INHERITING THE VOID
Inheriting the Void in a new place based research project that traces the intersection of mental health, climate crisis and the rise of AI. Supported by a MOCA Tucson NightBloom Award and the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts.
Inheriting the Void is a new performance, installation, and sound collaboration based on the last three years of caring for my mother and her rapid onset of dementia. I use different modes of creation (performance, video, green screen animation, prop-objects, and costumes) to explore the connections between dementia, our climate crisis, and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence. AI is a phenomenon that threatens the meaning in stories, memory, and information, as well as requires great amounts of energy and resources to maintain it. AI is a reflection of current social and environmental derangement, delusion, and dementia.
In 2024 the work developed as an installation, and through an artist residency at Northern Sustainable Futures, Moskosel, Sweden. During this time I collaborated with musician Sean Peter Rogers to create a unique musical score and to record video footage. The work is currently in development as a site specific performance in the US/Mexico borderlands.
Inheriting the Void.
Mixed media Installation (3channel video, VHS Dementia-Blob, salt crystals, rope, and mountain flats).
Group show, Fun House, May 2024. Pidgin Palace, Tucson, AZ.
Without collapsing into narrative Inheriting the Void draws on recent events and intersecting theme-image-concepts, including:
A book I found in a thrift store, titled “The Last Survivors,” the book includes the extinction of The Mexican Grizzly bear. A falling out of the world that occurred here in this regional place and at a time just before I was born; an extinction story, that to quote the book “was fueled by man and his dogs, traps, poisons, and 30-30 rifles”. The colonial tension of nature and settler-mentality. The manufactured forgetting of who was there before and how to live lightly on the land - the violence.
The characters are a bear (a repurposing of an old costume I made in 2005 for a show about being young and the power of imagination); And a ventriloquist doll who speaks on behalf of artificial intelligence, altered, and algorithmic memories; (who first appeared in a show about quantum-and-meta-physics). The only way out is a return to dirt, decomposition, seeds, and tiny new flowers.
In Empire of AI Karen Hao writes that the delusion of AI as a tool for humanity, “simply equates to educated people become ventriloquists for chat bots”.
To lose footing in one reality, contracting into another – to be lost to the garden precisely because you have ceased to be a caretaker -unwillingly through the forces of dementia, derangement and delusion. To fall out of one world paradigm, is the promise of a new one.
