Developed during the past two and a half years by Chicago-based collective ATOM-R (Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality), the performance piece Kjell Theøry bores virtual holes in the traditional theater experience. Housed in the ballroom of the Graham Foundation, the work makes extensive use of wall projections, live streams, and algorithmically generated text to create a layered, hypnotic dream space. Its four performers engage with technology on a visceral level, drawing the familiar tools of iPhones and MacBooks into a luminous collaborative dialogue between human bodies and machines programmed to speak to them.
“Kjell Theøry: Prologue” builds on these recycled images by hanging an augmented reality viewer—an iPad with AR software loaded onto it—in the center of the room. Visitors can point the device’s camera around the space and see text mapped on top of their surroundings; they can also see renderings of ATOM-R’s performers, modeled from 3-D scans of the collective’s bodies. The group appears in the performance and its prologue, in one space virtually and the other physically.
The image of Turing as Tiresias brought Morrissey to Apollinaire’s play, itself a kind of fertility ritual echoing the festival of the ‘Oss. Images of fecundity and transformation drove Kjell Theøry, which was developed across multiple iterations during the past two years at residencies in Finland and the United Kingdom. “There’s something really strange about the sources that are sort of timeless,” Morrissey says. “They have very different readings when enacted in different contexts, and are mutated by those contexts—both the political context and the technical context.”
Through 4/9: Tue-Fri 10 AM-4 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM International Museum of Surgical Science 1524 N. Lake Shore 312-642-6502imss.org $15, $10 seniors, students, and military, free for members and children four-13
Kjell Theøry Fri 2/3 and Sat 2/4, 7 PM Graham Foundation 4 W. Burton 312-787-4071grahamfoundation.org $15, $12 students
