"Inner Perspective"- In Depth

One summer a bunch of fellow students from various disciplines got together and created the "Dreams" exhibition at the Shoreditch Town Hall basement. A maze of small rooms, nooks and crannies with unexpected architectural Victorian details, ancient stoves and other relics of a complicated past. The rooms are dark and mysterious. My impression of this space is broadly coloured by my first visit during an Edgar Allan Poe exhibition which, as you can imagine, was rather haunted.

Our collective starting point was 'dreams' and any number of definitions could apply. And with so many different creative types coming together the results were broad and varied.

My idea sprang from the site, dark and enclosed. I wanted to juxtapose this atmosphere with a bright and open film, with shots of the outdoors and travel. Though I wanted these scenes to be disjointed and dreamlike with no real characters, only a variety of images looped and confused, like real dreams.

The character of the dreamer came next, the physical manifestation of the dreamer's portrayal of herself is honest and without filters. She is trapped in the room of her mind where the audience can come in and view her character stuck in this endless loop of dreams. Her reaction's are very visceral, almost childlike in the clear emotive responses, which are just as disjointed as the dream itself. I ended up playing this character, who else would do this for a week on the half hour for free? I also reacted to the audience, weaving around them and reacting to their intrusion into the room of my mind in order to bring them into the dream world.

The set was minimal, a single wooden chair with plants and dirt under the chair, an echo of the dream manifesting in her 'mind' space. There was a light under the chair to bring focus and gravitas to its placement and to illuminate the vegetation. This vegetation, both real and fake, also showed up along the edging of the door, the exit to the real world. My costume was a dress created from various cream and white fabrics pieced together and pleated paper, which slowly disintegrates, on the bodice. The colour palette of the film and the flower in my hair links to the vegetation in the room and connects both to the film which provides a contrast to the stark dark atmosphere of the basement. A comment on the reality vs. the dream world.

The film itself was made up of a very bright nature/ playful images vs the city, shown through a journey in the tube/arcade. This echoing my readings of Walter Benjamin's ideas of the wandering pedestrian. The approach to the chair in the beginning of the film echoes the girl already sitting in the same chair in the room. Real life events are echoed in the dream world but skewed. Another image is my 'dream' self disappearing from the screen and the real girl looks wildly around the room, logic has no place in this dream world. The childlike aspects are repeated with the swings and slides which are welcomed with joy and playfulness in contrast to the packed tube which is reacted to with fear. I tried to bridge the gap between the 'dream' world and the 'dreamer' with direct reactions and even using the projected image as a 'set'. Like when the train arrived I joined the queue on the platform as we waited for the train.

With this approach to the set as well as the interaction with the audience I hoped to bring them into my dream wold and to have them become a participant rather than a passive viewer, something they naturally resisted and thus seemed to prefer to watch the film. This project later led to my work on Martin Crimp. See here.

A video of the project here.

Notes on Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin is a great philosopher whom I greatly admire. His "Arcade Project" is a series of essays he wrote regarding life in early 20th century Paris, particularly focusing on the huge glass covered 'arcades' or covered shopping malls, the 'passages couvert'. One of the essays in this collection, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', focuses on how reproducibility, especially of a mechanical nature. Which severs the connection between the artist and art freeing the existence of art from 'a parasite upon ritual', or where art served a social function (ex: The Sistine Chapel), to art for arts sake. Walter Benjamin wrote this in 1936 during the Dadaists movement but before the later modernist movements like Pop Art and the Post-Modernism where this notion is further expanded. He was saying that if you are able to easily reproduce copies with no real original, say a photograph, the 'Aura' of the piece is lost.

I wanted to look at his notion of 'aura' and see how technology's effect on this 'aura', and how this lack thereof effects how we, in a digitalised age, look at art. Walter Benjamin said that reproductive technology substitutes a unique instance of creation with a multiplicity of instances (7). That a painter creates a natural distance between himself and the subject, whereas an editor of a film has to delve deeply into the subject in order to lay it out to the audience and through the nature of their medium, controls their perspective. I believe that this has developed to the point where we are now very used to seeing an artworks meaning presented to us, and rarely do we have to delve deeper. We are often so bombarded by a plethora of images that our minds are dulled to drawing a deeper meaning and creating further conclusions. Duhamel stated " I can no longer think what I wish to think. The moving image have ousted my thoughts. (32) He was referring to the natural process of association when viewing images are constantly being interrupted by the fast pace of film. Added to this the camera's constant comment on the performance through the editing process, and we are now very used to the fast paced image. We are probably most suited now to taking in a large volume of information at a faster rate than Walter Benjamin could ever imagine and we find this more comfortable than being faced with say a painting or a live performance.

I found this out in my performance of "Inner Perspective" where a projected film, with few people and no real plot, seemed easier to watch than my performance as the dreamer reacting to this projected dream which was what gave it depth and character. Regardless I found that people seemed more comfortable just watching the film than paying me attention even though it was a balance of the two that created the true story line. Have we really gotten to the point where we are more comfortable with technology than reality?

p1. Walter Benjamin's notes and personal items and his memorial where you can go into the sea.
p2/3 His notes on the Arcade project
p4. Pieces including my own influenced by Walter Benjamin's writing

quotes from Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": 1936
image links at http://www.pinterest.com/atmyworktable/walter-benjamin/