Andy with a Spinning Head (1 min. 2001) Directed and edited by Lester Alfonso for Techno-Bondage pop-up art performance event in Maynooth, Ontario.
Upload Day 68. Today’s artifact comes from a pop-up art performance event that our collective named Hijack put on at the famous Arlington Hotel in Maynooth, Ontario. This is where Canadian painter Tom Thompson was once fabled to have stayed. If he’d been around for our show in 2001, he would not have believed his eyes. I daisy-chained seven television sets together (in the manner of video artist Nam June Paik) and conducted live performances one after another in conjunction with the videos I sent to all the screens. Andy With a Spinning Head was a kind of overture to a dance piece featuring three women.
Strange night at the Arlington Hotel, someone might have remarked. Anjali, Melissa, and Kyla filtered onto the dancefloor as Andy Connelly’s head spun around maniacally on the screens. Three beautiful women positioned themselves and made powerful “Chau” warrior moves while yearning Indian dirge music played underneath the image of muddy river rapids in slow-motion. No other TV sets in the area received the signal for that particular channel that night.
In my account of the night, I wrote:
In the eighteen short days we had to create the elements that went into what became Techno-Bondage, a new millenium cabaret, I experienced a form of giddy happiness I had never experienced quite that way, for quite that long before.
Lester Alfonso, 2001
WEBmadman has kept an archive of New York filmmaker Randi Cecchine’s account of the night as it was published in the Bancroft Times that same year. I’ll be coming back to Techno-Bondage again soon! —LA
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