Fundamentals

As collaborators, we draw on skills from our distinct backgrounds as fine artist and creative technologist, producing work that integrates our disciplines. “Fundamentals” is a metaphor for the deconstruction/reconstruction of identity. Within this work, we consider the hegemony of gender as rigid, fragile structures, exploring how they might be shattered by a series of misalignments and formative events. The outcome of reforming these broken structures is a fluid, oscillating and self-aware identity that refers to it’s origins. The carnivalesque is referenced as a performative schism of reality. Like the carnival participator, we are challenged to reevaluate our conception of stagnant truth. “Fundamentals” consisted of thirty-five, 8” slip-cast porcelain orbs (“balloons”) installed in a grid arrangement on a wall, like a balloon/dart game. Throughout the exhibition, an algorithm selected random “balloons”. Each night, we used a large, handcrafted steel dart to stab the “balloons” targeted that day. Audio was recorded and processed by program that applied a Fourier-related transform, creating an infinite representation of the sound of shattering porcelain. These transformed recordings ran through a secondary program to create visualizations that were projected onto where the “balloon” was previously installed, while the altered audio played through speakers. These live audio and video components eventually usurped the ceramic installation, the result being a combination of shattered porcelain, the remaining “balloons”, a wall of projections, and a cacophonous audio environment.