Carnelian is an eclectic musical (written by Lex Brown and co-composed by Samuel Beebe) that debuted in Brown’s 2023 solo exhibition at the M.I.T. List Center as an immersive, synchronized 3-channel video installation. Live performances at the Celebration Barn Theater and Philadelphia Fringe brought these genre-bending songs to life with a 5-piece band. 

Through Dawn, Afternoon, Dusk, and Night, three characters contend with the arrival of a cataclysmic event: the “Boom.” The work offers a complex take on contemporary conditions marked by polarizing rhetoric, authoritarian structures, and the looming threat of human extinction. The characters — Necyria, Orachrysops, and Bicyclus, and the Auctioneer — are based on archetypes associated with the animistic qualities ascribed to fire, earth, air, and the void. Each character contends with their own definition of power, whether it be natural , authoritarian propaganda, dissociative technology, or the spectacle of consumerism. Carnelian asks when we will recognize that the “Boom” is already here, and how does our humanity endure through these existential threats?

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