AV Lodge Presents: Fruit Machine

Friday, July 18th, 2008, 9pm, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

The first presentation of a media performance by Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver. This 10-part, evening-length media performance combines video, sound sculpture and live actions in a series of humorous and erotic tableau. The parade of characters includes a life-sized toy robot; a dome-headed rabbit; and an androgynous bagpipe player. Five live acts are each followed by a related music video. In the live acts, costumes and props are wireless devices, which control video and sound in custom computer programs created in Max/MSP/Jitter and Processing. Paying homage to the celebratory Vaudevillian variety theater performance art of the 80s, Fruit Machine uses strategies of camp aesthetics to challenge hetero-normative assumptions. The overall performance is more mutant musical or concert than play, placing a similar emphasis on sound and image, with the props and controllers functioning as audio-visual instruments.

Fruit Machine was a name given to a Canadian device designed during the Cold War to ferret out homosexuals from the civil service and the military. The subjects were made to view pornography, and the device measured the pupils of the eyes, perspiration, and pulse for a supposed erotic response. The word “fruit” in the title refers to both a quirky, eccentric or queer individual and to the fecund, sex organs of plants. “Machine” references the rather technical engineering of the lurid and antic images.