BLANKOUT RECORDINGS TRIPTYCH (2014 - 2015)
SCIENCE FICTION ART FILM
CONCEIVED & DIRECTED BY MARISELA LA GRAVE
WRITER-SCENE DEVELOPMENT MAXINE SWANN
EDITOR MARISELA LA GRAVE
PRODUCER MAGNETIC LABORATORIUM
C0-PRODUCER BANFF MEDIA INSTITUTE
FUNDING NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS
BLANKOUT RECORDINGS -TRIPTYCH 2014-2015) is a new 72 minute feature video by Marisela La Grave and Maxine Swann with Magnetic Laboratorium that continues La Graveʼs and Magnetic Laboratoriumʼs inter-media explorations with video, art performance, text, soundtrack, public and private space. The work investigates three pivotal aspects of the human psyche at the opening of the 21st century, each in a separate section: the communal impulse and the utopian visions it sustains, the evolution of solitude in a virtual world, and the more and more inevitable cosmic awareness of synthesis between human, natural, virtual and urban worlds.
STARRING (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
HORSES. MAXINE SWANN. ELKE RINDFLEISCH. CHRISTOPHER INGRAM.
JEAN FREEBURY. SABRINA ESSBIT. RYAN TRACY. CATHY RICHARDS. MARIA A. DESOJO. HISKE DOOPER. DAVID CASH. MOJO. CHRISTOPHER EAMON. JONAH BOKAER. KEVIN STEEL. CLAUDE SALZBERGER. DANIEL SQUIRE. MEG HARPER. VICTORIA REDEL. SYLVIE BLONDEAU. VALERIE FILIPOVNA. MARK STRAND. HONORE MOORE. ROBERT. ALTMAN. MICHAEL COLE. CAMILLE DE GALBERT. MICHAEL ROMANO. GLEN RUMSEY. DERRY SWAN. PENELOPE THOMAS. KERRY STICHWEH. PETRA VAN NOORT. ATHENA GASSOUMIS. CALEB BRENEM. CATHERINE DE MARIA. DOC RALSTON.
ABOUT THE TRIPTYCH
Commune, Part One of the Triptych, is recorded in a real-life communal setting in upstate New York, a renovated cow barn temporarily inhabited by seventeen performers. This first part of the Triptych is an investigation of a communal mind in exile at the dawn of the new millennium. Floating within this psyche, alongside nostalgic references to 20th century utopias, are contemporary attempts, many thwarted, to break through the singularity of our existence and forge a connection. Confronted with this human pageant, the natural world stands by, a backdrop and a witness.
Polis, Part Two of the Triptych, opens with a transatlantic vessel as it glides along New York City’s Hudson River following the imaginary coastline of 59th Street. As we are transported from the countryside to an urban setting, the paradoxical function and dysfunction of technology generates reflections on solitude, spirituality and sex. An attempt to restore the value of an instant of perception as representative of the isolation of individual experience, Polis combines pulverized pieces of reconstructed human activity into the object of one body, the metropolis.
In Paramita, Part Three, we are greeted with another vessel, an air stream trailer in the middle of the New Mexico desert. A figure wearing a fiber suit steps out and proceeds to scan the environment in search of sensory data, only to find his/her discoveries interspersed with shards of memory. The human factor has become androgynous, the setting, a place of exposure and emptiness. Paramita is a digital attempt to posit another state of mind in which the search for sensory data in an atmosphere of nothingness leads to a fragile, nearly hallucinatory awareness of synthesis.
MAGNETIC LABORATORIUM™
BLANKOUT RECORDINGS TRIPTYCH (2014 -15)