Contemplating Life and Death in a "How to" Video

For my "How to" video I demonstrated the process of separating egg yolks from egg whites. I called this "Contemplating Life and Death" because of the inanimate/ life-like/ visceral quality of eggs have, the duality of the yolk and egg whites, and because moving the egg yolk back and forth between the egg shells seemed like a "contemplating" gesture. Separating eggs seemed fitting for the project since it is very banal, like a lot of "how to" videos. I liked the idea of having a set-up similar to a Martha Stewart cooking show but having a sardonic undertone to it, by commenting on death.

Public Communication

Technology and Media can blur boundaries of privacy. For my project, a friend and I improvised a conversation in the cafe about personal matters that many people would not want to receive attention for. In the conversation, we nonchalantly discussed suicide attempts, experiences with abortions, acting sexually online, having STDS, having a boyfriend in prison and a father that slept with a best friend. At many points during the conversation both of us intentionally become distracted by ourselves (hair or nails) or our cell phone and become less engaged, even though the other person is talking about a seemingly important subject.

I am not trying to poke fun of the topics in the conversation or say that these are things that people should be embarrassed about and I hope that is clear in the video. I chose these as examples of what many students would not to share with acquaintances online or want to discuss in front of or with others that they are not close to. I think that this would have been more of a "performance piece" if the camera were not visibly right next to us. I could have made this more performance-arty by having the camera not visibly next to us and by speaking a lot louder so that those around us could obviously hear what we were saying.

Carol Emmons

Fake flickering candles next to tarot cards, small cradles filled with large metallic pearls, dice and raffle tickets, and old gaudy clocks, text of ambiguous creation mythology. The room seemed like a collection of readymades of discarded spacecraft equipment and thrift store finds. Sun Ra might have approved.

According to Carol Emmons, creator of the work, "I am interested in the apparatuses and fallibilities of varied ways of knowing the universe, and these approaches as lenses through which to experience the world". Emmons is interested in creating "large-scale, site-specific, participatory installations" that challenges the viewer's relationship to their world.

I did not entirely understand the intention of what was in front of me in the gallery space. The objects were uncanny and interesting aesthetically and I appreciated the way that the architecture of the room was taken into consideration. I would like to hear more about Emmon's reasoning for choosing certain objects and grouping them together in the way that she did in order to relate them to the universe. Many objects seemed to be connected to concepts of fortune and chance while others while others suggested aspects of myths and cosmos, but I didn't see clear conceptual understandings of other pieces. 


specific objects relating to chance and fortune that she did. 

Media Interactions

For my interactive performative piece, I will experiment with boundaries of communication by staging a loud and obnoxious phone call in a public place. In the phone call I will talk about fake private and personal matters that do not present me in a favorable way. According to Nicolas Bourriaud, author of "Relational Aesthetics" the "Society of the Spectacle" is "a society where human relations are no longer "directly experienced", but start to become blurred in their "spectacular" representation." I am fascinated by the way that users of social network sites both filter and spew out information about themselves and how easy it has become to know about people by what they project online, without actually knowing them.