Sound Machine

The idea for my sound machine came out of necessity rather than artistry. I live a somewhat minimalistic lifestyle, and so have very few "things" lying around my room. Because of this, I was limited in the complexity of the machine that I could really build. So I started to think about something else that once I started I couldn't control. Immediately the fluxus projects came to mind, and so I decided to do a little addendum to my last project. Like I said in class, the result was significantly different from what I thought it would be, possibly because I overestimated the class's level of enthusiasm. I had given some people instructions to make harmonies and some people instructions to make dissonance, so what I had envisioned happening was for those two groups to sort of chase each other around for the full minute. Instead, everybody seemed quite fed up with the whole thing after about thirty seconds or so, and ready to stop singing/speaking/drumming, and so when miles finally shouted "HEY" after what seemed like forever, there was a truly beautiful and much welcomed silence that was far more pleasing and interesting than any other sound I could have imagined making.

Flux

Over the break, I went to see a fluxus art exhibit at the MoMA, where one artist asked others to send him instructions which he would then execute uniquely. Some of them got really weird. Some of them were incredible indicators of human behavior. For example, in one video that played on repeat, the audience was lined up on all four walls of a room, and the artist, without speaking would slowly choose a member of the audience, wait a long while, and then kiss them. The ways in which people would react when they were chosen were so illuminating, especially for an actor. The instruction on the side of the video was "Kiss someone. Back away. Repeat."

For my project, I wanted to play with the idea of "audience" and "artist". I tried, instead of making the cards for the audience to experience, to make them so that the artist him/herself would see the class or objects around the room as the exhibition. I'm not really sure how successful I was in doing that, but it was a really interesting mind game, and gave me a great outlet to philosophize a little bit about the structure of art. Like Dean always says about the structure of the classroom, the teacher stands here and the students sit there, and that sets up this almost formulaic stagnancy between the two parties.