Virtual @ LOW END | Princess presents @1minworld

STREAM: twitch.tv/bemiscenter
Twitch account not required.

@1minworld is a video song cycle and live performance piece about social media and cell phone culture that pushes the formal boundaries of online video streaming to challenge the distinction between live performance and pre-recorded video. The performance was recorded on stage at The Warhol theater of The Andy Warhol Museum. This performance will be followed by a Q+A with band members Alexis Gideon and Michael O’Neill and Rachel Adams, Bemis Center Chief Curator and Director of Programs.

Simultaneously, @1minworld was first presented via Instagram, released as a series of 15 distinct one-minute videos that take the platform’s constraints as a challenge to be reckoned with. The performance’s primary-colored bubblegum visuals are deployed as a calculated offering to the Instagram algorithm, while the songs’ content highlights the discontents of our social media age: filter bubbles, surveillance capitalism, and shortened attention spans, to name a few. This combination of accessible aesthetics and critical, self-aware messaging has long been a feature of Princess’s practice, harkening back to their earliest collaborations, which took place around the era of the dotcom boom and Y2K revolution.

Princess (Alexis Gideon and Michael O’Neill) is an interdisciplinary performance art duo founded in 1999. From underground DIY music scenes to world-renowned museums, Princess has used music as a tool for media-theoretical critique, producing dynamic multi-modal pieces that harken back to the history of Pop Art while offering commentary on the changing technological world around them. After meeting through a mutual friend who connected them across their respective Northeastern liberal arts colleges, the duo began a decades-long collaboration that has drawn on influences from acid rock to techno, hip hop to improv comedy. They officially inaugurated the duo Princess in 2003, and have since explored themes as expansive as queerness, toxic masculinity, science fiction and MTV. Princess has performed at 21c Museum Hotels, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Bass, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, MCA San Diego, MIT List Visual Arts Center, MOCA Cleveland, New Museum, Wexner Center for the Arts and numerous other institutions.

IMAGE: APPROVING Live, From the performance of @1minworld, Courtesy of Princess.