TRILOGY / MAP TO LOSE YOURSELF India
Produced in 2009 at the dawn of the digital age, Map to Lose Yourself is a trilogy to which online users gave instructions, prompts, over the unstable infrastructure of Indian internet cafes. The live performer followed their instructions through four holy Indian cities. All conversations, actions, experiences and visuals were fed back into the digital interface using an algorithm that translated them into information objects. The catharsis of the project was a self-immolation on the sacred ghat of the Ganges River in Varanasi, Manikarmika.
Live stream India / NOW ARCHIVE: All segments in one. Live performance India / promt from online community. NOW ARCHIVE : STILL PHOTOS
INDIA / TRILOGY ABOVE: Prompt aplication (Screenshoot). RIGHT: Final object - icon painted by human hands: reception becomes meaning! Zarilli writes about this as a form of oral performance, heroic/epic stories that do not have a fixed text, but rather each performance is systematized as it happens, and the mechanism of memory is actually a highly creative process that involves shortening and scanning in order to merge the story into a whole performance (Zarilli 2010: 18). It is also interesting how Zarilli describes the viewer or, better, the listener of created mythical words in primarily oral cultures: “The listener does not try to analyze, understand or interpret what he hears, but experiences and absorbs the musicality of the voice, timbre, tone, pitches, resonance, vibration and shape as the voice moves between sound and silence (…) Reception is perception, not ‘meaning’.” (Zarilli 2010: ibid.).
