Initial Ideas
My Initial Ideas for the theme of The Everyday revolve around portraying my experience of everyday life to an audience, and I want to do so through the means of visual and audio content. I think that creating an experience that reflects my own of everyday life would be interesting for an audience member to interact with, and educational about experiencing life with disabilities. I will begin my experimentation and research from this concept, and it will most likely evolve into something lager or different, in terms of refining content and developing my theme. Another interesting perspective is that of the concept of everyday life, and researching what the classifying elements are of such, and from a psychological point of view, how experiences and opinions are formed around the core of the ‘everyday’.
Research
John Cage
John Milton Cage was an American composer and music theorist who lived between September 5th of 1912 – August 12th of 1992. Cage is viewed as one of the leading pioneers of the post-war avant-garde; producing music, electroacoustic music and involving both non-standard use of musical instruments, and musical use of non-standard instruments. Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4’33” which was received with confusion accompanied by controversy at the time, due to its contents being the “absence of deliberate sound”; the 4 minute 33 second piece consisting of just environmental sounds that were witnessed by the audience, although is often viewed as simply silence. The piece of Cage’s that interests me the most, however, is his 1960 production ‘Walter Walk’, performed on the CBS game show “I’ve got a Secret”, which provided Cage with a chance to present his avant-garde music to the public eye. The piece, I view, as very performative in its nature, however it existed to produce a musical piece consisting of sounds Cage made using various non-musical objects (excluding a grand piano) during his performance. The objects, or “instruments”, are unconventional in nature; a water pitcher, an iron pipe, a goose call, a bathtub, a rubber duckie, five unplugged radios and various other objects and props are used in a myriad of ways to create noise during the performance. The audience reacted with unsure, nervous laughter throughout the composure of the music, unknowingly participating as an additional instrument to Cage’s piece. I find the video of ‘Water Walk’ fascinating, and I can imagine the confusion and controversy Cage caused with producing these kinds of pieces in the 50’s and 60’s, before more abstract audio and performative art was widely recognised and respected.
John Cage “Water walk” – YouTube: Week One – Mason EatonExperimentation
This Initial week is for planning Experimentation, to provide reasoning and context to my work. I have established that I want to work with Audio and Video media, so I will need to experiment with these two and a combination of to create a starting point to develop from. I plan to take audio recordings and video from my phone to begin with, then compile those recordings and edit them into short experiments to portray my surroundings and personal outlook. From this experimentation, I will reflect, analyse then refine what I want to do next in response as development, at which point I will loan some equipment to take higher quality video and audio recordings once I have solidified my developed ideas. I will also create experimentation in response to this week’s research, which revolves around John Cage’s ‘Water Walk’, taking inspiration from his stylization. Other Experimentation I may consider includes auto-writing to accompany recordings and/or media, to create more context to any footage or audio that I capture.
Bibliography
Open Culture. 2022. John Cage Performs Water Walk on “I’ve Got a Secret” (1960). [online] Available at: <https://openculture.com/2011/12/john_cage_performs_iwater_walki_on_ive_got_a_secret_1960_.html> [Accessed 9 October 2022].
Tate. 2022. John Cage 1912-1992| Tate. [online] Available at: <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-cage-845> [Accessed 9 October 2022].
Water Walk. 1960. Directed by J. Cage. New York City: CBS Game Show : ‘I’ve Got a Secret’. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXOIkT1-QWY&t=1s> [Accessed 9 October 2022]
Gosetti-Ferencei, J., 2007. The Ecstatic Quotidian. 1st ed. Penn State University Press, Chapter 1 : The Quotidian and Literary-Phenomenological Departures from Everydayness (pp. 13-40).
A good post Mason, a thoughtful, careful, considered plan and articulate cohesive research. I look forward to weeks 2 post which will include research on 2 of the projects that I showed you in the presentation and your research, reflection and experimentation for your project. Yes a good idea to get going with your phone and then move onto better equipment later, maybe, or maybe the phone works best for you, lets see, we have a gimbal tripod you can use for your phone if you end up filming with it..the honesty and generosity in the idea is key, exciting, so lets see how this develops..