My inspiration for this project is, indeed, very personal. After this year, I'm going to leave Cornell to a different school, meaning I'm going to leave behind everything I have built in the last two years. All the relationships I made and all the contribution I gave will be smudged by time and distance either I want it or not. There are points in life you just feel like things will fall apart. But they fall be be rebuilt. That is the reason behind my idea. Plus, I enjoy seeing the audience startled by the sound of glass hitting the floor.
I walked into the performance not knowing what I would put on the base first. Items were chosen randomly from the bag so the tower collapse pretty quickly on the first few times. It was "Trial and Error", merely experimenting. I love Sandy's analogy between the concept of the performance and chaos. We all try to organize chaos, trying to simplify life. But we're not supposed to. Chaos is beautiful. Chaos makes life.
The biggest challenge, or question I had during the process of coming up with idea and performing was either to practice beforehand or not. I decided not to to maintain the freshness and spontaneity.
To make the performance better next time, I would like to do everything in a larger scale with larger items, with added items from the audience, possible have several bags of items prepared and have the audience pick the bag.
I like the concept of randomness, maybe I will revisit it in my next project.
I really enjoyed your piece. I really appreciate you trying over and over. It was repetitious but because your items were picked at random it was like a fresh start. Your piece has a lot of symbolism in it—especially about life, movement, stability. I wonder how your piece would differ if you had different sized pieces
ReplyDeleteI really connected with your piece. The feeling of trying to get things in life to stack nicely without toppling over, knowing there's always more stuff on the way, is something I felt on a personal level. I like the idea of using bigger items. Theoretically, it would be great to do something like this with items so big you'd need a crane to lift and stack them. Maybe stuff old cars, storage units, furniture, etc.
ReplyDeleteOh, I love the idea of enlarge the scale here! I would REALLY want to do it if I decide to pursuit this path in the future!
DeleteI liked your piece because it's easy for anyone to replicate, as long as they can find some objects that don't stack very well. In a less literal sense, we're all replicating your piece all the time -- maybe not falling as hard, but never getting things in perfect balance before having to stack the next thing on top.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your performance. I also really like your inspiration behind the piece. I've had to switch schools and start over in new places a few times in my life, and I am about to do it again, for I am graduating college. It's really scary and hard! But that kind of stuff happens in life all of the time. Life is chaotic and we try to control and organize it, but it seems to always fall apart. Watching you place the objects on top of each other gave me a nervous feeling because I didn't want them to fall. However, I liked the big crashing sound when they did. I also liked the randomness of choosing the objects and how you still put things on, when you clearly knew that it would crash. "Oh well!" Failures in life can be a good thing sometimes. You learn from everything that happens to you, which makes you a stronger person. My one suggestion, if you were to do this again, would be to use a black bag.
ReplyDeleteAll good comments! Rio --- yes, I agree, many of our scary life experiences turn out to have some very good learning opportunities and pleasant surprises to them. Like the crashing sound which you enjoyed -- without it, maybe life would be too much the same... I really love the idea that the items would be huge - and you would need a crane -- reminds me of Roman Signer's work.
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