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The Living Newspapers
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Hide and Seek exhibition
February 16 – March 12 & June 1 – 25

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey
wings by Claire Ashley

The Living Newspapers is a live installation consisting of pairs of ‘museum visitors’ seemingly engaged in pedestrian conversation. These conversations are actually comprised of real-time data harvested from the social networking environment, Twitter. The performers in The Living Newspapers act as subtle embodiments of the collective voice of social discourse.

The Living Newspapers takes place each Tuesday-Sunday from 11:00 – 1:30pm and again from 2:30 – 5:00pm with pairs of performers in rotating shifts. The project is revealed as a performance twice daily, in the middle of each shift, when the performers transform into two winged figures. The image constructed is based on The Winged Figures of the Republic, a New Deal era sculpture permanently installed at the Hoover Dam.

The Living Newspaper was a genre of socially engaged theater funded by the federal government in the 1930′s. The plays were constructed from factual information on culturally pertinent topics (such as the syphilis epidemic or the economic plight of farmers) and were were often designed to educate or mobilize their audiences. This contemporary re-imagining of the form is driven by a computer program that constructs dynamic dialogue from cultural chatter. The texts, gleaned by thematic searches or geographical proximity, are received by the performers through discretely worn earphones connected to a networked mobile device.

The piece is performed by: Holly Abney, David Alcalde, Sarah Archer, Joseph Belknap, Sarah Belknap, Doro Boehme, Maggie Cappelletti, Chris Cuellar, Chelsea Culp, Carla Duarte, Karen Faith, Elizabeth Furani, Alexine Haynes, Joshua Kent, David Kodeski, Tet Keong Lee, André Carlos Lenox, Evan Lenox, Gwenn-Aël Lynn, Abina Manning, Lauren McCarthy, Remington Messinger, Jennifer Mills, Jenna Rieker, L. Ruby Sage, Edmund Sandoval, Ali Scott, Colin Self, Molly Shea, James Smith, Edward Thomas-Herrera, Carolina Wheat

Hide and Seek is curated by Tricia Van Eck.

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey will discuss this work as part of Art as Event, a panel talk at the MCA Theater on March 13, 2010.

Tags: database art | installation | live data | performance

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