The adventure begins when you book a time, provide your cell phone number, and show up at an appointed location near St. Anthony Main in Minneapolis. Arriving at your pre-described street corner, you wait for your cell phone to ring. When it does, your journey through the neighborhood begins. Keep your eyes peeled for traps. You are the lead in a heist movie. Fresh from the streets of Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, A Machine To See With now focuses on Minneapolis as the setting for its one-of-a-kind cinematic experience conjured through a creative marriage of technology and storytelling on Friday-Tuesday, April 15-19.
As participants navigate the riverfront and city streets, stories unfold with the help of precisely timed phone calls, exploiting the conventions of classic film noir and real-life surveillance. This new work of “locative cinema”–a media art form combining time, space, and place–was created by Blast Theory, a UK-based artist collective whose work blends participatory art, film, and technology. Rooted in the idea that we often see ourselves moving through life from a camera’s viewpoint, the piece’s title borrows a line from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou: “My eyes are a machine to see with.”
walkerart.org