This is a community participation project that involves, absorbs and reflects the community of artists at and associated with MIT
Installation: 8 handmade LED video panels, 2 sided [16 screens], 16-channel sound
Festival Henge is a dynamic, participatory installation composed of eight freestanding, translucent hand-made LED video panels arranged in an octagonal formation. Evoking the spatial logic of the artist’s earlier Panoctagon work, the structure functions as both architectural gesture and digital canvas. Each low-resolution video screen displays imagery visible from both sides, while also allowing the surrounding environment to be visible between the LED pixels, inviting viewers into a 360° audiovisual environment with sixteen-channel surround sound.
One aspect of this light dance is that the low resolution content is only readable from a distance and as the viewer approaches the content dissolves into flickering lights, much like community isn't so visible when you are inside it but clearly visible from afar. Viewers inside the circle are immersed in a sparkling light environment but seen from afar are wrapped in dynamic video content.
The installation remains silent except on occasion when activated by performances by community sound artists and DJs. The work evokes community by including community artists’ content but also by the content provided by Dolan which comprises scenes from neighborhoods and scrolling text messages starting with Community is… As such the installation serves not only as a meditative sculptural space but as a performance platform
The project includes community participation with artists in the broader MIT community contributing video content for inclusion on the LED screens. Initially the Festival Henge is seeded with a 30 minute loop of screaMachine content. As the project continues it will evolve as new content is added to this loop until the project finishes at the end of September. [Note: there is a possibility it will continue further into the Fall, depending on the Media Lab exhibition schedule: basically it will remain until the next exhibit is scheduled to be installed]
Festival Henge is open to participation from video artists, VJs, sound artists, and DJs for "Jam Sessions" very Friday Night in September after nightfall - fostering an evolving dialogue of light, motion, and sound. On these nights, 16 speakers will be installed, two at the base of each LED Frame pointing into the circle center, and a big subwoofer off to the side. Audio artists and DJs will perform live on this Hexadecaphonic sound system. screaMachine will both do some live audio performances and some dance party DJing into the night as needed. Video artists and VJs will similarly be live mixing/presenting content on the LED Frames, different to the regular loop running the rest of the week. Members of the community are encouraged to come hang and experience the audio and video works, dance to some dance music and participate in the audio and video jam session. Each evening will evolve into its own live experience for audiences and participants alike.
The installation transforms into a living project, a space for expanded audio and video works and a dance floor, shifting from contemplative art space to communal celebration. This transformation breaks from the rigidity of traditional exhibition formats, embracing embodied experience and collective joy beyond ideological boundaries
The content of the 24/7 video loop will be curated. The Festival Henge is a place for community celebration and only works that fit that theme will be accepted (the sibling project The Panoctagon is the space for political works, but is not currently on display). The theme of community is very broad and includes all kinds of works that explore art from the simple, minimal or beautiful, to content that reflects the individual author and/or their wider world.
The “seeded” video content that inaugurates the loop is an example of some of the types of video clips that work in this space. Remember of course all clips will look decorative and like flickering lights up close and it is only at a distance content is clearly visible, and even then very low resolution and of necessity, simple. Any general video footage tends to be indistinguishable from random noise and colors. Video clips need to be created with this in mind. The following are some of the clips and themes in the screaMachine seed video:
The Self/Individual: talking head clips from the self portrait non-linear documentary “Fractured Selves”, an interactive web based project where the author interviews various public projections of self. Black & White close ups of the faces depicted speaking are located, one in each LED Frame, pointing in to the circle, facing each other, and pointing out into the community.
They speak simultaneously while saying nothing as there is no sound and the resolution too low to read lips. They are manifestations of self, gleaned from a hybrid documentary and further abstracted by the simplification and technology.
The presentation of self in this public context, exposed, though restricted, speaks to the foundational building blocks of community - the individual. As a gender-nonconforming person, presentation of the self in public is political and potentially a risk: being out in a climate where the government declares you as a fiction is particularly poignant in the USA 2025
Another individual presented, is an animated characterization of a unhoused person in the late 1980’s New York City, taken from the 1990 screaMachine hybrid documentary “Without” featuring an actor playing, in animated photography form, himself as a unhoused Vietnam Veteran struggling with living on the derelict streets of the East Village. Most of his story is true, but has fictional elements and the actions were posed for photography and later animated, thus the hybrid nature of the documentary and the abstraction from the real.
He is seen to wander the derelict landscape, walking and crawling in loops. These walking and crawling scenes, as well as some animated face close ups are presented on the Festival Henge, representing the inclusion of all members of our communities, especially the vulnerable and disenfranchised. And while there is this element of sorrow, there is also beauty in this spectrum and the recognition of struggle as part of life and another building block of togetherness.
There are scenes from a number of screaMachine music videos from the 1990’s where they were deeply involved in the drum’n’bass scene, producing records and running Jungle Nation nightclub with their DJ friends. This shows the element of gathering and organizing into groups and making things happen that are cultural enhancements of community and celebration of creativity.
Mostly abstract but colorful, you can make out spinning records, DJs’ hands mixing and more. Another of the Fractures Selves personas, they continue to be a part of NYC and Boston nightlife and participate in and help promote gathering and celebration in that world.
These scenes are also conducive to dancing, should there be dance music playing. Video enhancement of the dance floor has been a mainstay for screaMachine for over 30 years and the Festival Henge at its simplest flickering lights form, can be just that: danced party lighting. This beauty can be lush and enticing in and of itself, but also belies the content, obfuscates the meaning up close, yet backed away, we see layers of meaning coalesce.
Also featured are clips from “Urban Junglism” a video depicting the artist from the perspective of tracking surveillance cameras as they walk the streets of the East Village, going to the store, walking the dogs etc. surrounded by graphic boxes and text tracking and interpreting their movements, with “Alert” and “Suspicious Activity” messages popping up next to the tracking boxes.
Created in 2000, but predictive of what is current technology used around the world, with face recognition and movement analysis. Being part of a community can also be being part of those being watched and under suspicion, particularly for immigrants and people on the fringes of society.
As a former undocumented “alien”, the author knows well the sense of constant fear and the fragility of circumstances, and the need to avoid drawing attention to oneself.
A stylistic note: though many of these scenes are from Black and White films, just like those elements of the individual that created them, are really not separable from each other but blend: the Black and White film clips are constantly invaded by the vivid color of the color films and the color films coopted by the content of the Black and White ones, blurring the distinction of each.
Another crossover project between the music videos and performance art is a project called “Nothing” which involved live remixing of audio and video content using a gestural interface. The performance is 15 minutes long and starts out slow and meandering, slowly building to the final 4 minutes where it is a fully complex drum’n’bass track.
The accompanying video mimics this form, starting with one white line that develops fluctuations that grow ever more complex and start including color and eventually video content featuring the artist and family, all blended with animated swirling forms. The piece tracks the notion of vacuum foam, or fluctuations in nothingness that spawns emergent properties that over time get more complex and develop living entities and meaning, specifically those related to the author, reflecting the idea that we are the product of void fluctuations and that from nothing we come and to nothing we shall return
These animations are presented across the inside and outside of the LED Frames and form a slow down of the pace of content, and, at the simple opening minutes, minimal area of lit LEDs, evolving to eventually take over the entire surfaces and return to the more full screen dynamics of the other content.
The most recent urban scenes are from the screaMachine feature documentary “The Biggest Obstacle” which depicts the struggle of disability rights activists fighting for accessibility in the New York City transit system.
As a member of the disability community and a lifelong activist, these scenes broaden the idea of community into one of communal action and the sense that together we can achieve, make progress and shine the light on our members.
There are many scenes from the Black and White screaMachine feature film “Urban Landscapes” from 2003. A “city symphony” style film featuring semi-abstracted roves through architectural landscapes, a series of New York City neighborhoods that were, in 2003, of import to the artist (and still are). While the concentration is more on structure, the inhabitants of these structures come and go from the frame like ghosts, exposed momentarily and blended into moving forms that are depictions of neighborhoods.
Included are places the author lived, worked, dealt with authority and played: East Village, Lower East Side, Times Square, Wall Street, Coney Island, Federal Plaza, 5th Avenue, DUMBO and more. These spaces are exploded via film, in the sense of investigated and exposed, like an “exploded” skull, rendered into articulated sections for study, and yet also in danger or really exploding or being vulnerable to such, as the film was shot soon after 9/11 and in neighborhoods surrounding the WTC.
The constant movement through these scenes, the endless flickering of the light, the activity of people, the artifacts of people render an image of non-specific continuity, of the ebb and flow of the city as a living, pulsating character. These examinations of neighborhoods are accompanied by and overlaid with scrolling text, that at first seems confusing, scrolling inside and outside the circle from Frame to Frame, and yet, given pause, are quite readable, posing ideas of the structure of community, reading:
Community is… Participation
Community is… Relationships
Community is… Togetherness
Community is… Unity
Community is… Connection
Community is… Belonging
Community is… Supporting
Community is… Organizing
Community is… Engaging
Community is… Communicating
Community is… Culture
These text scrolls are didactic revelations of intent, moments of clarity in the mashup of mixed content and luminous motion. They act as chapter markers, separating each section of content above and bring all back to the center before meandering off in a new direction. As new content, from the community, is added to the loop, these new sections will also be separated and contained between a pair of these statements, framing each in its own space.
The Festival Henge, like its ancestor structures in Ireland some 7 millennia ago, becomes a place built by the community and used by the community to celebrate itself.
This work is made possible by Arts At MIT, Artfinity Arts Festival, The Art Culture & Technology Program & Media Lab
live generated video by VJ Supreetha K responding to 8 channel spatial sound mix by Ian Condry aka Leftroman
video mix by Gearóid Dolan
video mix by Gearóid Dolan
Festival Henge Call for Artists
This is an open call to performers, DJs, Sound Artists, VJs and Video Artists in the MIT community to participate in this project being presented in MIT's Media Lab Exhibition space, Building E14 - West Lobby, Friday Evening Jams in September. See webpage for submission details and specs for performing in the project
