Global Plantation
is a multi-media lecture-poem that refers to the sources, mechanisms and effects
of the revolution in global capital now underway. A revolution which marks
the end of the progressive capitalist model and the reversion to a laissez
faire, plantation capitalist model now being acted out on a global scale:
the erasure of nations; the world itself as colony. A revolution empowered,
mediated, enforced and driven by information technologies and those who control
and manage them.
Through the combined media of spoken text, video projection and spatialized
electronic sound, "Global Plantation" weaves the abstract details
inherent in endless, mind-numbing data about globalization into a rich web
of associative meanings. Its goal is not effect but affect: to transform
the
data of the abstract and de-personalized into the personal and, by doing
so, to reveal and place the actions and influences of global capital's strategies
for domination within the locus of our own lives.
Whatever
lays claim to permanence in the spectacle is founded on change, and must change
as that foundation changes. The spectacle, though quintessentially dogmatic,
can yet produce no solid dogma. Nothing is stable for it: this is its natural
state, yet the state most at odds with its natural inclination.
Guy Debord
The video projections in "Global Plantation" serve as commentaries
on and amplifications of the on-going spoken text: the inferential nature
of the text is paired with an inferential set of images drawn from the text
as source. Given the density of the spoken text, and the general overall density
of the multi-media experience itself, the video reveals itself in shots that
evolve over spans of time. Many images are iconic, gathering accumulations
of meaning and new interpretations through simple repetition, through transformation,
and through fresh juxtapositions with the spoken text and music. The projections
are a window between familiar reverie and the smoky metaphorics of the oracle,
a semi-permeable membrane.
Global Plantation (2000)
video projection for multimedia performance piece funded by French Ministry of Culture, presented in Paris and New York. Video and motion graphics for the projection composed, produced, and mastered at Free Lunch. (58 min.)
Collaborators:
Randall Neal (composer, text)
Nathaniel Reichman (sound design, music)
Michael Hanish (video and post production)
Other Video Performance Pieces
Delusions for String Quartet (2000) video for projection. Music by Richard Tolenaar
