Someone in a flat below mine no longer wanted this chair, and was happy to give it to me. Its design is far different to the others, it’s more dynamic, but less homely. Dull and black, made of a brittle plastic, designed to fill an office space; it’s what you sit on to face a computer, not people.
I wanted to perform with this chair in a way that would make the most of its versatile design, and play with it in the way I was told off for when I would use these chairs in school computer suites.
For inspiration when I was recording and editing this performance for video, I looked to the work Merce Cunningham produced with Nam June Paik. Recently I watched this piece titled Merce by Merce by Paik, I loved the slow, methodical walking motions he would make, which made him look like he was trying to travel through the video keyed in behind him (especially when the camera was moving through a regular street), in an alien way, that made his presence look supernatural as his motions didn’t fit with the environment moving around him. Cunningham’s figure is also duplicated, so he dances alongside himself, crossing over and colliding with himself, as though he exists outside our understanding of time. This is reinforced by this work’s use and mimicry of a recorded interview with Marcel Duchamp, who had died a decade prior.
In the first version of my video, I used a static background of an image I had taken back in Oxford, of an empty Office Warehouse store. It upset me to see all this empty space in a city with a high homeless population; with the pandemic, these inequalities have been exemplified, and the sight of an empty store is much more common. This image also plays into the internet aesthetic of ‘liminal space’, described on Reddit as “the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing. Liminal space is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and let it form us.”
I decided I wanted to add some sound and make the background more dynamic. Directly across from where I live is an office block, which has stayed relatively empty for since I’ve lived here, yet the lights have remained on the whole time, even at night. It contains many desk chairs like this one, just sitting there collecting dust, so I filmed them from my window, and replaced the still photo with thing. For the sounds, I recorded the noises made by my keys whilst typing into a word document – the sort of thing you’d expect to hear inside this office if it were open. I used the sounds in my room that were picked up by my camera when recording the office block, in order to give the video some more background noise, likely to be the same sounds audible from the other side of my street and akin to an office environment. I also used some of the audio from my experiments with vinyl records, to make the soundscape a bit more jarring, to fit the keyed videos of me with the chair.
