Event details
Saturday, March 9, 2024
2–3 pm

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Included with museum admission, registration is recommended.

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Question:
What are the ideal spatial qualities of a site made for gathering?  
xxPOSTSCRIPTxx Do we gather to invent or invent to gather?

Facilitated by Elliot Reed

Elliot Reed is an artist whose projects aim to capture by physical means the idiosyncrasies of live performance. Reed is the founder, director, and sole employee of Elliot Reed Laboratories, a production office located inside the artist’s body. Established in 2014, Elliot Reed Laboratories holds a copyright with the Library of Congress and a business license from Los Angeles County. Elliot holds an MA in choreography from Exerce at the Centre Chorégraphique National Montpellier, France, and is a 2023 participant of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York. Recent performances and exhibitions include those at Anonymous Gallery, Metro Pictures, MoMA PS1, OCDChinatown, and The Poetry Project in New York; the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Getty Center, Hammer Museum, and the Broad in Los Angeles; as well as Lucerne Festival, with JACK Quartet, and Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland. International performances include those in Hamburg, London, Madrid, Mexico City, Osaka, Tokyo, Vienna, and Zürich. Reed’s text manifesto “Performance Art Is…” was published in MIT Press’s The Drama Review (winter 2020).

About the program series

Blind Dates Recursive is a series of participatory public conversations held at Dia Beacon in conjunction with Rita McBride: Arena Momentum (on view through January 2025). These engagements take place on McBride’s Arena (1997), a modularly structured tribune that is activated by the presence of audiences and performers alike.

Inspired by the artist’s decision to make the digital design files of Arena freely available through a copyleft license, which allows for the public to access and reinterpret the work, Blind Dates Recursive provides an ongoing, open forum to consider and enact the shifting nature of authorship.

Each month, an invited facilitator poses a question and draws on their unique field of expertise to act as an instigator, listener, and moderator of the responses and conversation. Participants are encouraged to think out loud and in dialogue with each other during the hour-long session, at the end of which the facilitator will guide the group to collectively form a new question. The new question will be posed at the next session by a new facilitator. In this way, like a game of Telephone, Blind Dates Recursive generates iterative gatherings and an evolving public dialogue over the course of the exhibition.

The public is encouraged to participate on a recurring basis.

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Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2–3 pm

More information on the full program series is available here.