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, 2023
Since the late 1980s, Claudia Hart, an artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has used 3D simulations technology to produce subversive works on identity and experience that cross the virtual and physical worlds. Hart thinks of herself as a mixed reality artist, and her art takes shape through tangible installations and sculptures, projection-mapped performances, and what she calls “Digital Combines”— hybrid works that combine NFT encrypted contracts and tangible paintings. These projects explore the poetic threshold between the concrete and abstract. Her new live performance, entitled 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.
Created in 2023, Hart uses materials culled from five of her 40-year media archive (2013-2018), focusing on works from The Alice series, Hart’s collaboration with the composer Edmund Campion. “The Memory Theater of Claudia Hart” is 30 minutes in length. Four different animations are projected one after the next in a single reel, with Hart telling stories timed to her projections. The Memory Theater is direct and simple, requiring only a single large screen for projection, and a sound system. Hart listens to a click-track of each narrative on AirPods as she speaks it live against a recorded sound collage featuring samples from Campion’s compositions that he produced and recorded for their collaborative performances. The piece does not require precise digital-sync.
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.