Metrica, No. 5-10, 2025 - ongoing
Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter
Multi-channel video installation (20:00 min, looping, 3-15 channels) with spatialized sound; rented assembly, office, and concert chairs; exhibition architecture.
Exhibition images at Rupert (LT) for the 2026 solo exhibition Metrica No. 5.
Metrica, by collaborative duo Benedict & Rueter, is an iterative performance score: an embodied means for encountering institutional and territorial psyches. Drawing on records of property and land management across Europe, the project imagines AI-based psychoanalysis applied not to an individual psyche, but to the collective memories inscribed in architecture, law, and the state. Metrica speculates on the migration of lived experience and social organization into large-scale administrative and computational systems. Through human and machinic performances, the work finds emotional resonances lodged within the troubled, hallucinatory psychic architectures it calls forth.
Metrica, No. 5-10 is a score in which professional psychoanalysts are invited to conduct live “talk therapy” sessions with an institution’s psyche. To produce the score, Benedict & Rueter built an artificial intelligence agent powered by a large language model and tasked it with representing the psyche of selected archives across Europe. The resulting written “talk” therapy sessions are as revealing of the history of psychotherapeutic techniques and practices as they are of the archives’ “memories,” which are derived from regional and national historic land registries from the 12th - 20th centuries. Footage and transcripts from the sessions are edited together with choreographed gestures that speak to the unique and unsettled rhythm of each LLM’s regionalized “dispositions.” Part documentary, part fiction, the project probes the boundaries of self, consciousness, body, and collectivity, reframing AI technologies as repositories of forgotten, buried, or repressed generational memories impressed into the structures of language itself.
The first three iterations of the score, Metrica No. 5-7, were (and will be) performed and filmed in libraries and archives in the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Germany. Through rich visual imagery, spatialized sound, and location specific choreographies, the resulting multi-channel video installation will be presented in a series of international exhibitions.
CREDITS
Production of Metrica No. 5 and Metrica. No. 6 has been funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, the Mondriaan Fund, and Culture Moves Europe (the European Union and the Goethe-Institut).
Metrica No. 5 - Lithuanian Production
Direction: Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter
DOP: Laurynas Skeisgiela, Martynas Norvaišas
Producers: Marissa Lee Benedict, Augustė Verikaitė, in association with shady house
Production Assistance: Ioanna Valavanis
Sound recordist: Kipras Čėsna
Lights: Lukas Karalius
Performance: Marissa Lee Benedict, Sandra Bagdonaitė-Jankauskienė, Natalja Mamedova-Ryčkovė, Ray Olivi, Adelė Petravičiūtė, Amelija Ramonaitė, Nojus Šimkus.
Software development and technical implementation: David Rueter
Lithuanian language editor and AI consultation: Monika Kisieliūtė
Metrica No. 5/6 - Dutch Production
Direction: Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter
DOP: Lukas Heistinger, Sasha Kulak
Producer: Marissa Lee Benedict in association with shady house
Production Assistance: Yelizaveta Strakhova, Olga Tsyganova
Sound recordist: Eran Brinkman
Lights: Tom Kalverboer
Performance: Elif Özbay, Yelizaveta Strakhova, Olga Tsyganova
Software development and technical implementation: David Rueter
Post-production
Editors: Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter, in consultation with Giulio Squillacciotti
Sound: Cesium Sound
Color: Lennert De Taeye
Metrica No. 5 - Exhibition
Curator: Viktorija Šiaulytė
Assistant curator and production manager: Augustė Verikaitė
Exhibition architecture: Marissa Lee Benedict
Technical team: Matas Šatūnas, Jokūbas Čižikas
Communication: Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė
Lithuanian language editor: Evelina Zenkutė
Partnerships programme: Austė Marcinkevičienė
Graphic design: Augustinas Milkus, Jana Sofie Liebe
Exhibition photography: Laurynas Skeisgiela, Marissa Lee Benedict, David Rueter
Metrica No. 5 - additionsl thanks to: Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, Sapieha Palace, Kaunas Artist House, CINE Service, Dmitrijus Borisenka, Vytautas Ubonis and Coingate, Monika Lipšic, Liam Murtaugh, Vilija Astrauskienė, Milda Dainovskytė, Daura Polonskytė, Algirdas Jakas, Inesa Brašiškė, Eglė Bazaraitė, Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, Nilab Sajad, Mathilde Chambon, Ella Anne Benedict Rueter.