147 Devices for Integrated Principles

Performance, Photographs, Videos, Installation, and Objects.

Images, Videos, and Objects by Hillerbrand+Magsamen
Written in collaboration with by Kirk Lynn
Music by Peter Stopschinski
Performed by Mary, Stephan, Maddie, and Emmett.

We are overwhelmed with the world we live in: crazy politics, Hurricane Harvey, school shootings, our parents declining health and death, and our children growing older and leaving home. Feeling the enormity of our lives, we wish for an app, tool, or device to fix things, such as a ‘Device to Heal a Broken Heart’. We have decided to make our own. 

The Devices Project began as a live lecture performance that included us and our two children. We showed audience members how to create and interact with fictional tools that we had created from everyday objects from our homes such as toys, spatulas, and laundry hampers. These ‘homemade’ devices repurposed their original intent into tools that helped us cope and manage. 

About the collaborators:

Kirk Lynn (www.kirkkirkkirk.com)
Kirk Lynn is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. As one of five Artistic Directors of the Rude Mechs theatre collective, Lynn has written and adapted over twenty plays, including the critically acclaimed Lipstick Traces, The Method Gun, and most recently, Not Every Mountain, which will premiere in summer 2018 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Lynn’s current solo projects include The Lamp Is the Moon, a commission for the Seattle Children’s Theater to premiere in April 2018, and A Plan and not Quite Enough Time, commissioned by UT Theater and Dance and Texas Performing Arts to premiere in 2019 as part of Leonard Bernstein’s centenary celebration. His one-man-show The Cold Record will premiere at the Fusebox Festival in the spring of 2018. Lynn’s debut novel, Rules for Werewolves, was published in 2015 by Melville House Books. Lynn earned his MFA as a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers and is Associate Professor of playwriting at the University of Texas in Austin, where he lives with his wife, poet and novelist Carrie Fountain, and their two children.

Peter Stopschinski (www.peterstopschinski.com)
Peter Stopschinski (Composer) has composed music for Madeleine George's play: The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence which was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, composed music/lyrics for New York Musicals Festival's 2015 Winner Best in Show: The Calico Buffalo, string arrangements for Grupo Fantasma's Grammy Award-winning album El Existential, and the film score for two-time Academy Award-winning director Al Reinert's film Rara Avis: The Life of John Audubon. His operas and musicals have been performed across the country from Arena Stage (DC) to Playwrights Horizons (NYC) to Center Theatre Group's Kirk Douglas Theater (LA).

1. A Device for Correct Activity
2. A Device for Sustainable Anger
3. A Device for Prolonged Addiction
4. A Device for Trust
5. A Device for Outward Enjoyment
6. A Device for Hydration
7. A Device for Pulling
8. A Device for Sympathetic Wishes
9. A Device for Breathing
10. A Device for Tasting
11. A Device for Dependence
12. A Device for Touching Nourishment
13. A Device for Reflective Adaptation
14. A Device for Understanding Growth
15. A Device for Thermoception
16. A Device for Cooperative Tension
17. A Device for Transportation
18. A Device for Anticipated Deterioration
19. A Device for the Delay of Blooming
20. A Device for the Opening of Emotional Doors
21. A Device for Release
22. A Device to Heal all Mothers
23. A Device for Swallowing the Apocalypse
24. A Device for Counting Blessings (Your Own)
25. A Device for Counting Blessings (Others)
26. A Device for Illuminating Possibility…

Performance:

A 60 minute interactive performance where we (Mary, Stephan, Maddie and Emmett) gave a town hall style multi-media lecture. We unpacked a box onstage that created a set of devices, objects and video projections, leaving a detritus of materials at the end. Audience members were each given their own box (contained photos, string, tinfoil, pencils, a prayer card, music notes, and a random object) to unpack with us throughout the performance, leading them to a unique connection with each other through the instructions and interactions.

During Covid we pivoted the performance to an online platform via Zoom. Participants were asked to download a virtual kit and we guided them through the performance through the webinar.

Documentation of:

• In-person performance at MATCH Center, Houston, Texas and New Jersey Center for the Arts, Middleton, New Jersey

• Virtual performance (Zoom) with Big Medium Gallery, Austin Texas and Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

• Tele-performance where callers could speak with us directly, order their own devices or tour the gallery

Performance Kit

For our A 60-minute interactive performance where Mary, Stephan, Maddie and Emmett gave a town hall style multi-media lecture. We unpacked a box onstage that created a set of devices, objects and video projections, leaving a detritus of materials at the end. Audience members were each given their own box (contained photos, string, tinfoil, pencils, a prayer card, music notes, and a random object) to unpack with us throughout the performance, leading them to a unique connection with each other through the instructions and interactions.

For our online Zoom performances, we asked participants to download a PDF instructions to create the kit so that they could participate in the performance with us. We change the kit in this version to include an interactive bingo sheet and a pledge to get more interaction in a online environment.

Exhibitions:

The following images and videos are documentation of the Devices Project exhibitions:

• Big Medium, Austin, Texas

• Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, New Jersey

• Heidi Vaughan Fine Art, Houston, Texas

• Art-in-Buildings, 125 Maiden Lane, New York, New York

• University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

• The University of Texas Arlington, Arlington, Texas

Photographs:

The following images are a selection from the over 200 images created for the performance.

17”x17” Archival Pigment Prints, Edition 1/10 + 1 AP.

Videos:

Twelve videos were made as part of the performance and were included in the subsequent exhibitions.

Book:

We completed a successful Kickstarter campaign for the publication of a 12”x12”, 147-page full-color softcover and hardcover book.

The book features writing by the Kirk Lynn of Rude Mechs, who we collaborated with on the original performance, there is a foreword by Alison de Lima Greene, the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator Modern & Contemporary Art at The Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the book was designed by Jenny Conte of Sharp Egg Design.

A special hardcover limited edition Collector’s Edition (Edition of 50) of the book features music in the form of a 10" vinyl record by the fabulous Peter Stopschinski who scored the original performance.   

This project is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance; supported through the Innovation Grants program of the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts in the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts, which is funded in part by the Houston Endowment, Inc.; and generously funded by Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Windgate Charitable Foundation, Inc., and the state arts agencies of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. Additional support has been provided by The Vermont Studio Center National Endowment for the Arts Parent Fellowship and the Santa Fe Art Institute Water Rights Residency