Lars Jan (born 1978) is a Los Angeles–based director and multidisciplinary artist, whose practice spans performance, photography, print media, sculpture, single and multi-channel video works, installations, and writing.
[2][3] Jan is the founder and artistic director of Early Morning Opera, an art lab that creates large-scale works "exploring emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience.
"[11] In October 2010, ABACUS premiered at the inaugural Filament festival at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York.
[12] 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 [13] to be followed by a series of lectures at REDCAT in Los Angeles in February 2012.
[14] 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.
[16] Holoscenes first premiered in Toronto's Nuit Blanche festival in 2014, and has since been shown around the world including in Miami, Sarasota, London, Abu Dhabi, Australia's Gold Coast, and New York's Times Square.
The work was also adapted as a spherical film in 2019, which premiered at the University of Colorado's Boulder Planetarium, displaying on six-foot diameter screens as part of a Science On a Sphere installation.
[21] Jan adapted Joan Didion's essay, The White Album, into a performance work which was co-commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and Center Theatre Group, as well as the International Festival of Firsts, where it premiered in October 2018.
"[22] In a review for the Los Angeles Times, theater critic Charles McNulty noted that The White Album had "an air of openness and informality [that] was integral to the production, but sometimes the exploratory vibe came across as tentative and unfinished.
The project was commissioned by Swiss watchmakers, Audemars Piguet, who called for time-based art that portrayed "tension between tradition and innovation" as well as precision and complexity.
[27] Alluding to the hurricanes that frequent the Miami coast and tides affected by celestial movements, as well as Japanese rock gardens and Angkor Wat, the work, Jans says, is both a foreboding commentary about climate change and a space for contemplation.
[27][28][29][30] Kathleen Forde, the curator of the Audemars Piguet Art Commission that year, writes that Slow-Moving Luminaries evokes "the passage of time, ephemerality, the blurring between built and wild landscapes, as well as responding to its immediate surroundings while raising universal concerns about our future.
[27][30] As visitors move around the space, kinetic sculptures, resembling architecture seen on the skyline, ascend and descend through an opening in the ceiling on a cycle determined by an algorithm.
[33] He became the subject matter of Jan's The Institute of Memory (TIMe)—his first autobiographical work, influenced in part by Polish director, Tadeusz Kantor.