11.

VIBE 30/11/2011

VIBE presents a video performance by Hannah Najjar and Uttsav Patel. With an interest in social experimentation and expression, this performance guarantees to question your morals and ethics.

VIBE is curated by Gemma Marsh. Gemma is currently a third year student of the BA (Hons) Visual Arts at Bournville School of Art. She has a background in Crafts and Visual Merchandising and brings this to the project with her Exhibition Design.

Hannah Najjar

I am interested in trying to confront an individual with his or her own involuntary mannerisms and movements. I believe that when watching ourselves back on film there is a feeling of uncertainty as we are unaware of how we really look to others. This piece was set up in order to put Utts and myself in a situation where our own expressions and body language movements would be stimulated in order to confront ourselves as well as our audience.

Uttsav Patel

Please express your understanding of what you are about to see

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Please express your understanding of what you have just witnessed

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For this project we confronted you, as an audience, with a performance piece that tied our contexts together. Hannah is interested in trying to confront an individual with his or her own involuntary mannerisms and movements, whilst Utts is interested in the transfer of meaning.

When considering Utts context, we have discussed the illustration of SCHRODINGER’S CAT proposed by Erwin Schrodinger in 1935.

The experiment meant hypothetically placing a live cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. In the chamber there is a small amount of hydrocyanic acid, which is a radioactive substance, meaning if an atom of the substance decays during the time the cat is in the chamber, then a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will break the vile and kill the cat.

As an observer, you cannot know whether the vial has been broken and therefore you cannot know whether the cat has been killed. Since we cannot know, according to quantum law, the cat is considered both dead and alive. This is what is called a superposition of states. Only when you break open the box and see the actual state of the cat is the superposition lost in which the cat can become either dead or alive.

With this knowledge we set up a box in which a performance happened. The audience could not see inside the box. The audience watched a projection on a screen outside the box. That was the part of the performance where we confronted the audience with individual everyday gestures and mannerisms. This was stimulated through pranks that we played on one another in order to achieve natural reactions.

To create a connection between the audience and ourselves, we placed props for the audience to interact with, this idea came from The Milgram Experiment, empowering the audience to repeat and respond to what they have seen. As the “performance” was pre recorded the audience will never know what happened inside the box. This being the link with Schrodinger’s Cat. The audience has been filmed throughout, recording the expressions and reactions to what they saw, thus becoming the performers.