NSA-USA: Sound as Prophecy is an elaboration and embellishment of an installation and performance work already performed at the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York City, 2013, REDCAT, Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater in Los Angeles, 2014 and as part of the Manifesta Parallel Program, St. Petersburg, 2014. It takes as its point of departure the recent scandal arising from the secret surveillance activities of the National Security Agency’s upon private citizens and politicians in the United States and abroad. This artwork focuses upon the culpability of the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Is he a villain or a hero and how will history treat him? Additionally, can improvisational recitals translate streams of information about the event, which in this case has been elaborated as graphic scores, to better help us discover alternative truths about the conspiracy in an unbiased and novel way? Is this a form of empowerment that artists should embrace?

This performance is in four acts… It is accompanied by an installation of graphic scores on display that involves the entire architectural space of Human Resources. Of special interest is a play by play running account of the action on stage occurring simultaneously with multiple real time Go Pro projections in synch with shifting gazes of the performers as they read the scores.

Performers include:

Ulrich Krieger
Rosemarie Hertlein
Joshua Carro
Kevin Robinson
Ashiq Khondker
Chiara Giovando
David Schafer
Renee Petropoulos

Curated by Isabelle le Normand

Isabelle Le Normand is an independent curator based in Los Angeles. For six years, she was director of Visual Arts and curator at Mains d’Œuvres, a multidisciplinary space in the north of Paris where she curated over 30 exhibitions. She has also curated independently in Paris, Los Angeles, Bourges, Budapest, and Marseille.

Warren Neidich is a Los Angeles based wet conceptual artist and theorist who exposes the interfaces between socially engaged cultural production and its interrelationship to the brain and cognitive capitalism to produce an Emancipatory Materialism. His interdisciplinary anarchic experimental works combine photographic and video elements, Internet downloads, scotch tape, painting and noise installations. Future exhibitions include Seconds, Sharjah Foundation, Saudia Arabia, The Cartography of the Mind’s Eye, Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, and The Phylogenesis of Generosity, Flora Arts Natura, Bogota. His book The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Two was recently published by Archive Press, Berlin, Germany. His collection of essays Resistance is Fertile will be published in German by Merve Verlag, in the fall of 2014.