check all the details below and get on out to support Detroit art events!
www.dlectricity.com
Detroit Institute of Arts hosts five Artists for
Midtown’s Extraordinary DLECTRICITY Festival
Tokyo-based artist Tabaimo,
shadow-puppet performances, robots part of electrifying art
From 7 p.m. to midnight on Friday, October 5, and 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. on
Saturday, October 6, Midtown Detroit will be enveloped in a sea of light as
artists “light up” buildings and city spaces as part of the DLECTRICITY festival
sponsored by Midtown Detroit, Inc. and Art Detroit Now. More than 35 projects
using various mediums meld sci-fi technology with Victorian spectacle on a grand
scale. The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) will host five installations both
outside and inside the museum. DLECTRICITY is free.
In an attempt to
bring contemporary art to the masses, DLECTRICITY aspires to engage a broad and
diverse audience, create a sense of community and be a place for stimulation and
discussion about the impact of art on public spaces. The city landscape will be
transformed into temporary exhibitions, inviting the public to rediscover these
spaces and see them in a new light.
“This will
certainly be a weekend to remember, and we’re delighted to be part of a collaboration with so many other Midtown venues,” said
Graham W. J. Beal, DIA director. “People will be surprised and amazed at the
variety of offerings and the cutting-edge technology and creativity of the
artists involved. The sheer beauty and spectacle of light-based art is something
I encourage everyone to experience.”
Here are the DIA’s
offerings:
Dolefullhouse, a video installation by Tabaimo – rear entrance of the DIA off John R
Street
This video installation features the bright interior of
an empty dollhouse that undergoes a surreal transformation. Disembodied hands
arrange bourgeois furnishings, piece by piece, until each room appears
conventionally domestic. Yet all is not as it seems: as the intimate spaces of
the home are made comfortable and orderly, the walls begin to pulsate under the
pressure of a grim, unseen force lurking beneath the surface. The hands begin to
frantically scratch themselves and then at the walls of house, exposing
something wildly organic and bizarre. The film concludes as a leak grows into a
disastrous flood and water bursts through the façade washing everything away so
that the whole process may begin again
Visions (rainbow
rose), a video installation by Marte Eknaes – south
lawn
This video is of a rose that
has been injected with dye in such a way that each petal has a different color.
The artist encountered this artificially enhanced rose for the first time at
Eastern Market in Detroit. Her attraction to this object is its artificiality,
which is simultaneously beautiful and tasteless. It combines two of the
stereotypically most admired natural phenomena: a rose and a rainbow. The result
is alluring and strange, embodying both the natural and the artificial.
Visions (rainbow rose) is a
further ambivalent enhancement of this flower, keeping it alive by suspending it
in virtual space. The video was made using the image-uploading program
Photosynth, which connects images based on visual
recognition to compose basic digital 3d reconstructions of objects. The
navigation through the images of the rose connected and layered in Photosynth
will be recorded in continuous screen shots to create a video.
I See
You by Apetechnology: Chip Flynn, Leith
Campbell, Brad Ballard – Woodward plaza
Two robots will become mobile
360-degree rear projection screens that will be remotely controlled to interact
with the audience. The projections will be a montage of videos focusing on the
idea of voyeurism and surveillance, implying the robots are watching the audience. These "seeing robots" will
interrupt the passivity of watching as they move into the audience, slowly
rolling through groups of people, and sometimes following them in an
observational, almost insistent manner. Projected "eyes" on cylindrical screens
will be able to quickly spin around to focus on anyone who sneaks up behind or
tries to quietly pass unnoticed. Through speakers on the robot, the artist will
broadcast both prerecorded and live improvised sound effects, making
electronically affected vocal commentary of real-time observations.
The overall effect will be to
surround the audience with an exaggerated form of surveillance that makes them
question whether they are watching or being watched. The desired outcome is that
I See You induces the audience to rethink their passive relationship to the
technologies they use for work or distraction, and that it may not be the
content of the media they consume that has the most profound effect on them but
instead their relationship to the machine.
StereoNegative –A tribute to Tony Smith by Tsz Yan Ng with Helena
Kang and Justin Kollar – northwest lawn
StereoNegative exposes the wonder of geometrically constructed
architectural spaces and the role perspectival vision has in our engagement of
the world. Isolating the negative space of Gracehoper, the sculptural/architectural volumes are
extracted and made into a pavilion on the lawn. This aluminum pavilion will be
clothed in a sheer fabric and up-lit in LED colored lighting. To bring the
negative space of the pavilion into dialogue with Gracehoper, a stereoscope is placed between the two
structures. The viewer, upon encountering the mirrored acrylic stereoscope, can
see the two structures collapse in the viewing device with the positive meeting
the negative. Small tetrahedrons, octahedrons, and combinations of these
geometric solids will be scattered on the lawn for people to sit on, lean
against and play with.
Mama Three Eyes
(Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 10 p.m.)
and Yaga Baba (Saturday at 8 p.m.) by Tom Carey
– Prentis Court
Mama Three
Eyes is a shadow-puppet play that
explores the myths and legend surrounding the mysterious, monstrous, yet
motherly Hindu goddess Kali. She rescued the world from a band of mischievous
demons at the dawn of time. When a flying saucer full of aliens touches down in Detroit on December 12, 2012, will she
be our savior again?
Yaga
Baba is a shadow-puppet performance
based on the Russian fairy tale by the same name. It
is the story of Suzy, who wants to babysit her little brother Michael all
by herself, but her mom says she is too young. When her mom unexpectedly has to
go into work one Saturday, Suzy gets her wish. Everything is going fine until
Michael wanders off on his own. Is Suzy brave enough to go get him from Miss
Yaga’s creepy front porch?
For a full schedule
of DLECTRICITY events visit www.dlectricity.com.
