with a focus on their current media performance AV Lodge Presents: Fruit Machine. Included in this presentation is a live demo performance of excerpts of Fruit Machine. Post-performance discussion will be led by media scholar Caryl Flinn (UA Women’s Studies).
AV Lodge Presents: Fruit Machine
Media Performance by Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver
Fruit Machine Description
Fruit Machine is a campy hour-long media performance that uses a dynamic interplay between live and screen-based events to probe the relationship between bodies and fantasies. Inspired by a long tradition of camp aesthetics, especially Jack Smith’s homemade participatory glamour and Leigh Bowery’s extravagant perversity, Fruit Machine brings together camp and digital performance. Using Arduino microcontrollers, Bluetooth and Max/MSP/Jitter, we create physical props and costumes that actively influence screen-based and sonic events. The overall performance is more mutant musical or concert than play. As much emphasis is placed on sound as image, with props and costumes functioning as audio-visual instruments.
“Fruit Machine” was a name given to a Canadian device designed during the Cold War to ferret out homosexuals from the civil service and the military. The subjects were made to view pornography, and the device measured the pupils of the eyes, perspiration, and pulse for a supposed erotic response. The word “fruit” in our title refers to both a quirky, eccentric or queer individual and to the fecund sex organs of plants. “Machine” references the rather technical engineering of the lurid and antic images. Camp codes of high artifice and excess, and camp’s self-conscious celebration of exotica are all at work here. Fruit Machine occupies a unique place at the juncture between technically sophisticated interactive media and humble and carnivalesque aesthetics reminiscent of a folk ritual or a school play.
Brief Bio
Collaborating since 2003, Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver have created a range of projects including objects, installations, videos and performances. Drawn to exotica, science fiction and pre-digital special effects, Harp & Silver create D.I.Y. spectacles by combining technical sophistication with humble materials. They have exhibited their objects and installations throughout the U.S. Their videos have screened all over the world and are distributed by the Video Data Bank. They have performed their live media variety show “Fruit Machine” in a number of venues nationally including Transformer Gallery, Washington DC; Around the Coyote Festival, Chicago, IL; and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
cfa website
flier, in .pdf format
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