Beginning preparation for seminar.

I have to do my seminar in just over a week. What I've got at the moment is a little unorganised, but I kind of like that. I've been able to keep piling in new ideas as I go without too many restrictions. I've decided to stick with the idea of a party as the main story, but with other deviations to support my genre (which can be classified as absurdism). The themes I have picked out to cover and discuss in my seminar so far, to describe them generally, are social, existentialist, and expressionist.

During my seminar I intend to show people videos of some of the artists I have been gathering inspiration from, a thought I might back out as it might negatively effect the audience reaction to my finished piece (due to people disrespecting a lack of apparent originality). This is one of the videos I'm thinking at the moment, it is of a musician/sound artist I've recently taken a huge interest in, and stolen a number of techniques from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2WSeZZV6iQ&feature=related

I couldn't find any decent videos of the performance artist Marina Abramovic I've been studying so here is a description of one of her performances, "Rhythm 0":

To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her.

Abramović had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip, and, most notoriously, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.

Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) several people began to act quite aggressively. As Abramović described it later:

“The experience I learned was that…if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed.” ... “I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.”

Inspiration

I've collected the two beats I want to use for my film, one is said to induce euphoria, the other creativity and inspiration. The inspiration beat is very aggressive, it has very defined pulses, so what I've decided to do is have the euphoria beat playing throughout the entire piece (save for one part of silence somewhere at the end). The inspiring will only come in at choice sections accompanied with a large number of shots a fraction of a second in length.

Recently I've been looking at this performance artist Marina Abramović and I've found a lot of her work very inspiring. It made me think that performance art is to drama, as sound art is to music. Maybe I could do a similar concept for my piece, do video art instead of a film.