Use Your Voice - Memory Replacement Election Day 2020November 3rd, Union Square Performance and Installation with Public Participation on Election D
After memory replacement
It has been two weeks since I made memory replacement and as it's usual when I do performance and installation I spent every ounce of energy, every strength of will towards making it happen. It's very high intensity work although on the surface it's like throwing together some installation and just asking people to paint on it. But under the surface there's a lot of planning, execution, planning for the day, planning for the installation itself. Some last minutes tweaks to the work, like for example I had to mitigate winds, I also had to worry about the cold so I called these the weather concerns, and of course I had to deal with whatever the entire planet needs to deal with which is Covid and its implications.
About 3 weeks before the installation I spent days in rural Georgia driving for the Census Bureau and it was absolutely intense experience on its own and as soon as I came back to New York I had to go into quarantine, and then I had to start constructing the installation.
So mentally I had to deal with all these things and I have to say I was not entirely ready for the installation and the performance, I was slipping a little.
I had to change my sleeping cycle - I'm a night owl so I will sleep all day and work during the night which is not very helpful. I had to do the Memory Replacement during the day and it was very difficult switching my sleep cycles and as you can see on a lot of the pictures I'm sleeping. I'm always sleeping on most pictures of myself but in this case I was exceedingly sleeping.
Adding to the excitement was the fact that I had decided to add another complexity to the project by looking for a photographer on Craigslist which I decided going to be the last time I do that, anyways, I want the photographer to be in the spirit of the moment so to speak because I really hate working with assholes and people who just show up and take pictures for cash, that's not what my work is about. Anyway finding a photographer on Craigslist was very difficult. So from this point on I'm going to try and deal with that before work happens. I want to find somebody whose ideas and ideals match mine, which is more important to me than the actual taking of pictures.
The intense experience of memory replacement literally left me completely spent and I could not think or do anything constructive for almost two weeks afterwards. I become like a zombie or sleepwalker where all things literally swirl in my head. Everything that happens in the world everything that happens in my world and all the future projects and ideas clash with my surroundings.
I do extreme kind of work. And for that I have to maintain extreme sort of mindset. This extreme mindset really doesn’t care for the approval either in the people near me or institutions near me and I have to work on maintaining my focus and maintaining my spirit and keep working on the projects that I feel I should do.
It's just like any other work except that other people simply are being tasked by somebody else but in my case I'm not being tasked by anyone, I create the tasks I create the work I execute the work and I have to manage all the outcomes.
Despite the chaos and my dreamy state - I seem to have had everything organized somehow in the folds of my brain and I also had a day of the performance checklist where on the night before I wrote NASA like sequence of steps I need to do the next morning when I wake up.
Don’t fall asleep checklist - Memory Replacement Election Day 2020 November 3rd, Union Square
So the way it worked is that on the night before I still had some planned objects to construct but I decided to stop, put everything that I had done in order and ready for the next morning. I decided to forgo working and instead put everything together and ready and then spent the evening thinking.
When I say thinking it's not that I work out in my mind exactly how everything is going to work because to be honest until the work hits the pavement I usually have no idea how it's going to work. I know what I'm going to do but what's going to happen is really up to whoever is in charge which is definitely not me on the day.
So I really spent a lot of time holding the entire contraption in my head like a chandelier dangling it here and there and looking at it from all sides. I cement the image of the work in my brain and in that way I get accustomed to it being completed so on the day of I don't have to think of its construction. On day of I was basically an automaton who simply completes certain tasks in succession.
I don't quite remember thinking how exactly I'm going to lay down the installation but I remember simply holding the whole thing in my brain for a long time before I fell asleep. so I guess the next morning all I had to do is go there and unfold it.
