The Set Speaks poster and studio, with Alex Herrera. Photo: Michael Workman
Drew Mausert-Mooney and Kera MacKenzie sat down and had an interview with Michael Workman about their last show The Set Speaks, the upcoming show ACRE TV LIVE at The MCA and the history of ACRE TV for Occasional Inquiries in this interview “IN DEPTH// Living in the Cinematic Moment: Kera MacKenzie and Drew Mausert-Mooney’s “MCA LIVE: ACRE TV.”‘
“Live cinema, and particularly live cinema sent out over a distance (tele-vision, in other words) is interesting to us in so many ways. There’s the looseness of it. If you fail in live TV, the embarrassment only lasts for a moment, which encourages a kind of experimentation and prolific pace of making that we are both very excited by.”
“Also, there’s something exciting about broadcasting live because you know that viewers are witnessing what you’re doing in separate places at the same time. It creates a concept of a community of viewers in a way that video on demand doesn’t. There’s a political aspect to that live audience, because they are all experiencing and negotiating “now” together, which is why news works so well on television.”
“For The Set Speaks, we invited seven groups of Chicago artists to take over our temporary studio and our stream. We asked them to think about what a real time studio practice/performance can look like in a frame, over distance.”
“Seeing other artists work out what it means to go live in totally different ways has been more powerful than I could’ve imagined.”
“Sometimes it seems like the collaboration is the work itself. Especially when we do live shows. Getting a group of people to sync their clocks in a room together and make something is the best thing in the world, and I think you can really see it in the work when lots of different people’s energy goes in to holding a scene together for a moment. It changes the scale and when you’re a part of it you get to stay constantly surprised by the work you’re making.”
Read the full interview here.