more about Debra Solomon (US/NL) creates experiential interventions aimed at breaking down the barriers between art and viewer in experience design driven installations and performances. Endorphin Experience / Bifurcation and Beyond / It takes a strong man to be a strong woman... all describe elements of the Ladies Gourmet Cycling project. Following excursions into performance, cyberspace and experiential installations, Solomon now fuses fashion, design, cultural intervention, audience experience and sport in a lifestyle project loosely based on the sensibilities of Victorian gentlewomen. The Ladies Gourmet Cycling (LGC) is an identity - in the form of a non-competitive biking team complete with a made-to-order month-long cycling regimen and raw food diet. MOST OF THE TIME YOU'RE NOT ON THE BIKE (the name of the LGC fashion label) is a clothing line of get-down-and-sweat cycling gear that transforms into glamourous evening wear where droplets of glistening perspiration are 'de rigeur'. And the transformation doesn't stop there. The Ladies Gourmet Cycling sports routine combined with a diet of low glycaemic index foods aims at escalating the participant's experience of endorphins max the consciousness-altering experience. The LGC promises to physically transform ordinary mortals, promoting clear thinking, calmness and personal empowerment. The ladies of the Ladies Gourmet Cycling are a fashion pack - and this is the aesthetic expression. The project is expressed in videos and photos of the rides and photo shoots, fashion and interior design objects, specially designed recipe cards and cycling maps. At the project's launch, models were styled to look as though they had cycled 60 kilometers at 30 kmph - while they embroidered the initials LGC and ROI (Return on Investment) on tablecloth cum tarpolin cum wrap-around skirts. Project Ladies Gourmet Cycling (2003, ongoing). In the project 'the_living' (1998-2000), Solomon devised a series of performances, a 'wardrobe of live moments' showing a digi-persona (nicknamed the_living) apparently engaging, realtime, with new media. In a sequence of spectacular settings, (underwater in a swimming pool, in an ice cave, biking her way through the Dutch landscape, boating in Amsterdam's canals, spinning on a Ferris wheel etc...) Solomon invited audience participants to join in digi-persona the-living's fictional narratives and, with her, re-enact moments of their lives on-line. Playing a real-life tamagotchi the-living asked her audience community to pretend-along. She stated, 'We live in Japan in a little plastic egg, little children will play us,' evoking the plot-line of William Gibson's Idoru. In 2000 Solomon's digi-persona the-living and her sidekick 'Blossom' engaged in truck-stop performances across the United States as part of the 'Birthplaces of Digital Mythology World Tour'. The tour included a residency at the PS1, New York. In her physical interventions, Solomon uses the architectural 'grid' to reference both virtual space and to raise doubts about our cultural and physical perspective. In the form of immense wall-to-floor drawings, Solomon's black-light illuminated grid-environments immerse the viewer in a hallucinogenic subversion of individual perceptions of reality physical and mental. Transformed by a skein of lines, the space is re-invented, and seems to fold back in on itself like an origami box. See: Project Brainstorm [Jan-March 2000, Edith-Ruß Haus für Medienkunst], Holodeck Japonnais [May 15-June 26, Nieuwe Vide (artist initiative), Haarlem, NL]. In the 'Artist-Astronaut', the grid reappeared as the black-light/holodeck backdrop through which selected participants supposedly travelled in time to the year 2050, led to believe they had witnessed or participated in a mission several decades into the future. The work explored the effects that artist intervention could have in space exploration video from Artist-Astronaut 'future sessions' was presented to the European Space Agency and at the International Astronautical Federation Congress. (Stedelijk Museum, NL; October 6 December 6, 2000, Ferens Gallery/Hull Time Based Arts, Hull, UK; July 13 September 16 2001, Smart Project Space (artist initiative) Amsterdam; June 1-July 15, 2002) Solomon's worked has been shown at the PS1 New York; Kunsthal, Rotterdam; V2_Organisation Rotterdam; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the OffenesKultuurHaus Linz. She has lectured widely, including UC Berkeley, the International Astronautics Federation Congress, and currently teaches on the MFA programme of the Dutch Art Institute, Enschede, the Netherlands. Curriculum Vitae Project images