INTERMEDIA - VIDEO ART AND MUSIC // PRINCESS’S ONE-MINUTE SOCIAL REIGN
This past May, interdisciplinary performing arts duo Princess
levels, whether the visuals and audio contrast or are in
stopped by Oklahoma City’s 21c Museum Hotel to perform
accord, and deepen the impact of the work.
their conceptual video opera @1minworld (One Minute World) during their cross-country tour of 21c locations and other experimentally-friendly art spaces. Once they were home, I caught up with Alexis Gideon and Michael O’Neill, creative partners in Princess since 2009, for a Q&A session to unpack some of their thoughts about the project. It could be easy to think of Princess as simply a band that performs songs with a cool live show. But how central are the
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Tell me more about the one-minute animated films for @1minworld? We used the process of stop animation—relying heavily on loops—to create a surreal repetitive universe. The use of Lichtenstein-esque Ben-Day dots reference both the pixels of the digital realm as well as the fakeness and mass-produced nature of social media experience.
visual and video elements to your work?
What inspired the @1minworld project? How did it come
The visual element is paramount to the work. We want to
about and how did it evolve into its finished form?
create narrative immersive experiences for the audience. The
Our last piece Out There is a sci-fi feminist rock opera that
visual element allows for meaning to operate on different
clocks in at an hour. While promoting the piece, we were
INTERMEDIA