FW: A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness on Dvblog.org

New work by Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint :) Lauren

—— Forwarded Message
From: "Cary Peppermint" <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 1 May 2006 10:05:59 -0400
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness on Dvblog.org

Chapters from the DVD "A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness
- Summer 2005" will be posted (three at a time) on DV Blog starting May 1st.


http://dvblog.org/

A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness, Summer 2005 is a video
performance work made in the woods and on rural back-lots. Performative
chapters on the DVD include, Move This Rock, Waiting On Bob, DoAble, Home
Economics, Sticks Like Snakes, Digging for Chicory, and Springwater Finale.
This video is the first in a series of forthcoming performance-art videos by
Peppermint & Nadir which engage issues, ideas, and mythologies of the
American concepts of wilderness, space, the frontier, and humans' ethical
relation to animals, forestlands, and nature.

This project is part of Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir's series of
performance-art videos begun in 2002. Peppermint is an artist who works with
new media technologies to create networked environments incorporating the
internet, physical installations, experimental music and sound, and live
performance. Until recently, Cary directed the Digital Art and Design
program of Hartwick College, and in Fall 2006 he will assume the digital
media position at Colgate University's Department of Art and Art History.
Christine Nadir teaches literature at State University of New York College
at Oneonta and is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University where she is
completing her dissertation. Its working title is "The Future of the World:
Sacrifice, Economy, and Ethics in Environmental Literature and
Ecocriticism."

Christine feels that these videos capture some of the energy, activities,
and thoughts that she and Cary have experienced as New Yorkers living in the
wilderness for four months every year: trying to establish a functional home
without running water, electricity, or maintained roads; developing
relationships with locals; un-learning the romanticization of nature while
re-learning humanity's dependence on the environment for survival; and
researching the details of the history of the land and the surrounding area
(its previous deforestation, its logging, its near use for an auto salvage
yard, its use as farmland and grazing ground one hundred years ago, the
precolonial possession by Native Americans for centuries before that).

Cary says: The North American concepts of wilderness are informed by
nationalist ideologies and concepts of freedom as a wild, un-checked
frontier of possibility. I don't believe there is any such thing as
wilderness as we Americans are inclined to see it. How could one know or
understand that which is truly wild much less employ it toward
nation-building? Also, I find a certain intellectual humor in the offering
of performances that purport to be both practical and wild.

http://www.restlessculture.net/practicalperformance


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