Workshop: Reenactment and Public Content Source

With the bottomless pit that is the Internet, millions of personal videos, photos, and words are available to our even greater appetite for intimate, secret, and peculiar stories from others to run free of context and reinvent realities. French-born artist Melanie Valera (AKA Tender Forever) will discuss the importance of reenactment, referential replication, recycled narration, and simulacrum through a selective showing of found videos. Using a found video of footage as origin, we will attempt to collectively reenact, recreate, and enhance its narration working with props, live chroma keying (green screen), video cameras, computers, and the active participation of the attendees. The program will conclude with a collective exchange exploring the power of reenactment as cathartic relief and the appropriation of publicly accessible source content as creative opportunities.

Valera is a performer and multimedia artist residing in Olympia, Washington. Her work has been seen at the Whitney Museum, New York; the Center George Pompidou, Paris; the French Institute Alliance Française, New York; and the Time-Based Art Festival, Portland, Oregon.