Never Never Never Ever Never Never Ever Never Ever Ever EVER Ever EVER Give Up Unless It Gets Too Hard
all photos by Thomas Lenden
Never Never Never Ever Never Never Ever Never Ever Ever EVER Ever EVER Give Up Unless It Gets Too Hard is a durational performance consisting of the filming of a promotional trailer for the performance itself. The piece proposes an all-in investment into “cultural capital”, privileging the development of web presence over the performance itself. Witnesses to the process are invited to enter, observe, leave, and return throughout the filming, to follow the project's progress over time. NNNENNENEEEEEGUUIG2H follows Sianne Ngai's "Theory of the Gimmick" as an organizational principle, updating the arch logic of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "Glory Machine" for the digital age, to produce what Slavoj Žižek calls an "over-orthodox" conformity with contemporary standards of success in our modern neoliberal hellscape.
Performers: Billy Mullaney & Jimmy Grima
Never Never Never Ever Never Never Ever Never Ever Ever EVER Ever EVER Give Up Unless It Gets Too Hard is a durational performance consisting of the filming of a promotional trailer for the performance itself. The piece proposes an all-in investment into “cultural capital”, privileging the development of web presence over the performance itself. Witnesses to the process are invited to enter, observe, leave, and return throughout the filming, to follow the project's progress over time. NNNENNENEEEEEGUUIG2H follows Sianne Ngai's "Theory of the Gimmick" as an organizational principle, updating the arch logic of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "Glory Machine" for the digital age, to produce what Slavoj Žižek calls an "over-orthodox" conformity with contemporary standards of success in our modern neoliberal hellscape.
Performers: Billy Mullaney & Jimmy Grima
How do we present ourselves online? How do we string together the best, most spectacular images from our lives? And how much effort does it take to make it seem effortless?
For the past two years, I've been researching how performances present themselves online--through trailers. Not just "theatre on film", I'm talking cinematic trailers that use filmic techniques like close-ups, match shots, jump cuts, forced perspective: Things that can't occur in the live experience. And they string together the best, most spectacular images from the show.
These trailers will be seen by thousands more people than will see the live performance, and they'll exist for as long as the internet is around.
So my question--and it's a little cynical--is: When we spend months if not years working on a performance piece--does it end up just being "material for the trailer"?
Never Never Never Ever Never Never Ever Never Ever Ever EVER Ever EVER Give Up Unless It Gets Too Hard dares to accept this absurd premise: The performance consists of shooting a trailer for the performance. It's a virus: Using social media logic, it is a machine to produce its own promotional material, in order to reproduce itself indefinitely.
For the past two years, I've been researching how performances present themselves online--through trailers. Not just "theatre on film", I'm talking cinematic trailers that use filmic techniques like close-ups, match shots, jump cuts, forced perspective: Things that can't occur in the live experience. And they string together the best, most spectacular images from the show.
These trailers will be seen by thousands more people than will see the live performance, and they'll exist for as long as the internet is around.
So my question--and it's a little cynical--is: When we spend months if not years working on a performance piece--does it end up just being "material for the trailer"?
Never Never Never Ever Never Never Ever Never Ever Ever EVER Ever EVER Give Up Unless It Gets Too Hard dares to accept this absurd premise: The performance consists of shooting a trailer for the performance. It's a virus: Using social media logic, it is a machine to produce its own promotional material, in order to reproduce itself indefinitely.
From text accompanying text the performance:
"This is not a performance. This is the filming of a promotional trailer for a performance. Trailers endure longer, reach far more people, and ultimately garner much more cultural capital than any given live performance. As with facebook friendships, milestones, achievements, and most meals, a performance takes on value today when it can be shared as brief, digestible audiovisual content online. Beyond a mere marketing tactic, trailers stand in as web presence for the artwork and moreover for the artists themselves. Therefore, we must produce art, and indeed live and die, with the resulting trailer in mind."
