Mark Tribe: Performance, Mediation and The Public Sphere

     Mark Tribe began his lecture with the notion that as human beings, we all practice a kind of unconscious self performance in order to reveal ourselves for ourselves.  This concept of self performance allowed Mark Tribe to questions different possibilities that show themselves in understanding performance within the public sphere.  Mark's lecture discussed his own journey and exploration of the dimensions of the social sphere:  performance, language, space, and visual.  His exploration and questions formed into different public and performance artwork.
     Mark's first piece showed the Carpark project in 1994, at Southwestern in San Diego, CA.  The project was a social experiment done in a day, where all of the cars in a parking lot were separated into color when the cars came in.  The project had been shown in the media news stations and broadcast over the evening news.  Not all participants were willing to follow the guidelines of the project (meaning not all that parked that day, participated in the project).  Visually the project was kind of interesting, seeing hundreds of cars parked by color.  The idea was also interesting, that most people who participated in the project, did so willingly just to go along with the idea.
     The next project Mark introduced in the lecture was the Rhizome project from 1996.  A website Mark described as a discursive place where people could share their ideas.  Back in the 90's the project was innovative, a kind of beginning of social networking and the arts.
     The next project discussed was very interesting conceptually and historically.  The project began with the questions about mediation and how performances are changed by mediation and time.  Mark restaged famous protest speeches of the past and reenacted them with actors, in the same public space that they were in long ago.  Coretta Scott King speech, Cesar Chaves speech, Stokely Carmichael, Paul Potter, Howard Zinn, Angela Davis, these are all famous people that protested long ago, that Tribe had redone to better try and understand nature by re fabricating history.  Mark described the project as a kind of historical vertigo that became eerily relevant for today, and yet not relevant all at the same time.  Mark also discussed different ways he exhibitioned the project and how actually being there as an audience was different than witnessing the concept in an exhibition or installation of the project elsewhere.  He described different installations as an illusion of space, and continued the illusion of space idea by introducing his next project the Dystopia files.
     The Dystopia Files in 2010 showed different protests focusing on protesters and media and police.  The project in some installations was shown on an empty wall with a door that opened into a room of locked file cabinets that held archives of different protests.  The project is about observing different reactions to the project while it is being shown.  Mark described the project as an exposure and exlusion.  He discussed the installations as a kind of weird inverted camera obscura participation experiment that selectively reveals and conceals.  The concept was very interesting, but the installation seemed a bit confusing.
     Mark Tribe has some incredibly interesting concepts, questions, and ideas.  I found his work interesting but a bit unfulfilled.  I wanted him to talk more about outcomes and personal growth within each concept and project.  The themes of his work are left unanswered and undone somehow.  I found myself wondering throughout the lecture...why?  I wanted all of his work to link together somehow and for me it just didn't seem to.  It will be interesting to see if he can take his work to a new level and combine it all together into something more.