How does language define us? How do we use stories and performances to shape the world around us, to give it meaning? How can digital media give us a new, deeper understanding of the power of words to transform our reality?
Join us for a performance of Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley and Garth Paine’s Crosstalk, which interrogates these questions through live performance and a variety of digital elements including 3D infra-red motion tracking, voice acquisition, speech recognition, multi-screen video projection and multi-channel surround sound to create an immersive multimedia environment. Crosstalk builds on the work of anthropologist James Leach, who theorizes how people construct reality and one another through language, the social performative and ritualized practices of exchange.
The performance will be followed by light refreshments and a conversation and Q+A with Crosstalk’s developers and performers, Garth Paine, Sue Hawksley and Simon Biggs; digital media theorist Xin Wei Sha, the incoming director of ASU’s School of Arts, Media and Engineering; and anthropologist Ana Magdalena Hurtado, a professor at ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This event is co-sponsored by ASU’s School of Arts, Media and Engineering, Center for Science and the Imagination, and the ASU Art Museum.