Literaraoke
Vincent Perez and Troy Leaman
September 9 - October 3, 2006

Installation view

Literaraoke is an adaptation of the technology of karaoke to performance literature. Our interest lies in facilitating the sharing of stories among neighbors, in endorsing storytelling as a grassroots and popular tradition and in questioning the professional domination of performance. In a culture that mediates information and expression through ourexperts, Karaoke has offered a viable, if campy, alternative to the expert/audience binary within the genre of music. We hope to use the same application to effect in other genres.

Vincent Perez is an artist, designer and curator living in Halifax, NS. His most identifiable artistic process has been the rescuing of thrift store and art gallery detritus and the revitalizing of these through the insinuation of sexual innuendo, sacred history, violent sub-currents, family dysfunction and racial faux pas into their form. He currently studies interdisciplinary design at NSCAD University.

In the distant past Troy was a award winning playwright, a film actor, a theatre producer, worked in a speakeasy and one of the nursemaids to the stillborn Eris Press. He has also been a vampire on alternative weekends but will deny it. Then there was blurry period where he suspects he was placed into some form of suspended animation by his enemies. Not long after escaping this fate he was asked by Modern Fuel to help develop its New Media Workspace. Here is where he has nurtured the (s)ubcultures and folie deux projects and enjoyed seeing some this work on TV in a spot usually reserved for informercials of scantily clad women who want you to call now.