A Performance That Can Only Happen Once

I call this week’s assignment “A Performance That Can Only Happen Once”. It’s a performance that follows a simple set of rules to ensure its unrepeatability:

1. Read a generated piece of text that is not saved anywhere.
2. As you read the text, destroy the clothes you are wearing.
3. Record this performance, saving it to a USB drive (and only a USB drive!).
4. Show the performance to one person, preferably in a memorable or beautiful place.
5. When the video is done playing, remove the USB drive. Destroy it together with your audience.

I struggled quite a bit coming up with a meaningful experience for one. I spent quite some time thinking about it, and most of the experiences I could think of that took advantage of the base assumptions of a daily reality ended up being little more than pranks.

I didn’t want to do something cruel, and I didn’t really want to do something that was just a prank, even if it was just amusing or even kind.

This led me to thinking about what makes a time-based experience, especially an experience for one person, meaningful. I think it’s the sense that something is “just for you”, so I decided to lean fully into that type of experience and try to create something that could only happen once. I’ve done a lot of work with generative text in the past, so a poetry reading that is impossible (or at least highly unlikely) to be repeatable was the first thing that came to mind.

I have a text file of the complete works of James Baldwin, one of my favorite authors, so I decided to use it to generate the text. I ended up reusing an old ml5 example using Baldwin as the training data instead of Virginia Woolf — it uses a stateful recurrent neural network to generate a text character-by-character.

This was a good seed of an idea, but it still didn’t feel like much of a performance, or something that unique: plenty of people read generated poetry, and plenty of performances (depending on how you define the word) are improvised in such a way that they can only happen once. How could I further ensure the uniqueness, and thus the meaningfulness, of this performance? I decided that something that would certainly reinforce the point being made, while simultaneously making the performance more entertaining, was to do something to prevent the very circumstances of the performance from happening again. Since I wasn’t using any type of set or props, this meant I had to make sure my costume wasn’t repeatable: I decided to destroy the clothes I was wearing as I performed.

This was almost there, but I still felt something was missing. I spoke to my brother, who’s a masters’ student in theater and the University of Galway, and he made a suggestion I really liked: why not further emphasize the digital nature of the performance and do something like a personal version of a Snapchat message or an Instagram story? Make it a digital performance, but one that can only be viewed once, by one person.

Though I’d be interested in iterating on this performance by creating something like a website that can only be viewed by one person at a time, for the confines of this assignment there seemed to be one clear way of ensuring the performance could only be viewed once: putting it on a USB drive and destroying it afterwards. After this final piece, I was ready to perform. I chose my roommate, a longtime friend, as my audience (since he’s used to me doing weird things for art), but didn’t tell him any other details of the performance.

Recording

(The video of the performance has been destroyed per the rules, but I bent them a bit and took a few screenshots).

I generated a nonsense (but fairly poetic text), and picked a few articles of clothing that I no longer wear but that still held meaning to me: a shirt from the coding bootcamp I attended that led to my career as a programmer (and in a roundabout way led me to ITP), and a pair of pants that an ex-girlfriend to whom I no longer speak gave me. I wanted to make sure that the things I destroyed lent themselves to the unrepeatability of the performance: it wouldn’t have the same effect if I just bought a ten-pack of white tees and destroyed one. The underwear weren’t meaningful, but I don’t think I have any underwear that have a particularly special meaning to me.

I read the poem, and as I read it I took a hunting knife and cut up my shirt first, then my pants, then my underwear. It was not the most flattering angle.

After recording myself, I put on un-destroyed clothes, saved the video to my USB drive, went up to the roof of our building, then called and had him come upstairs. I hid a hammer (which I handmade in Ben Light’s subtraction class) under some furniture so he wouldn’t know what was coming. It was a beautiful day and we have quite a nice view. My laptop was out (in the shade so he could see the video), and I had him sit down and pressed play.

This was a pretty nerve-wracking part — I spent most of the four-minute video pacing around nervously.

Afterwards, I unplugged the USB drive, grabbed the hammer, and started smashing the USB drive. I had initially planned on doing this step by myself, but I felt that having him participate in the destruction would add to the experience for him, so after I’d cracked its casing I handed him the hammer.

After we’d bashed it up, I snapped its internal chip in half and threw it off the roof, then took my bow. I’d also damaged my beloved handmade hammer, which was unexpected (and kind of a bummer), but certainly added to the unrepeatability of the performance.

Takeaways

I did a quick reaction interview with my roommate afterwards, which you can see below, but I thought it went pretty well. Some expected and unexpected things:

1. He thought the video was disturbing, which hadn’t really occurred to me but I guess should have been pretty obvious.
2. Even without context, it was clear that this could only happen once, especially once we started destroying the USB drive, which made the experience more special for him.
3. He enjoyed himself, which was the thing I was most worried wouldn’t happen.
4. He suggested that, were I to do a new version of this, I might obscure my face in the video — watching me struggle to cut up my clothes was pretty funny at times, which made the video less alienating. I kind of like the juxtaposition of something creepy and something funny, so I’m not sure I’d take this advice.

This went about as well as I could have hoped — I’m glad I took so much time to agonize over my ideas before settling on one. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how you can create artwork that’s participatory, that gets people to participate in the moment. Arguably any time-based performance only happens once (in the exact way that it happens), but this is usually something that goes ignored. Most plays or performances exist in a magic circle, where we try to exit the flow of our daily lives and pretend that we’re witnessing something that exists outside of it. While this sort of escapism is important, I think doing work that draws more attention to the uniqueness of any given region in time, rather than trying to exist outside of time’s arrow, is just as important. I’m hoping to explore these ideas, and maybe continue iterating on this piece, in the coming weeks.