Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series: Claudia Hart: Memory Theatres

Memory Theatre Performance I | 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. | Tempe Campus | Stauffer B125
Memory Theatre Performance II | 2:30 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. | ASU MIX Center | Small Screening Theatre
 
Please join us for our next Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture with Claudia Hart.

Since the late 1980s, Claudia Hart, an artist and Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has used 3D simulation technology to produce subversive works on identity and experience that cross the virtual and physical worlds. Hart thinks of herself as a mixed reality artist, and her art takes shape through tangible installations and sculptures, projection-mapped performances, and what she calls “Digital Combines”— hybrid works that combine NFT encrypted contracts and tangible paintings. These projects explore the poetic threshold between the concrete and abstract. Her new live performance, entitled MEMORY THEATER (2023) embodies this as a half-hour theatrical monologue combined with animations consisting of experimental avatar dance, video, and earlier works culled from her personal archive spanning 35 years of continuous media-art practice. In it, she recites fable-like anecdotes that hybrid Grimm's fairy tales with art history and personal memoir, bringing together her past, present and imagined selves.
 
Created in 2023, Hart uses materials culled from 5 of her 40-year media archive (2013-2018), focusing on works from The Alice series, Hart’s collaboration with the composer Edmund Campion. The Memory Theater of Claudia Hart is 30 minutes in length. Four different animations are projected one after the next in a single reel, with Hart telling stories timed to her projections. The Memory Theater is direct and simple, requiring only a single large screen for projection, a headset microphone and a sound system with a mixing board. Hart listens to a click-track of each narrative on AirPods as she speaks it live against a recorded sound collage featuring samples from Campion’s compositions that he produced and recorded for their collaborative performances. The piece does not require precise digital-sync.