Holoscenes

HOLOSCENES is a large-scale spectacle—a performance and installation—designed for public spaces that explores states of drowning, both literal and metaphorical. It is concerned with everyday behavior and long-term thinking, empathy, and our evolutionary future. The piece includes three large, transparent “aquariums,” each inhabited by a performer repeating a personal ritual: secular or sacred behaviors. The aquariums periodically fill with water and then empty; performers attempt to conduct their rituals submerged, and when the water drains, continue, soaked by these mini-floods. Through repetition, these behaviors conjure past and coming environmental tragedies, studies in adapted behavior and persistence rather than catastrophe. HOLOSCENES is part of a suite of multi-format artworks inspired by flooding; the name refers to our current geological epoch, the Holocene. During a month-long production and research residency, Jan and his designers, performers, and programmers worked with EMPAC’s production team to create a gigantic laboratory for the large-scale commercial water tanks and program the high-speed transfer of five tons of water between the two tanks by regulating hydraulic pumps.