Concert: I am the shadow of the image of my person

SMO performs as part of the sound and video installation by James Borchers and Jérémy Jolley, I am the shadow of the image of my person

Members of SMO featured in the video of the installation will confront, merge, and dialogue with their image.

Saturday, May 26 – performances will be every 30 minutes:
7:00 pm – Installation alone
7:30 pm – Performance 1 with installation
8:00 pm – Installation alone
8:30 pm – Performance 2 with installation
9:00 pm – Installation alone
9:30 pm – Performance 3 with installation

Oxbow 6118 12th Ave South
Suggested donation at the door: $5 to $15

Oxbow is a place where diverse disciplines cross and collaborate—experimenting through art installations, performances, workshops, music, films, and lectures—as well as community and private events.

About the installation: 

Through a large-scale interactive sound and video installation, artist-composers James Borchers and Jeremy Jolley explore the relationship between identity and representation in the age of digital artifice. Infrared sensors, multichannel speakers, and software generate an interactive experience featuring video projections of musicians from the Seattle Modern Orchestra.

As visitors move through the space, the images and sounds stratify, disintegrate, sync, and reconstruct. Visitors can enter a small dodecahedron-shaped room to immerse themselves in an audio-video collage of those same players. Through its presentation of altering human forms playing their instruments, the piece becomes part performance and part digital play, invoking both dialogic and meditative experience, and calling into question what we know to be authentic or real.

May 4-June 3, 2018

New Gallery hours:
Thursday, May 24th – 6:00 to 9:00pm
Friday, May 25th – 6:00 to 9:00pm
Saturday, May 26th – 7:00 to 10:00pm (Seattle Modern Orchestra concert)
Sunday, May 27th 6:00 to 9:00pm

Thursday, May 31st – 6:00 to 9:00pm
Friday, June 1st – 6:00 to 9:00pm
Saturday, June 2nd – 7:00 to 10:00pm (closing reception)
Events: 
Opening reception and installation preview May 4, 7pm
Georgetown Art Attack May 12, 6-9 pm
Performance by Seattle Modern Orchestra May 26, 7pm
Closing reception June 2, 7pm

James Borchers talks about the installation in conversation with Erin Jorgenson here. 

James Borchers and Jérémy Jolley’s statement about the installation:

In our present cyber landscape, self-expression has evolved into a digital game of perceptual artifice. A person’s self image, external image, and virtual image interplay in a hyperreality, relegating the actual self to unseen spaces or inspiring it to take on new forms. This socio-digital context invites us to try on new representational forms—often symbolic, perhaps seeking to convey a spirit of exuberance, loftiness, authority, or benevolence, or at times even subversive or fantastical versions of ourselves, an identify that exists as a construct. Yet still there is an element of self that seems intrinsic, a truth that is inescapable and that is lodged somewhere, possibly outside of ourselves, but within reach. That indiscernible truth belies a power that has the ability to elevate the most obscure, and to corrupt the most exalted, of identities.

Through a large-scale interactive sound and video installation, the piece seeks to explore the relationship between identity and representation in the age of digital artifice. Infrared sensors, multichannel speakers, and software generate an interactive experience featuring video projections of performing players from the Seattle Modern Orchestra.

As visitors move through the space, the images and sounds stratify, disintegrate, sync, and reconstruct. Visitors can enter a small dodechahedron-shaped room to immerse themselves in an audio-video collage of those same players. Through its presentation of altering human forms playing their instruments, the piece becomes part performance and part digital play, invoking both dialogic and meditative experience, and calling into question what we know to be authentic or real.

In addition to the intersecting motifs of social media and musical performance, this piece is inspired by a passage from Milan Kundera’s 1967 novel The Joke:

I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine, that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather it was I who was guilty of the non-resemblance . . . (part 3, chap. 5).

Bringing these words into the 21st century, one might say that we find ourselves part of a new joke with even more at stake. How is individual identity transformed, manipulated, corrupted, destroyed, rejuvenated, or enlightened by the social mechanism through which it exists? Or is there an inescapable self that can persist through any cultural or technological change?