KNT

Kayla Tange, Linzi Juliano, Chris Gibson, Peter Kalisch and Chad Wyszynski

Overload // Babel

2016

Video

Duration: 1:41

Global Performance Studies


“Overload || Babel” is a video installation collaboration between Kayla Tange, Linzi Juliano, Chris Gibson, Peter Kalisch and Chad Wyszynski on the topic of virtual sexual sensory overload. It seeks to layer multiple dimensions: the body, the language, the visual, the aural, and the physical. video itself features Tange beginning as a canvas of sorts for the text projected onto her. For “Overload || Babel,” language appears and is legible alongside her body. The commands, each edited to include processes from performance and media theorists, highlighted her. Though her gaze is clear and focused, it is nevertheless passive, as she never quite makes eye contact with the camera. When she does, she takes lens in her hand and stares back. At that moment, when her focus shifts to the otherwise “transparent” hardware and confronts the viewer, as soon as that registers, the screen cuts to an iconic image: the blue screen of death. While perhaps techo-campy, it functions in the same way as the woman looking back; with mortal defiance, the hardware confronts the viewer or user. The blue screen of death (BSOD) at the end nods towards a history of failure and, in this sense, alludes to what happens to our media when they “die.” Here, we are reminded of the materiality of hardware. Whether we think of the buried copies of the failed game, E.T., or the e-waste generated each time the newest smart phone or tablet successor is released and old generations slowly stop updating. We come to an intersection of environmental justice, materiality, and class.

Shown during Outfest Film Festival July 12, 2017 at Directors Guild of America.

Shown at Performance Studies International #22 in Melbourne, Australia, July 5-9, 2016.

GPS: Global Performance Studies is a peer reviewed, online, interdisciplinary academic journal published under the auspices of Performance Studies international (PSi). GPS provides a publication platform and resources for artists and scholars engaged in performance and performance studies. GPS draws from the practice of artists, and the research of scholars, as well as the intersections of practice as research and research as practice. GPS publishes articles and artistic research broadly relating to performance studies, including contemporary performance practices, theory, politics, social and cultural contexts, performance and visual arts and media, and connections to everyday life. GPS aims to expand published perspectives on performances studies, including diverse performance practices, research methods, and locations, while encouraging continued discussion throughout the PSi membership.

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