Make Me Miniature
Make Me Miniature choreographs a dream. A memory … Of childhood and adolescence. Of the illicit house parties of my youth. The work evokes a desire to be small, to squeeze into tight spaces, to experience a feeling of claustral joy. The childhood home is both a place of sanctuary and a site of unexpected fear, where monstrous creatures lurk amid the shadows, and wake you startled from your dreams.
The installation combines a dolls house mise-en-scene with video mapped projections, lighting effects and original live sound design.
“To be in a house … is not only to feel protected from a hostile outer world; it is to experience oneself in a larger world in miniature … I feel at one with the universe not because I am extended out into it, or can merely project myself there, but because I experience its full extent from within my discrete place in the house. … I connect the tiny and the enormous in one stroke.” (Edward Casey)
Theory
Our initial literary inspirations for Make Me Miniature were taken from Edward Casey's The Fate of Place: a Philosophical History which "offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualisations of place and space in Western thought." (Casey, 1997: p.fourth cover) and Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space which amongst other things explores how “particular nooks and crannies where one has dreamed are inscribed into our childhood selves” (Racz, 2015: p.134-135). Also Imogen Racz's Art and The Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday which argues that "the 'female space' of the home is a legitimate place of both creation and exhibition." (Racz, 2015: p.67)
We also wanted to create this piece in order to explore the multitude of relationships one has with 'home' from being a parent "literally weighed down with stuff” (Baraitser, 2009: p.146) to the nurturing womb like embrace of home as "we exist in the womb in a state of sublime gratification. (Howell, 1999: p.53)
Inspiration
Semi-Detached (2004) (pictured below) is a replica of Michael Landy's childhood home and "the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us.” (Bachelard, 1958: p.14-15) In addition to the similarities with our piece we also enjoy how a gallery space can imbue a subject with additional meaning and gravitas. Other examples of include Rachel Whiteread's Place (Village) (2006) and Robert Lepage's 887 (2015)
Michael Landy Semi-Detached (2004)
Through playing with size, perspective and hyperrealism Ron Mueck is able to create an immediate connection between the viewer and the viewed. The pubescent girl pictured below in Ghost (1998) looks uncomfortable in her own skin and seems to be trying not to be noticed but is being betrayed by her new ungainly, alien body. We hope that through the juxtaposition of scales the piece is able to shift the viewers interpretation of the different elements from feelings of creeping unease to playful childlike wonder, as Best notes; “Art revokes the liminal world of the infant” (2007: p.511).
"Benning restored an abandoned house so the interior would reflect the date of its abandonment, the mid-1960s." (Benning, 2012: p.1) Given a large enough budget and timescale we would like to explore working on similar scale, perhaps even on a larger scale, encompassing a number of buildings and incorporating collaborations with other performers and musicians, as shown in the Black Mirror video below.
Heather Benning The Dollhouse (2007)
Alexander Schubert Black Mirror (2016)
We would also like to experiment with a more narrative lead performance such as in Electric Hotel should any future iteration of the project seek to pursue a less dream like atmosphere and more strictly choreographed movement. Or more descriptive sound design in order to create motifs for either the characters or unfolding scenarios such as in both Electric Hotel and Hans was Heiri (below).
David Rosenburg Electric Hotel (2011)
Zimmermann and de Perrot Hans was Heiri (2013)
In 2 Dimensional Life of Her Noble's creations are able to exist in a multitude of dimensions and even to escape them. This piece was a huge influence on Make Me Miniature and was the original inspiration for experimenting with projections within the house.
Willi Dorner's Urban Bodies in Space gave us the theoretical framework to embrace the confinement of the various spaces in which we projected videos. "The intention … is to point out the urban functional structure and to uncover the restricted movement possibilities and behaviour … By placing the bodies in selected spots the interventions provoke a thinking process” (Dorner cited in Hunter, 2015: p.63)
Willi Dorner Urban Bodies in Space (2007)
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's work with structures, both small and life size and their choreographic placement of objects has been a source of inspiration and as we discovered their work quite late into our production of Make Me Miniature has served to reassure us that we are tapping into a shared fascination with the small, the home and playing with scale. Examples of their work that have been of particular relevance to us are: (from left to right) Conversion with Antonello (2015), Opera for a Small Room (2005), The House of Books Has No Windows (2008), The Empty Room (1997) and (below) The Muriel Lake Incident (1999).
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller The Muriel Lake Incident (1999)
In addition to Cardiff and Millers influence on the mies-en-scene we also experimented with creating both an environment of rubbish, and placing the house on a mound of rubbish similar to Yingmei Duan's Rubbish City (2008) (pictured below left) which creates a "labyrinth of rubbish ... a narrow, winding path, [and] thousands of objects covering the floor.” (Lepecki, 2012: p.78)
Astana Cordero's Solo...? (2008) (below right) uses “a variety of domestic objects, among them a TV set, electric appliances, buckets, fans, electric wires, lamps, shovels, irrigation systems, and desktop and laptop computers" (Lepecki, 2012: p.88) and throughout her performance destroys them. We found this piece evocative for exploring the idea of being surrounded by the unneeded and often unwanted things on our own home.
Bodie (pictured below) is a ghost town in California which we visited a couple of years ago during a road trip across America. It is a place that has stayed with us and we have often discussed the feel of this abandoned town and it has inevitably informed the feel of Make Me Miniature. The town was abandoned extremely quickly and the houses are still home to the decaying furniture and tins of food left by their old inhabitants. "Just as humble, unspoken moments render places intimate, so do objects that we know primarily through use. We do not typically pay heed to such items the way we would objets d’art; they become part of the fabric of our lives, too close to us to be noticed. When we do pause to consider these inconsequetials, … the word ‘holiness’ comes to mind." (Benning, 2012: p.14) We hope to have recreate the feeling of recent abandonment in some rooms of the house.
Sound
"through the application of sound transformations, creating as it were 'impossible sound complexes' in the sense that such things do not exist in nature, the listener is confronted with transcontextuality." (Landy, 1991, p. 6)
We wanted the audio of Make Me Miniature to be descriptive of the different rooms within the house and so created a short loop for each of the rooms. This audio was then processed live as part of the performance. Each room has its own sound and all the different elements are able to be played together and can be abstracted to the point of being unrecognisable from their original source. This scale of description to abstraction allowed the piece to "evoke particular images [and also] interact with more abstract[ed] aspects of musical composition.” (Emmerson, 1986: p.17) This method of performance also allowed me to start from the abstracted versions and bring them into focus allowing me to keep their "sources and causes ... relatively mysterious or ambiguous rather than blatantly obvious” (Smalley, 1997, p. 109).
It was important to us that each element of sound was simple and be able to have any number of them playing at once without the piece becoming cluttered. My main inspiration for the more musical elements of Make Me Miniature was Japanese composer Hideki Takahashi who's work we were introduced to at teamLabs 2017 exhibition Future World in Singapore. Black Wave (below) shows his ability to create descriptive sound design alongside simple yet emotive musical elements. Takahashi also able to demonstrates how different elements can become characters in their own right, such as the percussive chime in Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as well, Transcending Space (below).
Process
"To inhabit a room is for it to be in us, and for us to be in an entire house and world through it. … inhabitation itself is two-way. Just as I am in the dwelling that is also inside me, so I feel centred by being within the dwelling in which I reside – orienting myself by what is around me." (Casey, 1997: p.293)
Initially we intended to have a house built for us by my father similar to the one on the first two pictures below but felt we needed something that felt more gothic, a house with more gravitas. The house we eventually bought was hand made my a now dead Grandfather for twins, who turned out to be boys and completely uninterested in it. The house has sat in an attic for a decade, unloved and unwanted and the pervious owner was happy to the point of tears that it was going to be given a new life and displayed to the public. The rooms were painted white in order to better project upon them but we did not paint the facade as we enjoyed the rough wooden finish and having it all the same colour meant it was easier to see as a whole in a darkened room. We experimented extensively with the layout of each room and will continue to do so for any future showings. We hope to show the piece again several times and the performance department of Leeds Beckett University have spoken about basing their next Light Night Leeds piece around it - starting with the house and then performing movement for each room and using the original sound design.
In order to create the projections we shot footage from several angles within a theatre then projected them into the house with varying degrees of success. In the first example (below) we aimed to have the projection clime up and around the poles, but it was ultimately unsuccessful as there were too many obstacles in the way. The second example in the bathroom worked well but we decided to redecorate the room as so was no longer useable. Although our projected was the probably the worst quality one we had access to the pixelated quality of the projections gave the piece a voyeuristic tone as it looked like CCTV footage which ironically we felt gave the projections a sense of anonymity. For future performances we aim to recreate this effect in software and use a better, quieter projector and will also use VPT 7 projection mapping software to better fit the projections into the desired spaces.
The LED lights in the house were wired into an Arduino Uno and programmed in the Arduino software and Ableton Live. The lights were activated with MIDI via Ableton which allowed us to trigger the lights live as part of the performance, and to keep them in sync with the various musical and sound elements of the piece. The lighting system was the most complicated part of the whole process and required learning basic coding and electrical wiring. There is surprisingly little in the way of tutorials online as generally people who want to trigger lights with MIDI are doing so on a larger scale, such as in a club, and would use systems like a DMX MIDI to USB interface.
Although we have collaborated on many projects in the past this is only the second project my wife and I have worked on in which we have completed our own shared vision and had complete creative control. We view this project as both an ongoing work that can be continuously reimagined and redesigned and as a proof of concept for future projects in which explore similar ideas, perhaps on a larger scale.
Bibliography
Bachelard, G. (1958) The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA.: Beacon Press
Baraitser, L. (2009) Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. Oxon: Routledge.
Benning, H. (2007) The Dollhouse [installation], Sinclair, 5 January 2017.
Benning, S. (2012) The Dollhouse. Vancouver: Benning.
Cardiff, J. & Miller, G., B. (1997) The Empty Room [Installation], London, 3 February 2017.
Cardiff, J. & Miller, G., B. (1999) The Muriel Lake Incident [Installation], London, 3 February 2017.
Cardiff, J. & Miller, G., B. (2005) Opera for a Small Room [Installation], London, 3 February 2017.
Cardiff, J. & Miller, G., B. (2008) The House of Books Has No Windows [Installation], London, 3 February 2017.
Cardiff, J. & Miller, G., B. (2015) Conversion with Antonello [Installation], London, 3 February 2017.
Casey, E. S. (1997) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Cordero, A. (dir.) 2008, Solo...?, performance, n.d. Nott Dance Festival, viewed 8 April 2017.
Corner, W. (dir.) 2007, Urban Bodies in Space, performance, 4 July, Festival Paris Quartier, viewed 18 March 2017.
Duan, Y. (2008) Rubbish City [Installation], Malmo, 24 April.
Emmerson, S. (1986) The Language of Electroacoustic Music. London: Macmillian Press.
Future World (2017) [Exhibition]. ArtScience Museum, Singapore. 12 March 2017 - TBA.
Howell, A. (1999) The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to its Theory and Practice. Oxon: Routledge.
Landy, Michael. Semi-Detached. London: Tate, 2004.
Landy, L. (1991) Sound Transformations in Electroacoustic Music. [Online] Available from: http://people.bath.ac.uk/masjpf/CDP/landyeam.htm [Accessed 20 April 2017].
Lepage, Robert. 887. Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 2015.
Lepecki, A. (2012) Dance: Documents of Contemporary Art. London, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.
Mueck, Ron. Boy. Aarhus: Aarhus Art Museum, 1999.
Mueck, Ron. Ghost. Liverpool: Tate, 1998.
Noble, Fleur Elise. 2 Dimensional Life Of Her. Brisbane: Brisbane Festival, 2008.
Racz, I. (2015) Art and The Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday. London, I.B. Tauris and Co.
Rosenburg, D. (dir.) 2011, Electric Hotel, performance, 23 - 24 September, The Pavilion, viewed 10 April 2017.
Schubert, A. (2016) Black Mirror [Installation], Luxembourg, 11 April 2017.
Smalley, D. (1997) Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes. Organised Sound, 2 (2) pp. 107-126.
Takahashi, H. (2016) Black Waves. Tokyo: teamLab.
Takahashi, H. (2017) Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as well, Transcending Space. Tokyo: teamLab.
Whiteread, Rachel. Place (Village). London: V&A Museum, 2006.
Zimmermann & de Perrot. (dirs.) 2013, Hans was Heiri, performance, 23 - 26 January, Barbican, viewed 10 April 2017.