S M A R T S N O W
Smart Snow is a collaboration between dance choreographer and media artist Kathleen Kelley and poet Sarah Rose Nordgren. Since meeting at a high school party and recognizing each other as artistic soul-mates, they have been working together formally and informally for over 15 years. Smart Snow gives a name to their lifelong artistic relationship.
Smart Snow creates art that pushes the forms of dance and poetry into new technological territories. As women working at the intersections between art and tech, Kathleen and Sarah Rose are interested in the mirrored relationship between technological and evolutionary processes and the “natural” and the “human” inside of digital spaces.
About our name:
The phrase "smart snow" is borrowed from poet Cathy Park Hong's book, Engine Empire. In the section called "The World Cloud" which depicts a futuristic dystopia, smart snow is a substance that permeates the environment and allows communication through the cloud. We see smart snow as the perfect melding of the virtual and the material.
P R O J E C T S
Vibracorpus
Coming Soon
Digitized Figures
Digitized Figures is an immersive installation that incorporates video, text, and live dance to conjure a richly textured and fluctuating landscape. The installation elements surround and interact with the viewer, inviting them to play in and co-create the performance environment. Digitized Figures is totally immersive experience that you roam through, interacting with the text, the projections, and the dancers. Digitized Figures premiered in October 2016.
Territory
Hovering between utopian and dystopian visions, Territory depicts a woman confined in a 2 by 3 foot forest diorama constructed using landscape miniatures manufactured for war reenactment. Layered with projected text and narrated by her own thoughts, the landscape reveals itself as both magical and claustrophobic, static and surging with power. Ultimately, the woman is trapped between her ability to “see all sides of [her] enclosure equally” and the viewer’s gaze that keeps her enclosed. This predicament hinges on her discovery that “there is no new territory, just overlapping desire charged with violence.”
Territory premiered in Triquarterly Magazine on January 15, 2018.