hot dogs 24/7

Hot Dogs 24/7 is the centerpiece of my MFA thesis and is a sci-fi retelling of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave where text, image, and performative bodies merge to counter the seep of fascism (as defined by Umberto Eco). Crafted from recombinant DNA of an internet news cycle spun up on overdrive and the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, the videos references hyperreal layered windows of contemporary memes, the simulation of the deep fake, and performers mirrored bodies both in virtual and physical realms. The square format references social media and was designed to be screened inside a Uhaul truck.

Hot Dogs 24/7 is a gestamkunstwerk for my MFA thesis including an academic exegesis printed in the form of newspaper, radio drama, a screenplay insert, adapted video and performance art piece.

materials

26’ U-haul truck, tv monitor, live surveillance cams, chairs plus elite chairs inside the truck, “Safety Begins Here” rug, 1 boss + 50 “workers” (fellow students/faculty), emergency blankets, head coverings.

Video: animated 3D avatars, Fiverr commissioned actors, surveillance footage, news footage, gifs, script, music compositions, green suit, red tie, blonde wig, cheetos, castle-shaped cakes, hot dogs, pool noodles

ABSTRACT

We are currently faced with a phenomenological question: In a hyperreal, post-truth world, how do we orient toward the real and toward freedom? This abstract argues that the antidote to disorientation occurs through the embodied praxis of performativity. My research contributes to continued dialogue in media and political theory, as well as performance studies. Performativity is a growing and major new paradigm for the arts in the 21st century.

Much like the way conceptual art brought the visual arts out of an object-oriented realm and into a method, event-based realm, performance has a similar capacity for socio-economic critique via multi-modal, experimental forms of semiotic expression.

This thesis argues that performance orients us toward the real through a creation of the Foucauldian concept of heterotopic space. Performance becomes an index for 4D (physicists discuss additional dimensions: 10,11, 26), that we can’t see in a 3D world, but experience in time-based media or events. Performance thus becomes an index for the real, a queering of space and time. This index runs counter to the concept of a single narrative that is the heart of the hyperreal and fascism. Baudrillard’s mobian strip of the hyperreal is broken upon the entry of polyphony and the cunning of the carnivalesque. The locus for liberatory practice centers in heterotopic spaces and in turn the inclusion of multiple narratives-- for all of us, as we are always both spectator and participant, audience and actor.

Using fiction as method, I explore this hypothesis through the creation of a play called Hot Dogs 24/7. As a tripartite world set within a hypercube, or a tesseract, Hot Dogs 24/7 is a sci-fi retelling of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

ephemera as performance

My thesis document took the form of a newspaper as a live example of performative design. Continuing an obsession of Butler’s idea of a copy of a copy, my exhibit in the gallery was a newspaper rack with a stack of 100 newspapers. The 26’ truck where the actual piece was installed, was parked out front of the building in the basketball court. Both were intended to appear quite ordinary and out of sight. Even the truck. And it happened. The things we see, and the things we don’t see but are right there. The merging of fact and fiction.