_badpacket_ (STEVENTON, Mike & KASPRZAK, Michelle)

=Videodrome= Body + Blood/Picture + Sound
Saturday November 4 10 pm
Art System, 327 Spadina Ave, 2nd floor

= Videodrome = Body + Blood / Picture + Sound was the latest installment of Jubal Brown’s ongoing campaign to bring together performance art and underground dance/rave culture. Promising “experience as spectacle,” Brown’s interest is to combine the best of both worlds, providing the sensual, experiential environment and engaging atmosphere of a late-night dance party, but adding the content and unpredictability of performance art. Videodrome‘s thesis was to contrast live and mediated expression, presenting works that could be experienced ‘in the flesh’ in one room, or viewed as projected spectacle in another. For this event, a series of DJs played trance and electronic dance mixes in a party environment of multiple video projections, with live performances presented on the hour in a second room and projected onto the walls of the dance area. The performances ranged from gory tableaux of bodies in distress to the destruction of furniture and a late-night fire demonstration.

_badpacket_ is a performance art duo founded in May 2000 by Mike Steventon and Michelle Kasprzak. _badpacket_ uses performance as a vehicle for the exploration of contemporary issues relating to the interfacing of humans and technology. _badpacket_ combines the use of digital, analogue, and live elements, which allows us to plunder the immediacy of the internet, the fluidity of live video mixing, and the responsive interactivity of performance. A _badpacket_ performance is a non-narrative mix of improvisation and set pieces, using video projection and digital media as central elements, which are captured and submitted to our human-centred analysis and reflection. The use of video projections creates virtual canvases, which incorporate the media space into the performance space, and allows the actions of the performer to intervene in that media space. These multiple representations allow us to combine material that would be impossible to present in a conventional performance. Central to our technique is collaboration with each other, and with the audience, to create a unique layered environment that taps into our hopes and fears for the future of technology.