Performance Art Piece

My performance art piece... which i couldn't think anything better to call it other than "untitled". it almost seems more like a social experiment than a performance of art... but i think it qualifies because hopefully when you "experience" it, it will make you think, which is what art (should) do.

if you weren't there, what i did was show the class an image of a drawing i had done while messing around with india ink on watercolor paper... the reason i used this specific drawing was because it was done without any pre-planning or any thought. i just played the music and drew whatever i heard...every instrument represented in the finished product.

i then played specific parts of 3 different songs for the class, and told them that one song was the inspiration for the image. i asked them to look at the picture while they were listening, and try to isolate the different sounds and specific instruments, and just as they were listening try to see whatever shapes the music made. (i realize now after doing this that i'm asking people to listen really carefully on a much deeper level than they would normally, and doing it on the spot)

so basically i asked them to try to get inside my head while i was drawing and listening and using this india ink to translate what i heard into shapes on a piece of paper.

the songs were

all i need by radiohead (2:41 to about 3:10)
black white by the ravonettes (just the first 30 seconds of the song)
howl by black rebel motorcycle club (0:40 to 1:10)


the results were interesting, nobody in the class thought it was "all i need" by radiohead when that was in fact the song behind the drawing.

"black white" by the ravonettes drew 4 votes. I chose this song because it to me sounded very unlike the drawing... it sort of marches on and just sounds rigid and chanty...not swirling around with different textures like in the image.

the rest of the class (about 18 votes) favored "howl" by black rebel motorcycle club. I probably shouldn't have chosen this song for this though, because now that I realize how extra hard i'm expecting people to have to listen in order to get what I was doing, i probably shouldn't have used a song that really sounds like it could be the image. I chose it because it was kind of loud, like the part of the radiohead song i used, and i thought maybe people wouldn't see the finer details as depicted in the image.

so basically, i didn't really get any conclusive results... but i hopefully made the class think a little bit at least, and maybe see the correlation between the song and the image if they listen again, a little more closely this time.