Having never projected any video, let alone on a bright New York City street, I took special note of the fact that in class the video that looked best projected was very bright and high contrast. But feeling uninspired by the light, animation, architectural illusions, and EDM that seem to largely accompany the medium, I thought it might be interesting to instead do something to elicit discomfort and unease and at unusually large scale. I was inspired by the ending of Eraserhead to overwhelm the space with something particularly disgusting.
Still wanting to play with scale, Zach and I decided to manipulate a popcorn maker and the size of the popped popcorn. We both liked the juxtaposition of the popcorn maker spewing popcorn and the people vomiting.
Why vomit?
The first reason is Teddy, the spiritually advanced 10-year old child of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories.
“You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?” he asked. “You know what was in the apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff. That was all that was in it. So–this is my point–what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are.”
The second reason is because it’s usually hilarious. There’s something about the bared honesty of disgust or illness that makes it so compelling. Our class laughed at the transition to the vomit projections, which makes us think this was effective.