LOVE And hATE
The performance Love and Hate is an exploration of the reality of objectifying the Other through the experience of positive and negative emotions. In the performance, the egotistical nature of the Lovers and Haters amplifies the traditional assumption that the art object aims to reflect everyday reality.
A couple, a man and a women, are engaged in everyday monologues expounding clichés of love and hate seemingly towards each other. The play 'Love and Hate' adds original qualities of pleasurable, robotic repetitions and coding to the field of cultural explorations of relationships exemplified in the work of Woody Allen, Yoko Ono & John Lennon and Bruce Nauman.
Two actors, one male and one female, were asked to express positive and negative emotions towards their real-life partner during a theatrical improvisation. The actors never met, and they did not know each other or what the other one was going to do.
Their improvised monologues were recorded, edited and programmed into the robots. The musical soundtrack was composed using the broken halves of the pianos. During the performance, the robots switch voices so that each robot plays the male and the female in turn, so there is no identification between a robot and a particular voice. The expressed emotions are also directed to the viewer so that the use of the word "you" applies to actor, robot and / or viewer.
A singular event in the narrative is when the male actor/robot discovers that his wife has betrayed him. The robots' emotions can then be contextualised.
The robot heads are constructed from an assemblage of keys from the missing part of the piano they are sitting on. Their faces reflect each other with mirrored black and white patterns and the switching between the male-female voices by transgendered robots is such that the context has the possibility of generating a gender in an object.
Exhibited and Performed at V22 Summer Club 2012, Petra Rink, Art Cologne 2012, Social Bauhaus, Haifa 2018 (Curator Galia Bar-Or).
Piano keys, wood, metal, mechanics and programmed lighting, sound and robot technology.
Sculptures, direction, mechanical-animation and lights: Guy Bar-Amotz.
Sound design: Peter Zwingli Hall.
Voices: Sharon Gal, Shaun French.
Software design: Piers O'Hanlon.
Graphic Design / Typography: Raanan Gabriel.