Three Labs, a participatory performance, 2004. By Matias Viegener and David Burns.
In an installation of 7th grade schoolroom chairs and tables, participants are given handouts and the equipment and ingredients to perform three lab experiments. All the ingredients are legal, but each of the labs create products and experiences that defy strictures around the delicious, the delirious and the disguised. These performances focus on the folk tradition of the kitchen laboratory. Homemade soap, bathtub gin, and handsewn clothes exemplify the American spirit of making things you might otherwise obtain commercially. Drawing on sources from Popular Mechanics to High Times magazine, three different do-it-yourself laboratories evoke a different America in which people and not corporations are in charge of their pleasure and entertainments.
Read more on Machine Project’s website.
