Performance art in everyday life
There's a scale of formality for live artistic performances.
At the most formal end of the scale, you have a stage, a microphone, a sound system, numbered seats, tickets, greeters, ticket collectors, bar staff, security guards. The event could be a concert, a symphony, a ballet, a play.
Slightly less formal, somewhere in the middle of the scale, you have smaller events, like open mic poetry at a coffee shop or standup comedy at a bar.
At the least formal end of the scale, you have performances that the audience might not even realize is a performance.
For example, I was sitting at a picnic table in the park the other day and the guy on the other side of the table was talking with his friends. I overheard something he said and started laughing. As he realized I was listening, he shifted in his seat to include me in the audience and continued with his performance—hand gestures, facial expressions, witty quips. We were all laughing nonstop.
So at what point is someone delivering an artistic performance in the course of living their everyday life? A model standing on the curb hailing a taxi. An opera singer in the shower in the neighboring apartment unit.
Because I have seen comedians on stage who weren't half as funny as that guy at the table. And I have seen people walking on the sidewalk who were better than ballet dancers.
Substack just released this cool new feature where you can insert audio files into your posts. I’m super happy about this because I’m very interested in the interplay between written word and spoken word and also how technology can enable that interplay.
A few years ago, I wrote an entire book using the speech-to-text feature on my iPhone (that little microphone on your keyboard when you send text messages). More recently, I’ve been using Otter to transcribe my spoken stream of consciousness. I then later make edits to sculpt the transcript into a piece of writing.
For this piece that I’ve posted today (“Performance art in everyday life”), I originally recorded these thoughts using Otter while I was at the Outside Lands music festival. I thought it’d be fun to share the original audio …
In this case, the audio file isn’t a “voiceover” because the audio doesn’t exactly match the text. Moving forward, I might include audio files in my posts that are either my original recording for the transcription or a voiceover of the finished piece of writing.
Also, shoutout to my awesome girlfriend for participating in the audio recording. She writes her own Substack newsletter here. Go subscribe!
Let me know what you think of the audio!
In pursuit of experimental art,
Cole