Impossible to work

Take a look at that picture. When we started our durational performance/installation/creative playground on Saturday, there was no yarn. The volume of yarn that we went through indicates to me that Structures Without Integrity’s first piece “Simultaneous Landscapes” was a success.

If you were able to come and take one (or more) of our tours, I would like to thank you for participating.

If you were not able to come out to Version for the NFO XPO, you are a chump and you missed out on a lot of fun. Adjacent to Structures Without Integrity were the Bike Escorts (who kick ass and said they’d help me learn how to ride a bike). Nearby was Anti-Gravity Suprise’s politcal poster-making station. The folks from Three Walls had a table as well. But my favorite booth of the weekend was a group from Oakland. They were a group of artists with various spaces in the town the Atheletics call home. Barry Monigle, the resident rat, stopped by and took some of our tours. We liked Barry, and he liked our work. There was also a station to sign up for Société Réaliste’s EU Green Card Lottery. There was a lot more going on, but these are the groups I remember most.

“Simultaneous Landscapes” was a performance where audience members/particpants were the actual performers. When we started, I was worried that people wouldn’t want to play. But I was totally wrong. People were more than ready to have fun and make art with/for us.

Here’s the way it worked: We set up an installation that included (but was not limited to) a waiting room area with coffee, a guest book, reading materials and chairs, a bread room, a table fort, and some silly buildings made out of cardboard and kraft paper. People were asked to select from one of four tours of the landscape. Two were audio tours, another was a text-based tour, and the last tour was an interaction with Brianne Waychoff, whose body was itself a feature of the landscape.

I can’t say which tour was most popular. Lots of people took Irène’ Hode’s “My Brain is Eating My …” tour, which aws about 22 minutes long. Quite a few took the “Iceland (is a place we’ve never been)” tour that Sarah Best and I wrote, which was about 15 minute long. At least as many people took Ira S. Murfin’s text-based “Local Commute” tour, which was self-guided and of variable length (participants were encouraged to follow or ignore the instructions printed on cards). Tons of people either took Brianne Waychoff’s “Ladybugs” tour or watched others take it. I’d say this was the most popular in terms of numbers of people who interacted with it as it was also the shortest time commitment. Brianne was so interesting to look at, crowds gathered just to watch her. And many of them decided to take one of the other tours as well. It was great.

Most all of the tours made a lasting impact on the landscape in some way. In the case of Ira’s text-based tour, people left a yarn trail behind them, were asked to attach things to the walls, etc. With Irène’s audio tour of the inside of her brain, people were asked to decorate cupcakes and either eat them or leave them behind. Those left were installed with the cardboard city (and thrown out at the end of each day). With the audio tour that Sarah Best and I put together, people were asked to outline the coast of an island with yarn; bundle objects; catalog their bundles in a book and then draw a picture. The pictures were then hung on the walls of our space. When people interacted with Brianne, they had to stick cards to her body, which was a much less permanent, but no less real, modifcation of the landscape.

We took tons of photographs. I’ll post a few to flickr in the coming days. In the mean time, there’s a picture or two posted by the version folks.

I was happy with the way things worked out with our piece. The first few people who took the Iceland tour didn’t fully understand what we were asking them to do. We came up with a short set of instructions and that trouble was over. The CD asked people to do lots of different things (7 separate actions to be precise). I think I asked too much of some people, but just enough of others. The whole tour was about Icelandic myth, the 1973 volcanic eruption on Heimaey and exploration. Different places in the landscape stood in for those places mentioned in the audio tour (though very little of the landscape itself was generated through research on Iceland). While there were various things about the CD I didn’t like, I think it worked well enough to get the point across.

The bundles were fascinating to photographically catalog. My personal favorite was made out of a small plastic lamb, a binder clip, some yarn and a broken toothpick. Participants were asked to bundle up what they would take with them if forced to evacute due to a volcano. This particular particpant (whom I don’t know) made a lamb of god that s/he hung from the ropes that separated our space from the aisle. Other bundles included 6 bars of ivory soap; a bottle of aspirin, a feather and a box of matches; 9 aspirins, a hen and baby chicks toy, a pencil taped to a box of matches and a toothpick holder; and most sparesely of all: a toy animal pen.

I was also worried that people wouldn’t be responsible when playing in our space. A few people lit matches in the space (right next to a huge pile of torn newsprint, which was potentially vary dangerous). Most of the time, when people chose to ignore our instructions and do their own thing, it was in an interesting way, and I am grateful to them for doing what they wanted to do and helping us make art.