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.