Installation : Deleted Messages
Artist : Ana Husman
Country : Croatia

Deleted Messages (interactive, multiple-view DVD, 2005)
Ana Hušman & BADco.

BADco.'s Deleted Messages (2004) is a performance for six performers and one track keeper.

The audience enters the same space as performers - a space defined by a 20x15 meter rectangle of tearable white textile ironed together over the rough floor of a large warehouse or theater stage box, a number of thin aluminum rods hanging suspended in the air or lying on the ground and a couple of chairs placed within the rectangle. As the performance progresses the space transforms - the cloth floor gets smudged and torn apart, rods thrown around and chairs moved for convenience sake.

Performers interact in between preferably an overcrowding of audience, where the density allows no vantage point, either for audience or performers. They interact abiding by the rules of a "socio-evolutionary" game of mutual exchange or survival of traits - five elements of choreography each of them has at a given moment. Each of them enters the performance with a choreography interpreted from five individually unique elements based on parameters generated from the matrix originally provided by Thomas Lehmen's Funktionen proposition - the matrix containing following parameter categories: movement, place, manner of movement, image and relation. At the outset each performer has five elements, i.e. thirty in total, but as they get exchanged and overridden by elements from other performers during the performance, by the end they are reduced to five most indiscernible from audience behavior.
The exchange and overriding of choreographic elements is tracked on a computer table on one video screen. Another video screen addresses the issue of contagion, epidemic and quarantine. The last screen is motion tracking in real-time of the movement of the crowd formed by the audience and performers.

While performers unroll their "socio-evolutionary" game, they attempt to modulate the aspects that condition the behavior and movement of the audience as a mass, and ultimately to modulate the movement of the mass, primarily by using the occlusion made possible by members of audience standing in each other's sight and by using acts of interaction through movement with individual members of audience.

The audience is invited to interact, but not through hard subjectivation of intervention, rather through soft subjectivation of responsiveness to movement. Performance space offers no hard rules for the audience either - elements of space are lines of demarcation, rather than physical barriers - making all rules of conduct self-construed. There's no control other than soft control.

http://www.badco.hr