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USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study

  • Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study 3550 Trousdale Parkway Los Angeles, Ca 90089-0183 (map)

Physicists say that it is theoretically possible to time travel into the future, but not into the past.  Imagine, though, interactive live art that could function like a time-machine and challenge this assumption.  Encountering Professor Edgar Arceneaux’s work is to experience this kind of time travel, moving fluidly through the past, the present and the future.  For instance, when witnessing/participating in his interactive, multi-media, temporally fluid live performance art, Until, Until, Until, one moves through time and in time, where “linear logic is abandoned in favor of wordplay and visual associations.” Arceneaux’s work is what one critic called, “time-based action art,” which explores historical patterns, while simultaneously interfacing with contemporary discriminative attitudes.  Americans, Arceneaux has said, like to envision their history as “progressive and triumphant.”  But much in the stories is left out, invisible, purposely forgotten, erased.  For this session, Professor Arceneaux will move us through the intersection between history, memory, and trauma, with the intention to fill in the absent spaces and radically change our course ahead.