DAYS OF OUR LIVES - Sound Installation by Tom Cole and Lydia Eccles/Universal Aliens
LE PETIT VERSAILLES COMMUNITY GARDEN346 E. Houston St. / 247 E. 2nd St.ALL LPV EVENTS HAPPEN RAIN OR SHINEContact: lepetitversailles@alliedproductions.org/(212) 529-8815
DAYS OF OUR LIVES is a sound installation created during the pandemic when people could not gather for art. It played at Le Petit Versailles for passersby as a cumulative collaboration that emerged, grew and morphed throughout the month of August.
Saturday, September 12 at 8 pm, Garden opens at 7:30
DAYS OF OUR LIVES
Artist talk with Tom Cole and Lydia Eccles/Universal Aliens
A hybrid in-person/zoom event with video projection hosted by Peter Cramer and Jack Waters
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://zoom.us/j/94256322845?
Meeting ID: 942 5632 2845Passcode: 701401
To listen to Lydia Eccles/Universal Aliens Investigation of the Obvious playlist:
The collaborative four-part sound series played here Saturdays and Sundays from noon through 6pm on these weekends:August 8-9, 15-16, 22-23, 29-30. Each weekend had unique vocal content and appropriate theme music, offered in bite-sized modules for your convenience, and developing cumulatively over the month of August.The artists are interweaving this work week-by-week specifically for this garden and this time, when people cannot crowd in for art.Now, and until ???, art can be attended mostly from within private living cubes, often alone, tethered to 2-dimensional digital frames displaying pixel patterns. Outdoors in the real world in a socially-distant time when people can't crowd in for art, DAYS OF OUR LIVES is a collaborative sound installation of disembodied voices speaking to anyone passing--maybe pausing--by the Garden. Tom and Lydia have different voices, yet often are mutually implicated in one another's work.The artists will discuss their project (in the Garden or by zoom) on Saturday, September 12 at 8 pm.Tom ColeTHE END: Created during quarantine, THE END is four interconnected and cumulative micro-plays created from notes and raw data collected in real time in the lower east side during the pandemic. Concepts of risk, positivity, and negativity are challenged and subverted; in isolation, guilt and shame reverberate into absurd pleasure.I am a playwright with a background in literary and poetic forms and live arts. These various experiments have boiled down to a form of pure playwriting that references autobiography while remaining acutely focused on language – which at times becomes an end in itself. I depict a disenfranchised existence with an eye towards the visual and the poetic.Lydia Eccles/Universal AliensAN INVESTIGATION OF THE OBVIOUS: Four pieces made from interviews with free wage-laborers concerning how they spent their 24-hour daily ration of time pre-COVID19 on a typical working day, and on the experience of selling labor/time/life in general. The disruption of time-work discipline de-naturalizes normalcy for non-essential workers in particular, as they apply a Karl Marx lens to their labor process.Salvage ethnography is the study of cultures on the brink of extinction. My investigations are ethno/anthropological and are often lived out as experiences, practices or experiments. I record observational field notes in various media. To directly experience the relativity of your local culture (for example, capitalism) one must leave it deliberately in some manner (as in quarantine) and enter into a state of culture shock; this lays bare the unconscious assumptions and beliefs underlying normalcy.
Tom Cole is a writer and artist living in the Lower East Side. His work has been presented at Participant Inc, Petit Versailles, Thread Waxing Space, Art on Air, Clocktower Gallery, ICA Boston, Performa, Oni Gallery, and the Boston Center for the Arts. He is a three-time MacDowell Playwriting fellow and a 2015 Albee Foundation Playwriting fellow. He co-curates Experiments and Disorders, a literary series at Dixon Place. He has collaborated extensively with Anohni, most recently appearing in She Who Saw Beautiful Things at the Kitchen. He heads the New Play Commissioning Program at True Love Productions where he has commissioned new work by Heidi Schreck, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Craig Lucas, and Sheila Callaghan, among others.
Lydia Eccles normally lives in Boston, but is in exile in Vermont, where she is recording her sister's memoir of thirty years as an HIV nurse--the AIDS epidemic from beginning to end--recorded as COVID unfolds in real-time. She is creating a Corona Calendar of daily photographs in Vermont woods which function as a pandemic clock, and recently made a Free Money Tool Kit to assist self-employed people to obtain CAREs Act Payroll Protection Loans. Archives of her project, The Unabomber '96 Presidential Write-In Campaign will be included in Election Day at Das Weisse Haus, Vienna this fall. Other Universal Aliens work can be accessed on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/@universalaliens_hotmail_com).Le Petit Versailles events are made possible by Allied Productions, Inc., Gardeners & Friends of LPV, GreenThumb/NYC Dept. of Parks, Materials for the Arts, the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, and the Office of City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera. LPV Exhibitions are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. 
