I have been thinking a lot about the installation part of my project lately. Right now, it sounds really cool in theory, but I am having a hard time figuring out how to go about actualizing my idea while maintaining the integrity of what I want.
At first I thought this was going to be a video and music project, then I thought it wasn't, but I have since seen a really cool installation exhibit at the MoMA and have learned about a really cool program that are making me think about incorporating video again. The installation I saw at the MoMA was this piece by a Swiss artist. She transformed the entire atrium on the second floor into this psychedelic womb thing. I will explain further. They put down really comfy carpeting all over the atrium, and in the middle of the room there is even more comfy carpeting in a circle around a banquette of tempurpedic couch-like things. In the middle of the couch circle there is EVEN MORE comfy carpeting. On the three solid walls (the fourth wall is covered in a pink curtain to block it off from the exposed floors) there is a really trippy video playing that has images of a naked woman crawling through a field of tulips and also a pig eating rotting fruit and also the naked woman swimming and walking around in the rain and putting tulips in her nose and sometimes just pink with bubbles forming. It is way weird, but the whole thing, accompanied by a soundtrack that can best be equated to electronic groaning, creates a trance-like atmosphere. People were lying down on every variant of carpet, on the banquettes, on each other. The whole thing seemed to have become a de facto day care center, as the centermost ring, the comfiest of all the carpets, was host to a bunch of kids who were alternately enthralled by the videos and trying to destroy each other. In fact, I was one of the few people there sans kids. I'm not saying that this bears any resemblance to what I want to make, but I do like the way it created an atmosphere. I think that I am engaged in creating an environmental experience, so there are certainly things I can take from this exhibit.
The program I mentioned I learned about is called Max/MSP and it is both a software program and a programming language. It is a way of creating sound and video pieces entirely from scratch; that is to say, the program itself doesn't presuppose anything about your creative process, so it starts you off with a blank canvas and you can build virtual devices to manipulate sound and images in any way you can imagine. Unfortunately, it is still a little too complicated for me to really be creative with -- I am just now struggling to get the basics of it, but I am hoping that if I keep working with it I might be able to figure out how to make my own thing. What it allows you to do that I really like is that you can make sound and video interactive with one another, so as a sound changes, a video will respond. The installation is going to be primarily focused on religion and religious practices, so it might be really cool if the sound is the focal point, an uninterrupted thing of religious music and the sound of people praying, and the visuals change based on the sound. This is all still a little out of my scope of ability, but I am set to practice and see what I can come up with.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
As I divulged in the previous entry, I am having a hard time figuring out how much of myself and my specific experiences I want to include in this project. It might make it less accessible if there is no personal narrative to which an audience member can relate, considering the already extremely abstract nature of what I am trying to do. However, I really don't want to impose myself too much on the audience, I would like them to be able to have a perspective that isn't automatically triangulated through my lens. Since it is likely that the majority of the audience members will know me personally, I don't want their knowledge of me or their feelings toward me totally color what I am presenting to them.
One way I have thought about dealing with this is by making the written portion of my project fictionalized. The stories will still be based on my experiences, but they won't be told from a first person perspective. Even if I tell the story exactly as I would were I telling it from a first person perspective, the mere fact of having a third person narrator gives me some necessary distance from the story, as well as the audience. I think that will help in differentiating the space and purpose of the writing with the space and purpose of the blogging that I am doing. A little booklet, which is what I hope to make, is very different from a blog, and warrants a different approach to its subject matter. If the anecdotes I relate become stories, that further differentiates their purpose in relation to the blog, because this space is about factual documentation of my process and perhaps my experiences, whereas that space can be more reflective and leaves the door open for both commentary and ambiguity.
One way I have thought about dealing with this is by making the written portion of my project fictionalized. The stories will still be based on my experiences, but they won't be told from a first person perspective. Even if I tell the story exactly as I would were I telling it from a first person perspective, the mere fact of having a third person narrator gives me some necessary distance from the story, as well as the audience. I think that will help in differentiating the space and purpose of the writing with the space and purpose of the blogging that I am doing. A little booklet, which is what I hope to make, is very different from a blog, and warrants a different approach to its subject matter. If the anecdotes I relate become stories, that further differentiates their purpose in relation to the blog, because this space is about factual documentation of my process and perhaps my experiences, whereas that space can be more reflective and leaves the door open for both commentary and ambiguity.
So, I've been encountering a few difficulties in moving forward with my project. My first difficulty has been finding a space. The large majority of Centennial Scholars do their projects at one of a few locations on campus. Because these locations are used for tons of different events and activities, they do not really meet my needs. I want an empty box that I can fill and shape. I know that Prentis, a building used primarily by the Graduate School of the Arts on 125th street has a lot of wonderful empty spaces, but I'm not sure how I would go about securing a room there. I have sent emails to the people I think might be able to help me, so we'll see if that works out. If it doesn't, I really don't know where else on campus I would be able to do my project.
Except! I just had a brilliant idea! If the thing with Prentis doesn't work out, I might be able to create my own space. All of the Villages (what they called the dorm buildings at the university where I was staying in Senegal) had these little enclaves made of sticks that served as prayer venues. The picture at the head of my blog is of a sign that each enclave has outside it to say when the call to prayer is during the day. It might be much more difficult, but may be really interesting if I created my own space outside that mimicked this prayer space. That would cohere with the thematic content I have envisioned for the installation. Logistically, this seems extremely ambitious, just because I would have to construct the thing myself and that seems like a big and mysterious project, but I'll keep it in mind if I can't find another space inside a building.
The second problem I am dealing with is super meta, because it is actually this blog. I know that this virtual space is mostly for myself, and the few other people who might read it (who are probably related to me or involved in my project), so I shouldn't be so self-conscious about it, but I am having difficulty grappling with the self-revealing nature of the blog. I think in attempting to keep this blog I am realizing that this whole project has the potential to become something just about me and my experience, which is not really what I want. Instead of just sharing the things that happened to me with the audience, I want to create an experience for them. I think that my personal experiences give the project a grounding in reality, and will provide something concrete amid the fairly abstract construction that I have conceived, but I don't want people to come to my presentation and think that I am just trying to tell them about what happened to me. I am much more interested in putting people in situations like those that I was in, even if in a weirdly arty, abstracted way, to give them an opportunity to feel the way I felt, or feel something completely different in the face of a similar circumstance.
I guess what I am discovering is that I haven't articulated clearly enough what I want my audience to come away with, but the problem is that I have -- up until now -- purposefully left that ambiguous. I have already discussed that one of my goals is for this to be rough around the edges, for the pieces to clash as much as they mesh, but because of that I can't figure out how to keep my wits about something that is supposed to be confusing. I also wonder if I am too concerned with the audience, and maybe I should just construct the pieces of this puzzle the way I want them, without thinking about their reception, because part of what interests me is that I don't know how this will be received and I want to leave it open to interpretation.
I know I am in the messy middle of a process and it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I think that it is good that I am getting all of the problems I am seeing out in the open so I can strategize ways to solve them, or decide that they don't need solving, as I solidify or fill in the other elements.
Except! I just had a brilliant idea! If the thing with Prentis doesn't work out, I might be able to create my own space. All of the Villages (what they called the dorm buildings at the university where I was staying in Senegal) had these little enclaves made of sticks that served as prayer venues. The picture at the head of my blog is of a sign that each enclave has outside it to say when the call to prayer is during the day. It might be much more difficult, but may be really interesting if I created my own space outside that mimicked this prayer space. That would cohere with the thematic content I have envisioned for the installation. Logistically, this seems extremely ambitious, just because I would have to construct the thing myself and that seems like a big and mysterious project, but I'll keep it in mind if I can't find another space inside a building.
The second problem I am dealing with is super meta, because it is actually this blog. I know that this virtual space is mostly for myself, and the few other people who might read it (who are probably related to me or involved in my project), so I shouldn't be so self-conscious about it, but I am having difficulty grappling with the self-revealing nature of the blog. I think in attempting to keep this blog I am realizing that this whole project has the potential to become something just about me and my experience, which is not really what I want. Instead of just sharing the things that happened to me with the audience, I want to create an experience for them. I think that my personal experiences give the project a grounding in reality, and will provide something concrete amid the fairly abstract construction that I have conceived, but I don't want people to come to my presentation and think that I am just trying to tell them about what happened to me. I am much more interested in putting people in situations like those that I was in, even if in a weirdly arty, abstracted way, to give them an opportunity to feel the way I felt, or feel something completely different in the face of a similar circumstance.
I guess what I am discovering is that I haven't articulated clearly enough what I want my audience to come away with, but the problem is that I have -- up until now -- purposefully left that ambiguous. I have already discussed that one of my goals is for this to be rough around the edges, for the pieces to clash as much as they mesh, but because of that I can't figure out how to keep my wits about something that is supposed to be confusing. I also wonder if I am too concerned with the audience, and maybe I should just construct the pieces of this puzzle the way I want them, without thinking about their reception, because part of what interests me is that I don't know how this will be received and I want to leave it open to interpretation.
I know I am in the messy middle of a process and it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I think that it is good that I am getting all of the problems I am seeing out in the open so I can strategize ways to solve them, or decide that they don't need solving, as I solidify or fill in the other elements.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Catching up
Here is where I stand right now:
My Centennial Scholar project has five elements. That there are five parts is not arbitrary, but a gesture towards the inspiration for this whole thing, which is the call to prayer. The call to prayer happens five times a day, so my idea is that each element of the project represents a piece of a day, or in a more abstract sense, a piece of a whole. These pieces, like pieces of a puzzle, complement one another and they are related thematically, however they do not all fit together. My objective is for each piece to require a different kind of interaction with time, so each is on its own temporal plane. An art installation has a very different relationship with time than a book, or a live performance. So, as each part of this time-puzzle operates on a different plane, the pieces can never fit together completely. There is no way to fashion a convenient whole, even though each part is working toward that end. By this I mean that within each component I will seek to investigate and/or ruminate on ideas and experiences with a unifying thematic construct, but I don't expect to create a clean package that has a pithy take-home message.
Here's what I have so far in terms of a delineation of each element:
1. Installation
- Site specific (involving transformation of a space, dealing with issues of sacred spaces/spaces that are reserved for certain populations)
- Involving visual, sonic, and spatial manipulations
- Thematically concerned with religion
Why? --> I observed that for Senegalese, in general, religion is a 24/7 thing; it is the most important and constant thing, not just in your life, but about you personally as well
- VISUAL: Maybe I can make a space to look like an exaggerated version of someone's UGB (Université Gaston Berger) dorm room. I would need to include Catholic and Muslim imagery, which would be interesting. I could have in chalk on the wall "Heure de prières" and fiches about meetings and homework like in the Resto. It would be really cool to have the images of marabouts on the walls, and prayers written in arabic. Should the imagery be indicative of the actual religious demographics of Senegal (94% Muslim, 5% Catholic, 1% animist), or the demographics as I encountered them, with a larger input of Catholicism?
It might be important for me to put on the wall one of those blurbs like in a museum exhibit explaining the link among this part and the other parts of the project.
- SONIC: Obviously call to prayer, baye fall songs and whatever that other confrerie that I can't remember the name of right now that sang a lot was, people saying Hail Mary and other Catholic prayers in French, drumming, peolple saying "toubab"/"maay ma 100 francs"/etc., goats/cows/cats making noise
2. Performance
- Thematically concerned with LEARNING, within that umbrella: interpersonal interaction (issues of translation and miscommunication); repetition and the line between something being void of meaning and being imbued with new meaning or transcendent meaning through repetition
- For text, use Baobab Center workbook and Gangui; also wolof/English proverbs; compare the nearly-impossible-to-describe-or-explain Wolof sayings to perceptions of English or American sayings (Time is money...); incorporate Senegalese non-word verbal indications like EH! and pss-pss
- For movement: shaking hands, the question gesture, playing with spatial relationships (maing people stay very physically close -- it would be awesome if I could find a really old station wagon as a sept-place/set piece to give people the idea of what it is like to travel); the action of prayer (Julli, muslim prayer, vs. Catholic prayer: both very different, but unifying elements like prayer beads/rosaries)
- Tie in WAITING, also stopping things to pray/call to prayer\
-- Don't necessarily want it to be a narrative, but how to keep it coherent and engaging? Maybe structure it like a disrupted narrative, like a Wolof class that keeps being interrupted, to tie in idea of learning
REMEMBER: this is a medium where I can't slow things down, but the only medium where I can actively prolong/defer things
Maybe incorporate attaaya (Senegalese tea ceremony)? Have it take place over the course of three cups of tea?
3. Puzzle
- A sudoku that looks like the one from my 365 Days of Sudoku book that became my functional diary while abroad (more information about Sudoku tie in and Sudoku journal is forthcoming); include a place to put the date and a space for notes, just like in my Sudoku book. Have out for people to find and complete while they wait for performance to start/after they check out the installation?
- Maybe the puzzle accompanies an explanation of the relationship between my theme of time and my ideas about puzzles in general; for instance, on the post card that I have to create to publicize my project I will have one side be the Sudoku puzzle image and the other side be an introduction/advertisement for my project. This way the post card is both a tool for advertising and an integral component of the project itself.
4. Written thing
- Thematically concerned with: not just being the perpetual outsider, but investigating the puzzle-solving idea that element 3. introduces; I was an outsider trying to figure out a massive, unsolveable, cross-cultural puzzle, and the stories I include in this part all deal with that element of trying to figure out what is going on without having the necessary tools that a cultural insider or an initiate into the mysterious Senegalese rites would have; again, more elaboration of the puzzle theme is forthcoming
- Stories about:
*Pilgrimage to Poponguine with the Catholics
*Midnight party at Cheikh's house in Dakar
*A hilarious afternoon with Faatu
*A weirdo afternoon with Talla Lo
*Rachel/Youssou's wedding
*The bus to/from Mali, getting to Dogon, the sketchy Bamako hotel
*Unpleasant encounters with the Talibe?
*Passover!
*Singing at the Journée d'Integration des Informaticiens
*A djembe lesson
-It might be cool if everything was handwritten
5. THIS BLOG -- meta!!
- Thematically concerned with documentation/memory and remembering
- Keeping track of the process of putting together this project, including seeking out memories from others who were abroad with me, working through new ideas or refining ideas about other elements of the project, allowing the audience to participate in the documentation and memory of the project itself
SO! Those are all the things I want to accomplish in my project. I still have a lot of figuring out to do, if merely logistically (like, where will I find a space to put on this crazy thing!?). The idea of this blog is that I will rigorously and diligently track the progress of my project from here on. At some point, I might investigate how I can use this space to encourage interaction from/with disparate geographic circles (like, people in Senegal and people in the US!). Since this entry has largely served to catch up on what I have been doing for the last three months, hopefully forthcoming entries will be more immediate.
Ba beneen yoon! (that's Wolof for "until we encounter each other again along the road")
My Centennial Scholar project has five elements. That there are five parts is not arbitrary, but a gesture towards the inspiration for this whole thing, which is the call to prayer. The call to prayer happens five times a day, so my idea is that each element of the project represents a piece of a day, or in a more abstract sense, a piece of a whole. These pieces, like pieces of a puzzle, complement one another and they are related thematically, however they do not all fit together. My objective is for each piece to require a different kind of interaction with time, so each is on its own temporal plane. An art installation has a very different relationship with time than a book, or a live performance. So, as each part of this time-puzzle operates on a different plane, the pieces can never fit together completely. There is no way to fashion a convenient whole, even though each part is working toward that end. By this I mean that within each component I will seek to investigate and/or ruminate on ideas and experiences with a unifying thematic construct, but I don't expect to create a clean package that has a pithy take-home message.
Here's what I have so far in terms of a delineation of each element:
1. Installation
- Site specific (involving transformation of a space, dealing with issues of sacred spaces/spaces that are reserved for certain populations)
- Involving visual, sonic, and spatial manipulations
- Thematically concerned with religion
Why? --> I observed that for Senegalese, in general, religion is a 24/7 thing; it is the most important and constant thing, not just in your life, but about you personally as well
- VISUAL: Maybe I can make a space to look like an exaggerated version of someone's UGB (Université Gaston Berger) dorm room. I would need to include Catholic and Muslim imagery, which would be interesting. I could have in chalk on the wall "Heure de prières" and fiches about meetings and homework like in the Resto. It would be really cool to have the images of marabouts on the walls, and prayers written in arabic. Should the imagery be indicative of the actual religious demographics of Senegal (94% Muslim, 5% Catholic, 1% animist), or the demographics as I encountered them, with a larger input of Catholicism?
It might be important for me to put on the wall one of those blurbs like in a museum exhibit explaining the link among this part and the other parts of the project.
- SONIC: Obviously call to prayer, baye fall songs and whatever that other confrerie that I can't remember the name of right now that sang a lot was, people saying Hail Mary and other Catholic prayers in French, drumming, peolple saying "toubab"/"maay ma 100 francs"/etc., goats/cows/cats making noise
2. Performance
- Thematically concerned with LEARNING, within that umbrella: interpersonal interaction (issues of translation and miscommunication); repetition and the line between something being void of meaning and being imbued with new meaning or transcendent meaning through repetition
- For text, use Baobab Center workbook and Gangui; also wolof/English proverbs; compare the nearly-impossible-to-describe-or-explain Wolof sayings to perceptions of English or American sayings (Time is money...); incorporate Senegalese non-word verbal indications like EH! and pss-pss
- For movement: shaking hands, the question gesture, playing with spatial relationships (maing people stay very physically close -- it would be awesome if I could find a really old station wagon as a sept-place/set piece to give people the idea of what it is like to travel); the action of prayer (Julli, muslim prayer, vs. Catholic prayer: both very different, but unifying elements like prayer beads/rosaries)
- Tie in WAITING, also stopping things to pray/call to prayer\
-- Don't necessarily want it to be a narrative, but how to keep it coherent and engaging? Maybe structure it like a disrupted narrative, like a Wolof class that keeps being interrupted, to tie in idea of learning
REMEMBER: this is a medium where I can't slow things down, but the only medium where I can actively prolong/defer things
Maybe incorporate attaaya (Senegalese tea ceremony)? Have it take place over the course of three cups of tea?
3. Puzzle
- A sudoku that looks like the one from my 365 Days of Sudoku book that became my functional diary while abroad (more information about Sudoku tie in and Sudoku journal is forthcoming); include a place to put the date and a space for notes, just like in my Sudoku book. Have out for people to find and complete while they wait for performance to start/after they check out the installation?
- Maybe the puzzle accompanies an explanation of the relationship between my theme of time and my ideas about puzzles in general; for instance, on the post card that I have to create to publicize my project I will have one side be the Sudoku puzzle image and the other side be an introduction/advertisement for my project. This way the post card is both a tool for advertising and an integral component of the project itself.
4. Written thing
- Thematically concerned with: not just being the perpetual outsider, but investigating the puzzle-solving idea that element 3. introduces; I was an outsider trying to figure out a massive, unsolveable, cross-cultural puzzle, and the stories I include in this part all deal with that element of trying to figure out what is going on without having the necessary tools that a cultural insider or an initiate into the mysterious Senegalese rites would have; again, more elaboration of the puzzle theme is forthcoming
- Stories about:
*Pilgrimage to Poponguine with the Catholics
*Midnight party at Cheikh's house in Dakar
*A hilarious afternoon with Faatu
*A weirdo afternoon with Talla Lo
*Rachel/Youssou's wedding
*The bus to/from Mali, getting to Dogon, the sketchy Bamako hotel
*Unpleasant encounters with the Talibe?
*Passover!
*Singing at the Journée d'Integration des Informaticiens
*A djembe lesson
-It might be cool if everything was handwritten
5. THIS BLOG -- meta!!
- Thematically concerned with documentation/memory and remembering
- Keeping track of the process of putting together this project, including seeking out memories from others who were abroad with me, working through new ideas or refining ideas about other elements of the project, allowing the audience to participate in the documentation and memory of the project itself
SO! Those are all the things I want to accomplish in my project. I still have a lot of figuring out to do, if merely logistically (like, where will I find a space to put on this crazy thing!?). The idea of this blog is that I will rigorously and diligently track the progress of my project from here on. At some point, I might investigate how I can use this space to encourage interaction from/with disparate geographic circles (like, people in Senegal and people in the US!). Since this entry has largely served to catch up on what I have been doing for the last three months, hopefully forthcoming entries will be more immediate.
Ba beneen yoon! (that's Wolof for "until we encounter each other again along the road")
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