Medeology Collective

02/01/2013 - ‘Indi-Visible’: Performance Installation at Pulse 2013:  Art and Technology Festival, Jepson Center for the Arts, Savannah.

‘Indi-Visible’: Pulse 2013, Savannah.

“Individual: Latin individuum meant "an atom, indivisible particle;"
"single object or thing," c.1600, Colloquial sense of "person" is attested from 1742.”
Online Dictionary of Etymology

Crowd: “We are all Individuals!!”
Individual in crowd: “I’m Not!”
‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’.

For ‘Pulse’ 2013 the Medeology Collective focused on the relationship between the individual and the crowd.

The original meaning of ‘Individual’ before capitalism used to mean being ‘indivisible’ from the crowd. As the cultural theorist Raymond Williams outlined in ‘Keywords’. Since the Medieval period and the emergence of private contract law and the modern nation state, the spread of privacy and individualism has grown into one of the key ideologies of our era. This has meant the flipping of its’ original meaning to that of being ‘apart’ from the crowd.

Throughout this history there has been a shifting dynamic between group think, mobs, uprisings and the role of individuals towards and within this social formation. The collective montaged one long horizontal screen of crowds, groups and multiples in contrast to a smaller screen featuring individuals of many kinds. It is this visual relationship that threw up interesting, funny and unexpected results.

The themes of politics, history, social relationships and media representations of crowds and individuals all played a large part in this live video installation. This took the form of many cultural sources: from the Keystone cops to horror movie witch-hunt mobs and many more, the sociological potential was rich and raised some interesting issues.

We also each used an X-box Kinect gaming sensors to pick up and project the crowds of the Jepson audience and fed their imagery into the scenes of the Installation. This interactive feedback loop brought together the historical, social, cultural and living environment as the performance developed. In terms of sound we also included a live sound collage that related to the group/individual dynamic. The collective also realized that there was in this project an inherent meditation on what it means to be an individual in an art group, and this was also something that we explored as we performed.

Visuals: Mccclung, Gladman and Imperato

Soundscape: 
Matthew Haddock