Performance Times: 9am to 1pm ET, Friday October 20th
Live online (@NewInquiry, @_fanriot, and on this page) and IRL (Fierce Festival, Birmingham U.K.)
There’s a band playing down on the shore. The players are at the water’s edge, the salty slap caressing their hairy ankles. No one knows how They got there, like They came in with the nighttide, like washed-up telephone poles, perhaps hurricane Melania’s final speck of communication vomit. There are no instruments in their hands; one seems to be teasing some kind of cactus from a terra-cotta pot, another applying baby-pink lip gloss to The Lip Area over and over. The Other girl, wearing an oversized Apple Creampie & Fish T-shirt, just stands there on what we can only call “a leg.” All three (or was it four?) emanate a petrifyingly sparkly and shallow hollowness.
fic.the.sky is a four-hour “performance hangout” entwining music, dance, and experimental theater with aspects of fandom and open-source culture. Performance is a mode of fictioning here, of altered duration, and of “being together”; where fantasy, the reworking of popular myths and images, and the invention of new folk narratives are made possible. Fiction (or rather live fictioning) is potential: a nonproductive force through which we might envision a life beyond “work versus leisure” (Georges Bataille) or the consequent blurring of these paradigms, including the subsuming of play and participation into the neoliberal organizational agenda. fic.the.sky wants you to want to click or participate more than actually do so. This is a time of conjuring. The title is thus an imperative—a kind of Fluxus instruction for the computer age. When salvaged JPEGs of cutesy cats and fascist memes become monuments of digital democracy, fiction offers an alternative: a possible future glimpsed in the erotic tension between work and play, the utopic but always unobtainable sky and ourselves. So “hang out” for as long as you want or just open a separate tab while you get on with other business.
fic.the.sky is created by London-based artist Owen G. Parry with performance troupe Medeber Teatro. More on his Fan Riot project: http://fanriot.tumblr.com
https://t.co/GNjHoyuM4b live fictioning @_fanriot's 4hr 'performance hangout' @fiercefestival #ficthesky https://t.co/SROtJaV0fj
— The New Inquiry (@newinquiry) October 20, 2017