Video and Close- Circuit Installation
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/gouvrit
The space I was assigned has pros and cons. It is a 20 by 15 feet closed room with white walls.
Pros:
Intimate isolated space.
I don’t have to take in consideration the background and the perspective glitches.
Cons:
Walls don’t allow me to go further back with the camera: the distance of the camera is short by 5 feet to the necessary to have a real size projection. The images will be around 30% bigger than a real size.
Erwin Redl in the Wexner. Though it doesn’t have a strong concept, besides it’s pretty, and create some kind of ZEN expereience, his light installations give me ideas for my MFA show light installation.
Still, Lozano-Hemmer is much more inspiring.
My recordings
I am convinced I have to be one of the voices, and I will have to jump with both feet. I don’t work personal projects, never had. And now it’s not only personal, but it’s about something devastating and current.
If I want the recordings to be honest I have to torture myself to get into the mood that I want to show.
Intensive therapy of emotional torture:
ingredients: closed, isolated room, 300 printed emails, yellow highlighter, red wine and sound recorder.
receipe: lock myself all night long during one week. add red wine, and continuously add the emails between them. Methodically analyze, compare, make notations and between them and on the ones he wrote to me. – after 6-8 hours every night, start recording
————————————–
The theater department never answered my emails. After going and knock door to door, I finally have the emails of the MFA in acting. 14 people that I will contact soon. but I can start working with a phd girl from the theater office and an undergrad acting student that accepted the job for $20.
Meetings with actors
First the undergrad guy. I have to explain the whole situation, concept, and detail how am I going to approach this at the same time I explain him.
1. Explain the concept
2. Explain why this concept: my situation
3. Give him to read the forum posts
4. Let him digest
5. Ask for an improvisation. An acting exercise, without telling the story of the people he just read. Imagine he is one of them and tat I catch him in a moment of crisis.
I explain that if he had entered in my room, 8 months ago, what scene he would have find. Me crying, drunk, intoxicated, taking a shower only the days I have to go teach. Leaving the room crying and going outside, breaking bottles in the living room or the sidewalk, yelling to someone that is not there, yelling at my roommates if they get in the middle of my monologue, going outside to smoke and neurotically come back to cry, being hold by my roommate Claire that stays drinking with me. Reading over and over the 160 emails between my former lover and his new cow that were wrote during only 3-4 weeks.
If someone had come and see me in that moment, they wouldn’t know the storyline, but they would perceive the pain and anger. I want the actors to interpret that moment based on the readings. I feed their doubts with anecdotes of my personal story, of the betrayal.
Actor 1. records his sounds. they are not great. Lots of insults, and doesn’t know how to talk to a ghost, but he has a strong aggressive voice. So I am going to keep it for now
Actress 2. she gets all the explanation again. She wants to collaborate more tan just a voice. She will be recording sounds of her own, and have proposals for the lighting in the final piece.
Robots
I am attaching a weather balloon to the robots with LEDs inside. The previous body disappears in front of the invasive balloon. It became just the moving platform. The balloon is at the human chest high, attached by 12 LED wires that look like veins. It moves slowly.
The chosen behavior was the one discussed with Sergio. They are in their own space rotating one next to the other with a slow interrupted white light inside the balloon. The presence of a viewer makes them shut down the light and leave chaotically their position, after a few minutes, they start looking for each other.
Curiosity seemed easy to show, but finally, it is not easily recognizable. Fear seems easier to show with this reactions.
CONS. Helium only lasts for 1 hour, before the balloons drop to the ground.
Sound installation.
I decided that I don’t identify myself with any of these target groups. The elements I can relate to are grief, abusive and dependent relationships, and the sadness was redefined into pain.
Support groups for divorced people seem the most accurate group that could share my profile, and that meet in a space where they talk about it. But they don’t meet too often in columbus. A support group forum online was a treasure. People that had been left after a long relationship write about their emotions, the story is secondary in their posts. I posted a brief description of my situation explaining that my solution is to take this emotions into an art piece, and asking them for their participation. Some wrote back to me, giving more details, or just allowing me to use their posts.
People is not available to talk and record their own voice, it seems that actors will add more theatricality to the texts. But I don’t want them to read the story.
about sound installation
1. The voices could be recordings from the people talking about their experiences.
CONS. My concern with this is that people have no theatrical expression. They are boring even when they talk about the most painful or upsetting experience, unless they are put under the spotlight, like in therapy sessions, or even in a bar. It is only in those situations that they manage to get in touch with their emotion and I can not insert myself into that closed space. I want to have a glimpse of their worst moments.
PRO. It might be interesting as a mirror of society. A mirror cannot produce something that is not there. I leave the responsibility of their actions and behaviors to the interviewed groups. If several groups are interviewed about sadness/anger. The mirror piece could make a statement on what groups are more affected, or how the groups are affected in different ways. It is not a mirror of myself, it becomes a psychology case study.
Then the essence of the emotions that I am trying to get wouldn’t be built by the expressiveness of the text but by an setting up situations I could hear 1 hour audios of 1 group, next hour another group, …
Possible target groups: abused, lost jobs, minorities, grief, woman shelter, families of suicidal, veterans, … (do I feel related or closer to any of this groups? not really… )
About the robots
Robots BEHAVIOR
Sergio proposes reverse engineering approach. Instead of thinking all the possible actions in a begin-end order and logic, think about the last action and go backwards.
Instead of robots that are moving to find people and then staying close, maybe they start together, and they are not moving until someone approaches. Enters their space and disturbs their order. The goal could be to try to get back together, and restore their harmony. If they have empathy for each other, I might have empathy for them.
–> this works!
Robots BODY
My bigger problem hating these robots I’ve been building and abandoning for 8 months is that I am not interested in the formal solution, because i see the impossibility of creating empathy with something that is on the floor and looks like a toy. What makes it look like a toy: the motor noise, the motor interrupted pace, the size, the plastic parts, even the glass dome seems like plastic, just because we are used to see plastic.
Diagnosing the situation, the body would have to change. Now, everything is presented in an utopian way. Uniform, polish, symmetrical. I have to elevate the body to the human sight to perceive it differently. If I build or add something on top, the platform looses importance. It’s just a moving platform, it is not the piece anymore.
What to build/add on top: organic? inorganic? branches? paper sculpture? balloons? fabric? the non-symmetry gives personality. Convert it into a joke? humor is a way to share feelings.
My argument to not knowing what to built is that I have no experience or training in building objects! Sergio: you should see the not knowing as positive instead of negative.
Sergio: Even if I came to OSU to learn how to do new media projects by myself instead of hiring. Sergio says that grad school may also be the place I figure, i have the conceptual control, knowing what I want, and keep working with others and give them control on their part. (like Ann Hamilton, and basically how I have been working for 10 years)
It seems that everybody agrees, including me, that I have to go to the simple elements. Not trying to show all the complexity accumulated for months around a piece.
My robots don’t have to have an exploration behaviour programmed to go around a person, it doesn’t have to communicate the coordinates of its discovery through a reversed logic of movement. They don’t need to get all the information about their environment
My work is diagramic, maplike, complex and intends to show that complexity in the piece.
I can not show everything. Maybe I should try to be reductive. Destill critical elements:
Abstract the mapping, leave conexions without the content. And leave the content, the language for the writing aside.
Sound Instalation v.1
Look for a single voice. A single topic. Meditated, Engaged, Focused.
Look fr a specific situation.
The atmosphere could translate into cacophonie.
Case Study Structure:
Women, Men, Children, Elder,… / White, hispanic, … / Abused, abandoned, …
Make a choice and a commitment.
Specific –> General [He is right]
The strenght about the Sound Instalation v.2 is that there is a specific group. the Invisibles: street kids, homeless.
Robots.
What is in the world that just don’t respond, that isn’t empathic.
“a pile of socks”, “a loaf of bread”
Something surprising and original….. [easy said]
- he works with notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence, alienation, and inhumanity
- public buildings and monuments as backdrops for projections
He is also giving a voice to the invisibles. Santiago Sierra does it too. Sound Installation v.2 about the invisibles is not original, but the visual part will be interesting even if it remind me about the desaparecidos piece at the MUAC Museum.
One of the first Net Art Artists, drops New Media to make more activist projects.
He changes to projects that revalue you as a human not as a citizen in a society.
We should be able to choose where to live, how to live, have the right to move and to eat. But we are restricted to the rules of the country we didn’t choose, by the rules we never accepted. We are not born fee human beigs, but citizens constrainted to a situation.
H.B. makes guides on how to detour bureaucracy, on how to obtain free food, on how to cross borders.
Robots
I am trying filling the dome with white stuffing, and writting the cognitive map over the glass dome.
I have to limit the space where they move so they don’t run into any object.
Sound Instalation v.1
Amy thinks I should do a multitrack soundtrack, and forget the sensors.
… but what about the crazyness, the overwhelming anger when you’re sad in the middle of a crowd.
