Cycle At Large — The Haunt, with Sabrina Tarasoff, Zac Farley et Dennis Cooper

Novelist Dennis Cooper, filmmaker Zac Farley, and writer Sabrina Tarasoff bring Halloween inside the Bourse de Commerce with an evening exploring the phenomenon of the “home haunt”.

Beginning in the early 1970s, Halloween loving American families have been transforming their private homes into walkthrough haunted houses each October. These families, often with the help of neighbors and friends, undertake an ambitious makeover of their properties to turn them into temporary, walk-through scary mazes, which they advertise with signs and flyers in their neighborhoods and often on social media. On Halloween night, and sometimes in the days before, intrigued friends and strangers are invited to explore the heavily decorated and transformed houses, yards, and/or garages. In the past fifty years, the folk art-like tradition of the “home haunt” has only increased in popularity until many thousands of such attractions appear annually across the United States.

Cooper, Farley, and Tarasoff will present an illustrated history of this movement followed by an exciting world premiere event — a guided “walk through” tour of a virtual, video game-like “home haunt” they have designed and brought to life with the assistance of composer Puce Mary and partyTime.jpeg, a video animation and 3D environment design company run by Adam Sinclair and Mikhail Polshaw.

Dennis Cooper 

Complex yet ruthlessly clear, Dennis Cooper’s (b. 1953, US) prose recounts the emotional and erotic lives of troubled teenagers. His characteristic ability to combine cruelty with tenderness, sadism with anxiety, has made him one of his generation’s essential voices. In addition to his film collaborations with Zac Farley, he is known for novels such as the five novel quintology The George Miles Cycle (1989-2000), The Sluts (2008), The Marbled Swarm (2014), and I Wished (2021). Since moving from Los Angeles to Paris in 2005, he has written nine theatre pieces for the director/ choreographer Gisèle Vienne and composed a series of innovative GIF novels, most recently Zac’s Drug Binge (2020).

Zac Farley 

Zac Farley’s (b. 1988 US/FR) films and videos embrace confusion as a kind of truth and thus strive to visualize the most ineffable emotions. Through careful editing and framing, they weave analogies between bodies, landscapes, and abstractions. In addition to the three feature films he has directed with Dennis Cooper — Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015), Permanent Green Light (2018) and Room Temperature (forthcoming) — he is currently collaborating with director/choreographer Gisèle Vienne on a forthcoming feature film, Klara Kraus.

Sabrina Tarasoff 

Sabrina Tarasoff (b. 1991, Finland) is a writer and critic based in Paris. Her writing dwells on the mysterious movement between popular culture, poetry, and art, with a particularly keen eye on the nebulous “poet gang” that formed around the Wednesday Night Poetry series at Beyond Baroque Literary Art Center in Venice, CA during the early 1980s. Tarasoff’s research recently featured as a part of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A. 2020: a version, in the form of a walkthrough haunted house created in collaboration with Twisted Experiential. She is a contributing editor at Mousse Magazine and writes regularly for Artforum, Flash Art, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. 

partyTime.jpeg

partyTime.jpeg is based in Manchester UK, specializing in the creation of 3D real-time environments, VR/AR applications and video animation. partyTime.jpeg was formed in 2015 by Adam Sinclair and Mikhail Polshaw, with the aim to utilize the latest technology, software, and techniques to create digital works with an experimental playfulness at their core. 

Adam Sinclair has been creating artworks for some of the UK's Most prominent artists since 2011, including Ed Atkins, Helen Marten (Turner Prize winner 2016), Elizabeth Price (Turner Prize winner 2012) and Tai Shani (Turner Prize winner 2019). 

Mikhail Polshaw has worked on programming 3D environments, including for VR and other similar displays, for 24 years, for sectors such as Architecture, Medicine, Arts and Environmental planning.

Frederikke Hoffmeier

Frederikke Hoffmeier is a Danish born artist working in the field of noise/experimental music and sound art. Best known as the prolific act Puce Mary, Hoffmeier’s performances and recordings explore spoken word, extreme vocalisation, abrasive noise, cinematic soundscapes and performance art. With countless releases, performances and collaborations with artists Kali Malone, Drew McDowall, Stephen O’Malley, Yves Tumor and Loke Rahbek, on labels such as PAN and Posh Isolation, Hoffmeier has reached wide acclaim for their powerful and unique blend of modern industrial and noise music. In recent years Hoffmeier has produced music for film, performance art and theatre and taught music composition at the Royal Danish Music Conservatory. Her most recent score was for Jeanette Nordahl’s feature film Wildland (2020) that premiered at the Berlinale.