with co-director Barbara T. Smith in conversation with Michael J. Masucci
The film’s two chapters will be presented with a short intermission featuring international snacks from some of the countries visited in the film.
The 21st Century Odyssey is a video travelogue through love, liberatory technology, social and personal mythology, and the pleasures and rigors of making life into art told in part through the pixelated beauty of the videophone. Though rarely screened, it is a rich and resonant chapter in the legendary Barbara T. Smith’s careerlong experiments with machine innovation. Her partnership with Kate Johnson and EZTV documents an epic befitting their shared goals of evolving and synthesizing video art and performance art’s past and future. The film’s patient veneration of the quotidian alongside the grand coupled with the ache of long-term romantic longing re-embodies the interpretive act of translating this two-year-plus durational performance project into its video form.
The film sees Smith from 1991 through 1993 sending photo messages to her lover, physician Roy Walford, while he is sealed inside the Biosphere 2 and serving as its resident physician. Highlighting the newly-available and newly-aesthetically-permeable availability of transmissions via broadcast and teleconference by the Electronic Cafe International in Santa Monica, the film spans four continents and even the subject’s college reunion. Smith and Johnson’s resulting document of a durational performance is a stirring and strange tale of Smith as Odysseus. Unlike her inspiration, she can reach her (doctor) Penelope via semi-frequent messages. But the resulting tensions of their avant-garde and at-times intangible communication creates new permeations of distance-via-intimacy that are being newly defined as they happen, resonating profoundly in the world that these pioneers created for us. This is documentary as video art, love as performance piece, and a must-see for admirers of Smith, Johnson, and EZTV.
Special thanks to Mara McCarthy and The Box.
““Performance art is ordeal art,” she explained. “Like this trip, it is about breaking barriers, opening doors, uniting with people, moving beyond the mundaneness of daily life. It’s not about performing or acting, it’s about actually doing it.” - “‘Odyssey’: A Dialogue Between Two Worlds : Performance art: The Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica is linking communications between a global traveler and a physician in Biosphere 2.” - LA Times, July 7, 1992
“It was a journey to establish a global consciousness for myself. I was carrying with me a thread of goodwill and openness, not trying to convince anyone of anything nor take anything from them, just to experience and learn. I was also embodying the myth of Odysseus ... It was an art issue too. What is a durational artwork? What constitutes it? I think this is also about consciousness. To hold an art consciousness for a long and varied duration. I think that changes or enhances everything I did during that time.” - Barbara T. Smith via The Box
A film by Barbara T. Smith & Kate Johnson/EZTV
2007, video transferred to digital, color, sound, 208 minutes (with intermission)
“A two year-long durational performance that took place from September 26, 1991 to September 26, 1993. These dates correlate with the opening and the closing of Biosphere 2, located near Tucson, Arizona, where her partner at the time, Dr. Roy Walford, was the interred physician. Smith took on the role of Homer’s Odysseus and traveled the world while Walford, confined inside the Biosphere 2 facility along with 7 other “Biospherians” for 2 years, was Penelope. For Smith, this work was an endeavor to attain a global consciousness while maintaining the connection between Biosphere 1 (the earth) and Biosphere 2. “I was holding Bio 2 in my heart and connecting, of course, with Roy as a vehicle of that connection.”
As part of this work, Smith traveled extensively internationally and domestically and considered every aspect of her life in this two-year period, from the exotic to the banal, as part of the performance. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus struggles for ten years to get home to Ithaca after his battles in the Trojan War. Between 1992 and 1993, Smith traveled to India, Nepal, Thailand, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany, and Norway; within the U.S., she went to Northern California, Hawaii and Seattle. En route, Smith created real-time performances with local citizens while transmitting images of these events via videophone and computer to Walford in Biosphere 2 and a third key partner, the Electronic Café International, led by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. The Electronic Café, where Smith often attended their trans-communication events, was an early cyber café with advanced telecommunication capacity. It was located at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA. Galloway and Rabinowitz collaborated in The 21st Century Odyssey, anchoring their three-way transmissions and archiving all of the early videophone communications Smith had with Walford.” - The Box
