One Man Trance

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2020-01-20

Department

Visual Arts

Program

Imaging and Digital Arts

Citation of Original Publication

Rights

Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu

Abstract

Where we humans spend most of our time becomes representative of our subconscious. Our everyday movements and mannerisms are recorded in our environments. Your self becomes the space. Your rooms become your existing knowledge base. Writing on or creating in those environments can allow you to alter your self. In the multimedia installation One Man Trance, I use my everyday environments and actions to create, replay, and edit ideas - a new form of self-hypnosis for keeping my subconscious constantly engaged in a loop with my conscious output. The installation is structured around the four rooms where I spend most of my time: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and exercise room. The actions I carry out most often in each of these rooms respectively - watch TV, stand in front of the mirror, stare into the pantry, use the exercise bike - are all turned into actions that are used to trigger visuals of my handwritten notes, typed text as well as audio recordings of hypnotic scripts (and vice versa). I am combining habitual actions in these familiar spaces with the ability to self-review and self-renew. I am opening my everyday to self-programming opportunities, performing habitual behaviors to a self-score that reclaims daydreams for self-hypnotic possibilities.