The Alices Walking, 2014
A Sculptural Opera and Fashion Show
The Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, NYC
Created in collaboration with the composer and software designer Edmund Campion, Alices Walking was an opera in which the performers enacted a mixed-reality fashion show. Mashing augmented reality, sculpture, cocktails and opera, The Alices (Walking) was a performance about spectacle, looking and looking at others looking. It portrayed a culture so addicted to the devices of high technology that it can only bear a world that is filtered through them.
Using the words of Lewis Carroll's 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a starting point, Hart expanded the notion of madness to a live computational network. Steeped in the clichés of data-driven, punk and Romantic aesthetics, the live production is interactive and features five performers wearing "website dresses." Crafted from patterned fabrics designed by Hart, the dresses were embedded with visual content that could be read with a networked camera. During the performance, select audience members were invited to launch an augmented-reality application on phones and tablets, which recognized the inscribed patterns. "While the performance investigates breakdowns between the natural and the technological, it is also conceived as a means to create new experiences of human-computer interaction," said Hart.
The Alices (Walking), proposed an Alice for our time with characters clothed in a cyborgian identity, one welded to the realm of smartphone devices. It is a system vulnerable to glitches and decay, as Carroll's original narrative is spun into text graphics that evoke pop-up banner ads and trashy web design. The novel's text evolves into animations of strobing concrete poetry. Phrases from the novel also formed the basis for a libretto, sung and recorded by Claudia Hart with countertenor vocalist Mikey McParlane. Edmund Campion's score for the performance treats and adapts this libretto electronically. As each Alice on the runway is plugged into the system, a new code tree is activated. Tags and patterns of animated signage change, signaling the spaces of cloning, duplication, mutation and transformation. Staging an irrational cycle of haptic communication between the human and the machine, Hart's production ultimately channels death, rebirth, and an ambivalent desire for eternal life.
The Alices Walking Website Dresses, a collection of 5 sculptural wearables, featured a custom augmented-reality application using poetic text animations created by Hart. The libretto evolved from Lewis Carroll's original Alice in Wonderland by using Spinabook software designed by Alon Zouartez (https://spinabook.com/). Software fabric tags were created by Hart with costumes designed by Hart with Julie Robinson who engineered and fabricated them.
Review: The Creators Project: I Had The Most Meta Experience Of My Life At An Augmented-Reality Fashion Show Inspired By "Alice In Wonderland"
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Review: I Care if You Listen: Sculptural Opera- Claudia Hart's Alices (Walking) at EyeBeam