&NOW 2018

Oana Avasilichioaei, "Operator "
Based on my latest book/beyond-the-book project, Eight Track, which examines the various meanings of “track,” OPERATOR explores the subject position(s) of military drone operators engaged in the act of tracking, identifying, and ultimately destroying. This 15-20 minute multimedia performance combines sounds, electronics, voice, texts, and video projections, in an attempt to immerse the audience in the subject position of the operator. Constructed in an ever-tightening spiral of voiced and projected textual material and a range of sonic matter, the performance also includes a video projection from the perspective of drone cameras hovering over landscapes, watchful, monitoring. The work examines the loss of subjecthood and agency, the negation of complexity, deviation, and unpredictability, and the strict hierarchical structure of power. OPERATOR voices and enacts the subject as vantage point, as occurrence; the subject as the eye that brutes the sky; the malleable hand that blots out the living; the subject as perpetual, replaceable; an operator, not an operative, with future blood on the hands. Some of the subjects entering the operator’s cubicle become troubled by their positions, while others treat it as the ultimate video game. Delving into this difference, OPERATOR is hybrid, part text becoming the camera’s eye, part voice becoming movement, part moving image becoming poetic language, part body becoming sonic reverberation.

Daniel Uncapher, "Five Extraordinary Renditions "
"Five Extraordinary Renditions" is a 15-minute A/V presentation+reading consisting of truncated versions of five songs (Schubert's "Symphony No. 5 in b#," Mozart's "Symphony No. 25 in Gm," Shostakovich's "Waltz No. 2," Mozart's "Queen of the Night Aria," and Camille Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre") paired with montage footage of various moments, both contemporary and historical, including bodycam footage, interview material, and low-quality consolidated video from a variety of sources. Portions of the video will be accompanied by reading/movement with an experimental interest in the American condition, especially in terms of an oppressive space; the mechanisms and methods through which people are simultaneously dehumanized and weaponized.