PORTALS TO THE ALTER CULTURE



What if there was an entirely separate set of inhabitants in Los Angeles, with completely different and non-overlapping cultural references? They may watch TV, but they’ve never seen any of the shows we know about. They love music, but they’ve never heard of Michael Jackson. You would never encounter any of them, as they only go to places you would never in your life think or know to visit. Who are these people? Do they know about us? If you met them, would you know?

In figuring out how to contact the inhabitants of this “alter-culture,” the first thing to acknowledge is that all our questions are wrong, must be wrong by default. All our strategies are worthless because they are innately within our own culture’s frame of reference. It is impossible to contact the alter-culture without completely getting rid of ourselves first. Unless, as we suspect, there exist portals.

Parch Es and Scarlett Kim reenact strategies authored by artists and researchers as well as devise their own methodologies to cut and re-arrange time and other dimensions, in order to identify glitches in our own culture. Using performance, media and conversation, they attempt to find and create portals into the alter-culture.

Los Angeles Performance Practice

By Scarlett Kim & Parch Es