Mallory Catlett / Restless NYC
DECODER: Nova Express

June 2023

$20

photo by Walter Wlodarczyk

Performances will take place at The Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island. City.

Remember the future? Nova Express is the final edition of DECODER, a sound and image cutup machine, that has been turning out concerts, digital transmissions, video art, and sound recordings for the last 8 years. This Machine is for everyone – according to William Burroughs whose instructions were followed closely to create it. With two tape recorders and a microphone, performers Jim Findlay and cassette tape artist G Lucas Crane take you on an interstellar adventure into the prophetic imagination of The Nova Trilogy, Burroughs’ 1960’s space odyssey whose central character is the virus. Acting as both fictional characters and real-time systems operators, our time travelers cut internet debris into kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, prophetic pronouncements, and surreal routines of colonial fantasies and alien eroticism that expose their complicity in the systems that control them. Created pre, mid and “post” pandemic, Nova Express is a fever dream turned time machine that confronts the physical sensation of living today by traveling back to a time when the political problems we now face, became unavoidable.

Director Mallory Catlett returns to The Chocolate Factory with the same design team — G Lucas Crane (sound and video manipulation), Keith Skretch (video) and Ryan Holsopple (interaction design) — that created This Was The End in 2014. Now joined by performer/designer Jim Findlay, dramaturg Alex Wermer-Colan and lighting designer Kate McGee, they employ the same now expanded interactive system to remember the future.