Reverse Plane of Cloudy

REVERSE PLANE OF CLOUDY: The re-animated subconscious of Lieutenant Ray Mallory.

Based on encounters with a brilliant, unknown inventor and VCR repairman, Ray Mallory, lead artist Matthew Steinke synthesizes the musical inventions and hacked appliances that filled Ray’s living room in the late 1990s. Ray was terminally ill and is no longer with us, but Steinke imagines that his subconscious endures as a fractured narrative in an infinite loop. Taking the form of electricity, code, and radio transmissions, it re-enacts experiences by scrubbing memories, replaying conversations, dreaming new landscapes, trying to fix its own bugs, and continually searching for Ray’s life partner, Honey Wells, who passed away five years before him.

This temporary installation uses software, video, sound, and music to animate machine bodies in a physical space. These bodies include robotic musical instruments, kinetic sculptures, and automated appliances. Artists working with ephemera such as music, video, sound, smell, and performance have been invited to collaboratively develop segments of an operatic narrative that is performed by these objects.