a year in song is an interactive performance. the audience isn’t a passive bystander but instead an active member of the art piece. inspired by my spotify wrapped for 2022, as I near the end of my time at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I’m thinking a lot about journeys and how while we are all on our own path these trails are interconnected and intertwined in so many ways that we don’t even realize. I had an acquired cardboard pole that I painted with acrylics the year prior. top to bottom goes from a sunrise to a night sky scene. it represents this ritual of going through time - beginning and ending the day, week, month, and year. once I had my structure, I wrote fifty 3 line poems inspired by songs from my Spotify wrapped playlist. I chose twelve that created a story I vibed with. I formatted the zines on Canva and printed them on copy paper. I cut and folded the pages myself and attached them to the pole with thumb tacks. I wrote my instructions for the audience as seen below and printed it on cardstock.
I love round robins. the sound of voices overlapping as they all arrive to the end of the destination on their time is very fascinating to me. I wanted to incorporate that into my work. I had previously done a performance called a coke a day keeps the thoughts at bay where I had my classmates and teacher read a poem of mine they all picked out individually. But it becomes so much more realistic to the everyday struggle of being one voice in the sea of billions all screaming out to be heard. So, I'm not only making my experience their own, I'm now making them compete for attention. Which is one way to look at this performance. Another way to perceive this act of weaving my audience's voices together is to see how each of them balances the other and creates their very own song that would be incomplete without even one of them. They are now supporting each other.
During my audience's reading, I went around with an iPad mini, prompting each participate while they are reading to choose songs from my Spotify playlist to play. I had noise cancelling headphones on, so this whole performance, I couldn't hear a word of what people were saying. This speaks to how we oftentimes move through the world unaware of the way we affect others and how others are affecting us.
assisted by Yaelin Calaguas Kim, Asia Robago, Justin Cross, and Madison.
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