As MoMA's official Flickr account shows, the power of sharing a gaze with Marina Abramović brought some participants to tears during her "The Artist Is Present" performance in 2010. In her new "Mutual Wave Machine" project, Abramović introduces neurological sensors to this familiar posture to illustrate the power of the gaze from a scientific perspective. Instead of a museum atrium, participants sit opposite of one another in an enclosed egg-like space, and manipulate audiovisual elements using the synchronization of their brain waves. While the surroundings are manipulated, brain activity is recorded and displayed for visitors outside the enclosure to observe. [via Creators Project]
Back in March, Abramović visited WNYC to talk about a version of the project. Check out a video of the interview below, after a trailer for "Mutual Wave Machine."
"Mutual Wave Machine" will be presented by the Marina Abramović Institute as part of the TodaysArt festival in the Netherlands on September 27 and 28.
Back in March, the National revealed the cover art for its new LP, Trouble Will Find Me, a black and white image showing the top of a woman's head inside some kind of mirror system. That image is actually a scene from an installation staged at RISD in 2003 by the artist Bohyun Yoon. The installation, called Fragmentation, featured a man and woman lying nude with four mirror panels spread evenly from their ankles to head. By presenting "depersonalized" human bodies Yoon intended to draw a parallel between modern science and the consequences of plastic surgery on the human form.
The National's sixth album, Trouble Will Find Me, will be released by 4AD on May 20, and is currently streaming on iTunes. 
Chicago artist Nick Cave is bringing a new batch of his Soundsuits to New York for a series of midday performances in Grand Central Terminal called Heard•NY. Each show will feature 30 of his horse-themed sculptural costumes worn by dancers from the Ailey School, and for three hours a day they'll graze the terminal and perform choreography written in collaboration with the artist. The series is in honor of Grand Central's centennial and runs March 25-31, 11am—2pm daily.
Artists Dora Budor & Maja Cule, known as Dora & Maja, first started working on their KnockOff performance during a residency at Tanzfabrik Uferstudios in Berlin. The residency was held in studios for dance projects, but the pair was interested in creating a performance more grounded in reality than a contemporary dance. They drew inspiration from a fascination with the “making of” extras on DVDs, and conceived of a staged performance/video art piece with local MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighters filming action movies in front of an audience.
For their first performance in Berlin, Dora & Maja spent five days convincing members of a local Turkish fight club to participate in the show. Their next two performances included a former breakdance champion in Norway and a group of aspiring soldiers in Croatia—all well-versed in action movie stars and stunts.
The performance is a nod to an obscure "knockoff" film genre—sometimes known as "mockbusters"—which use elements from actual Hollywood blockbusters and poorly shot green-screen footage in the production of borderline counterfeit films on a fraction of the budget. For their performances, D+M scour YouTube for clips of semi-famous crime scenes, security camera footage, and city panoramas. The pair intends to keep growing their library for future shows.
The live KnockOff performance alters the traditional cinematic experience by showing the audience the production and the final product at the same time. Seeing both stages at once replaces the "magic" of filmmaking for the visceral response to live violence. The rotating cast of local fighters and constantly expanding video library make every performance of KnockOff slightly different. The artists believe the small differences force the audience to simultaneously watch the counterfeit copy and the sequel at once.
It turns out even the title of the project has a simultaneous meaning: the choreography is based on Jean-Claude Van Damme's 1998 film Knock Off, in which he and Rob Schneider find themselves involved in a counterfeit denim ring.