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Lars Jan Is Building Human Aquariums in Florida

We spoke to the artist about sensory deprivation tanks, performance art, and his current show at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.
Images courtesy the artist.Quaternary Suite light circumference installation / PMCA / photo by Don Milici

Lars Jan is the founder and artistic director of Early Morning Opera, a performance lab and collective that merges art and activism with technology and live events to make large-scale and often unclassifiable artworks that require years of research and development. Jan's latest is Holoscenes, a project which encompasses a number of different yet related schemes that correspond to a room-sized clear acrylic human aquarium. The performance-based installation debuted in October, 2014 at the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Festival in Toronto as a 12-hour performance, filling and draining with water at varying speeds to bring attention to the issue of climate change and its effects on the world's water supplies (the name refers to the Holocene, our present geological epoch).

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During the aquarium's prototype development phase, Jan captured a series of images that are now a part of what he calls the Quaternary Suite: a video triptych and images on five static "light circumferences" (a term Jan prefers to use instead of "light box," given that they're actually round). The works are currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art's Project Room, but are slated to move to a location in Florida that could be underwater in 50 years due to rising sea levels.

Abaya 1 / PMCA / photo by Don Milici

The seeds for Holoscenes were planted in 2010 after Jan saw an image in The New York Times by photojournalist Daniel Berehulak, that captures victims struggling against a massive flood in Pakistan. While it documents a destructive event, Jan says it's still a beautiful photo: “I was fascinated by this image of devastation that sparked a deep empathic response me, and I was intrigued by the complicated role that the sheer beauty of the photo played in affecting me.”Jan felt that beauty had the potential to induce empathy and tell stories while increasing awareness, and that's how Holoscenes came to be an "artivist" project about flooding and water in the 21st century, as well as a project about long-term thinking and our ability to understand and share feelings and experiences.

Formally, Holoscenes delivers its subtle message in the tradition of a grand spectacle, but unlike Busby Berkeley's "By a Waterfall" number in the 1933 film Footlight Parade, the reason why it works so well is because the subjects are actually engaged in seemingly mundane behaviors, like getting dressed, shopping, and sleeping. Jan hopes that because it's not fulfilling the same kind of expectations as a David Blaine number or even a dunk-tank, Holoscenes raises questions instead of just answering them.

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The video triptych in the Quaternary Suite is about 54 minutes in total, with all three channels playing as a synced loop. It's divided into five sections, and at the PMCA, the entire 54-minute loop only gets screened every day at noon, followed by screenings of just the first, fourth, and fifth sections. They are each projected onto 90-inch circles, delivering an optical illusion that there are glowing 3D screens placed on the walls, when the screens are actually the walls themselves.

Quaternary Suite video triptych / PMCA / photo by Don Milici

"The Quaternary series is circular and spherical, and it reads to me like the earth. It's like adults in utero, a petri dish. It's sort of sci-fi. It's really formal," Jan says. "Whereas the performance version, the aquarium, is all rectangular and right angles. And that feels much more like a room—like a kitchen, an apartment, a bedroom—and it feels a lot less abstract, and that's a big difference between the two parts of the project."

Meanwhile, the acrylic light circumferences in the Quaternary Suite feature chromogenic prints backlit by LEDs. Jan and his team worked for seven months to fabricate them, developing a dozen prototypes before delivering the ones on view, which are 36" in diameter and 3" deep. Jan acknowledges that making frameless, circular light "boxes" was a lot more difficult than he anticipated: "Our world just doesn't work that well in nothing but curves."

Quaternary Suite light circumferences / PMCA / photo by Alexis Kaneshiro

Fortunately, Jan has upwards of a dozen collaborators helping him with Holoscenes. In addition to creative support from performers, a costume designer, sound designer, lighting designers, architects, and composer, there's a hydraulic engineer, electrical engineer, structural engineer, and even an experimental plumber. Holoscenes was funded by different sources, including those who don't usually fund the arts. The project also had a lot of individual contributions, and Jan launched a crowdfunding campaign as well.

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The whole project evolved in different phases over several years. At one point, everyone rehearsed in a pool in upstate New York for five days. "We took a bunch of objects and costumes and swam between kids' pee hours," Jan says. He then wanted to figure out how to get chemicals out of the water so that performers can open their eyes, since goggles would "destroy the piece." Jan did allow nose clips, because he wanted his performers to move around freely. In the end, they ozonated the water and made it 90 degrees. "So then all of a sudden you're like, 'Oh, we just made a sensory deprivation tank,'" Jan says. "We didn't know that's what we were making, but in a way, that's what it became." In the end, that sensory deprivation tank actually became the aquarium in which audiences observe actual humans instead of marine life, serving as the centerpiece for the entire Holoscenes project.

HOSE / excerpts of a holo scene / from the ongoing project HOLOSCENES from Lars Jan on Vimeo.

From here, Jan is developing the Holoscenes Anthropocene Suite, which will include photographic prints as well as another, much larger-scale video installation. That said, his creative philosophy appears to embrace change and evolution, which in turn makes room for smaller, related material—like the Quaternary Suite—to take shape as well.

It's all part of an ongoing process: "I’ve begun to share elements of the process itself as work, and have stopped relying on a premiere to communicate with an audience," says Jan. "Holoscenes is many works that form a chain and expose the ideas behind the project, and how we developed it, more than any one iteration could.”

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Lars Jan / photo by Max Gordon

Click here to learn more about Holoscenes.

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