Cycle 1 Documentation

For cycle 1, I performed an early draft of my idea for cycle #3.

I am interested in intergenerational story-telling, and how our bodies are containers and expressions of time. I have lately been doing meditative performances with my family that involve blinking on a slow count of 8, as I’m curious about how our counts fall in and out of sync with each other. To add some visual complication to this otherwise simple thought, I performed this meditation with a projected video on my face. The projection is a sort of stop-motion collage made out of photos of my dad’s face. The original image is a black and white photo, so I placed a cut-out of his face onto a sort of fleshy pink background. The image is printed on rice paper which adds a sort of haziness to the lines, and its translucency adds a blush of pink to the grey tones. The stop motion element is me placing cut-outs of his eyes shut on top of the image. I then scanned 30 variations of this simple collage and imported them into a premiere sequence and exported it as a video, which became the projected material.

I performed this for about a minute and a half. I have been thinking about it as a durational performance, so I am interested in how it would feel as a full 15 minute experience, or even longer.

I was really excited by the feedback, especially with questions around the “music” of the piece. I loved the idea of including sound elements, especially ones that solidify this idea of internal time keeping. I’ve been experimenting with some heartbeat recording and want to think about how that could be used in the piece. I was also interested in how the audience experienced forgetting that I was a part of the piece. In the future, I’m going to include some shifts in opacity to narrow in on this question of fading legibility. I also might want to add in some variations on movement, but I want to talk to some more people about this.

I’m also running into some issues with the projector itself… It’s maybe too strong for my eyes. I might play with just darkening the overall projection, or trying to buy a projector with even less lumens. Overall, I’m really pleased with this performance.