PP1- randomness and dark humor
Posted: September 25, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »The day our Pressure Project 1 was assigned, I was immediately excited about the possibilities waiting for me in the process of the endeavor to achieve making someone laugh. We had 15 minutes of class left and I began working on the patch. My first thought was to create ‘a body’ through the shapes actors, and have something happen to that body that was absurd. As I was creating the shapes, I began changing the fill colors. The first color I tried was blue, and that made me think of making the body drink water, get full of water, and something with that water happens that creates some type of burst.
While I liked the idea at the moment, it wasn’t funny enough for me. After I sat down to work on it longer, I recreated my ‘body’ and stared at it for some time. I wanted to make it come alive by giving it thoughts and feelings beyond actions. I knew I had to have some randomness to what I was doing for the random actor to make sense to me.
So I turned inward. My MFA research is utilizing somatic sensations as a resource for creative expression through a queer lens. The inward-outward contrast, alignments and misalignments are exciting for me. I enjoy training my mind to look at things in non-normative ways, as both a queer and a neurodivergent artist. While I have a lot of coherent thoughts relative to the situations, I sometimes have hyperfixations or interest in random stuff many people might not think of thinking.
I wanted my Isadora ‘body’ to be hyperfixated on magic potions. I wanted it to be consumed by the thought of magic potions that led to some sort of absurd outcome, hence the randomness. I searched for magic potion images with .png extensions and found one that I would like to use. After adding that image, I needed a ‘hand’ to interact with the potion. So I searched for a .png image of a hand.
To help my ‘body’ convey its inner experiences, I decided to give it a voice through the text draw actor and included short captions to my scenes. The next part was giving my magic potion a storyline to have two characters in my story. I achieved that through showing how the magi potion affected the body beyond the body’s initiated actions. Carrying the magic potion from a passive role to an active role.
I connected a wave generator the magic potion’s width that created a spinning visual and connected another wave generator to the head’s intensity that created a sense of lightheadedness/dizziness or some type of feeling funny/not normal.
In the next scene, the head of my body disintegrates after consuming the magic potion. I achieved that with an explode actor.
To exeggarete the explosion and the effect of the magic potion on the person, I connected a random actor to the explode actor and connected a pulse generator to the random actor.
The last scene reveals the dark truth of the story, using humor. The body disappears and the only thing on the scene is the magic potion with its inner voice (through text draw) for the first time. I needed to give a facial expression to my magic potion so I searched for a .png image of a smiley face that I could layer on top of the previous image. After finding the image I liked, I looked at my scenes and found myself laughing alone in my room. That’s when I decided my work on this project has been satisfactory on my end and I stayed within the 5 hour limit we had to work on it.
In my presentation, everything went according to plan on my end. And the expected achievement of making someone laugh was achieved as I heard people making noises in reaction to the scenes, especially the final scene.
There was a feedback on the scale of images. I worked on it on my personal computer and presented on the big screen in the Motion Lab. Because I didn’t project this there before, the images were very big especially given the proximity of the audience to the screen. But I received the feedback that due to the texts not being long and readable both in attention span and timewise, it still worked.
I am quite content with how the process went and how the product ended up. Having used Isadora in previous classes, building on my skills is very exciting to me. I usually don’t use humor in my artistic works, but I had a craving for it. With the goal of making someone laugh, using Isadora as a canvas or a ‘stage’ for storytelling and connecting beyond the ‘cool’ capabilities of the software was the part I enjoyed the most in this process.