Kitchen Sink Surrealism Avatar Exercise

“Develop a surrealist sensibility in your kitchen.”

I would love to get some feed-back on this 10 minutes long sketchy single-player audio session.

Written by

Tova Gerge, Ebba Petrén & Gabriel Widing

Music by

Tobias Wedin

Preparations

The exercise is carried out individually, although other people can be present in the room as witnesses. Download this track to your mp3-player. Play it in your kitchen with earphones on and carefully follow the instructions. You are not allowed to listen to the track before. You are the avatar, an alien entity in your own kitchen. You follow instructions without hesitation. If the conditions for following an instruction for some reason is not right in your kitchen try to make an action equal or similar to the one that is proposed on the track. Before you start the track take a few relaxed seconds by yourself, standing in the middle of the room.

Posted

15 July, 2011

Blogpost, English

Tags:

avatarvaro, Ebba Petrén, surrealism, Tova Gerge

Comments

5 responses to “Kitchen Sink Surrealism Avatar Exercise”

Måns Billing's Portfolio » Blog Archive » An Alien In My Kitchen

16 July, 2011

[…] I recently participated in a 10 minutes long single-player audio session made by Gabriel Widing, Tova Gerge, Ebba Petrén and Tobias Wedin. You can find out more about the session, and download the mp3, here. […]

Reply
Måns Billing

16 July, 2011

This was a really interesting experience and I’m glad that I participated in it. It made me think both of video games, in which “we” control avatars that do what they are told, no matter how strange the situation. I also came to think about breaking borders and I must say I found this exercise quite liberating. I would’ve never done many of the these things in my kitchen if it weren’t for this session and I’m glad I did them. It made me reflect on how we are surrounded by restrictions, created by ourselves, that sometimes make no sense. We have a habit of limiting the physical space in ways that just limit ourselves.

If I were to give some advice it would be to increase the interval between the different actions somewhat. Overall it worked well but I feel it’s better to make a longer session than having people press pause/play now and then. It was no major problem though – perhaps just me being slow =)

Well played and thank you for an interesting experience!

Reply
admin

17 July, 2011

Thanks for your feedback Måns! I’m happy that you found the session liberating. 🙂 The timing is definitely a problem and I agree that it’s a little bit hasty.

Anyway this is the first recorded thing we’ve tried out and there are of course many possible improvements. Next step could be a 2-player session.

Reply
Erica

13 April, 2018

Gabriel, do you have this track? Cause I tryed to play it, but it’s not possible (error).

Reply
1. admin
  
  19 April, 2018
  
  It should be online again now. Thanks for your comment Erica.
  
  Reply