My Fifth Performance

I really had no idea what to do for this piece. The instructions were basically "do your own thing" and usually, those are my favorite projects. This time, however, I really struggled to get any ideas out there. This is probably because I've only started working with performance art this year, and ideas... OK, I procrastinated! And I also had trouble coming up with ideas. Anyway, I would have done something incredibly different that involved a portable speaker and an mp3 player had I not gotten sick Friday. But, because I did, I had all weekend to put something better together. So what did I do? I waited until Sunday night to think of something!

The video on the projection is the result of hours of very early morning editing and the mask was made in half an hour. The piece was inspired by opening my book to random pages and making my project be influenced by the first name I saw on each page. Frederick Kiesler, Merce Cunningham, and Marcel Janco were the names I came up with, meaning I was working with Dada and Fluxus inspirations. I wore a robot mask, made to be like the Dada masks by Marcel Janco, and did a dance of exploration and self discovery in front of a repeating video backdrop. The song I played was one with robotic vocals and various sound effects I made a few years prior and the video is compiled YouTube videos of breakfast, educational videos, and kymotropic analyses. If you don't know what that last thing is yet, look it up. They're amazing and mesmerizing to look at.

I agree with the class that this piece either needed no robot in it, or the robot should have been limited to large, broad gestures that would then be randomized. The video, with some more editing to make it more engaging, could stand on its own really. So could the robot discovering its own existence when, in reality, the person playing the robot is completely blind. It makes me think of trying to portray a character for film or theater. The character being portrayed discovers itself while the actor is lost behind the mask. The video, on the other hand, has nice contrasts between the media-rich commercial world we live in versus mundane tasks like eating versus something as inspiring and mesmerizing as kymotropic analysis. Seriously, it's not as boring as it sounds. I'm not sure if I want to split these up into two performance or not but. If I find they play off each other, I'll keep them together.