RX Receiver Platform

RX RECEIVER PLATFORM was a synchronized live PowerPoint performance presented at Garage Rotterdam on October 2, 2021, as part of The Great Invocation. This group exhibition curated by Pádraic E. Moore set out to explore automatism, sublimation and séance as conduits for accessing potentially affirmative forms of consciousness in times of acute global and/or personal crisis. RX, the abbreviation for the Latin word recipere or recipe (literally “take, thou”) refers to the instructions apothecaries would give to ailing patients/customers for compounding their own remedies before the advent of manufactured drugs. RX is also the abbreviated sign for receiver/reception in computing and electronics. Noorda’s performance operated across and between these two definitions.

Kneeling in front of a platform erected on the gallery floor strewn with plants and rocks in front of projected digital landscapes, Noorda used a mortar and pestle to grind up mineral samples – graphite, cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, lead, quartz, soil from failed communitarian sites and shredded photographs –and then added water as the combining agent. As the video sequence of living plants, static interference and dream scenarios featuring her Second Life avatar played out behind her, Ruchama, equipped with a hogweed twig screen pointer offered in and out-of-sync commentary on the video streamed signal. Bridging the gap between PowerPoint and the apothecary, the corporate boardroom and the witches’ coven, Noorda opened up for the duration of the performance a space capable of confounding/compounding the imagined distance between past and future.

RX RECEIVER PLATFORM: installation/performance, The Great Invocation, curated by Pádraic E. Moore, Garage Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, June 19 – July 19, 2020.

http://www.padraicmoore.com/automatic-receivers/