Which With Its Waves

2019
Livestream Video
Curated by Brianna Leatherbury

Part of an exhibition curated by Brianna Leatherbury located in Gallery Elektrozavod in Moscow, formerly the site of one of the largest electronics and lighting factories from the Soviet era. The project research focused on histories of media and transmission in the Soviet Union and included artists working locally and around the world producing live transmissions into the space for a period of 24 hours.

My contribution was broadcasting onto a computer monitor by livestream from the MIT Media Lab in the United States using archival footage from MIT Archives of early graphical interface technologies. In particular the 1979-1980 project titled Put That There created by the Architecture Machine Group with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which was a remote control computer interface concept incorporating pointing and voice activation. It was created at a moment of increasing Cold War tensions and project documentation included simulated naval battles. The documentation also included many outtakes with the creators ripping apart their paper screens upon which the image was projected. The live video additionally collaged historic and contemporary footage captured of current computational simulation technologies that modeled how large groups of people respond to urban changes or sudden catastrophes. It explored what live transmission between these two sites of research might mean geopolitically, as one node in this international project.