Laura Hynes & Kate Casanova
The "Living Room" project: a living performance space, bringing art and music to life.
In the tradition of 18-19th c. "salon" concerts, we would create a salon/living room out of various living elements: a grass couch, a fungus-growing chair, a moss wall or rug, flourescent-protein printed wallpaper, a flower foot stool, a rickety old upright piano (guts open and strings prepared) adorned with succulents. More "living art" is hanging on the walls of this formal space.
Performance of a "Life Cycle" song cycle? If the room took on a 18-19th c. style, it would also be really neat to juxtapose electronic music improv (filtered through sound patch of the sound of something growing) with 18-19th c. song. I like the idea of breaking up the original "classical" songs into fragments that would be gently improvised upon or altered and then interwoven with the electronic music... shadows of their former selves (à la George Crumb Makrokosmos III, mvmt. 5 "Music For a Starry Night" with its ghostly Bach fragments on prepared pianos).
Sara Nichol & Christy Newell
We decided we needed to focus our energy on something specific--something that captured our skills and interests and was doable in the timeline of the class. We had both been excited, but overwhelmed with some ideas that came out of our last meeting with doing a large collaborative project in a public space, so narrowing our focus seemed like the natural next step. Since both of us have an interest in photography and doing something with things that grow, we decided to create a series of living images. Some of our ideas with this included making stamps out of fluorescent proteins growing on a petri dish, making photo paper that has fluorescent proteins growing in/on it, and growing sprouts or other plants on top of an image.
We decided to draw up a tentative sketch of a photo series that incorporates some of our interests:
• Photo 1 is a blank sheet of paper
• Photo 2 is a photo & print of #1 with seeds sprouted out of it (at time of exhibition sprouts would be dead)
• Photo 3 is a photo & print of #2 when sprouts were living, with another plant/natural growth added (at time of exhibition new growth would most likely be dead as well)
• Photo 4 is a photo & print of #3 added to compost, decomposition begins and is later halted, leaving image partially destroyed
• Photo 5 is a photo & print of #4 while in compost pile, with GFP grown on the surface or in the emulsion
The photos could be shown in the Living Room, ideally under a black light. Photo 1 would glow under the black light because its surface is all white. Gradually, as the white surface of the photo is taken up by visual information in the picture, they would progressively glow less. That is, until the final print which would possess GFP.
Laura, Kate, Sara & Christy
We all liked the idea of the "Living Room" as a platform for other projects to take place within as well as being a project on it's own. It could be a space for Sara & Christy's photos to exist. It could be the stage for a performance of Laura & Kate's "Life Cycle" song.
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