World Music 2 + Dance Party
Creator of work: Vagner M. Whitehead (Brasil/ USA)
Music: Vagner M. Whitehead

World Music 2, a single channel video, contains original music that was composed using royalty-free “world music” audio loops. Inserted into the shape of the male dancer are images found in Google Image searches for the terms “world”, “music”, “world music”, and “music world”. This work explores the paradoxical nature of consuming and being consumed, while displaying a representation of a world-wide collective unconscious, so to speak, a sort of snapshot at what people around the world, connected via the internet, consider world music to be.

For the Body Navigation Festival I want to add Dance Party to this piece, in the form of an immersive installation. Looped along World Music 2, Dance Party, will invite attendants (as a voice-over in Russian), to invade the space and interact/dance along to the music, while rapidly flashing images will be projected onto their bodies (so that they will emulated the original video experience).

Vagner Mendonça Whitehead
works with photography, video, performance, installation, hypermedia and digital imaging.

His work employs original texts, childhood songs, nursery rhymes (in Portuguese and English), photo-based imagery (old and new, found and created), their translations and his interpretations as allegorical devices that reframe personal experiences within a trans-cultural context.

Vagner has exhibited his work throughout the United States (Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Texas, Wisconsin), abroad (Canada, India, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland) and online, in solo and group exhibitions, as well as in video and film festivals. In 2002 Vagner was an artist in residency at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL. He was also a fellow in the AIR Program at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY in 2006. In addition of producing, exhibiting and curating art, Vagner is a regular contributing writer for the Barcelona-based Art Signal magazine. Vagner received a BFA degree (photography) from The Savannah College of Art and Design in 1995 and an MFA degree (creative photography and electronic inter-media) at the University of Florida in 2000. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Oakland University, where he is developing the New Media specialization.