Antipodes – people with feet opposite ours

2002

Antipodes – people with feet opposite ours is a performance collaboration with Xavier van Wersch.

Antipodes premièred at the Kiev International Media Art Festival in October 2002 and was performed later that year at the PEK festival in The Hague, The Netherlands. In 2009 Beekman and van Wersch revisited the concept with a performance at DA Fest in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Antipodes – people with feet opposite ours is about the act of crossing boundaries between sound and image, control and output, between performer and computer, the same computer people.

The two performers are joined by the computer as a third, independent performer, with a mind of his own, which records, decodes, interprets and interferes with actions of the human performers. Collectively, they shape sound and vision through shared control strategies.

Central to the concept of performances by Beekman and van Wersch is the coming to terms with the realisation that there are people with feet opposite ours.