Gil Sperling

video, stage and music

Cornell Box

September 25, 2019 by gilsperling

Ashlin Halfnight, Artifacts of Consequence

My short sentence was: Artifacts of Consequence is about humanity’s legacy.

My longer sentence was: Artifacts of Consequence asks the question, whether any part of human culture has enduring value.

Emotions that came up included: an obsessive-compulsive need to organize, a kind of death-fetishism, and an enjoyment in doing something destructive to a precious object.

I went on a Dallas-style quest to find inspiration and source materials in the thrift stores of downtown Brooklyn. Searching through the shelves at the Goodwill, a storage labyrinth in itself, served as a good entrance into the key thought process in the play: how do I select what’s valuable out of all the junk?

Source materials:

2 vinyl records “Our Best to You – 16 all-time favorites by the world’s greatest artists”
A page from King Lear, Act III scene 2 “Blow, winds and crack your cheeks”
Omega-3 capsules
Sand and seashells in a plastic bottle
Printed still photo from the lift scene “Dirty Dancing”

Bonus

These items didn’t fit into the concept of the box, but work as their own gesture:

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One Response to “Cornell Box”

  1. […] my immediate academic environment. In my Design for Live Performance class in the fall, I created a Cornell box in response to “Artifacts of Consequnce”, a play about a group of people trying to […]