Uncategorized – City and Site

May 13, 2016Joshua Pearson No Comments

Record(ing): The development of art and an artist.

Framing Statement:

For our piece, we invited audience members to watch a 20 minute ‘tour’ of the high street starting at Churchills’ café following the high street all the way down until just past the train lines. This however was not an ordinary tour. We created a facebook event where allocated times were posted and it was up to the audience to say which slot they would like. After they did this we then devised a timetable so we knew what times people would be coming in order to allocate ourselves breaks and organise for the tablet we used to be charged. The audience member received instructions over facebook (on the event) as to what to do next. The description of the event was as follows –

“Recording the high street.

A record of the high street.

If you would like to attend this performance please post your preferred allocated time on this page, performances are an individual experience and will occur every thirty minutes starting on the hour.

Please ensure you arrive promptly as late comers may miss their slot.

Upon arrival, enter Churchills and wait to be greeted by a member of staff. Please make sure you let the waiter/waitress know you are here to see Record. You will then be taken to your seat.”

When audience members arrived at the café, they were shown to their seat by the waitress (after we negotiated the café’s involvement within our piece). Once the audience member was seated the waitress took their order, food and/or drink, and the experience could begin.

After reading the ‘menu’ we created the audience member proceeded to put on the headphones provided and watch the video. This 20 minute video took people on a ‘tour’ of the high street from the comfort of a chair in a café, the film was shot from a point of view angle (POV) using a steady-cam camera and was shot in 4K HD (influenced by Janet Cardiff, but more about her later). Along the journey there was a constant sound track playing over the top of the video which were all artifacts we had found during the process of putting together our piece. These included a symphony from a classical album, an extract from a book called ‘Dames don’t care’ and instructions on how to start a car; all of which we found in the car park that comes in the middle of our piece. Once the audience member arrived at the car park in the video the audio track was then played in reverse as the camera went back up the high street to show how an experience of a place can be altered by small things such as music, we felt this gave a whole new feel to the environment. Once the video arrived back at the café, the audience member was then given a few extra minutes to relax and digest their experience and was told (on the instructions) that they could leave whenever they wanted, we wanted this experience to be a relaxing a reflective time for the audience member and we believe we achieved this.

Analysis of Process:

Friday 6^th may 2016, it was our final performance. Because our performance didn’t require us to be actively involved in the piece it was a good time for us to reflect on our journey and the different events that led us to where we were.

Site specific performance, for me, is using the space around you in a unique and novel way to enhance the experience or change a person’s perspective on how they view a space. To alter the relationship between a person and a place is the essence of site specificity and this was what my group wanted to achieve from the very start. In the first few weeks we looked at numerous different practitioners such as John Smith and Tim Etchells from ‘Forced Entertainment’. One thing I noticed whilst studying these site specific practitioners is how they use everything within that space whether that is the buildings, people and also acts of randomness, Mike Pearson also mentions this in his introduction to site specific performance “Places are thus not so much fixed as implicated within complex networks by which hosts, guests, buildings, objects and machinery are contingently brought together to produce certain performance in certain places at certain times. Places are about relationships, about the placing of peoples, materials, images and the systems of different that they perform.” (Pearson, 2010)

The site were were given was the high street, we began to explore the high street as much as possible, ranging from the main strip down to hidden passages we had never noticed before. We began to think of different kinds of performance we could do in this space using Carl Lavery’s ‘Instructions for Performance in Cities’ (2005). After trying out different activities for Lavery’s document we decided that one of the things we found interesting was personifying the buildings around us. For this we assigned a certain sound to individual buildings, for example some buildings would let out a large sigh and some would let out a scream that sounded angry. These sounds then allowed us to develop characters for each building as they all sounded individual to us. The following week in class we watched a video called ‘girl chewing gum’ by John Smith, this video was a film of a normal street in England with a narrator over the top. Because the narrator took on a directorial role, it appeared he was controlling the action. For example, if a woman wearing a hat was to enter the screen he would say ‘woman wearing hat enter from left’ and so on. Because John picked out tiny moments in this film to narrate such as a girl chewing gum, we thought that noticing the un-noticed was an interesting idea that we wanted to include in our own piece. We walked around the high street yet again but this time looking out for the un-noticed, things that we walk past every day but are too caught up in the busy hustle and bustle of our hectic working lives to notice. We wanted to discover these hidden gems on the high street in order to give our audience a brand new experience of such an ordinary place they have visited numerous times. Not only did we look out for the un-noticed, we also tried viewing the high street from different angles such as stood on benches to see if this gave a different feel as we were experiencing the high street for the first time from the point of view!

After experimenting and having fun with our different activities we had developed we started to think about how we would present this performance, and like John Smith, we wanted to use technology (although ours would be more advanced). We thought about how we could use technology in a way that still gave an audience member a private experience, we then thought of QR codes. QR codes are square bar codes that you scan with smart pones that take you directly to an online link. We had decided to create a soundtrack made up of different interviews we had asked people. In these interviews the participants were asked a series of questions in a specific place, some of these questions were –

What do you think this place used to be used for?
If a significant event in your life happened here what would that be?
What does this place sound like if it could make a noise?

After we had collected enough interviews in different locations we then made multiple sound tracks (relating to Lavery’s 10^th instruction of creating a symphony) and allocated them to the corresponding QR codes, these QR codes were then sellotaped to the site. Audience members would find the QR codes by looking at a map they were given with tiny QR codes representing the location of the real codes.

Here are a few videos of our class trying out our initial performance –

After receiving feedback we discussed how we could further develop our piece by using images to make the piece more engaging for the viewer. We began doing some more research into site specific practitioners and found a woman called Janet Cardiff, using her work as inspiration we decided to change our piece from a stationary audio soundtrack to an audio and visual tour of the high street from a point of view perspective just like Cardiff’s ‘Alter Bahnhof video walk’. Using the influence of our two favorite practitioners (Cardiff and Smith) we began devising our final piece. We loved how Cardiff captured the site around her using a POV shot, this made the audience member feel more connected and because it was viewed through a smart film it almost looked as if the audience member was filming it themselves. However, in Cardiff’s work she has carefully placed performers working with her such as a band and a ballet dancer whereas we didn’t want that level of performativity in ours. We still really liked John Smiths acts of randomness as this enabled us to capture the natural beauty and buzz of the high street, combining the two practitioners gave us our final piece… Record(ing).

After discussing our ideas for the new audio/visual tour with our tutors we decided to keep the tour stationary. This is so the audience member could relax and be fully immersed in the experience from the comfort of one place, also so they didn’t have to hold a smart phone at eye level for 20 minutes as this would be extremely uncomfortable! As our group had spent a lot of time in Churchill’s café having meetings (and breakfast) we decided to have Churchill’s as the place where our audience would watch the tour. After much negotiating with Churchill’s staff and attempts to negotiate with the owner (although we never received an email back from him) we were able to secure two tables for the day of our performance. One for the audience member to watch the tour at and one hidden upstairs so we were out of view as we didn’t want to be in the final performance as that would have added a new level of performativity, we simply stayed in the café for security for the tablet and headphones we had provided so people could watch our piece. ‘Robinson in Space’ by Patrick Keiller was another inspiration for us as this was a beautifully shot film with narration over the top, the inspiration we took from this piece was incorporating the sound of birds when there was speech. Artifacts we had found in the car park in the middle of our film were recorded and edited together to make our soundtrack, this included an extract from a book called “Dames Don’t Care”, instructions we had found on a scrap piece of paper on how to start a car and the album cover for Symphony No.9 by Anton Bruckner. The soundtrack was a continuous and flowing piece of art carefully designed to relate to certain points in our film, for example when the camera looked at a church the music switched key to one more obviously Minor, and when the camera looked back to the high street switched back to major key thus provoking a more positive feel to the piece.

Our aim was to create a piece of art that altered a persons relationship with our site, through the careful design of the soundtrack, beautiful focus points in our film and the chance to take in the experience of the high street from the comfort of a café I believe we achieved this. Our film has turned what was once a regular high street into a piece of art for those who have seen our site specific piece, our work “incorporates documentation precisely in order to address the paradoxical relationship between its construction of a work and the site it seeks to uncover” (Kaye, 2000).

Performance Evaluation:

In reflection upon our piece of work, it is rewarding to see all the positives that came from our hard work, yet also rewarding to see our failures as this gives us the opportunity to grow as young artists and practitioners.

Things that worked well in our piece –

The camera we used was excellent; it was a steady cam which meant by using gyroscopes in the machinery, the camera automatically steadied itself creating an extremely smooth show which was easy on the audience’s eye. Not only was it incredibly smooth, it was also shot in 4K HD which meant it was crystal clear too enhancing the rich colour and sights of the high street.
Using the environment of the café worked extremely well as it placed the audience in a situation where they felt comfortable, warm and could digest food and drink out of a large selection to better enhance the experience.
Having only one person at a time made the experience more personal as it felt as if it really was his or her own journey down the high street. Not only this, but being on your own without distractions from friends or other audience members allowed participants to become fully immersed in the video.
Using artifacts we had found to create the soundtrack made the video more unique as it wasn’t like any song the audience member had heard before as we created it ourselves. This also made the video strikingly more artistic as the soundtrack had been carefully designed to relate to visuals on screen.

Things that we would improve for next time –

Unfortunately the computers we used to edit the video simply weren’t good enough for the quality of camera. Because the camera was on loan to us from an events company we were only able to get hold of the camera the Tuesday before our performance (the Friday). Because of this short space of time we had to film, we tried (and failed) many different techniques of editing the video ranging from 3 different computers and trying to compress the file to a worse quality so our computers could cope with it. Finally it got the point where we had to gain access to an editing suite at University and stay in there until 3 in the morning one night. Without a doubt next time we would try using the correct computers to edit in the first place.
As we didn’t have performers in our piece and everything that took place in the video were acts of randomness, different shoots led to different events taking place. One of our shoots on the second day of filming was perfect; we had beautiful weather, a busy high street, musical buskers interacting with the camera, constant stopping and starting because of traffic all making the video extremely interesting to watch! Unfortunately right near the end of filming the camera ran out of room on the memory card so stopped filming and because we wanted the video the be taken In one take to make it as smooth as possible we had to reshoot meaning we lost all of the unique and beautiful moments.

Record(ing) the Final Piece…

Here is our final piece that we uploaded to youtube for those who didn’t manage to see our performance on the day.

This experience has opened my eyes to an entirely new world of performance, a world that I wish to explore more as I develop as a young practitioner. As an artist I no longer see performance to be something contained in a traditional environment such as a stage, performance can happen and is happening anywhere and everywhere all the time.

Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem… All the worlds a stage…

Joshua Pearson.

Bibliography –

Kaye, N. (2000) Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London: Routledge.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palsgrave Macmillan.

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities.

May 2, 2016Emily Claire Bickerdike No Comments

The final stages

Throughout the past two weeks, the build up to the final performance has been very hectic and incredibly stressful. We have been trying, experimenting, developing, failing and creating.

The first hurdle we had to combat when experimenting was the sheer amount of props/set/objects we have in our piece, and how to source and build them. A big problem we keep returning to is the structure of the placards – the change in weather means they keep blowing over. We have experimented with building the placards from different materials, initially using broom handles as the main ‘stem’ and planting them into a compost-filled plant pot. After this was unsuccessful, we moved on to using bamboo sticks in compost, but again, whilst these were slightly more stable than the broom handles, once the wind picked up they eventually fell over. Instead, for our next experiment we aim to use bamboo sticks in a plant pot filled with sand, weighing the structure down more.

We also found that the cardboard part of the placards blows about in the wind, yet we are unsure if this is a hindrance or a nice aesthetic choice if kept; it gives the placards more of the natural theme we are trying to infer, as though they are plants blowing in the wind. It creates more of a visual spectacle for passers by to view, and even acts as a distraction in their line of sight, inviting them to have a closer look.

We had lots of difficulty sourcing tables and chairs for our experiments, and had to conduct them without. By doing this, we realised how integral they are to our piece, as without them we cannot have an intimate connection with our audience-participants, nor can we make them feel comfortable and at ease. Without this sense of ease, we are less likely to get audience-participants that open up and write down the more personal answers we are hoping for. As a result of this, we haven’t yet been able to have any interaction with audience-participants. Instead, we have been conducting the piece without the audience element, creating the placards from answers we have previously received in earlier experiments. We hopefully be running the piece as it should be, with audience-participants, in a couple of days.

Over the past few weeks, we have done closer experiments with individual elements of the piece. An example of this is the shredding element. To recap: our idea is to shred the answers that people wish to destroy, and to turn these shreddings into compost by mixing it in with soil. A development we made through trying and testing was to allow the audience-participants to shred their own answers; this is to provide absolute confidence that their answers are destroyed as they are doing it themselves, as well as ensuring our role is more background, and the audience-participant is placed at the centre of the piece.

We also looked at ways to draw the roots from the plant pots – we used chalk to slowly and methodically make the roots ‘grow’ from the pots as the piece progressed, embedding the placards into the space. Once we had taken the placards and pots away, we noticed how the roots remained, and appeared almost alien to the space. The idea of the roots remaining with no context for passers-by is intriguing as it will make them question why and how they got there, allowing them to engage with and notice the space in a way that perhaps they never had before. Furthermore, the idea that the roots remain links in with our aim of planting something in the audience-participants’ (and even passers by) heads that will grow and develop into action. The roots in the space link up with the roots in the minds of those involved – they will always be connected to Speakers’ Corner in a way they never had been before.

Additionally, we created a blog page giving information about Speakers’ Corner and the aims of our performance. This will be given in the exchange between audience-participant and artist in the form of a hand-written note. The audience-participant, it is hoped, will then follow that link after they have left the site, taking the performance with them into their every day lives in a more physical sense – it doesn’t simply leave them once they leave the space; another way we are rooting thought and action into their minds. To end our piece, we want to take photographs of each placard/post-it note and document them on that same blog site – this gives them a permanent place in the world, long after we have dismantled the placards, and even after the cardboard has been recycled into something new. We are doing this because we believe the thoughts people will be expressing are so important, and must remain alive by any means. As we cannot leave the placards in the space, we will ‘install’ them online in a more permanent way.

In his book, Site-Specific Performance, Mike Pearson asks the question: “How can site-specific performance play a role in an active engagement with place, helping make sense of the multiplicity of meanings that resonate from landscapes and memories?” (Pearson, 2010, 56). “Active engagement with place” (Pearson, 2010, 56) is what we want our audience-participants to achieve; discovering the intended purpose and history of the site, and being inspired to act upon this in the space. The “multiplicity of meanings” that resonate from our site are what we hope to metaphorically show in our piece through the placards, roots, watering, gagging and shredding. All of these elements emulate the ghosts of the Suffragette rally gone before, the emptiness and natural beginnings of the site as a field, and we hope that enough of these will shine through to an audience. This idea of layering histories comes from Cathy Turner’s notion of palimpsest, where “no space is truly empty, as left at site will be traces of what has happened there before” (Gleave, 2011), an idea that has shaped our piece from beginning to end, and will continue to inspire us as we develop further in the final stages.

Works Cited

Gleave, J. (2011) The Reciprocal Process of the Site and the Subject in Devising Sitespecific Performance. MPhil(B). Univeristy of Birmingham.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

April 15, 2016Emily Claire Bickerdike No Comments

Going back to the roots

We decided to meet up and discuss the logistics and meaning of our piece, writing everything down in an attempt to be fully clear, as individuals, on our roles and the meanings behind them. We realised when doing this that we were over-complicating our piece; we needed to strip it back to our original idea. Whilst we were simplifying our overall piece, we found it hard to plot out what each person would be doing at what point, so we decided to focus exclusively on the idea of growth – growth of ideas, growth of confidence, growth of voice.

Whilst remaining with the idea of watering each placard to nurture the ideas and make them bloom, we decided it would be a good idea to show this growth in some way throughout the duration of the piece. One person at a time would be given this task and then would rotate when everyone’s task changed over. The person responsible would walk to a filled plant pot and begin to draw chalk roots on the floor. These roots would eventually fill the space around one plant pot, at which point whoever drawing them would move on to another plant pot. Each time the artists rotate, the roots would be drawn longer and around more plant pots as they were filled, creating and interweaving map of thought and growth. The lack of permanence around this idea echoes the entire piece; the roots will be washed away with the rain (if this is the case in the performance, the artist starts over), much like how the cardboard would wilt and the writing would run. This element of temporality emulates the life cycle of plants: they grow, they are nurtured, they wither, they die. However, the ideas on the placards remain. Once they are revealed to the world, they cannot be removed.

Continuing with this idea of growth and nurturing, we decided to incorporate the ‘destroyed’ answers into this natural cycle. Using a hand-powered shredder, we will shred the ‘destroy’ answers into strips of paper, and it will be one artists’ job to turn that paper into compost. They will travel around each filled plant pot and mix the paper in with the soil using their hands. This raw, ritualistic-style action adds another layer of nature to our piece, and shows that all ideas can fuel the desire for protest and change.

As a group, we also made a big decision regarding the audience of our piece. We decided to bring our work closer to that of our main influence, Adrian Howells, and make the piece a one-to-one experience. One at a time, an audience-participant would come up to the table, sit, and make eye contact. At which point, the artist sat at the table would produce a piece of paper with the first set of instructions on it; the audience-participant reads it; they make eye contact; they are handed the question and paper/pen; they write; they are given the last set of instructions; they are given a card; they put their answer into one of the two boxes; they leave; the next person sits down. And so on. This one-to-one experience gives the piece a much more personal feel, and delivers the idea we strived to achieve of making the audience feel connected to the piece in a deeper way, which allows them to give much more honest answers. By giving a one-t0-one experience, the audience-participant feels valued and are given time away from their lives for a couple of minutes to engage in collective catharsis, just as Adrian Howells does in many of his pieces. The idea of non-verbal conversations that Howells and Dee Heddon talk about is also present in our piece through the use of eye contact – not only does our lack of speech and purely aural communication tell the audience we are taking a step back (this is not about us, but about them), but allows them to search deeper into themselves via an intimate experience.

We went out into Speaker’s Corner to experiment with the placards and work out the logistics of them. We also wanted to find out, by using just one placard, whether people stopped to read it. We placed the placard in the centre of the square, and covertly sat on a bench on the other side.

We realised that the placards were rather unstable in the wind as it often fell over. We believe to counteract this, we need larger (deeper) buckets with a brick in the bottom of each to keep them weighted.

In terms of a reaction, most people who walked by reacted to the placard in some way. Most simply glanced at it, but some did stop to read it. When people walked by us in groups, we realised we’d created a talking point; people were answering the question, whether they knew it or not. They were talking about it to each other and giving answers without even realising. Most of the conversations we over heard suggested people were confused by the placard, and mainly believed that they had very little power at all.

March 18, 2016Emily Claire Bickerdike No Comments

“Free Power”

I conducted some further research on the work of Adrian Howells as I wanted to know more about his performances and how he uses different types of transaction. Currently, the transaction in our piece takes place in the form of cake being given to the audience-participants for helping us with our performance. However, I felt this type of transaction to be too impersonal and too forced rather than artistic and meaningful, yet the use of the cake as an incentive problematises this notion of meaningfulness, as it’s meaningful to us to get people to take part.

As a result of this, I read the article From Talking to Silence: A Confessional Journey by Dee Heddon and Adrian Howells, in the hope of finding out more about transaction. Heddon discusses how “the boundary between performer and spectator dissolves in the process of exchange, an exchange that asks for a very committed and at times vulnerable sort of spectatorship” (Heddon, 2011). Not only that, I found that in most of Howell’s work, exchange is “consistently dialogic […] performed within a wider cultural context of the mass-mediatization of the personal and private made public” (Howell, 2011). The use of dialogical exchange in Howell’s work is primarily used to help the audience-participants feel comfortable with sharing.

On Wednesday we wet out into Speaker’s Corner with signs advertising “FREE CAKE”. To our surprise (and contrary to similar experiments we have done in the past) a lot of people came over to talk to us. We generated more interest than ever before, simply by advertising something for free. I was delighted that we finally had participants, but somewhat disheartened with the lack of sustenance in our part of the transaction. Us giving out free cake lacks meaning and generosity, whilst somewhat telling people we’re only doing this for us, not them – the opposite of our purpose. So, we decided to ask our classmates.

Back in the seminar room we talked our classmates through our performance and our ideas, and asked them specifically about our use of transaction – what do you think to it? What does it say to you? What could we do instead? Some suggested that the transaction from our side is giving them the means to protest, giving them “free power”. Could we give them something physical to symbolise this? Perhaps a slip of paper with something written on it. Another person suggested giving them “free advice” on what they’d written down, like an advice slip you get from a cash machine, which are so present in Speaker’s Corner (this too plays on the idea of ‘transaction’ as that is what a cash machine is built for). Other more general ideas around our performance were born through this discussion, such as the placing of the placards into plant pots and allowing the audience-participant to do that themselves if they so wished – they are letting their idea grow and are nourishing/nurturing it. This triggered the idea of someone – perhaps one of us – going round at certain intervals and watering the soil each placard is planted in. Furthermore, the idea arose about having smaller signs branching off the larger placards once we run out to create a physical representation of a tree.

Works Cited

Heddon, D. and Howells, A. (2011) From talking to silence: a confessional journey. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 33 (1) 1-12.

March 15, 2016Kieran Spiers No Comments

Creating the performance

Over the past few weeks / months we have been thinking, experimenting and devising work. Initially we wanted to create a strucutural representation of the obelisk located in St Marks Square, but we realise that we could go further both themeatically, metaphorically and artistically.

Our aim for our site specific work is to bring in the community. The High Street as said previously, is a communal non-place. It is a transitional place. People move in and out and walk and don’t stop for anything other than to look inside a shop window or briefly speak to someone that they recognise on the street. The obelisk can be argued to be a centrepiece to the halting of the transitional atmosphere as it’s purpose was a fountain. People would drink from this place, it was a source of life. It was a source of nourishment. Now it is a memorial. A homage to those that have done extraodinary talents to lincoln. It has been stripped of it’s purpose which was to serve as a fountain but also a homage to St Thomas Beckett chapel that was demolished in the late 1700s.

Attracting an audience is often a tricky tact to do in a performance and in traditional theatre. Over the past weeks we have been experimenting with different questions and approaches to people on the high street and noted down best practice. We wanted to engage with the people on the high street, connect with them. See who would react to what specfic question and which methods / texts were being ignored. It became clear very early on that the broader, more complex questions got more responses such as: “If aliens were to attack the high street, where would they land” proved to be a favourite amongst people. We got distasteful reactions, responses were always interesting, funny looks, actual places such as the cathedral, tesco car park and “that house” were also given and all managed to contribute towards this initial experiment.

What we were creating through our experiments were episodic forms of Street Theatre rather than a piece of work that reflected Site-Specificity.

“Theatre should be product of the community” (Bim Mason, 133, 1992)

Our performance needed and is now currently underpinned by the historical significance of our specific site, as well as upheld via our practitional influences which as previously mentioned are Forced Entertainment, Michael Fried and John Newling. We are not dealing with performance of acting as such. We do not play characters, nor do we intend to. To play a character in our piece is would detract from the entire intention of our site-specific performance. It wouldn’t be organic and nor would it entice the audience i.e the community walking by, stopping, talking, writing labels on the bottles or our invited audience of our peers.

To frame our work as a whole I would argue that this is a type of exhibition. An organically built exhibition built through us as the performers and the audience that wander through the labelled bottles and infact the witnesses. The witnesses in context to this perfromance are those members of the public that contribute their suggestions to our final and only question:

In one word, what do you value most in life?

They witness their bottle being taken from them and / or placed down by themselves. The bottle is either placed in conjuction to the formation of the bottles placed by us – the performers, or it is infact placed totally different, distrupting the formation altogether but in doing so, making it a more organic piece. Something that is not orchestrated by us, but orchestrated by the audience.

It can be argued that when we are performing in this kind of site specific work we are not really performing. There is the assumption that we are as we are engaging with people as if they are an audience, we have our ‘stage’ we have our ‘props’ our ‘set’ and our ‘costume’ but we are not generating a theatrical performance and nor is our intention. We are simply bridging the gap between the audience and the art.

An Audience member > (Contributes a suggestion) > The suggestion is taken by the performer and is written on the bottle > (On the bottle is a white label, and in black permanent marker the suggestion is easy to read) > The performer places the bottle down in formation and the engagement with that particular member ends.

That is until they ask us (which is typical of people who are intrigued of lots of waterbottles being placed down on the street) in which case we pull our a piece of paper which contains a eulogy. The obelisk is representative of a memorial, of memory. So in this regard we are treating our particular site with the memory of the obelisk that once stood. There is the argument made by Michael Fried that if you move a work of art, that work is destroyed. Although the obelisk served a social purpose it did serve as a, archaelogical piece of artwork. Now because it has been moved, it’s purpose has moved with it. It no longer serves a communal nor social function. It is just something to be admired, something to look at, and something to be interpreted. Which is what our piece of work is incorporating throughout the duration of the performance.