DISORIENTALISM, a collaboration between Katherine Behar and Marianne M. Kim, studies the disorienting effects of technologized labor, junk culture, and consumerism as forces that mediate bodies and instate body-knowledge. Utilizing live performance, video, and photographic projects, DISORIENTALISM is an ongoing effort to reverse-engineer our identities.
An Archaeology of the Mistaken Present, 2007. Photo: Monica Ruzansky
RECENT PERFORMANCES
Performance
Arizona State University IAP Gallery
SYNOPSIS: The Disorientals outsource production of an interactive, limited edition artist book, DISORIENTALISM: Volume I: The ABCs, to an assembly line of middle-aged white men.
Public Performance
d.u.m.b.o. art under the bridge festival
SYNOPSIS: Confronted with the park and recreational park activities as sites of artificial nature, the Disorientals are learning to be leisurely. In Two by Two, View by View, our disorientation continues at a site where the natural and the man-made collide.
Photo: Monica Ruzansky
Public Performance
PSi 13
Performance Studies International Conference
SYNOPSIS: Taking to the street, the Disorientals assume the guise of a clean-up team. Roaming through Times Square with magnet brooms, they collect metal objects in their path. Next, in the role of archaeologists, they collate and label the specimens they have amassed. As outsiders, they must devise theories to explain how each object could be put to use in a disoriented civilization.
www.psi-web.org/psi13/main.html
Photo: Monica Ruzansky
VIDEO AND PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECTS
4 Short Videos:
Wet Wipe, Bars and Tone, Tube-Tied, Off Air
SYNOPSIS: TV Maintenance presents television audiences with four scenarios, each the length of a typical commercial. In each of these short videos, Wet Wipe, Bars and Tone, Tube-Tied, and Off Air, the Disorientals are trapped behind the glass of the boob tube's screen. Boxed in, we are charged with the task of performing maintenance on a technology on the wane: the analog TV set.
Video, 4'17"
SYNOPSIS: As factory workers-come-superheroes, the Disorientals offer a humorous portrait of the disorienting effects caused by labor by attempting to reverse engineer their identities. We are "plugging away" in a search for self-recognition that takes us from assembly line drudgery to deflecting bullets, and from a kumquat grove to an iPod groove. Simultaneously producing and consuming the DISO-PLUG, a disoriental invention, we take stock of digital, mechanical, and organic dimensions to ourselves.
Video 2'15"
SYNOPSIS: Within the length of a television commercial break, the Disorientals must attempt to recover their bearings. It's the holiday season and they are momentarily caught inside a blizzard of scattered media. They wander aimlessly through static in attempts to finding a signal that will lead them out before they are completed erased.
Digital Photographs
SYNOPSIS: A photographic project depicting the birth of the Disorientals, this irreverent homage quotes from Western classical sources such as Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and La Primavera and Cranach the Elder's paintings of Adam and Eve. In one image the Disorientals are twin goddesses without modesty. In another they are images fit to sell a product. The photographs play on the sacred and the profane, attraction and repulsion, the erotic and the mythological.