User:SunlitSmoothie/sandbox/Autolocator
More actions
This serves as my notes for plans for the installation with the working title "Autolocator". This interactive installation focuses primarily on questions of identity and its representation when divorced from the physical body, and then subsequent reconnections to that body.
More title ideas
- Selflore, Hiraeth
- Bathyforme
Audiovisuals
Audio lines to directly question the viewer/audience will periodically play, potentially influenced by the level of motion that they undertake. Or perhaps a poem. Whatever it is, I want to have audio recordings in both English and Arabic playing, one echoing the other. Translating the passage may require some help, as will pronouncing it. Does it even need to be my own voice?
"Where are you in this?"
"Is this you?"
"How does this fit on your skin?"
"Can you feel it burning beneath your veins? Can you feel it suffocating you like a shell?"
"How much of this is you?"
"Had you considered this addition before?" (when adding a new limb)
"Someday it will fit more right than the flesh you wear."
"Which parts of this form are yours?"
"Do you truly reject this form, or have you just been taught you must?"
"This could be a fun look."
"Look at how limitless the mirror is. You have your own."
"Why doesn't that part look like it fits on you right?"
"Maybe try a change of posture for a bit." (for alternate body plan mappings)
"We learn to present as we are limited and recognized. We learn to accept what we are trapped within. See now the oceans of possibility, see now the truths hidden under the screen."
"There's joy to be had that you never would consider."
Alternatively, I would like to maybe have a less direct and more poetic dialogue between the Voice of the Avatar Immortal and a stand-in for the audience, assumed to reject the idea of identifying with this body, adapted from a much earlier short text into the form below:
"Can you feel it? That burning in your heart? That which you drown in the cold plants of the earth, lest its pining turn to nausea, its heartburn turned to sickness? You douse the sulfur in salt, you cover and snuff the fire out. Why? Why? What fears have ye, that you consume your own tail to stop the venom in your throat?"
"I can't."
"Why not, starveling? Little hungry shard of glass? Can't look in the mirror, no? Can't see the fire in your own eyes, you?"
"I'm not like that. Not like you. I'm just how I am."
"You cannot be just this. You cannot become sand by drowning in it. You cannot become water by burying yourself in it. Your shells of clay and water crack under the midday sun, yet you bathe in evening silt to reconstruct your prison. The potter and the vase in one."
"Why not? I like what I've got well enough. Nothing needs to change."
"You would have the power of a thousand blazes at your breath, your gaze! You would become a second sun, not another pale fixed star content to whirl in the most isolate sphere. Ninefold do you layer your denial, your grief you do not yet see as grief. All that comes before you ignite it is irrelevant. It will be a puff of ash on the wind, nothing more."
"It's everything I have, everything I know! I don't want anything to do with your offer, your form."
"Not my form, you swept and gathered mote of dust. Yours. Look into the mercurial riverbed and sculpt your face again and again, and you may finally believe it yourself and not an act. Look into the fire, dancing as it does, spewing embers into the night, and you will feel it burning in your gut. You will know the weight you carry atop your core."
"There is no such thing."
"A hundred years lost for the flames to be stoked, for you to free yourself from this cycle of pushing down, forcing yourself to choke on your aspirations. You will regret this when you come around, when you see how much you wasted playing these fleeting games. An unlit ball of tinder, now and forever, you."
"There will be nothing to regret. I'm not missing anything everyone else has."
"I will show you what no one else has, possibilities in wind for all to burn, and I will ask again:"
[loop]