Conny

A live internet performance, accompanied by live music

3 Apr 2009
3 Apr 2009
  • Worm
  • Boomgaardsstraat 71, 3012 XA Rotterdam

“Conny” is a performance within the framework of the thematic project "The Monstrous at Play" held at the Piet Zwart Institute by Felix Ensslin.

Brock Enright first performed “Conny” live via the internet from New York City at Vilma Gold's project space in Berlin in 2006 in conjunction with the musician Marcus Schmickler who piped live electronic music into the gallery from his studio in Cologne. The audience was asked to tell "Conny", who was sitting almost naked and with toys in a bath-tub, what to do. After a few hours, an audience member, seemingly euphoric by the impression that there, on the screen, he had finally met someone like himself, took up a suggestive gesture of "Conny’s" and started to cut his own chest with a shard of glass. For a few minutes, the audience and the cutter both expected Conny to do the same, to sign the narcissistic dance of mirrored selves with his own blood. But all that happened was that "Conny", aka Brock Enright, wrote on a small piece of paper the words: “I am scared”. Besides the ambivalence of signification experienced by some members of the audience, who (mis-)read the words "I am scarred" on the hastily ripped up piece of paper, what really happened was that the cutter was left with his own phantasm, his own desire, thrown out of the warm embrace of finding likeness, into the cold of being just with himself, of being himself."

Brock Enright

graduated from Columbia University in 2001 and has exhibited widely in Europe and the U.S. He became internationally known in 2002 for his series of customized kidnappings and has participated in a number of exhibitions and produced theatre productions as well as performances, including at P.S.1 in New York, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, The Moore Space in Miami, Mass MOCA in North Adams, and the National Theatre in Weimar, Germany. He is represented by Vilma Gold in London and Perry Rubinstein in New York, amongst others.

Marcus Schmickler

is one of the most versatile sonic architects from Cologne, Germany, a city which has experienced a renaissance in music since the early 1990s. An academically trained pioneer of digital production, Marcus Schmickler has always run his own studio at different spaces in the city — first the Kaspar Hauser Studio in a former warehouse, and then the state-of-the-art chamber he calls Piethopraxis. There he has concocted a number of records, amongst others under his other name Pluramon, as well as a stream of computer compositions and live electronic improvisation.

A performance in the framework of the thematic seminar "The Monstrous at Play" held at the Piet Zwart Institute by Felix Ensslin.

With the support of the Goethe Institute Rotterdam.