Collaborating artists MITCH GARCIA and IAN MADRIGAL display snippets of their performance from the Tupada event Kinetic Orchestra. With RPG - Role Playing Games 1: Fragmented Link, they simultaneously combined performance and video, contesting live art and its spectators. According to them, “performance is a date and a setting with elements and action on its opposite state.” While their videos played on two television sets, and an electric guitar was strummed live by a collaborator in the background, Garcia stitched Madrigal’s lips together with no anesthetics. Garcia’s video was a collation of various artists’ performance documentation, edited to create an abstract of a crime investigation with the last part rendered as comics, leaving the audience to take on the detective’s coat and magnifying glass to solve a mystery: is live action reality or fiction? Madrigal’s video, however, used poetry text over past video works, creating another scenario altogether. The pain involved in the process resounded through the stunned audience as the stitching stopped and Madrigal started reading his noiseless poetry, unable to mouth words he wrote. These performances on the virtual interstice juxtaposed technology with human characteristics to create artificial forms of artistic expression.

RPG - Role Playing Games 1: Fragmented Link (Video)was exhibited by Mitch Garcia & Ian Madrigal at the Atrium, 4/F Cultural Center of the Philippines from April - May 20, 2007.