An Intermedia collaboration between Alisha Jihn, Elizabeth Sugawara, John Cartwright, and Isa Bowser.
What Are You Looking Forward To? was created for our Intermedia class taught by Norah Zuniga-Shaw. In this piece, we explore the layers and overlapping nature of our identities, experiences, and surroundings. We began the process by interviewing each other on the question: What are you looking forward to? This could be in an immediate sense, a cosmic sense, a longterm or short term sense, etc. We recorded these casual interviews and used them as the soundtrack for the piece.
Texture and sound were further explored when Elizabeth brought a ream of crinkly cellophane into the space and John improvised with the material against a projected live feed image of him with a kaleidoscope Isadora filter. The sound of the plastic was reminiscent of waves crashing, breathing, leaves rustling, paper shuffling. All things that implicitly and explicitly showed up in our interviews.
The kaleidoscoping projected image generated a feeling of mystery and associations of birth, primordial goo, composite bodies, strange beasts, amoebas, and many more. All the while, Alisha typed out and documented what was happening during the performance. This stream of consciousness score was projected backwards onto the wall behind the scrim.
Each of us held the space in different ways. John took on the role of active generator of meaning and associations. His movement ran parallel to the spoken interview and aligned with and contrasted our words at different moments. Alisha observed and documented the experience in real time, allowing her thought processes to become seen yet semi-obscured by the backwards projected text. Elizabeth and I set the space by laying out the cellophane in preparation for John’s solo and then closed the space by laying out fabric around John after he came to rest and lying down next to him in quiet stillness.