Willamette Week - November 15, 2000
by Steffen Silvis
In Liminal’s Interrupt-Interactive Hypermedia, the audience is thrown into the middle of an event, as Liminal has constructed a multimedia funhouse where those who enter interact with a series of installations and performers. It’s a Caligarian nightmare alley, where a series of rooms plunge the viewer into alternative worlds. Yet, the viewer has the power to alter the experience by interrupting the action. As usual, John Berendzen has crafted an excellent soundscape to aurally traverse, using fragments Hochenkeit and Katie Griesar. Past the bio-surgical art installation of Keith Yurdana lies the unknown. Jennifer Olson is a caged medium and Amanda Boekelheide runs a nurse’s station in some nearby dystopia, while Rich Southwick appears as a mysterious gentleman on a telephone whose conversation may be about you. Interrupt is a piece that needs more than one visit, and patrons are encouraged to turn all knobs, open all doors and, most importantly, interact.
Interrupt: Interactive Hypermedia (2000)
Interrupt, a retro-engineered multimedia performance installation premiered in fall 2000. Interrupt was a unique live experience that pushed the boundaries of performance with engineered spaces where audiences, performers and technology could interact.
Resisting the temptation to put the latest shiny new technology on display, Interrupt explored the underside of progress - meltdown, misfire and miscommunication. Within the performance space, audiences participated in the operation of a mechanized, yet functioning dystopia where ‘high’ technology served the most crude ends. With Interrupt, Liminal uncovered the ambiguity between the archaic and the futuristic, the living and the programmed, and the alchemy of base materials transformed into substances of a different order. Moreover, Interrupt was about letting someone experience something they didn’t quite expect and then seeing how long they would play with it before they get bored again.
Interrupt was directed and programmed by John Berendzen and created by over a dozen Liminal company members and invited artists who collaborated in the design, engineering, rehearsal and production. Performers included Rich Southwick, Amanda Boekelheide, Jennifer Olson and Linda Miles.
