video performance
5:32min
editon of 5, 2 APs
description: Taking cues from Erving Goffman’s text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), that established a critical framework for analyzing process and meaning in mundane social interactions, Deliverables, addresses the language with which the performance of the self is evaluated and measured in the art and business worlds. Both of these social and economic spheres engage the term “performance” as a means by which to measure an individual’s quantity and quality of output (or, work products) and expression. Delivered in the style of a corporate management training video, the performance/video appropriates text from a collection of performance measurements entitled, Perfect Phrases for Setting Performance Goals (Douglas Max & Robert Bacal, 2004). These phrases are presented as silent film-style intertitles, and are interspersed between scenes of balloons gathered at a conference room table. Following a performance cue, each balloon appears anthropomorphized as it lifts off and rises up out of the frame, a metaphor for how individual and group power dynamics are established through wordless interaction.
