Artwork #1: Score

Score Final Iteration: “Infinite Refraction”

Score:

One object, a transparent bottle with water, a camera

Take the picture of the object and put it into the water.

Observe what changes through refraction.

Try to make a new object look like the refracted one.

Put it into the water again and repeat the steps.

Take pictures for everything you made.

See what changes from the beginning to the end.

Art Statement:

The refraction through the water is kinds of interesting experience. When I was small, I try to look at this world through a bottle of water so that I got a totally different scene. Water is one thing that has magic. When I put the spoon into the water, it seems to be bigger. Additionally, when I move the spoon to the front and back, it changes with the distance to me in the water. I took a group of pictures for this.

At this time, I watched the video from Zach King, a You tuber who focus on the visual magic. In the newest video, he makes water magic which is to create visual error by water. There’s a part that he put a pencil into the water, it looks like the pencil is bended by the refraction. However, when he takes out the pencil from the water, it was really bended. By the video, I think that I can record one thing get refracted again and again and start my preparation.

For my preparation, I firstly start to find a transparent bottle. A normal plastic bottle without any patterns is easier to observe. Then, I need an object that can be easy to transformed or make a new one after refracted. I tried to put my wire into the bottle but there’s no big change. At last, I choose to us the wire to create a shape and observe its refraction. It’s really hard to use normal objects like spoon to play since I cannot make its form after refracted. That’s why I choose the wire.

The central idea of this score is that — when people pass the information to each other, something in detail will be changed since the information is conveyed through people’s memory. Thus, after some times of information get conveyed, it’s different to what it was before. My score is to stimulation this progress and compare the final object to the original one. For example, in the pictures I uploaded, the wire is much fatter than the origin one. In our real life, especially when we try to tell our friends something happens, this thing is “refracted” again and again. At last, it becomes a Rumor which is totally different than before.

It’s my first time combine the homework to the word “experimental”. I did many steps to achieve these pictures especially the choice of objects. I enjoyed the progress of doing experiments!

P.S. I’m trying to make a video like that through this method.

Here’s the final one I made:

The action is inspired from Ono’s Grapefruit, “Painting to Hammer a Nail”, about doing one thing again and again everyday in the morning. From my point of view, the water refraction is transitory and changing ever time when you change the angle of observing. Thus, I choose not to do it everyday but repeat in one time until I can’t. I really love how Ono shows her final piece out but I only have the pictures and videos — water refraction is a fleet thing. So I try to edit a video at the end of my works.

Don’t forget the most important rule: Make sure to have fun!

Play that new game you just got for hours at a time

Spend time with friends and family

What? Do your chores? Go to the gym? But that’s not fun. Why do something if it isn’t fun?

Put on an endless stream of online content to sort of watch

Pick up a new hobby for, like, a week or two

Start your homework? Send an email? You’re joking, right? Just do it later I guess.

Stress about all of the boring, important things you need to get done

Struggle to catch up on all of those things far past their deadlines

These ones must be fun because you’re going out of your way to make them happen

Do it again

This piece was partially inspired by some of the works we discussed in class, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, where the art itself is somewhat dangerous to the artist. While not exactly “dangerous”, performing my piece would definitely be harmful for the artist. It was for this reason primarily that I didn’t explicitly carry out this score. However, I obviously drew pretty heavily from some of my own firsthand experiences, so I do have a bit of a sense of what doing it deliberately would be like. I was diagnosed with ADHD about a year ago, and I wanted to use this score to sort of show in a more understandable way the kinds of things that causes me to do when I let it get out of hand, as well as explore the idea of what giving in and taking it to the extreme would look like.

This also plays into the other main theme I wanted to explore, which was taking everyday things or lifestyles and turning them into art to give a new perspective. When taken at face value, this just seems like a set of unhealthy habits. However, I think looking at it through this lens shows it in a bit of a different light and allows possibly for a better understanding of the subject. Like I had mentioned before, this score was never really intended as something that should actually be performed, but more as a different way to think about some of my experiences for both myself and others to learn from.

For my score, I was loosely inspired by Yoko Ono’s Painting by Hammer and Nail, wherein the executor of the score repeats an action every day in the morning. It reminded me of a routine I sometimes do in the morning of writing down my dreams in a dream journal. I also realized how I never really do anything with my dreams after I have them and write them down, and wanted to change that. So I wrote my Dream Paper Score, as follows:

Dream Paper

Go to sleep.

Dream about something

Type your dream in a dream journal.

Pick a font size/style that will fill the page completely.

Print out the dream on cardstock.

Repeat the process every day, printing on the same piece of paper.

Use a different color every time.

You’re done when there is no white space remaining.

Artist Statement: The main purpose of this assignment was to attempt to give a sort of form to the messy mixing of memories and dreams over time. What starts as a relatively clear memory is obscured by other, newer, equally clear memories (at the time), until they all obfuscate and mesh together into a mostly incomprehensible mess. An interesting occurrence of this particular work was that there were still lines from individual dreams that could be clearly made out in the finished piece, most notably “and a flip phone.” at the bottom.  It kind of showed me how even though i originally thought that everything would be lost, there are still particular facets of each individual part that compromise the whole which are unique and visible in the final product, just like memories in an aged brain.

Here is the final piece, which I have pompously titled “and a flip phone.”

To Eat an Apple

Pick an apple from a tree. Choose it carefully to ensure the best quality of taste.

Eat the apple until only the core remains.

Find an empty patch of soil and plant the core of the apple; ensure that there are seeds in the core, not just an empty shell.

Water the soil every day; fertilize it frequently.

Continue nourishing the soil until a sapling sprouts from the ground and grows a couple inches tall.

Find the best books, textbooks, and paintings you can.

Throw them at the sapling.

Leave the sapling in the pile.

Continue to water the earth, even if you can’t see the plant.

(a) Wait until a tree grows upon the books.

Once it reaches a couple of feet tall, take a picture of the tree and frame it.

(b) If the tree does not grow, repeat again, but with an orange.

2019 Fall

Artist’s statement:

“To Eat an Apple” was inspired by a children’s science experiment known as the “Potato Maze” and the scores in Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. The “Potato Maze” is a science experiment I did in 7^th grade, in which a potato is placed at the bottom of a maze-like shoe box with a hole at the top. The goal was for the potato to grow a stem around the obstacles to ultimately poke through the hole and reach sunlight. In addition, I loved the absurd and destructive nature of Yoko Ono’s works, which I wanted to embody in a way that involved college. This semester, as a freshman, I’ve had to adapt to the new college lifestyle. These ideas culminated in “To Eat an Apple”, a score in which you symbolically take the role of a parent, trying to raise an educated child. The apple is heavily tied with the concept of knowledge as the fruit from the tree of knowledge in the “Fall of Man” is often depicted as an apple. In addition, an apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head is the common explanation for the beginning of his research on gravity. The work all together is intended to recreate the feeling of parenthood and entering a child into the college process. In the start, eating the apple is analogous to having sex, as the activity itself satisfies a base desire and (after planting the core) results in new life. Afterwards, the played needs to care for the soil by fertilizing and watering it. Once it sprouts from the ground and becomes large enough, the player throws textbooks and other works at the plant, in order to simulate the schooling process, which can be overwhelming yet ultimately beneficial. As the player continues to water and fertilize the soil laden with books, it becomes difficult to observe the plant itself, so the player must provide distant support. Ultimately the sapling must navigate through the pile of books and grow on its own with the resources given (now transformed into a sort of fertilizer). In the end, if it succeeds, you celebrate with a picture (kind of like at a graduation), but if it doesn’t, you move on and attempt again with a different fruit, an orange, symbolizing that the traditional education route may fail one child, but it may succeed for another (apples to oranges).  As discussed in class, the gameplay of this score are intended to convey a meaning, rather than the story itself, as the player unwittingly takes up the role of a parent.

Documentation:

(For some reason WordPress won’t let me upload photos, so I uploaded them to the google album linked below, and you can view them from there)

https://photos.app.goo.gl/84w2poA1bguPA7nM8

Photo 1: The apple I’m using to do the score, picked fresh from the Dining Hall.

Photo 2: Me, biting into the apple, it was really juicy. Not pictured: Me eating the rest of the apple.

Photo 3: Me, holding up the completely finished apple core to show that the deed had been done, I had consumed the apple, leaving behind only the core.

Photo 4: A picture of the seeds contained inside the core of the decimated apple.

Photo 5: The core in a hole in the soil, being prepared to be buried. (I did this somewhere in Fenway in some soft soil).

Photo 6: The core completely buried now, with soil and wood chips pushed over it.

Photo 7: Me, watering the spot in the soil with the apple core.

That was as far as I could go as the plant didn’t grow yet.

Polaroid Painting

Take a picture using a polaroid camera.

Carefully remove the plastic film covering the picture using a blade of some kind.

Take a paintbrush and use the ink to paint the picture on the back of the polaroid frame.

The three main themes behind this score are rebirth, repurposing and time.

The theme of rebirth comes from the action of taking the picture and ‘killing’ it by cutting through it and removing its life, which can be thought of as the blood representing the blood of the picture. Then, the image is given a new life through the action of remaking it through a different technique and somewhat preserving the medium.

The theme of repurposing comes from this idea of taking something we are given and making something else out of it. One of the ways in which I view this score is somehow fulfilling a desire. When you take a picture, you are not exactly sure as to how it is going to come out, especially on a polaroid camera where there is no display and you simply have to rely on the image which one can see in the viewfinder. Therefore, when the picture comes out there is a chance that we are not satisfied with the outcome. This score allows you to take that polaroid and make something you want out of it by repainting the image with the memory of how you wanted it to be and not necessarily how it came out.

The final theme is time, which is obtained through the process of using a new-ish medium, as polaroid cameras have now been long surpassed by digital cameras, in order to give birth to an ancient medium, in this case, painting which has been present since at least 39,000 BCE with the first painting of a disc found in El Castillo.

The idea behind this score came from an art project which I had worked on where I was exploring the theme of emptiness and unfulfillment and decided to explore the medium of the polaroid. I had created a tryptic with one overexposed polaroid which was completely white, one polaroid which was taken in the total darkness of our school’s darkroom and one which was simply the frame of the polaroid painted using the ink from a picture.

Wanderlust
On the third Friday of the month,
Take a bus to a place you have never heard of.

Disembark;
Walk until you cannot.

Await further instructions.

I had two intentions when I created this score: first, I wanted to share a sense of adventure (perhaps a sensation of feeling lost). This is an important element missing from day to day life–some of my fondest memories growing up are times spent in the Adirondack mountains upstate in New York. Wandering, exploring, getting carelessly lost, and occasionally hitchhiking back to my uncles’ farm are among the realest experiences I’ve had; perhaps these are the times in my life I’ve lived most attuned to Fluxus values.

My goal was to combine that feeling with my second intention: an intervention of instructions using humor (“that deadliest of weapons against all that is pompous, staid, and holy” Zhuangzi). Scores, essentially lists of instructions, always seemed to me a weird vehicle for Fluxus to employ. It’s strange that they would employ such an explicit means–although maybe that’s part of it? Details such as “the third Friday of the month” and the pseudo-poetic structure of the stanzas are meant to imply some ornate level of significance, when there is in fact none. It is part of a trap laid for the reader: a lure with the promise of adventure only to discover a dead end, a punishment for following instructions blindly without question.

Or at least that was my original, somewhat callous intention for the score. Later when shared in class numerous other interpretations opened my eyes to alternate possibilities. My favorite of these (in keeping with the theme of wanderlust) involved changing the line “walk until your legs give out” to “walk until you cannot”: a far more open-ended prompt. Subsequently, the final line “Await further instructions” becomes similarly open to interpretation–the instructions can come from anywhere, you’ll know them when they come.

It’s always cool when other perspectives can show me new ways to riff off of something I created. I’m starting to truly value the potency of collaboration.

Washing Cycle

1) Pick up a dirty laundry
2) Wash it until it’s clean
3) Throw it at any surface that would make it dirty and do one of the following
a)Pick up the laundry and repeat step 1-3
b)Leave the laundry

Development and Inspiration
The first iteration of my score is a simple three step instruction. The first step is to “pick up a dirty clothes”. The second step is to simply “wash it clean”. And the third and final step is “throw it in a dirty puddle”. My inspiration for this score came from the scores in Grapefruit. In Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit there is a lot of seemingly pointless and absurd scores and instructions. Scores that stand out to me are Water piece which just simply stated “water”. Another one is where it tells you to hide until everyone forgets about you and die. I wanted to make a score that seem pointless like washing a dirty clothes just to throw it away and make it dirty. During the class discussion people brought up a lot of good points and observation about my score. Such as the score could represent a cycle or breaking of it. And that there is no further instructions after the last step, where it’s up to the person. So I took in those ideas and made the final version of my score. I wanted to give a clear option to the person performing this score. One option will create a cycle and another with break it. I also changed some of the wording to give more freedom to the performer. I changed dirty clothes to dirty laundry so that they can use other things such as socks, pants or even backpack. I changed the dirty puddle part to any surface that would dirtied the laundry. The reason for this change is because during the discussion someone brought up the point of what if the performer couldn’t find a dirty puddle. All these changes would let the performer use any laundry and at anywhere.

Idea
My idea behind the score is the idea of redundancy and cycle. Everybody is technically already doing the first three steps in their everyday life. They got dirty laundry and they would wash it. Eventually the clothes gets dirty by touching multiple surfaces and then the cycle repeats again. This is why I made the score vague in terms of time. I did not tell the performer to do the step right after the other. I left out the words such as “then” and “finally” so that each step can be done at any time. Everyone is repeating the 3 step until they chose to leave the laundry. The option at the end is a representation of the option everyone has: an option to stop. But ending a cycle is difficult. For example a bad habit, people can tell you stop but it’s difficult. You’re not gonna stop unless you want it to. Like the dirty laundry why would you throw it away just because a score gave you an option to. Only reason you would want to is you choose it yourself.