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In the Tomorrow Theater’s short but impactful existence, the PAM CUT hub has regularly tried to put a face to multimedia art. Having a recent call over Zoom with Alexis Gideon and Michael O’Neill, the performing duo and art pop band Princess, it quickly became clear the two were the living embodiment of that concept. It seems almost impossible to categorize their music, singing and visual art, and that’s perhaps exactly why the theater is showcasing their creativity.
Gideon and O’Neill have been working as a pair in the world of performance art since 1999, becoming Princess by 2003 after settling into Chicago’s DIY art scene. Presenting original songs with background animation, the duo’s latest multimedia performance, @1minworld, will be shared at the Tomorrow Theater on June 6 as part of Portland Art Museum’s Free First Thursdays.
The first half of this production is available on its website and consists of brief video clips covering a range of social media challenges being faced in our modern age. Topics like doom scrolling, approval seeking, and tracking/surveillance are given the experimental treatment in cutout-style animation to the sounds of beat-heavy blends of hip-hop and electronica made by Princess. One song shows a backyard pool filled with app icons, with O’Neill jumping into the pool with the lyrics of “Wasting my time, gonna take up my mind to get away from myself” playing.
Princess premiered @1minworld at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2022 and has been intermittently touring since. “At the time, there was a one-minute constraint to the duration of a video on Instagram, and we were coming up with this idea of, ‘well, what if our next piece was made specifically for Instagram?’” O’Neill says. “We had to put it all into that one little thing to feed the algorithm and feed the audience with this platform that is more readily available to them.”
O’Neill is currently based in Brooklyn and Gideon in Pittsburgh, and both are very free-flowing in their collaborations, exchanging sounds and images to build a foundation on the theme. They feed off each other’s random ideas, so that even in previous works, such as Out There, a longer-form music video, you can still see the work has a Princess touch. Their DIY approach with the songs and animation, along with a love for very saturated colors for a rather poppy atmosphere, is what gives them that unique voice. Thematically, Out There is completely different from @1minworld, focusing instead on modern-era toxic masculinity, but it retains their style. “Each piece takes on its own identity and aesthetic, and we try to stay open to what that is during it and then follow it as it emerges into whatever it becomes,” Gideon says.
Even with Gideon producing all the animation, they’re working from a shared mindset: Both agree, for example, classic cartoons like Betty Boop are huge inspirations on the repetitive loops found in Princess’ work. “I think there’s something about the repetition that expands out toward infinity,” Gideon says of @1minworld, “that each moment or each action is almost happening on the plane of the infinite, and how that puts more weight on each [video].”
The second half of @1minworld, not available online, is described as a long and meditative piece of music, with a wildly different tone from the first. This further adds to the multifaceted nature of the performance, along with the very concept of what mixed media art can be. “I think, over the years, we’ve gotten to clearer explanations on what it is that we do,” Gideon says. “But it is a lot to try and convey what people will actually see and experience effectively.”
Describing themselves as a queer performing arts duo, O’Neill says this is where that aspect really comes in. “The work has always been queer because it’s nonbinary,” he says. “It’s not defined. It’s not just music. It’s not just video. What is it? It’s on a spectrum.”
Princess never seems to be looking down at their audience, nor overly serious. @1minworld is a critique meant to use humor to call themselves out as well. “We’re not going to let the suffering control us,” O’Neill says, “and I think part of our coping mechanism is to laugh.”
SEE IT: @1minworld will be performed at Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division St., 503-221-1156, tomorrowtheater.org. 7 pm Thursday, June 6. Free.