“Big Dada”
Excerpt from an image by xtine burrough.
Invited exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art’s Center for Creative Connections theater during Late Night Art Bytes, November 18 2017.
“Join LabSynthE, a collective of UT Dallas students and professors, for an hour of playful and inventive Dada-inspired installations and performances fusing art and technology. Celebrate the 100th anniversary of Dada by participating in these opportunities to mix, shake, pour, stir, and serve data.”
Performance repeated in the Edith A. O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building @ UTDallas, Richardson, TX in March 2017.
Big Dada Visualization
Sean Michael Landers and Alex Garcia Topete, 2016
Operating in a tradition of ‘pataphysical data visualization, the ‘invited lecturers’ explained how algorithmically edited videos from 1916 were sophisticated dada-visualizations that would reveal the meaning of the past, the present, and the future - Dada, DADA, dAdA.
A History of the Cocktail
Ostensibly: a series of live lectures supplemented by video montage that do a deep dive into the historical context and creation of a little known historical cocktail.
Actually: a database of public domain vintage film and video content are mixed and remixed algorithmically; a title slide was generated (complete with the name of a spurious, never-existing cocktail, such as ‘Stockholm Simmerer’ or ‘The South Atlantic Gin Nightmare’. Two presenters would take turns improvising spontaneous justifications of the images on screen, ‘describing’ the drink. Accompanied by a live jazz guitarist, to help hold the whole thing together and give it some appropriate atmosphere.
Credits: Dufour and Burrough; Leticia Ferreira de Souza, David N. Wilson, Sean Michael Landers, Alex Garcia Topete, Clayton Harper, Ariel Comstock, Francis Eyth, Gabriella, and Anastasia, 2016.