DICK
The methodology of spectacle and how myth gets made.
DICK is an exploration of truth and the production of knowledge which uses Herman Melville’s 1851 novel ‘Moby Dick’ as source material but ebbs and flows from adaptation to completely new rendering. We are specifically interested in how spectacle has been employed throughout dominant western cultures to subjugate other knowledge forms. This project examines the methodology of spectacle, asking how myth gets made. Using intersecting mediums of spectacular reproduction – virtual reality, stagework pyrotechnics and oral storytelling; ideological aesthetic forms are under research toward the creation of a live performance event across multiple mediums and interfaces. We’re addressing this work from the poetics of truth and the choreography of myth making.
The work is also intended to extend beyond the stage in multiple interconnected actions, installation and community engagement. To kick-off the project we initiated a community reading project to subsum the volume, the book in an oral retelling and communal ritual. We’re collecting the chapters of the book from 135 people, inviting both known and unknown contacts in the Bay Area and Europe to record themselves reading chapters in their mother tongue. We frame this exercise as an ‘an-archiving’ of Melville’s text, asking people to record during COVID-10 lockdown in their homes in, around or near water. This small ritual performance in the domestic frame produces a community portrait of intimacy through fragmentation.
The next stages of development are focused on generating texts, capturing field recordings, learning folk songs, experiments with plastics and object work, research and development with ‘mix reality’, VR, digital media and installation in nature. We first began discussing working with the western canon in September 2019 and have been developing this project remotely since a residency on Cape Clear Island off Ireland canceled due to Storm Ciara making landfall in February 2020 and throughout the international pandemic.
See Project Dossier. Please be in touch if you interested in collaborating on this project.
Credits
Being co-created between Ruairí Ó’Donnabháin and Julie E. Phelps