There’s a new installation at the Momentary that integrates light, sound, and technology into a single hypnotic work of art. Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis visited the new feature last week and brings us this report.
“Firebird is our installation built of more than 500 car taillights we got from scrapyards around Massachusetts, and we toured this work now to different places like MASS MoCA in Massachusetts, New York, and now we’re super stoked to be in Bentonville in the Momentary Museum.”
Bo Koek is an artistic director of Touki Delphine, an art collective from Amsterdam and the people behind Firebird. The newest installation at the Momentary synchronizes light with music, namely Igor Stravinsky’s ballet suite, The Firebird.
“Yeah, so the music is inspired by the piece Firebird of Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer, and he made the Firebird Suite version in 1919, so we felt like after 100 years we would do a rework of the original composition. And you won’t hear much of the original composition back in what it is now, but it’s our version.
“We wanted to do the Firebird, which is about the phoenix, the firebird rising from its own ashes. And we wanted to use recycled materials, so materials that are basically useless at their end station before they go into a shredder or something. I wanted to give this a new value and a new thing. So we found scrapyard materials, junkyard materials, were perfect for this.”
The exhibit invites viewers into a dark room with one wall entirely dedicated to the dancing lights.
People sit on couches or dance in front of the art. There are even silver, space-age blankets for guests to wrap themselves in as they watch.
“The first time we played Firebird, we wanted to make it a ritual, basically, and this is a work without people on stage. That was a first time for us. Normally, we performed in all our performances live on stage. But now we wanted to make a thing without human beings in the performance, but to have an interaction with the audience. We really wanted to create a whole ritual, like a whole experience with it. So we designed the capes, and we drew all these routes over the outside location, the island where we first played it in Holland, and then all these people in silver capes came together at the Firebird, like sort of an oracle kind of thing.”
Koek says combining discarded pieces of tech with light, music and live performance is something his collective, Touki Delphine, is keen on exploring.
“We were interested in the whole balance between human nature and technology. We started to create performances without humans because we thought we should do a step back as humans in the whole world. So, since 2019, we are now seven years already making all these installations that are inspired by this whole thing — nature, technology, human, how to coexist, and if we can find a way to use technology in such a way that it’s not harming nature, but see if we can find a sort of balance that’s more natural.
“We do make very abstract work, or poetic works. I find it very important that everybody creates their own thoughts about the work and fills it in with their own fantasies or wanderings or whatever. So I loved it when we were just in there and all these children were dancing in front of the screen, which is fantastic. I think it’s very family-friendly. But you can also be very focused in there for an hour. That’s also possible. People like to stay for two minutes, maybe other people like to stay for three hours and just hang around in the space, and it’s all OK.”
Firebird is on display at the Momentary’s Fermentation Hall through Feb. 15. The exhibition is free to experience. More information is available at themomentary.org.
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