Project 5 - Ritual Performance

For this project, we were to choose a place and a "ritual" to perform a total of five out of seven days.

I have two plants which have been in my dorm room since the beginning of this semester. However, a few weeks ago they started to look kind of wilted and sad so I decided to put them outside to get some sunlight. Unfortunately, they didn't really improve. I watered them some, and it also rained, but I couldn't tell if they were getting too much or not enough water. I didn't know what they needed or how to make them better, so in an absurd, last-ditch effort, I decided to read poetry to them.

I chose a poem by E. E. Cummings, my favorite poet: "what if a much of a which of a wind." I like the cadence it has when read aloud, along with the connection of the poem's meaning to my actions. In the poem, there are themes of change in nature, a movement from order to chaos, the unknown, and future potentialities. Here's a picture of the poem, from the book 100 Selected Poems, e. e. Cummings:

Here are the plants, outside Armington:

            

Day 1

            

Day 2

            

Day 3

            

Day 4

            

Day 5

Seeing the pictures side-by-side, the plants (at least the one in front) look like they actually got worse over the five days :( But they're not dead yet! There is still hope.

Each day when I read the poem, I voice recorded myself. At the end of the five days, I compiled the voice recordings into one file using GarageBand. I created two versions, one titled "plants/poetry: order" and the other "plants/poetry: chaos." For the "order" one, I went into each audio file and lined up each of the different phrases so that they were in sync. This was a tedious process, and there are some weird blips in the audio because of how I was moving sections around. I like that it ended up sounding like chanting, which to me corresponds with the concept of "ritual." For the "chaos" version, I simply set all the audio to start at the same place. From there, they quickly disintegrate as the different versions are slightly different lengths. This version is unpleasant to listen to, but enchanting in its own way. These audio clips, and their order, correspond with the decline of my plants. They also correlate with the progression within the poem from a state of order and neutrality in nature to a state of confusion, chaos, and the unknown in nature and life.

plants/poetry: order

plants/poetry: chaos