performance:

Flickr Dene Voss

banality in a morphing decor

1 Jan 2005
31 Dec 2005

A 60 minute nocturnal performance by Martin Butler, read by Henk van Engelen, Katarina Mella, Marieangela Tinelli and Martin Butler.

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Ritter, Dene, Voss by Martin Butler and friends - Playing Flickr, Mediamatic Exhibition 2005, photo by Willem Velthoven

For the closing night of the Flickr Peep Show, Martin Butler has created a shortened populist version of Ritter, Dene, Voss, renamed Flickr, Dene, Voss. While during the previous performance the spectacle was to be viewed through small peepholes, this time round the windows have been opened for a different experience.

The performance, an adaption of the Thomas Bernhard play, is a reference to the return of the philosopher Wittengenstein to his home after having stayed in a psychiatric asylum, and the banal way his sisters at home deal with that. Even endowed with all their mental wealth, these people can also not rise above the power of everyday details.

Banality is something that Martin Butler also finds interesting about the photographs that can be publicly viewed on Flickr.com. The 17 million photographs on the site, of everthing from birthday parties, sunsets to pets, offer an incomparable view of the behavior of the photographing human. Mediamatic developed an application called CUNO that allows users to request photos from flickr.com by means of SMS. The decor of Flickr, Dene, Voss, are projections of photographs that match various keywords in Bernhard's text. This way, a contemporary photo landscape is made from random amateur images found on flickr.com.

Flickr, Dene, Vos was followed by the last chance to experiment with CUNO and flickr.com yourself.