The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart, 2022-2023, 3D animations of varying lengths that include music by Edmund Campion and Claudia Hart and a recorded version of Hart’s live performance.
The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart (2022-23)
30-minute 3D animation monologue to be performed live
4 acts, each with recorded music compute-assisted live music
The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart ) is a half-hour theatrical monologue combined with animations consisting of experimental avatar dance, video, and earlier works culled from her personal archive spanning 35 years of continuous media-art practice. In it, Hart recites fictionalized versions of traumatic life events to hybrid Grimm's fairy tales with art history and personal memoir, bringing together her past, present, and imagined selves. In this version, Hart mixes a recorded sound collage featuring samples from long-term collaborator Edmund Campion’s past audio compositions produced and recorded for their collaborative performances with either recorded or live processed music by Tommy Martinez, Avatars Motion-captured "stilt" dancing performed by choreographer and performer Kristine Isabelle in 2018 is embodied by Hart's Bauhaus-inspired avatars. The piece exists in many variations, including one where Hart removes her normal voice-over so that the avatar dance can fully embody her narrative.
The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart, a 35-minute live performance combining 3D animation and storytelling, the premier in Queering Democracy, the first Budapest BINÁLÉ, a digital art biennial, curated by VIOLA LUKÁCS, PÉTER WEILER and JÚLIA MÁRTA NEUDOLD.
The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart, a 35-minute live performance combining 3D animation and storytelling, the premier in Queering Democracy, the first Budapest BINÁLÉ, a digital art biennial, curated by VIOLA LUKÁCS, PÉTER WEILER and JÚLIA MÁRTA NEUDOLD.
Claudia Hart makes mixed-reality works that explore the poetic threshold between the concrete and abstract. Her live performance, MEMORY THEATER (2023) embodies this as a half hour theatrical monologue combined with animations consisting of experimental avatar dance, video, and earlier works culled from her personal archive spanning 35 years of continuous media-art practice. In it, she recites fable-like anecdotes that hybrid Grimms fairy tales with art history and personal memoir, bringing together her past, present, and imagined selves.
On July 17, 2023, I performed The Memory Theaters at an intimate goodbye-to-Berlin party in the backyard of Scope.bln, a residency and art center, where every audience member was a personal friend, or a friend of one. This piece was assembled from shots taken by all of them.
The audience for the backyard Scope Memory Theater were all personal friends. Because of the improvisatory set up, the technical mishaps resulting, and my equally improvisatory responses, the performance took on the quality of family story-telling by an outdoors “hearth.” It was very special to me, and is a different interpretation and staging idea than the one at the first Binale of Digital Art, "Queering Democracy," produced in Budapest by Fruzsina Tóth.