Critical studies Tutorial preparation (pre tutorial)

Ok- so here it goes- CRITICAL STUDIES RESEARCH IDEAS

My research proposal is to investigate storytelling through time based media within performance, shifting my photographic practice to a physically and virtually interactive level where it becomes subject/performer/action and less decorative object/illustrative backdrop.

The questions I aim to explore include;

• What is storytelling? How has it been used in theatre and visual arts practice?
Explore history and use of stories in culture, what makes a good story? What makes a bad story? Story telling methods, arenas, urban myths, fables and fairy tales, legends, personal stories told from the heart, the embellished, the old wives tale, the deceitful, the extract, the ear-wigged or overheard, the out of context, fictional, factual, manipulated, rehearsed, spontaneous, etc. How do we pull in the listeners intimately or unwittingly, and also leave them teetering on the edge of a cliff hanger....
Contextual references- Investigating use of stories in historical and contemporary performance using these ideas-
Bobby Baker, Uses stories to play out everyday life happenings.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film stills, invented characters in stereotyped stories within photographs
Will Adamsdale, Human Computer BAC, November 2007- “Cardboard cabaret stories.”
Caroline Smith- Spank, September 2007,real and virtual performer storytelling bringing together the autobiographical and the historical, using objects to tell stories
Stand up comedy+ Cabaret- hyped up/embellished storytelling
Playback theatre- storytelling as therapy, using participants in an audience and playing out their stories
Shadow puppets telling mythical stories, adopted through Paper Cinema, tales of Edward Allen Poe in Masque of the Red Death, Punch Drunk.

• How can time based media become performative, entirely consumed within the performance and less about pure documentation?

Looking at using real or invented autobiographical objects as aid memoire, props evoking stories, or as pinhole or hidden surveillance cameras, participants or self using these to ‘capture stories’ in the everyday to playback in a performance. Possibly a nostalgic object that poses just as that but secretly records, through video hidden inside, accounts given of reactions to it- what does it remind you of?
Contextual references-
Julia Bardsley-Trans-Acts, April 2007, “Trans-Acts forges an intimate dialogue between the audience & the performer, the artist & the creative process, live presence & the visual art object.” Exploring using pinhole photography in different ways and live presence and video thorough dialogue.
Peter Richards-History of Performance art- Group Pinhole photograph, dissolving boundaries between photography and performance, image as artifact that is made during performance and which survives it. “The giant cardboard obscura [is]site (as the stage in theatre) and source (the text - the actors) of the work.’ Sofaer
Curious- Camera as Participant, videos a performer performing to camera, a possible mechanism for storytelling
Sigmar Polke/Scott McMahon- experimental photographs abusing photographic processing norms
Zach Liberman+Theodore Watson- technique in Computer Processing-Virtual interaction with projected media

Practical context- Work underway
• Stories from participants objects that they couldn’t bear to throw away
Looking at the process of creating an image in a darkroom and exploiting the photographic ‘correct way to do things’ within an auditorium as a darkroom, photogram technique exploring objects and video projection of participants sharing their stories to camera will be employed to reveal and then destroy the photographic photogram image and at end encourage people to surrender their objects to charity or dustbin- the death of an object through the death of its shadowed image.

Reading- needs developing- Camera Lucida, Barthes, Joshua Sofaer, Conflict of Interest, Performance as a Spectator Sport.