"We Can Really Feel Like We’re Here"
A live cinema + music + sound collage performance piece for MAGFest
Does technology help connect people? Or does it replace them? As the tools of one age become the masters of the next, it’s precisely the gaming community that knows the Metaverse existed long before its recent corporate rebranding. In "We Can Really Feel Like We’re Here," live cinema artist SUE-C and metamedia group Negativland collage the last century’s worth of technology — the one now being resold back to us as our future. But from Sensorama to Oculus, from Second Life to PlayStation Home, from I Love Bees to Twitter — there’s only so much gamification that the real world is ever going to allow.
Negativland
Since 1980, the multimedia collective known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and "culture jamming" (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement. Their art and media interventions pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, ownership, propaganda, power, and perception in the United States of America. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about and cited in over 150 books and legal journals, and their favorite video game is Katamari Damacy.
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SUE-C
SUE-C is a projectionist, engineer and educator working at the intersection of creative coding and live performance. She has created handmade videos and live media performances, taught college level courses and workshops, and traveled extensively in the USA and internationally since 1999. Her work blends technology, photography, video and everyday objects into an improvisational animation “instrument” using her own custom software and live cameras. Working in tandem with musicians, “her camera is equipped like a microscope, turning the scrap store objects into a visual equivalent of ASMR.” (From The Wire, November 2021). When not performing, teaching, parenting or making NFTs she is usually trying to finish a stack of books while petting one of five cats.