Performance
In performance, I “become” light. Light propagates from my body and magnifies my movements. I feel light’s direction, scale and geometry as my body, and move accordingly. The performances work when movement dissolves the boundaries between light, body, and architecture.
The goal and message of my work is the experience of light as vision. Fresh ground is achieved through an inversion of light’s illuminating function, thus revealing the perceptual basis of the world in concept, by which the nature of “light” itself is revealed.
Eye Dance
A collaboration with poet and visual artist Elizabeth Goldring, using Light Dance to communicate with her impaired eye. Goldring viewed the performances through a scanning laser ophthalmoscope that directed imagery onto healthy portions of her damaged retina. This work led to “Eye Robot,” a “seeing-machine” for people with low-vision.
Eye Robot and My New Friend SU: The Moon’s Other Side
Elizabeth Goldring and her MIT team, and Seth Riskin of the MIT Museum, collaborated with Robert Wilson, the legendary American avant-garde stage director and playwright, to develop technologies that address issues of blindness and partial sight using robotics. During a four-day workshop in the ACT Cube, they rehearsed new scenes for “My New Friend SU: The Moon’s Other Side,” a theatrical collaboration in which Goldring’s “Eye Robot” played a role. The piece used Goldring’s texts and seeing technologies.
Light Dances in the night sky
A series of projects with the artist Otto Piene.
Wearing mirrored and holographic costumes, Riskin performed Light Dances in the sky, lifted upon helium-filled, polyethelene tubes.
Riskin performed in light beams cast through the glass of Piene’s “Prism Dome” at the Schadow Arkaden in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Robotic Light Ballet
Riskin collaborated with Otto Piene to build motion platforms that animated Piene’s “Light Ballet.” In addition to these tests at the MIT Museum, the Light Ballet Robots were featured in the memorial for Otto Piene at MIT in 2014.
Regenbogen Raster
In appreciation of Otto Piene’s “Light Ballet,” Developed for an exhibition at ZERO Haus, Düsseldorf, Germany in 2021, the project built upon Otto Piene’s “Light Ballet” with novel techniques and LED light sources.
MIT 150th Sky Art Event
With Otto Piene, Riskin led the planning and execution of the culminating event of MIT’s sesquicentennial celebration, lifting Piene’s inflatable stars, Cereus and Paris, into the night sky of MIT’s Killian Court.
Ikaria hologram performance
At the 2002 Sky Art Conference in Ikaria, Greece, Riskin created a holographic window through which his Light Dance performance was virtual rings of light flanking his body.
Silo Solos
Experiments in the “Light Silo” and “Bell Silo” at the Otto and Elizabeth Piene Art Farm in Groton, Massachusetts.
