Friday, December 12, 2014

ARG lasted months

UO:
This year, we had small performances that our participant, Rick Moody, was invited to every week for two months before the main weekend, preparing him for that day when all the threads would come back together. Some he knew were happening; others he did not, and those happened around him, with or without him noticing. Things were fed into his life over time: a children’s book written for his daughter was given to him, a fake New York Times review of that book was emailed to him by a friend, pieces of music composed by Travis Weller were left playing for him in a space we called the Cloister, where we asked him to go weekly to interact with installations that we created. Then there were two major moments. At the end of August, I met him in a park and a car picked us up. He didn’t know where we were going until we arrived at LaGuardia Airport, at which point I opened the trunk and pulled out his suitcase. Inside was his passport, and upon inserting it into the ticket machine, he discovered that he was flying to Regina, Saskatchewan. There we created for him a very specific aesthetic experience with a cellist playing the same music from the Cloister in a field. That was all before the culminating weekend of experiences.
That performance extended over three months.