September street party videos are up at last!

We’ve been busy little… Discotropers, but at last, the videos from our street party shows at Zero1 San Jose and ISEA Albuquerque are online! You can find them on our Videos page, or just watch em right here.

We had lots of fun at both shows -Discotroping outdoors in public places was something we’d been interested in since the beginning. The two shows were very different from one another, and it was interesting to talk to people and hear their reactions to Discotrope in the context of the individual shows (especially before we’d start, when they were trying to figure out what it was!) We got a lot of questions about Discotrope as “eco-art,” and we tried to assure people we were not attempting to use Discotrope to save the environment. But some of the most interesting conversations were about instrument-building, which is what – content aside – Discotrope is, when you get down to it. Since “the dawn of time,” people have been building instruments to make “music,” and designing them to take “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master.” Our strategy for doing that with the video disco ball is to use solar power – for us it turned out to be a straightforward way in to developing what could be a more nuanced performance instrument. So perhaps that’s not quite “eco-art,” but we think “eco-instrument-building” has a nice ring to it, don’t you? Perhaps, “EcoInby” for short? Hmm…

Anyway, big thanks to everyone at Zero1, 516 Arts and ISEA 2012 for putting up with our show (and our outfits.) And thanks to all who checked out the shows!