Borderline Antigone

Confidence Float is a mobile sound and video installation that takes as its text portions of Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. Melville’s novel is set on a Mississippi river boat, and its structure is episodic, organized by brief encounters with passengers who are repeatedly swindled by a shady, even diabolical, operator. The novel was received with a mixture of praise, puzzlement, and contempt when published in 1857, just a few years before the turmoil of the Civil War, and actively skewers American piety, trustfulness, and optimism. The performers will ask SoundPedro participants to respond to questions echoing the novel, such as, “Do you have confidence?” and “If I forgive someone who insults me, shouldn’t you trust me?” As the evening progresses Melville’s story progresses with more contemporary material. The installation will also be concerned with water, drawing on Melville’s river-boat theme, the site-specific proximity of Angels Gate to the water, Southern California’s dependence on imported water for irrigation, drinking and food, and other recent ecological elements, including the protest on the Standing Rock Sioux nation, the recent decision of the New Zealand government to grant “personhood” to the Whanganui River, and the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan. One of the collective has recently been involved in opposing an attempt to sell water from the San Bernardino Mountains to a bottler; bottling clean drinking water and selling it to people who likely themselves have access to clean drinking water from their taps is the ultimate confidence game. It includes a video monitor and recorded sound, played at low volume, as well as live performance by multiple performers.