This is an outline of the project OverTime as it unfolded in the 4 months of class. The reference material we viewed includes demos of softwares such as Max MSP, Max NATO, supplanted by tools such as the Wacom Tablet, the Diem Suit and Mimio. Lectures by Paul Kaiser, Troika Ranch, dancer Tomie Hahn, musicians Curtis Bahn and Dan Trueman offered insight into what is currently being experimented and produced in the sound-movement interaction arena.

Jam session
For OverTime, we started by showing each other our individual work and talking about the different issues and ideas we wanted to toss around to other members of the group. Maja showed us a tape where she is playing the violin and the sound coming out of her instrument is sampled, modulated and processed in the computer and outputted on speakers. She also played, live this time, pieces from her repertory. Isami showed us slides of a site-specific installation involving light he had done in a racket-ball court. The space of the room was made opaque by diffusion of a dense red light, blurring balance through optical diversion. Malene performed a piece where different parts of her body were directing her movements, shifting from limb to muscle to cartilage to bone, back to muscle to limb, emphasizing lightness and weight, in the axis of her rotations. Diana and Liz improvised. Diana's movements were saccaded and gestural, acknowledging the proximity of the space around her body. She expressed interest in icons of popular culture, an aesthetic of the superhuman (Wonder Woman, Superman) coupled with imagery of the cyborg (RoboCop, T2), all inherent in her gestural vocabulary. Liz circulated in the room with poise, grounding her movements to include the floor, shifting speed and breath as she progressed through her improvisation. Keith played the tape of a performance of a score he had written when he was 18, in which the performers/musicians had to multi-task, jolting their hands and body to reach keys on their musical instruments, alternating position and speed, giving form to a sound varying from high to deep, in a rhythm reminiscent of Chinese Opera. Nicholas played an excerpt from a CD he had compiled of his work. I showed them installations I had made, dealing with inside and outside space, mediating my gestures between a world outside of the artwork, as well as directing the gaze of my audience, their glimpse into this mediated space I had set-up.

Place and time
I was interested in trying to tackle the concept of performance as it might relate to contemporary culture and aesthetic by deconstructing the experience of the viewer, taking the performance on the road, on the street, in the subway, making it nomadic and transitory. So I suggested we set the performance on a platform at 42nd Street, where subway performers take their gig: the gold statue of Liberty, the break-dancers, the Latino salsa dancer and his stuffed dance partner, etc. Not knowing what and where the stage was going to be like, we thought about using an urban setting, a sidewalk or a street intersection, even Campus Walk as a base for the performance. I liked the idea of having Maja play on the street, her violin case open for donations. Everybody in the group liked the idea of starting our performance before the actual staged one, so that the demarcations between time before the event (coming out of the subway, entering the site/theatre of the performance, waiting in line, getting seated, etc.) and the actual event (when the curtain is up) would be blurred.

Pillow /Inflation suit
With Isami, we talked about restricting the dancers by building an inflatable suit that would slowly inflate as the performers would be moving in it. In the Mel Stuart directed movie Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Paramount, 1971), there is a scene where Violet Beauregarde, played by Denise Nickerson, eats a chocolate she wasn't supposed to and starts to inflate like a weather balloon. She gets so big that the elves have to roll her out of the room. Isami talked about bondage, how the suit would slowly bring the dancers' movements into a trapped submission. The motif of the wee-wee pads in my work came in as a pun on the color of the university. A light baby blue colored liquid poured on hygienic pads in commercials, for example, this specific shade of blue summons a myriad of images that come with their connotations. When Isami mentioned making a breathing pillow, I proposed to make the pillow out of the light blue animal training pads. Isami, who was to make the mechanical component of the pillow was skeptic at first. But when applied to the shape of an inflated pillow, the texture of the wee-wee pads made perfect sense: the smoothness of its impermeable side combined with the lightness of its hue gave a sedating look to the object. The underside of the pads, made of white cushioned absorbing cotton, added fluff and density to the respiratory movement of the pillow.

Installation/Video
I have been working on an installation in studio #301, involving the corridor between the elevator and the space of my studio. To make a long story short, I ended-up putting­up frosted windows on the wall between my studio and the corridor, turning the façade into a video screen. When it was announced that we would be using the installation space at Prentis as stage for the performance, I proposed that we used the screen from my installation to project videos extracts from our performance, so that as people would be getting out of the elevator, on their way to the performance space, they would be happed by the video image, playing on the screen. The video footage screened on the wall is a compilation of the dancers breathing, mimicking the movement of the pillow, and a deconstructed view of the choreography present in the performance, but re-enacted individually for the camera. For example, Liz and Diana¹s Duet where they interlace each other between cords and wires becomes a Duet where they are doing the same movements but 3 feet apart and displaced one from the other (see video).

Web site
When thinking about this Web site as a format in which to encapsulate this project and to make it a live catalog for the different documents and notes we would want to post, I tried to think of the ideas we had thrown around about the almost viral qualities of the performance, the fact that we wanted the final piece to integrate some of its surroundings into itself. So I thought about appropriating some code from an information site and using that as the base for the Web site of our project. Rhizome.org came as the most adequate candidate for such an experiment, given their stated mission and profile: "Rhizome is an online community space for people who are interested in new media art. By "new media art" we mean any type of contemporary art that uses new media technology. Rhizome's activities focus on: presenting artworks by new media artists, critics and curators; fostering critical dialog; and preserving new media art for the future."
The colors and some of the design has been change, to reflect our project's own, but the overall architecture of the site is the same.

awl31@columbia.edu