Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier -street Photography

An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Vivian bounced between Europe and the United States before coming back to New York City in 1951. Having picked up photography just two years earlier, she would comb the streets of the Big Apple refining her artistic craft. By 1956 Vivian left the East Coast for Chicago, where she’d spend most of the rest of her life working as a caregiver. In her leisure Vivian would shoot photos that she zealously hid from the eyes of others. Taking snapshots into the late 1990′s, Maier would leave behind a body of work comprising over 100,000 negatives. Additionally Vivian’s passion for documenting extended to a series of homemade documentary films and audio recordings. Interesting bits of Americana, the demolition of historic landmarks for new development, the unseen lives of ethnics and the destitute, as well as some of Chicago’s most cherished sites were all meticulously catalogued by Vivian Maier.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Rotozaza "Etiquette" Autoteatro

ROTOZAZA "etiquette" -autoteatro



The Autoteatro series, which began in 2007 with Rotozaza's 'Etiquette', explores a new kind of performance, whereby audience members perform the piece themselves, for each other. Participants are given instructions, often (but not exclusively) via headphones for what to do, and sometimes for what to say. By simply following these instructions, something starts to happen: some kind of an event begins to unfold. Not to be confused with gaming (or ‘game show’-like improvisation), Autoteatro does not ask audience members to be clever or inventive. It simply frames and celebrates our slightly differing, often clumsy and always unique responses to simple instructions, and uses them to build narrative and event. 
In Autoteatro,
• there is no actual 'audience' beyond the participants themselves
• the structure is automatic: there are no actors or human input during the work other than their own. An Autoteatro work is a 'trigger' for a subsequently self-generating performance.