Tomorrow I will present a live art work in the studio theatre at AUCB that has been developed from an improvised performance at Polymer Culture Factory.
It’s been cut down and reformed and is quite far removed from what happened in the first event. The main focus of the event was tearing paper and this has remained the focus of this event but with so much stripped down will it still work?
Since the beginning of the new academic year I have been running Peer Critiques every Wednesday. I’ve been using these sessions to learn about other people’s work and to discuss why had how I am presenting this work. On one occasion whilst we were discussing the use of sounds for the piece a loud debate broke out. I sat and observed and then one student turned to me a quietly asked about the importance of the ‘party’ atmosphere that the music was intending to create.
It was like someone had opened the window and let fresh air in. What about silence? What about allowing the sound create itself? By adding music at the first event it created an energy. It was completely improvised; I asked Tanel to put on some music and he chose Bille Jean. This was great for the event but at the same time the connotations of this song, this artist added another level to the event.
I expect that the absence of this baseline will have a dramatic effect on the event. The fact that the venue is an art college and that about half the attendees will be people I know and who know about my work will also change it. The studio, professional lighting, HD camera, the planning and the fact that it exists outside of a festival and is in fact a research project will make everything about the experience very different.
What I need to decide is what I want from this experience. Just like the previous experience I am nervous. I have no idea how the attendees will react to the situation. I want to see what happens without time constraints and without random additions. How does the idea and the process stand up by itself? How do people engage? How do I direct and manage the experience?
At the back of my mind I feel that the lack of sound will create tension, which hopefully will be released and transformed into giddiness and excitement and an atmosphere for play. This is the key thing for this activity; a group of people coming together to play this is the artwork, to create a situation where the public have a shared experience of playfulness. Whether they understand that the destruction of rejected materials as part of a process to create whiteness or as Kenya Hara describes it itoshiroshi ‘that extreme form of purity that is ladled out of chaos and which appears to us both potentially and actually’
