ramblings of a pseudo intellectual

As I finally sit myself down to write this paper at 12:15pm on the day of which it is due, I am flooded with the thoughts of the last few weeks behind me – of the time I’ve had to think about this project and the time that decided to take other forms. Last night, as I set my alarm clock for 8:15am before I went to sleep at 1:00am I thought, ‘I need as much time as possible to make this project happen.’ I promised myself that I would wake up early because I needed the time, because at the time, my perception registered a lack of it. Of course, this morning was a different story: after struggling with the sickness in my throat and head, unable to breath, unable to sleep, my perception of time (because it suited me) was that I had plenty of it – I could sleep one more hour… I could sleep at least one more hour.
When I woke up with anxiety at 10:00am I walked down stairs to make myself some tea and quick breakfast, and the day proceeded to produce more obstacles than just a simple “lack of time”. As I manically maneuvered around my brother and the foul smelling clutter in and around the sink, my perception of time was quickly becoming clouded with the overwhelming stress of space. If I was going to make breakfast, I would first have to clean the kitchen. If I was going to clean the kitchen, I would first have to wait for my brother to finish making his breakfast.
I only had a few moments to stand paralyzed with the space vs. time conflict when the fire alarm started sounding loudly from upstairs. My brother sat comfortably, eating his breakfast burrito as I raced upstairs to discover the trashcan in the bathroom overflowing with flames, pervading the rest of the apartment with suffocating black smoke. At that moment, the reality of a paper to write, a performance to produce, and a breakfast to make was, simultaneously, made inconsequential and twice as paralyzing, in relationship with the immediate reality of a minor catastrophe. My hands shaking and my face expressionless with shock, I sat myself down to write a paper; and it quickly became apparent to me that I needed to put myself in a calmer, quieter, smoke-free environment in order to focus.
For the past few weeks my, oh-so, strategic planning for this performance has consisted mainly of a single image running repeatedly through my head. This image was basically made up of me being video taped while watching and reacting to a prerecorded video of myself. I realized that the concept I had taken on with the image I had created was much too large to fit into a ten minute performance or a five page paper. It became quickly obvious to me that I needed more time, as I tried, in the last few hours of deadline, to imagine what I would need in order to put it into fruition and how I would translate it logically onto paper. I should have been working on this for weeks in order to have given myself enough time to even know what questions I needed to ask.
Stomping quickly through the snow, on my way to find some peace and quiet on campus, I found myself thinking of the seasons. Specifically observing winter, the season that seems to slow time – freezing moments and bones in space, also quickens as snow falls quietly in the course of a few hours, transforming our reality and our perception of time. In a day, the sun can melt it all away, and we are once again speeding through the streets to our next destination. With a somewhat vague reference to the profound poetic notions of birth and death in all of the cycling seasons, I ask the questions: in our material reality as performers / human beings, can we / do we experience infinity? What is time? What is reality?
When recounting her experience of the televised replay of the 9/11 attacks in her excerpt “Never, Again” Rebecca Schneider writes,
The twin nature of the attack, a kind of violence of ambivalence, made
the terror manifest at the level of ‘replay’ - but replay as real.
The space of time between one tower and the next was itself the space of a replay
in the realm of the ‘real,’ making the inevitable televisual replays that followed also
(impossibly) ‘real.’ The repetition at the level of the image seemed to evidence the
primal lie of trauma: something has been missed, we were not there,
it must be seen again, it must be replayed as it cannot have happened ‘once’
– in time or in singularity. It cannot have happened except to have both already
happened and to have not yet occurred.
The digitalization and mediatization of the attack made it possible to witness the tragedy repeatedly (an infinite loop). An individual could watch it and react to it for the first time, and then rewind it and watch it again – magnifying, slowing down, or fast forwarding moments, making the “real” event a performance study.
It is my sense that it is not just the digitalization of a moment that holds it, frozen in time, but the reaction of the observer in “real time”. Through my performance, using a projector, a laptop, a video camera, a TV, a mirror, and myself, I will attempt to create a sense of infinite mirror. In exploring the concepts of “real time”, past, and digitalization / virtual reality / “hyper real”, my goal is to PLAY. I don’t foresee myself answering any large questions, or giving my audience anything to think about except for, maybe, more questions. Considering that at this moment in time, I have yet to experience the actual performance, and it is only a concept replaying itself for my imagination, I have only vague ideas of how it will manifest itself in accordance with my intentions.
My hope is that through the lens of a manufactured infinity, my performance will represent a few concepts that have recently come to me about time and reality:
Time is masturbation – a deep involvement in the manipulation of our own psyche to persuade ourselves to believe we are not alone (within the workings of society) and, at the same time, separate ourselves as individuals from the rest of humanity. The loss of a perception with time is a moment of connection with the present, and with infinity. This morning, when my reality was proving to be in conflict with, what I considered to be, limited time, my perception of time adapted to suit my reality.
Schneider explains “Recognition as a precondition of vision means that we see only what we can recognize by virtue of having seen it or imagined it, or something like it, before.” This seems to subtly support an idea that maybe “reality” is a grand form of narcissism – we exist in a world that we see only through our individual awareness. We project ourselves into some kind of reality. We create and are created by our surroundings, therefore, it can be said that our “reality” rests, essentially in an infinite mirror.


...this is ridiculous.