Second Time Around with Tea

Playing off the ideas of my last creation I decided to make my work capture me as I performed. In this way the subject of the peace shifted from the story I was trying to tell to a story that was being created by performing. However this thought process took a bit of time to end up with the product.

For a bit I tried to the idea of focusing on the presentation of the information considered giving the audience carte blanche on how they absorbed the media. I would film from different viewpoints and then connect it to a stylist that would allow the audience to view the temporality of the information on a spatial level. This would continue the thread of the relationship to time but would massively change the project. I put this idea in a box for another day and started with another solution.

I decided that the story itself was an event that could be told. This time I created a patch in Isadora that would video me for a certain length of time. It would store these videos away until I chose to play them all at once on nine tiles. These tiles would be projected onto me as the video camera again would capture my actions and projector image and then play this back.

During this time I also became obsessed with the idea of the magical mundane. In my performance I wanted to equally show my flaws as well as my strengths. To do this I credit improve  score. While the video camera recorded me the first time I would do a free write. For the performers that was shown I wrote about the audiences expectations of my work or at least how I felt about the audience expectations. As I did this I drink tea to add a little bit of action into the tile frames. Once the video was done recording I read the free write which was captured buy another recording. Finally this recording was playback also as tiles in Cannon but not split up, in other words each video was delayed a little bit from the last.

I finally felt like this was an interactive piece, in the vain of the rest of the class. To make it even more interactive I involved a Makey Makey that, with the help of some tinfoil, would turn my tea cup into a switch that would trigger the start of the first recording and that the switch from the second recording to the showing of the second recording. This was highly successful in that it changed the way the queues were read, in that my face do not have to be in the computer and I was allowed to perform more freely.

For my final iteration I wanted to try to further the ideas in this one and make it more exciting to watch and take it a bit out of draft state. The feedback that I got included consideration of detail. With the final iteration coming up so soon I’m not sure about how much Will change.

Fist Time Round with Tea

I had a very difficult time getting started with my project. I had a fairly clear ideas for what I wanted but did not how to express them in an interactive format. At the base of my project I was trying to explore storytelling as an act of time travel. We experience the world in linear mode, but categorize it fairly non-sequentially, skipping from detail the detail and making associations with other times. In this way our bodies experienced time in a different way then our minds do and the way did we interpret the world. I have been dwelling on these thoughts for a little bit now. There is an idea in the theater that the show starts at the first pamphlet and never really ends. As performers we can control what the audience sees but everything that is not the performance ultimately has mass effect on the nature of the work.

From these fairly heady notions I wanted to create a format for telling stories without my control and manipulation of time. I wanted the viewer to experience it as a thought, disconnected from a temporal state. My first project was more about achieving this shuffled time state then the interactions with the audience. I filmed short three second clips of me making tea and the images that I saw while making tea. I’ve then made an Isadora patch that would play these images at random either forward or backward.

At the stage in the process the choice of tea was fairly arbitrary. I chose it because of its sequential nature and because it was a process that was familiar to me and to the viewer. I was committed to it being a performative work and thus read a script while the videos occurred. The script run counter to the objective view presented by the camera. It’s featured nuggets of information that I knew about tea and interlaced them with instructions for making tea with the steps reversed.

During my lab time I toyed with projection mapping in to corners. I was interested in the effects that would have on immersing the audience into the work. I think this Will be a rabbit hole I jump down in the future, but did not serve my work in an intentional way.

After the performance I got feedback which allowed me to focus more on the content. For my next cycle I wanted to try to make the world more interactive, and not necessarily interactive with the audience but interactive in that content would be generated during the performance.