Excerpt from “Violence is a form of self-expression;” a real-time performance in which the artist adopts the persona of “Professor Max Quality,” who performs a lecture fit for a 1998 warehouse rave on 20th century media theorist Marshall MacLuhan (in a media studies course in the year 2120).
“Violence is a form of self-expression”
Variable length real-time audio/video performance with single channel projection, two-channel audio, varying number of additional screens depending on audience participation.
2018
Professor Max Quality gives their inaugural lecture for Media Studies 5000, part of SAIC’s art history curriculum’s Fall 2120 semester course offerings. This first lecture starts at the beginning, with the teachings of the great 20th century media theorist Marshall MacLuhan.
This performance imagines a mid-to-late-90s-retro-futurist conception of what a typical college lecture may resemble in the year 2120 (i.e., what a 27-year-old artist in 2018 thinks a 27-year-old in 1998 might think college might be like in 2120). With intense visuals, frenetic drum ‘n’ bass, and improvised strings of MacLuhan sound-bites lacking any sort of pedagogical structure or coherency, this sensorially overstimulating lecture exists in a time where late 90s rave culture didn’t just stick around, but actually became the dominant form of common life, and MacLuhan’s axiomatic “the medium is the message” is taken as unquestioned dogma, such that sensory overloading lectures of this type are determined to best communicate that the medium is indeed the message, better than any traditional didactic lecture ever could.
Performed at Elastic Arts in Chicago as part of:
IF WE COULD TURN BACK (REAL)TIME: THE archaic PRESENtation OF MACBOOKS FROM 2012
(a night of real-time audio/video performances)
Watch the full 7-minute performance below.
The full 7-minute performance