Micro - macro. Experimental crit show performance.

Micro - Macro performance piece. My original idea was to combine microscopic footage of my body with flashing images of men at all ages of life, from a new born baby to an elderly man, to show the vulnerability of men, their flaws and wounds and imperfections. The work was loosely in response to third wave feminism, the friction between the sexes that is prevalent in the media a lot at the moment. Men and woman finding their new roles and expectations of eachother. I felt it was important to show male vulnerability, there is such a projection on men to be strong, powerful, gentle, loving, protective...a tough act to juggle. I complied the original video but wasn't pleased with the end result, it looked slightly disjointed and almost too strange and cryptic to make the point i was trying to make, i decided i would do it as a live performance, with the image from the microscope projected live on the wall behind me. I felt the contrast between micro and macro would be really effective and engaging. I also decided a voice over was needed to tell more of a story and guide people through the narrative the piece was implying. I decided to write a script but to ask dean from our year to read it aloud, my voice and accent can come across quite traditional (Radio 4 as a tutor put it once) dean has a lovely urban London accent, which i felt would compliment the work perfectly. I also wondered if i should be naked but decided against this as i didn't want the focus of the work to be lost and felt it didn't need to be titillating to be successful. I also felt the contrast between being dressed yet seeing what was under my clothes would be more true to life. That we don't normally see what we are hiding underneath.

 ​How did the performance go? What was the critique? ​
The work went down well, it was unlike anything i had done before which i think supersized people a little. With out any kind of rehearsal dean read the wording beautifully and it was felt the words went well with the piece. There was a moment when i focused on a small wound on my hand, which when projected 1000X larger onto the wall looked like a bloody gaping maw, it literally made people gasp.  There was some debate about whether i should have been naked after all, the tutor Kate thought it would have made it more powerful, others thought it would have been distracting. All in all i was pleased with the reactions/feedback and was glad i had spontaneously decided to do the piece live instead of a pre-recorded video edit. The micro-macro contrast in certainly something worth developing and using again. I would like to do this performance on a larger screen, in a gallery setting. 

How to develop this work???
There is definitely part of this to use in future work, making the tiny huge and vise versa. It is a perception shift that can be utilized in lots of works. I would like to use the microscope to make a series of works on the natural world, looking at the unseen detail and beauty, or ugliness that we miss with our naked eyes. There is nothing i can see me using this for in the immediate future but definitely in the back of my mind, perhaps as a backdrop to other pieces of work. Time will tell!