Ludicy: An Evening of Para-Pandemic Liberation
March 20-21, 2021, Saturday and Sunday, 4:00-5:30 ET
Experimental Performance Poetry
In Machiavelli World on Mozilla Hubs
Directed by
Claudia Hart and Asher Remy-Toledo
Produced by Hyphen Hub
In celebration of her second vaccine and the 26th birthday of the first edition of A Child’s Machiavelli: A Primer on Power, Claudia Hart created Machiavelli World, a social VR site on Mozilla Hubs. She then invited esteemed colleagues to read site-specific poetry reacting to her set and Asher Remy-Toledo, the co-founder of Hyphen-Hub (a non-profit focusing on media performance), to join her in producing and directing the event.
Hart reached out to a cast of writers and artists grounded in cultural practice, though not in digital art, as a means to retrospect - a way of returning to the art world of physical objects from which she exited as her Machiavelli entered, those 26 years past. Neither Hart nor Remy-Toledo had any preconceptions about what might happen, starting with a series of workshops with the members of the group. Both were thrilled by the outcome of what turned out to be a series of improvisations. The result of this process is a new form of theater in a halfway realm — somewhere between a fairy tale world of the imagination and the experimental theater of the avant-garde tradition, between Pixar’s Toy Story and the Theatre of Cruelty of Antonin Artaud. Ludicy is an endgame. Its players so hope you will attend.
Seating is limited to 17 on both Saturday and Sunday, March 20 and March 21.
If you are interested in joining, or for further information, contact:
asher@hyphenhub.com
claudia@claudiahart.com
Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen are skulls. They work collaboratively and also separately to create pieces that pull from histories, literatures, and diasporic time travel, informed by an immigrant’s perspective of constant translations within multiple realities. Their projects operate on relationality — prioritizing inter/intra-connections, both spatial and temporal, between the work, the audience and the environment. In addition to their collaborative and individual practices, both are member founders of Black Mountain Project, an Austin-based contemporary art platform that rejects approaches of monolithic paradigms and embodies fugitive practices in pursuit of impossible freedoms.
Their piece for Ludicy is in defense of the wor(l)d (a través de Galeano), bringing to light a 1978 text by the radical Latin American journalist/poet/thinker Eduardo Galeano. Written in a context of dictatorship, censorship, and wanton abuse of Indigenous peoples, in defense of the wor(l)d (a través de Galeano) visualizes his still relevant call for a different wor(l)d, a wor(l)d deserving to be what the wor(l)d wanted to be when it was a different wor(l)d, a wor(l)d deserving to be what the wor(l)d wanted to be when it was not yet born.
Charlotte Kent is a UXR Vapor Wire avatar. She is also an assistant professor of visual culture and an arts writer. Her piece for Ludicy is An Absurd Work, based on her ongoing research about the absurd as it occurs in contemporary art and speculative design. Kent’s interactive piece excerpts and reconfigures Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus (1941).
Jeffrey Grunthaner is a crocodile. He’s also an artist+writer+musician+curator currently based in Berlin. Jeff’s articles, reviews, poems and essays have appeared via Drag City Books, BOMB, Archinect, Folder, artnet News, Hyperallergic, The Arcade Project Zine, The Brooklyn Rail, American Art Catalogues, and other venues. For Ludicy, he composed Bone Saw, an intertextual meditation on Machiavellianism, which incorporates elements of music, performance, ASMR, and poetry.
Meredith Noelle is a toasted marshmallow. She is also a writer in many languages, human languages, sounds, computer languages, enzymes. Her body is a language she writes in the bath, snow, metal workshop, and painting studio. She is nourished by collaboration, conversation, and group experimentation. In her practice, she works in performance, painting, and the written word. Meredith’s early work as a robot hacktivist and filmmaker is alive in her current poetic work and teaching. Her work for Ludicy is Tri Via, a sound meditation on the body and the different somatic paths expression can take; today we are virtual disembodied creatures in a 3D virtual world.
Morris Fox is a bat. He is also a queer new gothic writer-artist. His work tongues & cruises the haunted house for feelings of Elysium. He remains in Canada and online. His piece for Ludicy, Cruising the Netcropolis is an elegy from the ne(t)cropolis of his gothic hovering. Words are a net—anything that serves to catch or ensnare—are a necropolis, a dead person city, a cemetery of desire.
Terri Kapsalis is a carnivorous plant. She is also a writer and performer. Terri is the author of Jane Addams' Travel Medicine Kit, The Hysterical Alphabet, and Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. She is a collective member and health educator at the Chicago Women's Health Center and co-creator of the "Mirror and a Flashlight" podcast. She co-founded Theater Oobleck. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For Ludicy, Terri has created Tender, an adaptation of Chapter 76 of the Tao Te Ching.
Asher Remy-Toledo is an owl. He is also the co-founder of Hyphen-Hub, a New York-based non-profit organization that explores, promotes, and presents new visions of the future through the integration of art and emerging technologies. Hyphen-Hub produces innovative live performances and art salons and organizes and curates art exhibitions. It also serves as a platform for a global community of artists, engineers, designers, performers, and tech innovators to connect, share information, and collaborate.
Claudia Hart is a stage object. She is also an artist working with simulations, and the author of the illustrated series of aphorisms, A Child’s Machiavelli. It was released last year in its second edition by Beatrice Books, redesigned by publisher Patrick Reynolds. Initially written and illustrated by Hart in 1995, A Child’s Machiavelli was inspired by Niccolo Machiavelli’s Renaissance treatise, The Prince, the first book of political philosophy. Hart’s version began as a series of oil paintings and small catalog, produced by the Realismus Studio at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, in 1995. The catalog was eventually republished as an expanded hardcover by Penguin in 1998, and later in German and French editions. While keeping to the meaning of the original, Hart rewrote The Prince to reflect street values and the voice of youth culture — as if Machiavelli’s book, meant to advise kings, was a primer teaching good manners to small children. The book has proven prescient, uncannily prefiguring the brutal tenor of contemporary public discourse in America.
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