If activation is the foundation of all inner stimulation development, how can durational performance art in public places influence the state of excitation and tension from the pedestrians? How can durational performance art heighten the alertness from the recipient, without being just weird or alien to the nature of the witnesses?
The marketing research proved already that pictures activate us principally much stronger than words and that three different techniques of activation are existent. The authors Kroeber-Riel and Weinberg differentiates 3 causes for the activation:
- cognitive effect of the stimulus (mental conflict, contradictions and surprises)
- physical effect of the stimulus (music, colour, odours, rain)
I want to create a poetic picture / an action on the street, where the pedestrians get the chance to see the situation from various perspectives. They should get the chance to realize the effect of the stimulus. If we know that to much stimulus will diminish the alertness how strong has to be the stimulus than?
Of course I like the idea of irritation which creates an emotion of interruption and destabilization of the recipient and I believe that this dissonance will activate the emotional and cognitive intensity of the mental processes, but how can we diminish the effect that the pedestrians think that the performer is just mental ill? Yesterday I realized that the starting point of a performance on the street does not allow even a small mistake. Place, time and tension for the action has to be chosen very carefully and must be done with the knowledge of a form given moment. I should say - like always in performance art, but at the same time even more in public spaces. The knowledge of the site where the performance is placed is even important and the differences between big cities, small cities, villages or places somewhere in the mountain have been calculated inside the action beforehand. I am wondering how international working performance artists and performance festivals who invites all these international artists deal with this problem. If I go there just to show my art which I have been done before in Tokyo, Hannover or Sendai the same way, where is the difference between performance art and e.g. painting which was sold at an art fair somewhere in the world?
