The Vigil – June 6th and 7th, 2014 at Zero1 LAST Festival
the vigil
The vigil is an ongoing project exploring the tension between physical silence and movement, the motions of loss, and between where you are and where you have just been. Reminiscent of many varieties of vigils, a solo participant is stands in stillness, fitted around either the sacrum or heart with a motion sensor, and asked to attempt to remain “still”. A a continuously regenerating and fading live line drawing (which becomes upright when they are still) is generated from that sensor data and projected back onto the participant to create an evolving line-scape of the distance between movement and stillness.
Th Vigil premiered as part of the 2013 LAST (leonardo art science technology) Festival, curated by Piero Scaruffi at Zero1 Garage gallery in San Jose in June 2014,and was developed in part through residencies at EarthDance, Kinetech, and research work with the WaterWheel.net project in distributed telematic performance.
That sway is used to generate a slowly fading line drawing tracking their movement and breath (and those of every other participant world wide).
Future development includes a long-term networked installation where the vigil includes simultaneous participants across time zones in order to keep a single “vigil” awake around the clock.
