Paradise Lost: Transfix at the Salton Sea

Paradise Lost: Transfix at the Salton Sea is a roaming site-specific atmospheric performance that merges video projections and live performance, transforming the ASU campus into a poetic, theatrical landscape. Using hand-held projectors, the performers project quotes from Frankenstein and photographs of Transfix taken at the Salton Sea—an abandoned resort town in California that was once a thriving destination but is now a toxic environmental disaster. The haunting text and images form a visual essay that offers stark reminders of the causes and consequences of the boom and bust economy. Connecting to the story of 1816 and the ‘Year Without Summer’ when Mary Shelley began writing the novel, Paradise Lost: Transfix at the Salton Sea imagines a desolate world of perpetual summer.