Performance Art

link:             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=236KcMN2IzY&feature=youtu.be

For this project, I decided to use humor and nostalgia as a means to captivate an audience. And as a performance art piece, I wanted my project to serve as a social experiment. Living on campus, this was very convenient to produce, as I can simply walk around anywhere on campus and find people to use as an appropriate audience for this experiment. I gathered my old Heely's from deep in my storage, this also happened to be my first time wearing them since high school. I had a friend of mine film as I put my Heely's on and rode around one of the busiest spots on campus. My goal was achieved, as I stood out from everybody else in the area, gaining attention and people's thoughts and impressions/interpretations. The meaning behind my piece is to promote being comfortable to stand out from the crowd and not to care if people are judging you, because as long as you are having fun, that is all that matters! Another thing I wanted to promote through my performance art was to have the audience/passers smile, laugh, or bring back childhood memories to when they used to play with Heely's. And, after hearing from several subjects from my audience after filming, I have done exactly as I had hoped.

Some people may not know this, but Kanye West is actually a great performance artist. In 2010, the rapper directed, produced, and starred in his own music video/short film for the song, "Runaway". The short film was essentially an intricate rendition of his entire album, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy". West beautifully uses special effects and the characters and actions along with his music to convey very strong messages and a story. Kanye definitely uses a great deal of technology in this piece, unlike Marina Abromic, however they both effectively convey very strong and powerful messages and emotions to the audience through their own style. Marina Abromovic's performance art piece, "Rhythm 0", was also very interesting, powerful, but strange project. Ultimately the whole project involved Abromovic sitting still and expressionless for a long period of time as she allows dozens of complete strangers to stare at or mess around with her with various odd or dangerous objects/materials. To me, I feel like her expressionless face and body language as strangers screw with her actually does show a lot of emotion in an abstract way. I feel that she is very brave, strong, independent, and successful at what she does for coming up with this strange but unique concept, and for maintaining her composure through all the odd and uncomfortable things happening to her. Abromovic does not depend on technology for her performance art piece, is it plays a very small role in the overall piece. The only 'technology' she uses is the props and materials she lets the strangers use, which is very minimal in part to the rest of the project.