We were unable to meet on the Monday due to it being really busy over the bank holiday weekend. We have spent the last two weeks refining and adjusting our piece after the feedback we received. Essentially our piece is the same as it was, the differences are that we have shorted the soundtrack to the least contrived ones. This track will be played out of four speakers at four different times creating an auditory layering in the piece. We are taking influences from The girl chewing gum by John Smith by commenting on the pedestrians as they walk past our piece creating a ‘live layer’ to our piece. The difference between our piece and Girl chewing gum is that our commentaries of people are spontaneous and live whereas Smith’s commentaries on his piece happened retrospectively (he watched the footage and then commented on what he saw meticulously knowing on what was coming).
The layering is one of the key elements to our piece in that as well as the layering of sound and live elements we also have the layering of dates. The dates which we collected the recordings on are incorporated into the soundtrack which we then right on the space, this, combined with writing the dates of the performance creates as additional layer.
Feeding the birds has been a part of the piece for a while but what Conan mentioned in his feedback is of a piece in Paris which he witnessed in which the artist filled a trench full of bird seed and the installation piece lasted 20 minutes as the birds flocked around to eat the food. We were inspired by this in that we are crumbling the breadcrumbs finely and sprinkling them over the dates creating yet another layer on top of the written words. This layer will quickly be removed by the birds reinforcing our links with Cathy Turner’s ideas of palimpsest and erasure (still being able to see the layer after it has been removed).
To aid us in remembering/clarifying the piece in our head we wrote out a table of what we were doing and when. This creating a sort of dialogue on the page which, after discussions with Steve, he thought could create an interesting element to the piece. We were cautious however that the piece would become stale and rehearsed so the addition of commenting on what we are doing is going to be spontaneous and completely up to the performer who is doing said action.
Joe Turner
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