The Cake of The 3 Towers

The three towers are prison, museum, and (housing) project, albeit loosely. Music, video, and performance draw parallel lines between the three industrial archetypes. Moving through these structures, the artists utilize fragments of their environment to envision a utopian creative endgame. Meanwhile, an Austrian super villain (Florian Reither) attempts to unite and destroy the dystopian worlds. The Cake of The 3 Towers (TCo3T) is a collaborative project featuring Japanther, Schuyler Maehl, Florian Reither, and Felice Faison commissioned for Quote Unquote: Experiments in Time-Based Text, an interdisciplinary series presenting work by artists that use an existing text as a departure point for installation, film, and performance.

Japanther is an art project established circa 2001 by Ian Vanek and Matt Reilly in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to wild interactive live showings in unconventional settings, the duo has collaborated with Dan Graham, Gelitin, Eileen Myles, ninjasonik, and Spank Rock, among others. Japanther was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial as part of Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty and the 2011 Venice Biennial as part of Gelitin's Some Like It Hot performance. The duo has made a name for themselves through unique performance situations including shows with synchronized swimmers, oversized puppets, from out of the back of a moving truck, alongside giant dinosaurs, and with BMXers flying off the walls of the Whitney sculpture garden.