EVENT: SCRAPBOOK (OR, WHY CAN’T WE LIVE TOGETHER) (AUGUST 16. 2019, NEW YORK)
Scrapbook (or, Why Can’t We Live Together)
July 12 – August 19, 2019
Microscope Gallery
1329 Willoughby Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11237
T: (+1) 347 925 1433
Featured artists:
Zoe Beloff, Bill Brand, MV Carbon, Diane Dwyer, Bradley Eros, foci + loci, Morrison Gong (w/ J. (Jialing) Shih), Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Marni Kotak, M. Lamar, Le’Andra LeSeur, Jeanne Liotta, Simon Liu, Bruce McClure, Julian Louis Phillips, Tenzin Phuntsog, Raha Raissnia
The highlight of the exhibition is foci + loci's performance Affordable Engines: Bramble (2015-2019) on Friday August 16. Below is a sneak preview :
Friday August 16, 7:30pm
Scrapbook: foci + loci, MV Carbon
Live sound and visual performances
Microscope is very pleased to present an evening of live sound and visual performances by foci + loci (Chris Burke & Tamara Yadao) and MV Carbon as the 9th of 10 performance events taking place as part of our exhibition “Scrapbook (or, Why Can’t We Live Together)”.LINK
foci + loci
“Affordable Engines: Bramble”, 2015-2019
This newest iteration of foci + loci’s “Bramble”, is a two-channel custom video game environment which the artists operate in live performance. A ghostly musical instrument rises out of the shell of a broken down player piano in the desert. A bush made up of electrical wires and circuit boards grows algorithmically nearby. Day and night pass at an accelerated rate. As the performers navigate through and around the bramble, it blooms and evolves, while its underlying code makes as many choices as the musicians.
foci + loci’s practice is reliant on proprietary digital tools. We test a game engine’s limits by prodding, poking and breaking the system. The idiosyncrasies of the tested code allow us to create systems with high levels of machine agency, affording a relationship between the machine and the player/performers. This relationship emphasizes codified connections to events in a responsive numerical space, played out through an improvised, musical conversation with the system. — foci + loci