LASERS!

Downloadable here: How Close is Too Close_sarahdahnke

I wrote about this in great detail in my journal, but essentially I continued playing with this idea of a permeable membrane, cutting holes into the Lycra to allow actual visible penetration. This also gave the dancers an authentic physical task: use your upper body to push through this fabric. (In the second video, they [...]

For this assignment, I decided to explore with the content from my self-portrait, utilizing the physical frames from the video shoot as the found object(s). The narrative already existed, abstractly improvising with the idea of frames, the way people are put into frames based on others’ perception, the way we are forced into frames when [...]

How Close is Too Close?
A Project Proposal by Sarah Dahnke
Introduction to concept:
In the summer of 2010, a controversy erupted in the media regarding a proposed multi-faith Islamic cultural center and mosque and its proximity to the former site of the World Trade Center. Many of the opposition parties opposed such an institution being established on [...]

I’m investigating narrative perception as it relates to the appearance of one’s face. What does one perceive when they view a face? How do these views vary from person to person? What’s lost in this transmission from the “real” to the perceived? What misconceptions and biases do we as humans carry and immediately apply, often [...]

I took the movement scores I derived in my last series of experiments into the studio, first going through each of the three movement scores individually as improvisations, then breaking them up and taking one or two lines at a time. I also brought in this large piece of Lycra, to use as kind of [...]

I’ve been keeping an ongoing list of artists and readings people mention to me in reference to my project:
Readings:
Jonathan Crary’s writings on perception
Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto”
Ralph Lemon “Geography” (added by me because it has influenced me greatly)
Roselee Goldberg “Performance Art”
KA Cerulo’s “Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions”
Timothy Powell’s “Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identities”
“Interrogating Identity”
Elizabeth [...]

As promised, I did a re-scout of the area around the WTC this past week, looking for spaces that might be appropriate for my new, more focused idea.
I had decided to essentially scout the streets around the perimeter of the World Trade Center, and after walking around for a while, I approached One Liberty Plaza [...]

To begin this series of iterations, I put out a call to my social networks to have people interpret photo, video and/or text through photo as a way to incorporate this participatory element of interpretation into an experiment, as well as the idea of interpreting through and from various forms of media. Looking back, I [...]