Name Paul Abacus Role Lecturer | Movies Abacus | |
Born May 1, 1979 ( 1979-05-01 ) Occupation Lecturer, Designer, Consultant | ||
Paul Abacus is an Internet hoax dating from 2011, a fictional personality that "media artist" Lars Jan now performs as. According to an article on indiewire.com, Paul Abacus is not a real person at all. Paul Abacus "is an invention, a persona created by real-life performance artist Lars Jan and his production company, Early Morning Opera, whose works have been commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Symphony Space, REDCAT, and the Whitney Museum of American Art."
In October 2010, ABACUS premiered at the inaugural Filament festival at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York. In September 2011, it was announced that "Paul" was invited to give his presentation in the “New Frontier” program at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah to be followed by a series of lectures at REDCAT in Los Angeles in February 2012. In 2014 the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) invited Abacus to share his presentation for the first time on the East Coast of the United States as part of the fall Next Wave Festival.
The show draws inspiration from the work of polymath R. Buckminster Fuller. An updated version of Fuller's visionary data-visualization device, the Geoscope is utilized to make the argument that we are living near the end of the Screen Age, a historical moment when "the era of nations" will wane.