learning the ropes

My first mental model of performance.

If you’re interested in a basic mind-map editor, FreeMind is pretty easy to use. It is a bit inflexible, but it does the trick for quick brainstorms.

Performances such as the pigeon map that came out of Amsterdam Realtime are accomplished with technology are not simple instances of layering technology over top of a performance, but rather tightly integrating the technology into the performance.

I feel that performance is a dialog between the performed work and the audience. In the case of designing sound, particularly the work I did on “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” the sound design was in dialog with the situation the actors were experiencing. The sounds of the subway served to highlight the tension between the characters as well as the tension of the situation they now found themselves in.

I was out gathering media for our journaling assignment on my way back from my internship and got the idea that talking on a cell phone in public is public private performance. Before cell phones, in the days when we talked on our home phones, these conversations were private performances — full of gestures, facial expressions, harsh words… Now these performances take place in public, but still retain many of the aspects of their private nature. I say that these are intentional performances. There are goals involved in the conversation.

So I decided to take some covert pictures of cell phone users.

Later in the afternoon, I read about Wendy Richmond’s piece “Public Privacy” and saw that she was making similar observations about cell phones in public.

Alfred, a homeless man I encountered on the #2 train gave a public spoken performance of his situation and his need for assistance. He reached some of his audience, but others ignored him.

I move my body, a well practices gesture, to indicate to an arriving bus that I don’t need it to stop. I look away and turn my whole body. A similar performance occurs when I want to make the bus stop.

When I cycle, the attitudes and posture I adopt are a performance. When I have arrived safely, it was a good performance. I have to take on the role of a care — and play this role convincingly to other cars.

At this moment, though, I wonder about the performance I am engaged in. The Samson reading describes Preedy entering the “scene” at the beech. I’ve entered the “scene” at the street corner to wait for a bus. There are a few people around. The role I feel I’m playing at the present moment is that of focused “thinker.” I have my pencil and my notepad and I’m furiously writing down important ideas. I’m conscious of this as I do it.

I needed about ten minutes of a spooky wind for “Off the Beaten Path,” but couldn’t find a good recording. I first tried making some wind sounds with my mouth, but found I couldn’t sustain the sound for long enough. The thought of manually editing a string of my ten-second samples into a ten-minute wind was not appealing, so I dug up one of the filter patches we worked on in Audio Art to adapt it.

The patch was already feeding white noise into a filter, so I figured I could automate the frequency parameters to simulate howling.

I used the “drunk” object to randomly walk through numbers between 0 and 128 and then scaled those numbers two different ways to drive the filter and cycle frequencies. Initially I used a resonant filter type, but I found that the wind hissed too much. To get a lower, moaning wind, I tried sweeping the frequency of a low-pass filter instead. After tweaking the frequency ranges, I duplicated the wind generation and routed it to the left output channel so I could make a swirling stereo wind.

Since I need to burn this file onto a CD for the show, I connected an “sfrecord~” object to the outputs of the wind generators and then let it run for ten minutes.

Download MAX/MSP patch
Download sound sample (9MB)

• Theatrical performance — the shows I’m working on
• Instructional performance – thinking about Kelly’s first day of school. Is content delivery a performance?
• Performative surfaces – while considering Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” my mind turned to the place where a performance occurs… and then to playing surfaces — and architecture. Some spaces are designed specifically for performance: theaters, concert halls, broadcast studios. What makes these spaces different than “normal” spaces. Isn’t it possible to perform anywhere?
• Radio Drama

A story of the public performance of a marketing strategy for a product called “Airborne”

excerpt from http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2006/04/created-by-school-teacher.html

“The School Teacher Diversion
Magicians know that the best way to trick an audience is to divert their attention away from what the magician is doing with a flamboyant gesture or joke. The fraudsters at Knight McDowell Labs elevated this to an art form with an insidious diversion that turned a liability into a “viral growth” marketing engine…”