One of my main reasons for wanting to take this class was to be able to explore more performance art ideas that I have been sitting on but not doing. I’m really glad that I had to do one for homework, because since my performances are usually so hard on me, I dread doing them to the point that they rarely happen… But there’s one idea that I’ve been sitting on since September 2017 that I knew I wanted to develop this semester: Rhythm 0.1
After seeing the Abramovic retrospective at the Louisiana museum in Denmark (July 2017), I knew I wanted to do some sort of reimagining of Rhythm 0. The initial seed idea came from a set of muscle stimulators that my friends and I had been using as a game for years — I want to do a performance where I can stand on stage and the audience can press a button on their phone and shock my nipples. I’m a simple man with simple dreams.
So I began ideating my version — working title Rhythm 0.1 — and quickly realized it would take more work than any performance I’ve done combined, so it would have to wait (cue ITP). However the design was as follows:
I am on stage sitting within a huge contraption, 72 mechanical apparatuses surrounding me, and the audience stands before me, phones in hand.
On their devices, they can log on to a website where they are presented with a few buttons that control various mechanisms within the machine — i.e. “shock nipples”, “fire paintball gun”, “feed cookie”, etc.
At first they would only have access to a few buttons, but much like an RPG leveling system, depending on what buttons they press, they unlock more buttons of the same flavor, albeit a more powerful iteration. So if they clicked on “play X sound” button 5 times, maybe they unlock “display X video”, whereas the person next to them who pressed “feed cookie” 5 times unlocks “pie to face”.
I’ve also tossed around the idea that they are generating some sort of currency or points that they can spend as they want, and the higher powered buttons cost more. I’d like it to be some sort of system where the more they interact, the more points they have to spend — a participation currency.
One of the most important aspects of this is anonymity. It’s essential to me that each user can access the commands on their phone and press buttons without anyone watching. Partly because I’m terrified to imagine what would have happened to Marina had a participant been able to anonymously load the gun and fire it.
I think simultaneous commands are ideal, with plan B being a successive order list you can add to. I just think simultaneous is better for ensuring people feel that no one will be able to tie their choice to them. If I see my neighbor press a button and then “shock nipples” comes up on the order list, that’s not really anonymous is it? Though I guess the list could be hidden, and I guess automatic orders might have the same effect anyway…
I’ve considered having some sort of screen displaying statistics, and in one iteration I was considering having explicit distinctions between “good” and “bad” actions, and displaying those “team” statistics on a screen to see how that would affect group choices. But that’s less interesting to me now, especially since a lot of “good” actions could also be bad. “Feed cookie” is benign until someone presses it 50 times.
Obviously some of these high-ticket choices would be one-offs, earned only by the most active participants. I also decided to not do the core idea of being able to shock my nipples after reading about how dangerous transthroracic current is (I want my audience to have a heart attack, not me!) Maybe if I can find wireless electric-fetish clamps or something…
The major roadblock to bringing this to fruition at this point is my lack of knowledge in networked apps and connecting websites to physical hardware. I think in a few months I’ll be at a point where I can do that, but for now, I have to keep it low-tech. So for this assignment, I knew I wanted to to a prototype of Rhythm 0.1 — Rhythm 0.0.1. I just wanted to test various hypotheses of mine regarding choices and anonymity, so the main focus for this was to make it a playtest, something I could fail quick and early at to get as much information as possible on how to make the next one better. And I succeeded at failing! Well, the performance went fine, but I just made a lot of mistakes that I’m glad to have gotten feedback on.
The premise was simple: I would be in a room surrounded by objects; a webcam would be streaming video, and I would have a laptop screen on which to receive instructions. Outside the room (in a spot I couldn’t see from anywhere in my room), there was another laptop displaying the webcam feed and a way to input commands. Since I didn’t have the ability to make a website people could go to individually, I figured a shared google doc was a simple low-tech option that would still demonstrate the function. I knew signage was going to be an issue since the laptop was removed from the actual site of performance, so my partner graciously offered to be an assistant and guide people if they were confused. I had 18 commands pre-written, nine continuous actions and nine discreet actions:
Continuous:
Do an ab workout
do jumping jacks
stretch
paint your body
shock your arm
juggle dildos
balance on one foot
flog yourself
dab
Once per Command:
Drink some water
Eat a Cookie
Suck on a Lemon
Take an article of clothing off
put an article of clothing on
take a deep breath in/out
do a line of Soylent
slap yourself in the face
stop (warning: will end performance)
I was really excited about most of these, and really worried about some…. Speaking of which, here’s me doing a line of soylent:
Here’s the full list of commands I received.
The first one I gave myself at 1:20pm, and the “stop” command came at 2:00pm. You’ll notice that after about 10 minutes, people went off script and got creative.
begin
drink some water
paint your body
dab
eat a cookie
juggle dildos
do a line of soylent
count from 1 to 100 progressively, using a gesture and each number must be iterated with that same gesture but increasing the violence and energy of that gesture with each number.
turn the lights off
turn the lights on
be gentle to yourself.
when you do not feel like being gentle to yourself, yell the word ENOUGH.
shut off the lights
turn on the lights
wear something that's not a hat as a hat
hug yourself
keep hugging yourself
balance on one foot
balance on one foot
balance on the other foot
put on ten hours of dogs barking and listen to that while you continue balancing on one foot and being gentle to yourself also- LIKE REALLY LOUD. obnoxiously loud.
when this becomes unbearable, behave like a dog (revised after my assistant suggested that would never happen)
when this becomes slightly unbearable, behave like a dog
lie down and relax
stare out the classroom window like an animal in a cage desperate for freedom (most fun one, see below)
pretend to be like those fish in the abyssal zone of the ocean that have a light (angler fish) with your iphone. turn the room lights off.
stop
The major takeaways for me:
IT WASN’T ANONYMOUS!!!! Man! I spent so much time trying to figure out how to ensure people felt like they were anonymous by making it so that I couldn’t see or hear the people giving me instructions. But just because they were anonymous to me doesn’t mean they were anonymous!!! There was a huge issue I think with people feeling really self-conscious about what they were putting down, both because they didn’t want to pick a bad thing necessarily, and because once people went off script, they wanted to be more creative than the last person. But more than that, instead of people having their own private device, everyone had to share a laptop! So one person might be watched by a whole group of friends, like negative peer pressure! Beyond that, having my assistant there was great for troubleshooting, but terrible for inhibition. Definitely the most important confirmation of my initial hypotheses: People need to feel like no one will be able to tie them to whatever action I’m performing.
Man, I knew signage was going to be an issue but it was even worse — I really should have focused more on the design of the input space. I had a sign up for people walking by the room that said “To interact use laptop ——>”, but even that sign should have been more obvious and inviting. Oh well, I don’t think that would be as much of an issue in my intended performance space anyway, since people will be congregating directly in front of a stage, instead of walking by a normal classroom and not looking in because why would you?
Don’t trust camera rentals from the ER… I thought I had recorded my whole performance, but got two 4 second clips… Awesome.
Having the ability for participants to write in their own instructions was really interesting and made for a lot of surprising, fun activity, but I don’t think I’ll keep that as an option moving forward. My assistant said there was this tone of “I have to write something more creative than the last person, since my classmates are judging my input” and I think that ultimately lead to less interactions overall. There was already a barrier to input from people being shy about choosing the commands, but when you add the additional anxiety from having to come up with something on their own, it made it so that there was less than 1 command per minute on average, which is not at all the frequency I had hoped for. I think it’s interesting that Abramovic offered finite options, but since they were objects in the control of participants, there were way more than 72 options. That’s not so much a possibility with my planned machine, so maybe I should consider other ways of giving control to users, other than the control of option-combos and frequency.
DON’T SNORT SOYLENT. I have a (bad? genius?) habit of planning performance art pieces by imagining what do I NOT want to do, and then realizing if I don’t do that thing I’m not a real artist…. So when I thought, man, it would be so dumb to do a line of soylent, I immediately hated my brain. After doing a line in the performance, I literally thought I was going to die. I almost had a panic attack when I was getting lunch after the performance because I coughed up a cloud of soylent and convinced myself that my lungs were going to get infected or the moisture in the air was going to make the soylent clump up in my lungs. So I won’t be doing that again, but glad I did it once. I think.
Readings Response:
Drama Matters: What Do We Mean By Durational Performance?
Love the Abramovic quote about durational performance having the largest capacity to transform both audience and performer.
I do think there’s a lot of truth to the idea that durational performance reminds us what it is to live — there’s a lot of repetition and you sort of have to come in and out of attention. It’s not something that you can ever fully engage with, but you come in and out of it and by the end the sum of the parts makes something unique and transcendent, I think. I think there’s something special about watching someone spending a lot of time on one thing too; we spend so much of our effort managing our time and being acutely aware of how much time we have and how long things are going to take. So to watch someone simultaneously accept and reject that ingrained behavior by committing to doing something totally outside of survival-brain logic for so long, it really gives you pause. Even if the artist might not have spent as much time on the piece as, say, a sculptor who spent a year on a statue, there’s something about being present for the artist’s waste of time that makes it so much more real.
Marina Abramovic: A lecture on “The History of Long-Durational Work”
Love love the idea that durational performance is inherently a reaction to mortality and impermanence… Wow.
I remember reading in Abramovic’s memoir “Walk through Walls” that one of the factors that created the new medium of performance art in the 20th century was anti-capitalist artists desiring to produce media that couldn’t be commodified and sold, and I always think about that when discussing the ephemerality of performance art. I think that’s one of the most attractive things about the medium to me, that it’s a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience for the artist and those present — even if it’s recorded, it’s not the same. There aren’t a whole lot of other types of art where that’s such a huge part of it, I don’t think, and makes each performance so important.
Fascinated by the idea that there’s a lot of baggage in the concept of an artist as a solitary hermit on a mountain, since I consider one of the focuses of my art to create community.
Laughing as I remember that I technically started a durational performance art piece in college called “August (Live)” that’s been on-going for the past 5 years.
Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc
the bit about “I think metaphysically, in the past, we've considered the skin as surface, as interface. The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased.” reminds me of one of my favorite Alan Watts passages in “The Book”. He mentions how humans have this arbitrary distinction between the external and the internal, and how the skin isn’t a boundary, but rather the membrane that connects us to everything else in the world. Interesting to see the parallel in this context.
Oooooh love the idea that we now have to design bodies to match machines, instead of the other way around.
Man that stomach sculpture is gnarly.
