FORE CAST by Mary Mattingly, live rock opera at White Box, NYC December 2006

Fore Cast was a clarion call anticipating the looming environmental urgency. Fore Cast was an interactive Opera, opening at White Box on December 19, 2006, at six o’clock pm. Fore Cast will transform White Box’s space into a waterlogged, apocalyptic swampland, soundscape, and videosurround. The opening night will feature live performances with an original opera score by Jessica and Sarah of The Redcoats Are Coming! with Andrya of Antonious Block and Alexis of Apples and Arrows'.

Entering a water-filled and truncated landscape, viewers witness the land’s predicted end-state, a reversion to its primeval condition and a topographical perspective of the new world. The marshy waterscape is the setting for the future of a civilization ensnared in an unceasing loop of WWIV, a war Albert Einstein foreshadowed as being fought with sticks and stones. The installation explains the tragic outcomes of this hypothesized war in the not-so-distant future.

Multiple video projectors arranged in a circle fill the walls of White Box and present a “Fore Cast” that will loop for six days and one hour. (A new week, according to Mary Mattingly’s proprietary uniform time scale, derived from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian astronomical methodology and translated to a system for future use.) The videos play continuously in White Box's waterlogged space. The main screen portrays WWIV, fought by six groups of combatants ---The World Economic Forum, The Council on Foreign Relations, Bechtel, Nestlé, The United Nations, and B.R.I.C.--- colluding to capture and assert political and economic control over a shattered and borderless world. The belligerents’ leaders plot together in corporate conference rooms, ultimately degenerating into intercontinental world-scale conflict fought with the weapons of Cain and Abel, sticks and stones, the war unfolding in aqueous and terrestrial environments everywhere.

Nestle Waters, one of the six players in WW4. Shirley Hu in the R.&D. working on the war suits with me.

Endgame.
The Circular Video in the Main Space

Endgame, the central video in Fore Cast, shows a turbulent world after WWIII, the war is spent in laborious travel by boat and exclusive travel by plane, or on foot through the peripheries of the remaining land. Even the simplest tasks have become complex and complicated. As the war is determined, the torches are passed, and the operatic word of impending doom spreads. Past, present and future merge, meld and magnify the world, zooming in on the Dowel of Babel, being spun to symbolize the merging of cultures, languages, zooming in on warring future-tribes, new mechanics, and reoccurring tragedies.

MY GRATITUDE TO: Antonious Block, Apples and Arrows', Leslie Bocskor, Leigh Boone, Mira Burke, Christina Croll, David Darst, Stephanie Dedes, Fred Fleisher, G-77, Glen Gable, Shirley Hu, Derek Junck, Linda Kim, Monica Mattingly, Clinton McClung, Paul Middendorf, Mike Nirenberg, Sophie Novack, Juan Puntes, Annie Ratti, The Redcoats Are Coming, Robert Mann Gallery, Sarah Wilmer, Jen Wirtz, Katherine Xu.