Revolution Revolution

Revolution Revolution is performance and video work by Gillian Dykeman that activates the latent radical potential of the human energy amassed through engaging fitness. Operating as a home stationary bike workout, Revolution Revolution delivers fitness instruction in tandem with revolutionary rhetoric. Utopia is latent within the everyday, so how do we move from sliding over its radical possibilities and instead find a way to activate it? What is the energy of revolution? How do we better engineer our energetic outputs to formulate collective ways of being out of a culture that glorifies individualism …to radically reimagine what it is we’re doing with our lives?  Our life-force? Our love? See more on Vimeo and HERE

Revolution Revolution has been presented over dozen times as either a exercise-bike or aerobics based performance both live and as video installations. The performances include fitness instruction and revolutionary rhetoric, usually tailored to a given location or exhibition theme. Below is the documentation from the development and presentation of this work at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

I did an independent residency in November and December of 2017 at the Banff Centre, where I developed Revolution Revolution work substantially. I made a large backdrop painting 7′ x 12′ for the video version of this work.  It’s a watercolour on canvas. At this time, the major focus of my revolutionary rhetoric was on the needs of contemporary workers; the Precariat in particular.

Thanks again to artsnb.

Dispatches from the Future Feminist Utopia is a work revisiting major earthworks and recasting them as abandoned alien technology. Feminists in the future have appropriated these devices (the earthworks) to bring forth the feminist utopia.The narrative voice (spoken as the moon) is polyvocal and decentred through multiple genders and accents. This work – an installation of sculptures and watercolour schematic drawings, and videos – describe how to activate the earthwork devices to bring on the feminist utopia now. The works compel the dispatch recipients to find their own iteration of this possibility.

Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future from Gillian Dykeman on Vimeo.