Tonight at 6, Eyebeam will be presenting Spook™: The Negro Revolution 1776 — 1781, a free screening of scenes shot by resident artist Kenseth Armstead. For the project, Armstead had more than 100 viewers and gallery visitors enact scenes from his script Spook 1781: the invisible life of double James, about “double agent/slave-spy James Armistead Lafayette”, who reported to the Marquis de Lafayette on the goings-on in Corwallis’ army. You can watch different edits of the footage, and different pairs and groups playing scenes from the film, on Armstead’s Vimeo page.
Especially given the film’s subject — a slave spying on behalf of a nascent country that was about to mark him down as 3/5 of a person — you might detect in the revolving-door participants a rather cheeky commentary on how, really, we’re all actors in a script somebody else wrote. Or perhaps the “Open Source Casting” breaks down divides not just spectator and participant but between history’s agents and its extras…