HW1.2 Artist Research

Ragnar Kjartansson is an Icelandic artist specializing in performance art.  He created one of my favorite artworks, The Visitors.  The Visitors is a video piece presented on nine different screens within an installation space.  Each screen shows the performance of a different musician in a separate room within a large mansion in Upstate New York.  Although he is a performance artist, Kjartansson uses technology to record many of his performances, including The Visitors.  Each musician's video and sound is recorded separately.  In the installation space, there is a speaker placed above each projection that plays the sound associated with the musician on screen.  Therefore, as one walks through the installation, the different musicians' performances fade in and out as one walks past them.  Since the musicians were all in different rooms of the mansion while they simultaneously performed, the entire performance can only be viewed by watching the recordings together.  Without technology, the work doesn't exist in its final form.

Technology also allowed the musicians to perform the work simultaneously while in different rooms and away from each other.  Each musician wore a pair of headphones that connected them to the other performers by allowing them to hear what was being played in the other rooms.  Thus, the musicians were able to keep time while playing and singing in unison.

Kjartansson also uses a surprisingly non-high-tech piece of technology in The Visitors.  One of the projected screens of the work shows a group of people on the front porch of the mansion reveling as the musicians play indoors.  As the music slowing begins to crescendo, the people on the front porch and front lawn begin to load a cannon with gunpowder and eventually detonate it.  This out-of-date artillery technology commands attention in a way that the headphones and projectors never will, but the cannon is used in a casual, perfunctory manner by the people in the performance.

The Visitors lasts over an hour long and at its end, the musicians begin to leave their posts in their assigned rooms and move towards a single room, then to the porch, then altogether away from the mansion.  Along the way, while they eventually lay down their instruments and take off their headphones, they continue to sing acapella.  The contrast between the musicians' voices as they are accompanied by their instruments and amplified by their microphones and as they use only their voices and walk off into the distance illustrates the effect that technology has on the performance and highlights the change in tone once it is removed.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/arts/design/the-visitors-by-ragnar-kjartansson.html?_r=0#
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/07/24/hipster-musicians-from-iceland-view-video-masterpiece/IYqyl5W7LNuutpPfMc55PI/story.html
http://hyperallergic.com/66988/go-with-the-slow-ragnar-kjartanssons-the-visitors/
http://www.hangarbicocca.org/exhibitions/what-s-on/the-visitors
http://www.thinkerbelle.me/2015/10/the-visitors/