SURREALIST SOAP OPERA POST-APOCOLYPTIC CORPSE’S ROLLERBLADES WITH SPACE-FUTURE-GLAM+VICTORIAN OUTFITS

Yeah, you heard me right.

Just wait ’til you see my costume designing skillz/corpse performance.

(Okay, I was just an extra in my friend’s pilot for a surrealist soap opera series. These are the blades I gave outfits for.)

TRYING TO REACH YOU

This piece was presented to an audience of about 50 people at the March 2010 edition of Flux Factory’s Flux Thursday, a monthly potluck and arts salon.

During the meal, I walk about the crowd, collecting future participants and their phone numbers.

Each participant is assigned a role in a scripted conversation and is provided a partial script to read. Each script distributed only has lines for one person–the corresponding participant’s lines remain a mystery. There are three conversations in total, and there are two participants to each conversation. Each Caller A is given the phone number of a corresponding Caller B who has the other half of the shared script. Each Caller B knows only that later her phone will receive a phone call, and that she will then be held responsible to execute the script that was provided to her. Each Caller A only knows a phone number to dial, and is told to execute the lines in the script accordingly.

At a designated moment in the evening lineup, I take the “stage” and give a brief explanation of the coming orchestration of encounters. I then summon all Callers A (each of which is assigned a Script 1, Script 2, or Script 3) to dial the number to their Callers B. We all press “Send” on our cellular phones at the same moment.

Silence,

followed by myraid ringtones, beeps, alarms, and bell sounds. Then, everyone begins reading their scripts.

Well, not everyone. A small portion of designated participants (1-2) had left; another small portion (1-2) lacked reception in the gallery. Another, apparently, had first read incorrectly the number given, and called a nonparticipant who had no idea what was going on.

Participant: I AM TRYING TO REACH YOU.

Bewildered Person: Hello?

Participant: I AM TRYING TO REACH YOU.

The phone number, read and dialed “correctly,” reportedly produced similar results.

Additionally, the number I myself dialed had no answer. No answer, and moreover I was told by a recording that “This number is no longer in service.”

I feel like all of the “failures to connect” in this piece actually gave it more weight, contributing to what I set out to make.

Changes for the future: more scripts, more people. Definitive ending/encouraging people to wait silently or else continue talking on their phones until everyone is consensually silent and has ended their connection.

INCREDIBLE DE/FEATS

In January, I inherited a box of twine and cords and wires that I’ve found really appropriate and thematically necessary for a lot of pieces that I have in the works–pieces combining themes of technology, communication, war, identity/identification/recognition, and how knowledge/understanding is claimed.

Playing around with the wire one evening in late January, I created some simple projects. One of which is this:

It is a nonfunctional tin-can telephone. On one side,  reads “incredible feats of communication,” while from the other end is a mirror-image sculpting of the text, “incredible defeats of communication.”

Currently, this piece hangs precariously from thin wire brads on my studio wall, though my intent is for it to hang by fishing line from a ceiling/tree/apparatus  in the center of an open space, thereby inviting viewers to walk around it and see it from different perspectives. This way, the opposing texts shift from being legible and easy to comprehend to appearing garbled and backwards, depending on the relation and perspective of the viewer that engages the piece.

To me, this sculpture is a comment on language as a dominating form of communication–one that is, for better or for worse, relied upon to carry the weight of  interactions between parties which may be great distances apart. In years when technology arguably connects people around the world, I wonder the extent to which it is also keeping people apart (both physically and figuratively), and I wonder the extent to which it affects how its employers understand what they come to know (about each other, about themselves, about anything at all).

The fact that technologies facilitate distance between encounters is frequently lost amid rhetoric about bringing people/ideas/etc together; and in the process, mutual understanding is taken for granted. We walk away satisfied from our dangling tin cans: we said what we knew how to say, and we listened to what we knew how to listen for.