Bloop
2020
single channel video + sound
00:41 second excerpt of 7:47 minutes
“Bloop” is an audience participatory score performed as a movement parallel to the ocean. Separated by the ocean, “Bloop” is the reverberation of the bombs that created a generation. An audience participatory score performed as a movement with eyes closed, parallel to the ocean, the following three actions are repeated in order, until out of the camera’s frame: 1. Throw the provided rock forward. 2. Imitate the sound of the rock’s landing. 3. Locate the rock and refer back to action 1. The deficiency in translating this experience can be seen as a contrast point of humor against the trauma of warfare. “Bloop” empowers the performer to simultaneously mock and make oneself vulnerable, exorcising out of our body the weight and levity of warfare into an intimate and personal exercise, casting a rock like a bomb, reversing its power into an anti-climatic drop, and unremarkable plop, the opposite of a bombs devastation. “Bloop” is the playful parallel, the blind search, the banality that comes out of the strife of warfare.
Composed by Sholeh Asgary.
Performed by Michael Mersereau, Sholeh Asgary, and Beatriz Escobar on July 8, 2020