this is the speil....american decameron

American Decameron Blurb

In the face of the news of collapse everybody makes his or her ‘bug-out-bag’. They have their bug-out-car if they are lucky…. they might even have a bug out cabin. These are the provisions you pack for the apocalypse. Survivalist last package. With the help of the Bernie Maddoff’s of the world their faith in information…their faith in the high returns of waiting and saving and suspended gratification have been replaced by a type of aesthetic hedonism: the portable ‘bug out pleasure’. Stories. Witnessing. The great social media sites form a type of collective sarcophagus: the delicious pleasures of witnessing are what are left. What would be in this small vial that they might carry around their neck? A bug-out-pill? Bug-out-meth? Bug-out-cyanide capsule? Credit card suicide? The great Ponzi schemes of state, business, academia, religion, entertainment, enjoyment, your house, your cool job, sex, and everything else you are told to wait for while the music keeps playing has crumbled like a ton of bricks. While the stench of decay is around them all the Ponzi elders tell the young ‘don’t you still hear the music’ as they have one hand on the chair of survival.

If death is the manure of life then there are piles of it in Florence during the Black Death. The young and the beautiful…the articulate chat rooms and the jersey shore, and all of the other morbidly curious MTV reality shows coalesce in this snapshot of those with the gorgeous skin and bodies before the mortification of the black plague takes them. Their bug-out-survival-pack is the story…. the recorded oral story about the triumph of the five senses against bad faith. With the preponderance of death they ignore the old fear mongers and the formal church and the pyramid scheme lies of the elders. ‘Be chaste’ means save yourself for some better pyramid scheme in the future especially with the here after. This is it. This is the sensual, poetic world wrapping the senses around a series of stories. The sensual body has some sort of knowledge and the means of telling a story about this sensual means and so it unravels. American Decameron Borrows the form and essence of Boccaccio and expands this networked performance to include all media.

We use iphones and droid phones, rigged with custom controller apps. ‘Touch OSC’ will allow audience and performers to change the projection and interactive content. ‘Layer’ augmented reality inserts of ‘clues and latent desires’, gyro mouse gesture controllers, sentient cameras tuned with Max and Jitter code, the text of the Decameron is expanded to include contemporary stories to ‘mash up’ with the older thread. projections and interactive game content from within the ‘smart device’ blast out on the walls of the theater itself and into the homes of Skype participants. Xbox Kinect cameras allow the actors to move sound with gestures and every surface of the empty space becomes charged with possibility. We run this venerated script of witnessing, pleasure, culpability, and escape with the current tools of culpability and escape. We have grown the Meme pool of the decameron and we are letting it grow….

Pb