Theo Triantafyllidis
Anti-Gone
January 26, 2020–January 30, 20202020 Sundance Film Festival, New Frontier, Utah
Announcing the premiere of Theo Triantafyllidis’ Anti-Gone at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, New Frontier, programmed by Chief Curator Shari Frilot. Commissioned and produced by Onassis Culture, Anti-Gone is a new mixed reality performance inspired by the comic book of the same name by Connor Willumsen. Anti-Gone incorporates live performance with real time simulation to explore the social impacts of technology, privilege and the beginnings and ends of worlds.
Adapting the mechanics of open world video games, Triantafyllidis revises traditional narrative into a continuous simulation, taking place in a meticulously crafted 3D world, full of visual signifiers of paradise: a bright blue ocean, lush multicolored vegetation, a sunken city lit by glowing sunsets. This world is also riddled with social unrest and mutation, a post-climate change world where environmental catastrophe has become normalized. The vestiges of late-capitalist culture – consumerism, inequality, social unrest – live on, clinging like barnacles to the ruins of civilization. This work features Spyda and Lynxa on their sailboat, as they glide from shopping to movies to psychedelic drugs, and social unrest. Using a motion capture suit and virtual reality headset as embodied interfaces, actors perform both onstage and in the virtual world. Performing alongside them on-stage, Triantafyllidis and his team of game engineers direct and shape the world in real-time.
Triantafyllidis’ hybrid theater becomes a mirror of the demands made by the hyperactive disorientation and confusion of our mediated “real” lives and class gap tensions. The virtual world Triantafyllidis has created is a portrait of the complexities of our world, consumed by the game-logic of the virtual worlds we’d like to inhabit. As the fourth wall becomes merged with the audience’s perception, Anti-Gone proposes an alternate perspective of universal concerns for the present and future, which may very well already be our past.
Commissioned and Produced by Onassis Culture
Special Thanks to: The Breeder, Athens.
Mari Spirito, Commissioning Curator; Matthew Doyle, Adaptation and Assistant Direction; Performers: Lindsey Normington, Zana Gankhuyag, and Matthew Doyle; Music by Cameron Stallones; Lighting by Connor Childs; Production design by Polina Miliou; Motion Capture technology provided by Noitom MoCap; Thank you for our pilot performance at Human Resources, Los Angeles, UCLA Design Media Arts, Bitforms Gallery, Barco Projectors.
Theo Triantafyllidis, 1988, Athens, Greece, is an artist who builds virtual spaces and the interfaces for the human body to inhabit them. He holds an MFA from UCLA, Design Media Arts and a Diploma of Architecture from NTUA. He has shown work in museums, including the Hammer Museum in LA and NRW Forum in Dusseldorf, DE. He was part of Hyper Pavilion in the 2017 Venice Biennale and the 2018 Athens Biennale: ANTI-. He is based in Los Angeles, US. Triantafyllidis is represented by: The Breeder, Athens and Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York.
slimetech.org/anti-gone
Official Hashtags:
antigoneXR
theotriantafyllidis
onassisculture
onassisstegi
NewFrontier
Sundance
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sundancefest/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sundance/
Sundance Press Release: http://bit.ly/sff20-newfrontier
Instagram: @sundanceorg, @theo.trian, @onassis.stegi, @noitomocap @connorwillumsenltd, @the_breeder_gallery
