Desperately Seeking

I set up spaces through performance art where I create dialogues. I take normal everyday events and insert them into unexpected places: setting up a full formal dining table in Washington Square Park, or asking poeple to try on my magic shoe. I invite strangers to participate and film the proceedings.

When you take an event, put it out in public and ask people to participate you are “breaking” reality in some way: most people aren’t expecting to physically feed someone in their way to work, for example. These pieces transform spaces and question our environment and our relationship to it; a different variation on “public art.”
I point out the obvious – that I am creating an unusual event – but also, hopefully, our desire to be swept away by things we encounter in our everyday lives.

The camera is a very important element and its presence is never hidden. It cues people onto the fact that perhaps I am not only conducting the talk show, for example, but that there is a secondary motive driving my presence.

There are often unexpected products of these videos. First, the performances are spontaneous – they can go in a lot of different directions. Although I provide the framework, there is no script or blueprint – the “performances” often go in surprising, humorous directions. Additionally, in the editing process, I attribute meanings and add my own colors. I am often surprised to see characters, events and information that I did not notice during the actual taping. Also, when audiences view the videos, they are - like we all do when watching TV or videos at home – peeking into an outside world and becoming at least a little bit familiar with strangers.

My work questions performance art today: what is the role of the artist; of the participants? What kind of balance or relationship is at play? Is there some “proper” balance between staged events, and naturally unfolding, organic ones? Do the videos lose some element of performance art when I edit them, later?

ITp brings really interesting questions about interactivity and technology. Performance art is a field very open to those ideas. I am motivated by interactivity, and I want to see interactivity in physical spaces. I am interested to see how technology can influence and preserve this interactions.

I come from a fine-arts background, and in ITP, I started using performance art, as a way to create videos.
I want to create for my thesis final, an installation that i show these performances that I created in my time in ITP, and a place to do a final .presentation and exploration of that work.

My audience is anyone that watches or takes part in the videos, and situations that I am creating.
In the case of the show my audience are the visitors of the Spring Show.

My audience is anyone that watches or takes part in the videos, and situations that I am creating.
In the case of the show my audience are the visitors of the Spring Show.

It is a performance that gets experienced in the form of video. I would like to use the spring show as another place that a performance could take place.
For that I would like to create an installation inside the sound booth, where various of my videos get exhibited and maybe create a final thesis performance.

In my thesis I created a few performances, in public spaces where i tried to explore the fragile lines of reality, and see where they meet with art.
I learned that if you try to shake a little the perception of an experience very interesting stories could be created.
By placing common situation in spaces that don’t normally exist, an abstract story that is familiar to each one is being created. The simplicity of the elements is what makes the work successful and attractive. By using video these performances get captured and then played, whith an implication of a story attached to it.