Recycled Time was a multimedia performance created by Aaron Ross and Christian Greuel in September, 1991. The idea of the project was to create a space which could be stored, re-used, and re-experienced. Its current incarnation on the Web is an extension of that concept.
Using techniques and concepts from the disciplines of music, video, art, theatre, and dance, Recycled Time was an integrated media project for the Modular Theatre at California Institute of the Arts which took place on Friday, September 13, 1991. The performance was funded by a grant from the CalArts Interschool Projects Committee.
Recycled Time featured 3D spatial audio and an interactive video installation, along with live performances and a printed program densely packed with information and art. The show was created in the hopes of annihilating boundaries among the arts. We advocate the free flow of information in order to foster evolution. To accomplish this, we saturate the senses with sights, sounds, ideas, and feelings.
Source material was generated via complex electronic systems which mimic life in its constant change and unpredictability. Sounds and images were spontaneously created, then processed and recycled through twisted loops and nested hierarchies. The result was a multimedia onslaught with scientific groundings in chaos theory, psychoacoustics, neurology, and analytical psychology. Artistic influences ranged from the ritual music of Tibetan monks to that of industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, and from filmmaker Jordan Belson to author William Gibson.
A strange, postindustrial environment was created in the Modular Theatre with the use of 3D audio and theatrical lighting. In the control room, Christian Greuel combined prerecorded multitrack audiotapes with MIDI sequences and live synthesizers through a matrixed mixing console, and dynamically assigned the sounds to ten speakers strategically placed in the theater. Onstage, Aaron Ross generated complex visual patterns in real time using a four- camera video feedback installation.
In addition, we used strobe lights and video flicker to induce brainwave entrainment. Certain frequencies can trigger various psychological states, including meditative calm and hypnagogic trance. We employ this technique to encourage descent into the unconscious. Since these synaesthetic images and sounds are chaotic and abstract, the viewer is free to project into them any meaning he or she desires.
A large amount of written and graphic information was conveyed to both hemispheres of the viewers' brains through the printed program, which was sponsored by MONDO 2000. We spoke of terror and of enlightenment. We sang to the sun and moon. The show climaxed with a dance performance, Meltdown (Chaos in Motion), which spotlighted the two of us inducing trance states within our own brains.
It was a unique event which epitomized CalArts' interdisciplinary atmosphere. We have remained committed to the mingling of the art forms, allowing them to evolve. The arts must be alive, self- sustaining, and always putting out more than they take in.
FIGHT ENTROPY.
greuel@xian.com