How I work (brief)
Sometimes it’s nice to bend the design to the materials rather than bend the materials to the design. For me, building something is a dialogue with the materials, working towards some kind of ideal result while allowing a huge amount of play between what I want to happen and what is actually happening. When I’m designing/building something, it’s like watching a video of the finished work in my head. I see how it works or doesn’t work, and diverge on free associative tangents that bring new ideas or materials into the thing I’m building, thus changing the video of the finished work in my head. This is also how I work when I make performances– the piece starts finished in my head, and then I work backwards from there, finding out that the main idea is not really about, for example, “monsters”, but actually about how common childhood fears can stay with us through memory, and can inform collective culture. It’s almost like I remember the end product of all the work I haven’t done yet. I don’t like to think of it as being product oriented because, as many artists might agree, the product I imagine from the beginning is usually completely different from the product that comes out. And as I do the work the memory of the result gets amended, modified, adjusted, replaced… Part of me would like to be able to work linearly, to be able to think of a concept, design something coherent on paper that illustrates the concept, and then implement the concept and design to produce a thing or a performance, but that’s not how I live my life, and that’s not how I think. When it comes to memory, my thought process is a ball of consciousness that bounces around between instances of my life (kind of like Quantum Leap), in a semi-logical manner. I’m really good at remembering the last time I saw a person, what we did, etc, but remembering exact sequences of things, exactly what a person said, etc, does not come naturally to me. I’m good at seeing mechanical things working in my head, or visualizing objects that aren’t in front of me, but don’t yet have a system of skills that allows me to go ahead and build or express it. That’s on the way! That’s why I’m happy to build modular systems that can be changed or used in different ways.
Tags: performance, practice, process