To stop the video, click on it.
Lightship “Frying Pan”, an historic ship formerly used as a moveable lighthouse by the U.S. Coast Guard, was the locus of Float Potion. The ship was abandoned, then sunk, until it was rescued and moved to its current location on the West side of New York city. While the outside of the ship has been restored to her original appearance, the inside retains the barnacle-encrusted, sunken-ship motif that acknowledges her storied past.
Extending the pipes, stairs and super-structure of the “Frying Pan”, Float Potion is a piece in which a dancer re-invents the environment by juxtaposing human-scale movement on the deteriorated remains of the ship, the “built environment”. This movement is recorded onto video, and replaced and resampled in the midst of the environment; this creates a feedback loop, metamorphosing human time into inhuman time. In performance, the video is mixed and processed live, using a customized MaxMSP Jitter interface. To accompany the visuals, an electronic remix of Debussey’s La Mer is also processed and arranged live, so that both the visuals and audio are improvised. The video also responds to the reverberation of the music on the hull.
A DVD of Float Potion is available (~8 minutes). An edit should play upon opening this page. On this project, I collaborated with:
Morgan Barnard
