TM Sisters - (no) sparks

Opening at the Lee Center in Seattle last night, the TM Sisters' interactive dance pads - (((sparks))) - can't compete with high style games available in the lobby of any upscale multiplex.

The distinction of their project is its frail claim to powder-puff eco-relevance. Participants can move a TM sister around the screen and try to protect her from getting struck by lighting or overwhelmed by trash.

Even so, the score is lopsided: multiplex 2, TM Sisters zero. Instead of critiques, TM offers awkward imitations of the corporate industrial game complex, with shadows that quiver on the screen.

But wait, I said to self. TM Sisters Monica and Tasha Lopez De Victoria are performing in person later in the evening. Maybe they'll redeem the false start of their doppelgangers.

Alas. They are dancers who can't dance and video artists who appear to be taking a break from decorating the gym for their high school prom. Next to them, assume vivid astrol focus is Bruce Nauman, and Tiny Tim is Baryshnikov.

To say they are trivial doesn't cover it. They're trivial with moxie. Their self-confidence inspires others desperately seeking a girlie-girl version of the new, such as the long-ago great ARTnews, which put them on the cover of its 2007 Trendsetters issue.

Had the evening's festivities been limited to the sisters, their brevity would have been a virtue, but no. They were preceded by Hooliganship and Extreme Animals.

Hooliganship's Peter Burr and Christopher Doulgeris are slight but adorable. As they exercised (not danced) to tame techo-pop in funny suits in front of their candy-colored Kool-Aid videos (mountains and seas of light-hearted dump sites), they were charming for a few minutes. The 10 or so that they played felt longer and wore out whatever good will I had managed to muster.

Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman) offer a different set of problems: substance sandwiched between long stretches of the physically painful. When Ciocci asked the audience to remember its favorite heavy metal moments, I stiffened. I have no favorite heavy metal moments.

Those whose idea of music is the equivalent of beating themselves over the head with a mallet in a volume that threatens immediate sensory neural hearing loss are fodder for the war. Building a bridge between them and and the visual art community is laudable, but a bridge is not a capitulation. (Anne Mathern did it with better art and better music in 2007.)

Wightman's guitar operates in the upper registers of cat torture. On the video, flickering images of people tossing their hair around went on and on. And yet, in there somewhere, greatness kept trying to rise to the surface. Ciocci shops for images on the Internet and rolls familiar fragments into a fascinating (if exhausting) collage. In another context, he might easily be brilliant.

TM's dance pads continue at through Oct. 3, curated by the ordinarily reliable Yoko Ott.  (TM Sisters on YouTube here.)