ARTIFICIAL CAMPFIRES

Artificial Campfires is an experimental art/music project by Jazmyn Crosby and Quinton Maldonado. Together, as Artificial Campfires, their works explore notions of the self, privacy, and spirituality in an ever digitizing world.

a form giving fire

a form giving fire is a durational zoom performance in which candlelight is broadcast from our personal devices (phones and computers). In the spirit of a Yule log, this ritual welcomes the new light as the days begin to grow longer. Fire, in the darkest of winters, pulls us closer together, forging the strongest bonds at our most vulnerable. As the quarantine continues to drive us further apart, these devices gather round the fire, reaching out to people who cannot be physically present. The light captured by our cameras, reproduced on other screens, brings them into this ritual of reprieve with us. If human history is predicated upon the harnessing of light and fire this work considers the changing nature of this relationship mediated by screens.

Only From My Mind and From a Safe Distance

Only in my Mind and from a Safe Distance was a ritual broadcast performance from our roof in the first week of the pandemic after schools, restaurants, and other places of gathering had shut down in the United States. During the first weeks of the pandemic our relationships to one another changed. At home in a way we never were before, afraid of possibly transmitting the virus in person, the physical boundaries of our communication collapsed. It was an ideal moment to transmit this performance to our neighbors through pirate radio, and to family and friends through Instagram live. The broadcast offered a sanitary means of connection across distance and played with the scale of transmission.

Jackson Hole, WY

The video footage from Jackson Hole, WY was sourced from the ongoing Jackson Hole Wyoming Town Square live stream and an episode of Wyoming public access television from 1995. Over the course of the episode the discussions on the history of barbed wire & branding, cornerstone technologies for the cattle industries, hint at, but ultimately obfuscate the brutal history of colonization and enclosure that these objects actualized in the completion of Manifest Destiny. Resurrecting these pasts and layering them into a ‘live’ moment, we see how the legacies of the settlement of the west remain unresolved and buried, while the next great enclosure, the surveillance and monitoring of all daily life, continues in its complete normalization.

a bell burning at night

The Stetson hat factory was constructed in 1892 and located in Philadelphia’s South Kensington neighborhood. It burnt down on September 4th 1980 after the factory had been closed for 9 years. Stetson was a famous hat manufacturer, most well known for producing the 10 gallon cowboy hat, symbolic of the American West. The Stetson bell rang out several times a day to alert nearly 5,000 workers of their days for the better part of a century.

Our hands were blackened with soot after playing the bell. A haunted air hung over the space as if the bell were able to conjure its own memory. It was awakened, a thing of the past, telling of a history come and gone, reverberating through our bodies in the aftermath.