Johnny Forever et Gambletron SPAM
© J. Forever Nawracaj, 2015
SPAM is a multimedia installation with durational performance. Gambletron and Johnny Forever create an immersive and interactive “social media funhouse” projecting video conferencing platforms to create visual and sonic feedback loops mimicking the sensation of a funhouse maze of mirrors. Simultaneously, a pirate FM transmission created from the sounds in the room comes through a series of radios scattered throughout the installation. The radio transmission, along with the movement of human bodies and the manual manipulation of devices within the space act as analogue media restructuring digital identities and interactions with highly surveilled digital media.
As audiences enter a room filled with smartphones, laptops, and radios they find their bodies and voices projected around them. Their images become tangled with those of remote performances as Gambletron and Forever invite performers to “Skype” into the installation from afar. Audiences participate through consensual surveillance. Laptop cameras capture viewers joining a multi-platform video conversation projected back into the room. This creates a series of video feedback loops, giving the room a funhouse mirror effect. Drag-clad Forever encourages participation while Gambletron gathers sonic information in the room, mining audience voices, footsteps, and breathing and transmitting it back, scrambled, over the radio.
The piece explores semi-consensual relationships with Internet surveillance while contrasting digital and analogue transmission. By setting the sweet solace of pirate radio against the enthralling anxiety of Internet-based self-imagery we will viscerally explore a furtive media clash, creating information noise.
Festival tickets office available on site
$5 (access to all the activities of the Opening Party of the HTMlles Festival)
*Also at OBORO at 7:30 pm
performance root work (work that root), Monica Rekas
© J. Forever Nawracaj, 2015
Johnny Forever and Gambletron are a queer multidisciplinary duo based in Montreal. Together they create immersive, interactive performance environments exploring queer resistance through radio transmission, video, and fibres. Largely improvised public performances bring together Forever’s video and soft sculpture with Gamble’s experimental noise incorporating modified electronics.
