John Roach
August 1, 2006 throughAugust 31, 2006
In 2006, Alma on Dobbin invited media artist John Roach for a collaboration at the 4th International Artist Book Exhibition, Saint Stephen's Museum, Szekesfehervar, Hungary. Roach and Hungarian artist Gyula Várnai opened the exhibition with a performance devised by Roach called "Hungarian and American Page Turners." Positioned in the exhibition space were two machines that each rapidly turned the pages of a book automatically. Each artist attempted to read aloud video projections of the open books (one in Hungarian and one in English) while the pages flipped back and forth. The effect was one of automatic poetry, a succession of sounds, stutters, and non-sequiturs, which translated the contents of the books into a new language.
Special thanks to the Newschool Funding Committee and the American Embassy in Budapest for their support.
-
John Roach is a Brooklyn-based artist working in many media including sculpture, video, installation, internet collaboration, and sound art. He is usually not happy unless he is jamming things together that don’t seem to fit. Collaboration is a key component to his work as can be seen in the project “Trailhead: Wavefarm—Free103.9,” with the artist James Rouvelle and poet Matthew Rohrer, as well as in his ongoing networked performance project “Simultaneous Translation” (which includes SimTrans software that can be downloaded from Turbulence.org).
© ALMA 2014