You walk into rehearsal with this thing in your head: this perfect, shimmering bastard of an idea. And then reality shows up with a tire iron and starts beating the shit out of it. But here’s the thing: that’s not a bug, it’s the whole goddamn point.
I’m working with other people, right? Some of them get inside my skull in ways I didn’t invite, didn’t expect. They take what I thought was crystal clear and smash it into a thousand refractions. Site-specific work? Forget about it. You think you’re in control, you’re shaping the frame, positioning the pieces, conducting the whole symphony, and then the space itself has other ideas. Accidents cascade. Random collisions. The universe deciding to rewrite your script in real time.
The images you constructed so carefully? They start mating with each other when you’re not looking, spawning these hybrid offspring you never imagined. Actors bring their meat and chaos into the equation. Text becomes texture becomes something else entirely. It’s volatile, man. Everything you predetermined gets shredded by what you didn’t see coming: transformations that sometimes feel like betrayals, sometimes like grace.
But those collisions? Those unwelcome guests crashing your vision? They’re usually where the real magic hides. Doors open to rooms you didn’t know the building had.
When you take that private dream and drag it into the light (through conversation, through the brutal democracy of collaboration, through photographs that freeze and betray the process) it stops being yours alone. It’s a negotiation now, sometimes willing, mostly not. Your subjective hallucination meets other people’s bodies, other people’s imagination, and the whole thing evolves or dies.
The space, whether it’s some decaying monument or a stretch of industrial wasteland, isn’t just a container. It’s consciousness made architectural. A three dimensional model of how we think, how we process reality. It keeps the work from being mere mimicry, mere behavioral reproduction.
You can’t tell an actor they’re “performing a mediated image within a larger structure of consciousness.” That’s the kind of art speak bullshit that empties rooms. But you can understand that the human figure onstage isn’t raw data. It’s already been processed, filtered through awareness, transformed into something beyond simple perception.
I know I can’t control how anyone receives this. That’s the surrender you make. But I can shape it as something already mediated, already worked over by consciousness, and that creates a different kind of electric charge for whoever’s watching.
The performance unfolds in space, sure, but more crucially as space itself: like a vision that grabs your skull and won’t let go, that constitutes itself as a series of images reshaping how you see in that moment. Each person in the audience negotiates their own treaty with what they’re experiencing.
It’s phenomenological as hell, this whole process. Visual and acoustic images colliding with individual consciousness, each spectator processing the wreckage in their own way. The beautiful, inevitable wreckage of making something real.