THE X-ART FOUNDATION

blast5drama

22 November 1996 - 4 January 1997
opening Friday, 22 November, 6-8 pm
Sandra Gering Gallery
476 Broome Street, New York, NY 10013
tel 212/226-8195
fax 212/226-7186
email gering@interport.net

http://www.interport.net/~xaf

Sandra Gering Gallery is pleased to present "blast5drama," an
installation by The X-Art Foundation.

Since 1990, the primary focus of The X-Art Foundation has been its
annual project Blast. Originally a boxed publication containing
projects in various media, Blast explores contemporary textual and
visual formations and their accompanying practices of reading, viewing,
and authoring. Blast5, the 1996 version, extends beyond the boxed
publication into a multiplicity of forms, both traditional and digital.
Blast can no longer be identified as a publication in any familiar
sense. Its container has become a vehicle which no longer houses
content, but rather structures its conditions.

In this installation, the content of blast5 expands to incorporate
performance and roleplaying. The basis of blast5 is a story taking
place in a fictional town with no name, only a location. This location
is a combination of real and virtual locales–for example, a mix of
physical landmarks ("Highway Six and the train tracks") with Internet
addresses. The location is generally referred to as the "Crossroads."
Like the location, the characters within the drama are both real and
fictional or virtual. The Crossroads becomes a place "caught in the
vortex of machines gone mad, a double crossing of the borders of life
and death, a place that no longer remembers itself, a landscape that has
fallen into a liminal crack outside of reason." Upon entering the
installation, viewers can become part of the plot taking place at the
Crossroads. The installation includes stage sets, video cameras,
computer projections, sound, and projects in many media.

Blast5drama explores relationships between scripts and actions. It
looks at the ways that texts and representations are transformed by new
technologies into immersive, inhabitable forms. By nature, a script
evokes the ways that daily life is structured according to the logic of
various institutions, making it a register of social and cultural
patterns. Therfore, a script is an architecture that provides for
characterizations, environments, and behaviors, while simultaneously
carrying within itself the potential for subversion by the very acts it
structures.

The editors of blast5drama are Marlena Corcoran, Jordan Crandall,
Ricardo Dominguez, Sean Bronzell, Antoinette LaFarge, Heather Wagner,
Adrianne Wortzel. Time curators are Emily Hartzell and Nina Sobell /
Parkbench. Visiting editors are N. Katherine Hayles and Gregory L.
Ulmer. Contributing editor is Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

The "Theater of Operations" for blast5drama can be accessed at The
Sandra Gering Gallery online at http://www.interport.net/~gering.

For further information please contact Marianna Baer at 212 226-8195 or
gering@interport.net. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday,
10-6pm.