Glass Bead Collective (GBC)
INFO

About Glass Bead Collective

Glassbead Collective (GBC), based in New York City, brings together individuals from diverse academic and professional backgrounds including video art, film, theater, architecture, photography, music, mathematics, fine arts and philosophy to create works which re-contextualize culture and the world in which we find ourselves today.  GBC was founded in 2002 with a multimedia theatrical performance of Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit.

We have since produced various live art events and films experimenting with a multi-disciplinary approach to contemporary issues (mixing visual and literary narratives in real time) as well as created live visuals for groups such as Billionaires for Bush, The War Resisters, Brooklyn Media Lab, GRACE (Global Resource Action Center for the Environment) at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival among others. We have recently created a piece for the WORD_and_WORK section of Volume No. 9 of ART.ES, a Spanish art magazine published in Madrid.

Mission

To stimulate viewers to perceive the porous membrane between themselves and their environment as well as other people in order to spur them to participate and experiment in a creative spirit with their surroundings, perceptions and continue playing the Glass Bead Game. The urgency of our times compels us to directly engage the public in the game through diverse audiovisual methods.

To fulfill our mission GBC draws on the creative vision, collaborative effort, enthusiasm and wide-ranging talent of its members to engage in a direct democracy experiment through the act of creating pieces together by interweaving diverging narratives. The majority of our projects are undertaken on a non-for-profit basis.

Methodology

Video and audio sampling mixed with original video footage are essential to our way of working. We utilize the culture around us to communicate to people in a language that is easily understood and adaptable to its environment, similar to the mass media approach but instead of a superfluous context of escape we attempt to re-invigorate and re-engage the audience in our world.

One of the ways in which we tackle complex problems which culture presents is to break concepts in to vectors including a conceptual alongside an emotional vector in order not only to convey fact but re-activate people's emotions about the world in which they live. This could be, for example, on the abstract level of color or the associational level of the image, what we call cultural artifacts, which in our contemporary mode of perception play a large role in people's reactions to each other and their surroundings.

For more information contact: [email protected]