THE JESTER OF TONGA

PS122

Nov 13-23
Wed-Sat 8pm
Sun 6:30pm
$20, $15, $10

Silovsky and his robot Stanley tell the very true and complex story
of Jesse Bogdonoff, the sensational modern-day Court Jester to the
Tongan Royal Court. Twenty suitcases packed full with island lore spill
their secrets, scandals and adventures onto the stage.

Joe is a quintessential brilliant and quirky mad scientist type; who is constantly derailed from his story telling by the technology and his own exuberant interest in absolutely everything.  But the digressions are the fabulously interesting, and he's got Stanley the robot to keep him on track and tell you all about the woes cased by the last big financial bump on Wall Street.

I imaging there will be a few pore sole will be run out of town in the dead of night due to this financial crisis.  But I very much doubt they'll have as odd a story as Mr. Bogdonoff or as entertaining a chronicler as Mr. Silovsky.

Happy to be here for the 2008-2009 DPI Residency.  I'll be developing a performance using the rope&pulley media control system I created.  

Last week, I did some preparatory experiments for my DPI residency at the DeBaun Auditorium with Wendy Richmond. More to come on those experiments soon!  

Wow. Really happy to have found another home for this project. After several months of struggling with the piece I've recently fallen back madly in love with it. There is more background info on Alchemy of Light at Street Pictures. Very much looking forward to delving deeper at DPI. 

One discussion I often find myself getting into with people when I start talking about robotic actors is what exactly do you mean by robot. Does it just have to look like a robot, (and what is that) or does it have to meet some semantic
or technical definition of robot.

I really don't have an answer accept how I feel about it, which is that a robot is a mechanical object that take a series of tasks without direct human intervention.

I feel there are still problems with that definition, but it works for me, although I keep ending up in arguments about weather my coffee pot and washing machine are robots.
So here I have started exploring the idea as a mind map, which unfortunately does not seem to fit very well int he blog.

We are please to announce the 2008-2009 Digital Performance Institute Artist Residency projects.
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• rope&pulley
  Michael Chladil  
• The Mahler + Machine Project
  Jennifer Tsuei     
• ‘cara viaggio’
  John Kelly 
• Alchemy of Light
  Ruth Sergel