Behind the Experiments: Film and Video Artists Speak

Recognized as one of the most exciting young artists working in cross–disciplinary media and performance, Kristin Lucas focuses on our relationship to electronic media, which she envisions as a surrogate for personal interaction. Many of her compelling projects configure social space as a matrix of alienating technologies that produces little more than psychic discomfort. Lucas's explorations have led her to engage such media platforms as automated tellers, public access television, computer games, and the World Wide Web. The "Simulcast Town Meeting" is a participatory performance-part chalkboard lecture, part stand–up comedy-that lambasts the insinuation of technologies in our public and private spheres. Within Lucas's schema, electronic technology has introduced "ambient and competing energies that effect the mind, body, and our living environments." To "simulcast" is to resist and shape these energies, turning them toward more socially productive ends. Lucas will distribute Simulcast Mobile Kit #3 modules to all gathered and clue us in on the newest Invisible Inhabitants Network. Then we will be released into the night as activated Simulcast deflectors.

Behind the Experiments, a series of mini-residencies with media artists, offers an exciting opportunity for public dialogue with important contemporary experimentalists. The series continues in April with the residency of Montreal-based artist Donigan Cumming.Behind the Experiments is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) with additional support from the Pew Charitable Trusts.