Folio 4: Serving No Useful Purpose: The Futility Project.
Single-Channel, Single Camera, One Angle, Single Take. Documentation of A performance.
The Futility Project (ongoing) is situated within the long tradition of lens-mediated, single-channel, lockdown-shot performance art. The class is introduced to Martha Rossler’s Semiotics of The Kitchen, Andy Warhol’s Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger, and William Lamson’s Vital Capacity to examine gazes, confrontation, frustration, uselessness, failure, performance, and a little bit of production design.
The project parameters are deceptive: succeed in documenting the performance of a failing act. Performances must depict failure or fail spectacularly in a neutral environment. There have been many memorable and successful performances, ranging in tone, effort, and articulation.
In 2022, green screen was brought into the project to continue introducing compositing and post-production.
Futility 2022: Storyboard Excerpts.
Students were encouraged to aestheticise the initial storyboards even if the end products were outlandish.
I hope to return to this method of previsualization in 2026.
Futility 2022: Composited Video Excerpts.
Lessons learned as an educator never cease.
This version of the project was ambitious. It required a green screen setup with 3-point lighting, which our gallery tech generously facilitated. The gallery also provided us with their light-controlled media exhibition space as an ad hoc lighting studio. Logistically, the arrangement did work—students came in, set up for their performance, got their take, and then left. The futility project, in its irreverence, tends to leave a residue. Gallery etiquette and ethic-of-care discussions are necessary before undertaking this project with approximately 75 students across four sections.
One positive from the Futility is that SOVA now has an access-controlled space for checkout so that future projects can be done more securely and without as much fear of frustrating the gallerists.