Amnertia - Excavating The Artifact

Tracklist

1	Excavating The Artifact

Notes

Mixing an excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart with Max Leonard Hitchings' own text, this work from 2003 was originally conceived as a piece to be played through headphones that were situated in a large red-lit wooden box-frame with mesh covering the sides, floorboards over the top and soil 6 inches deep that covered the base.
Also in the box was a small video monitor showing Hitchings writhing naked under a red strobe light.
Audience members were invited to step up onto the floorboards and lower themselves down, individually or in pairs, into the box.
The work drew on metaphors and aesthetic concerns that Hitchings has developed throughout his practice, such as darkness and focus and red light as womblike and was intended to be both an expression of an internal psychological state or process, and an inducer of one.
Audience members reported feelings of distress and claustrophobia but also exhilaration.