Event

Deceptionista

Composer and artist Aaron David Ross (ADR), a classically trained musician with a background in contemporary art and technology practices, will fully realize his project in the theater at MAD with the debut of an immersive virtual ecosystem and an improvised live performance using the free online tool VPeeker.

VPeeker interfaces with Vine to provide a continuous global feed of real-time videos playing six seconds of the most recently uploaded Vine clip. Sourcing both audio and video from the feed, ADR has discovered an untapped world of Internet detritus and developed his own methods of engaging with the unfiltered live stream.

Deceptionista combines the relentless ephemera of VPeeker with ADR's distinctly overt compositional approach, distinguishing itself through its formal deliriousness and playful tenor. The performance will occur in two parts. The first, an improvisation using the VPeeker tool in real time, will allow the chaos of algorithm-determined Vines to flood into the theatre. The second marks ADR's debut of a live video game-like environment skinned with VPeeker-sourced texture maps. The dynamic color palettes and shifting atmospheres from the clips create strings of incongruous alternations, where real conflates with virtual, irony blurs into belief, and human emotion is measured in digital upload speeds. Deceptionista seeks to dramatize these dichotomies by traversing the deep chasms between them, unpacking and further mystifying the spiraling inconsistencies of our globally networked lifestyles.