“9-1-BUY-1” is a modularized performance work that uses audioscapes, re-mixed video and performance to conceptually investigate how multi-national corporations with governmental support use September 11, 2001 (9/11) to create a product: Terrorism, and launch a brand: Homeland Security. By using satire and humor I combine video, pre-recorded digital audio, still images and “Chicano butho” to explore the medias complicity in corporate profiteering.
“9-1-BUY-1” was created as an innovative hybridized work that is not confined to its performance presentation. Conceptualized and created to function like a “transformer robot” each module of the show is removable as an individual artwork. For example the audio-scapes create audience immersion in an audio experience, large-scale projected video visually enhances the immersive environment and performance is incorporated to give the work a theatrical mood. The audio and video components can be removed from the performance and presented as immersive environments in galleries with video able to circulate in video festivals. In addition the complete show is a full evening of performance.
I have been producing theater, installation and visual artwork exploring themes ranging from “myths of the high-tech revolution and their effect on communities of color” to “the collapse between human body and new technologies”. My work has varied from, street performances, installations, video to billboard scale digital prints.
Presently, I take cues from re-mix culture and advertising media and inject humor and absurdity to subvert contemporary master narratives. Influential in my work is the absurdity of Monty Python, the installations of Nam June Paik, the video nuance of Bruce Nauman, the ethnic bite of Guillermo Gomez-Peña, the video concepts of Paul D. Miller and a splash of the Mexican Muralist tradition for it’s large-scale politically motivated narratives.