This piece, premiered in November, 2003, at the Wayne and Miraim Prim
Theater, Nevada Museum of Art. The work features a constructed dialogue
intermixed between quotes from the Iranian refugee
Merhan
Karimi Nasseri,
who has been living in the Paris Airport for 15 years, aka “Sir
Alfred”, and dialogue appropriated from the Steven Speilberg
film "ET: the Extraterrestrial". The combined texts are performed
in the online game "Aliens vs. Predator". (The idea came
about after reading about Speilberg’s latest effort to take Merhan’s
story and create an Americanized version featuring mega-star Tom Hanks
as
a hapless refugee trapped in an American airport).
What results is a live performance event that involves a combination
of dialogue from “ET” and Merhan’s own words, in a
bipolar mixing of the two sources with the live image from the "Aliens
vs. Predator" gamespace projected large upon a screen behind the performer.
I read and type in the dialogue as “Sir Alfred”.