Julia Heyward and Perry Hoberman’s 29 Space Time brings performance art into the future

Heyward and Hoberman. 29 Space Time media still. Courtesy Roulette

29 Space Time is a performance art piece that was recently performed at the art space Roulette in Brooklyn, NY. Performed and created by the multimedia artists Perry Hobber and Julia Heyward. A unique piece on its own, but made more notable because of Heyward’s involvement. A renowned performance artist, Heyward has been living and working in downtown New York since the 1970s and was one of the veteran artists included in the Whitney Museum’s ground breaking survey of performance art Rituals of Rented Island. 29 Space Time offered a rare opportunity to view an artist’s new work post-retrospective.

Working with sound, performance and various media, 29 Space Time was more than simply multimedia but multi-everything. Produced after spending the last five summers in Twenty Nine Palms, a town in the Mojave Desert, the piece a kind of “docudrama” mixed fiction, fantasy and reality by way of the artists observations and documentation of desert life. Mixing narrative with interactive media and sound the piece works with feelings of hope, worry and paranoia.

Perhaps the most all inclusive part of the performance was a scene on which Heyward “interrogates” a woman, who is present as a life size video projection. In trying to decipher the woman’s muffled voice Heyward begins to sing her words. This scene is exemplary as it employs the performance’s components of video, sound, performance to serve the piece’s Sci-Fi narrative in a spectacular way.

Watch the 29 Space Time video