Marianne Petit: The Mutant Gene and Tainted Kool-Aid Sideshow Cd-rom

Title:

The Mutant Gene and Tainted Kool-Aid Sideshow Cd-rom

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

1995

Artist Statement:

“The Mutant Gene & Tainted Kool-Aid Sideshow CD-ROM” (completed October 1995) is a navigable interpretation of a series of performances I staged in 1994, by the same name. The performances incorporated live and prerecorded, multiple-monitor and projected video, animation, text, both sequenced and live instrumental music, as well as the use of dramatic artifacts and performance elements such as masks and dance. Beginning with the psycho-dramatic confession of an extraterrestrial, the piece journeyed into a series of multicolored, entropic landscapes. My intent with the performances, and the use of technology was to create alternate or augmented realities for an audience. I wished for the audience to be immersed in an environment of sound, light and motion, which often paralleled the content – in essence, making certain fantasy states real. A complete written description of the performances was published in Leonardo (Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences & Technology), The Special Virtual Reality Section, Volume 27, Issue 4. The CD-ROM emerged from a desire to break down the linear constraints of a performance to create a more personal “circular” experience, where an individual can explore the environment in any order, without being guided as a collective “audience” through various states. It was created on a Macintosh 660 AV, a Commodore Amiga 2000 and the equipment at the Experimental Television Center. It is entirely self-produced and self-published, and is available for the Macintosh.