Alan Smart		Curriculum Vitae		Work		Contact
	Williamsburg / Stand-Up Tragedy
	Installation design, fabrication consulting and assistance for artist Georgia Sagri Exhibited at MoMA PS 1 in the 2013 Expo 1 group show ProBio Georgia Sagri is an artist whose practice centers on the exploration of performance as an ever-evolving field within social and visual life, interconnected with, though distinct from, the dialectics of representation in theatre, music and dance. In addition to performance pieces, her work includes video and digital media, texts, installations and drawings. ProBio explores the theme of “dark optimism” within the context of the human body and technology. Some scientists and thinkers have speculated that, with the advancement of applied biological science, humankind may no longer be subject to Darwinian natural selection. In its place would be a world of horizontal gene flows between people and between other forms of natural and unnatural life—a world driven by self-actualization, in which genes become open source, biology becomes software, and the distinctions between living organisms, information, objects, and products become irrevocably confused. This exhibition presents a group of emerging artists, mostly based in New York, whose work explores the continuing radical impact that technology has upon the human body and the human condition. The featured artists are Alisa Baremboym, Antoine Catala, Dina Chang, Ian Cheng, DIS, Josh Kline, Ajay Kurian, Tabor Robak, Carissa Rodriguez, Georgia Sagri, and Shanzhai Biennial. [MoMA PS 1 website]
	I collected the field recordings for Williamsburg in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn before the piece was made. They were used real-time during the performance to map and activate movement motifs that I observed in the neighborhood. These movements, in total of twenty in all, were repeated and rearranged in the different sections of the installation. The platform part of the installation contained grass, flowers, vegetables, rocks and urban debris that could be stepped on to reproduce the sounds and conditions of the movement. A metal frame supported lights and fans the recreated environmental conditions and served as a scaffold for the (re)construction of the movement events. A flat-screen monitor mounted on the frame displayed the screen of my computer, set to screen recording mode, as it captured video of the performance from a ground level and displayed the various programs I was using to record, loop and repeat my voice, in order to simulate the sounds of Williamsburg that I remembered. - Georgia Sagri