Event: TEDxToronto 2010
Performance: Orpheus - collab with Robert Bolton and Andrew Zealley
Date: September 30th, 2010
Place: Glenn Gould Studio, Toronto

ORPHEUS - A Graphic-Narrative Poem
A collaboration with Robert Bolton a.k.a. Arowbe and Andrew Zealley.

Robert: Eric and I originally collaborated on this piece for a performance as part of the Vancouver Art Gallery's KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art exhibit (May 17-September 7, 2008). In its entirety, it is structured loosely around the story of Orpheus - the great poet and musician of Greek mythology who follows his wife Eurydice into the underworld.

The phrase, "a laptop in Pittsburgh a change of clothes in DC" is actually a quotation from a hacker by the name of Adrian Lamo. I stumbled across it in a February 2002 issue of Wired magazine. For me, that quotation pointed to the (sur)real 'inbetweenness' of contemporary culture where the Internet further blurs the divide between reality and replication. The Internet is the space between the original and the copy, mystical in its ability to make a moment unlimited, to occur in more than one sole time and space, to recur infinitely. Orpheus became a meditation on Internet identity, which basically culminates in the fact that through its anonymity, we are finally able to invent our own avatar, In cyberspace, concepts of gender, race, nationality and age can start to become obsolete.

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