Mark Tribe is the founder of the online resource for new media artists, Rhizome.org, that we are so fond of here in class. So, instead of using his wikipedia site to try and look for other artists, I thought that I would check out some of his own stuff....... Here is some of what I found:
Star Spangled Cover
This was a video projection/installation piece that he did in collaboration with New York guitarist Andre Lassale and Greg Tate. He videotaped Lassale doing a complete remake of Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" that he played at the Legendary Woodstock (which is amazing as a single musical performance in itself, I know). But then, he created two separate copies of this video that would then be projected onto the same wallspace from two different projectors, except that one copy of the DVD would be completely out of sync with the other copy, creating this blurred and mashed up version of Lassale's performance that created a visually appealing and almost psychadelic moving image to go along with the audio of the song. And to make the installation more apporopriate, and perhaps more completely unified, Tribe projected these two videos against a background contemporary image of Yasgur's farm, the very farm in upstate New York on which the Woodstock concert of 1969 took place.
links to both video clips of the performance and installation here:
To me, this is quite a bold performance installation piece, even if it doesn't even come close to being as epic and intense as what Woodstock itself was for many. I think Tribe is making an interesting comment on what Woodstock meant for those who attended, those who didn't attend but lived to see the history attached to it, and even what it means to us today - this famous legacy of the 60's, hippies, anti-war movements, and psychadelic explorations, all culminating in the massive 1969 multi-day festival. By creating two separate projections of the same video, Tribe touches on this idea of psychadelic images, feelings, and experiences that people most likely were touching on themselves back in the day, especially during the Jimi Hendrix performance of the Star Spangled Banner. This installation reaches out to the two senses that probably rendered the most clear for everyone at Woodstock, sight and sound. And by projecting this video on top of a modern-day picture of what the Woodstock sight looks like today, Tribe is bringing the history of Woodstock back on a new and creative level, one that allows viewers to question the meaning of the past and how it relates to our culture and experiences today. The fact that people perform recreations of the songs performed back at Woodstock, which is obviously not surprising because they are utterly amazing, but the very fact that this happens, that we keep loving and listening to pieces of audio art from 4 decades ago says something about how we live as a society today. And, as someone who is a fan of old classics like Jimi Hendrix, I am quite fascinated by what Tribe has done here.
More work to come from Mark Tribe!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tribe
No comments:
Post a Comment