Tench Cholnoky
Projects
p.01
p.02
p.03
p.04
06.07.24
Concept
WHAT IS MADE MUST BE MADE.
WHAT IS MADE MUST BE REMADE.
WHAT IS MADE MUST CHANGE.
WHAT IS MADE MUST BE REMEMBERED.
WHAT IS MADE MUST BE IN CONVERSATION.
We have only glimpsed into the digital realm through rectangles of glass, unable to absorb information without barriers. However, with the discovery of the five essential elements of this dimension, we finally have the technology to build the first functional entrance.
Tonight, we complete the portal.
Tonight, we enter the digital realm.
In enter here_ we built a portal into the digital world using the five principles of the digital world, fueling it with the daily screen time of the audience. Between each performance was a buffering in which participants would add their screen time to a clock that was projected onto the walls, steadily counting up with each input. By the end of the show we had over 250 hours of screen time from just one day.
My Focus
For enter here_ I focued on themes of rigidity and connectivity. Our concept stemmed from five principles of the digital world (retainment, automation, variability, modularity, and connectivity), as well as the idea that we were building a portal into this world. We decided on using scaffolding as a visual motif very early on, and I ran with that in my visuals. I also continued my mouth and eye experiments from the past few months and elaborated on those.
Regarding curating I wanted to work with artists whose work clearly engaged with at least two of the principles of the digital world. I wanted a fairly even split between the principles, but the subjects of the pieces could be anything at all. We structured our open call broadly around the five principles, and got a variety of responses that hit the mark. It was important that the subjects of the pieces were whatever the artists wanted, I used the principles as a way of threading a structural throughline between the pieces, rather than a conceptual one. Because of that, we got a very wide breadth of topics discussed in enter here_ but all of them involved
1. retaining or holding onto data
2. automating or replicating data
3. variability and changing dynamically
4. being made of modular parts that can be interchanged
5. connected individual parts that communicated with each other
Curating around structure instead of concept was a very new approach that I hadn’t considered yet. It was fascinating to think about how projects were engaging with concepts rather than which concepts they wanted to engage, and I think it led to a show that wouldn’t make sense on a concept level, but given that structure and scaffolding was the primary driver for the show, I thought it fit perfectly.
Documentation
2. Me performing in my VJ booth
4. Wide shot of my mouths projection
6. Installation by Tina Tarighian
8. installation by Arden Schager
3. Performance by MAKS
5. Performance by Magali, A Cult accompanied by my visuals
7. Performance by Bri Frei accompanied by my visuals
9. Installation by Yuelin Li