The Documentation of Baby Smiley

Here is a blog that documents the activity of a stuffed toy called baby smiley. There is no explanation as to what is going on, the blog just begins to document baby smiley doing different things from an alleged day that baby smiley arrives. Baby smiley is the only one in any of the pictures, aside other stuffed animals and toys... people are in these pictures but are only there in pieces. A hand holds the toy, a body with a face hidden under an umbrella holds the toy in the hood of the jacket on the back, only baby smiley is the focus in each image. Its interesting how baby smiley comes to life through this way of dedicating documentation to nothing but baby smiley. There is one mention of someone human in the most recent blog, the person is referred to as Master3yrs...

http://babysmileyinct.blogspot.com/

Improvised Collaborative Story Telling

I would like to mention here a certain project that Alex Chiu and I have started recently, collaborative story telling. We have currently dubbed Tuesday nights as our practice times for this. Below is a link to the Myspace page I created to host some of the results of these joint story-tellings (feel free to add us).

inLimen

The term limen refers to the threshold of a physical or psychological response. The whole process of each story tends to be built in a threshold which is why I chose the name. I put it up as our Myspace title name for now... we'll see if it stays or not.

What I like about the process of the collaborative story telling that we do is that we begin and tell the entire story with no real preconceived ideas of how the story will start or where it will end up. Having two people direct a single story makes it so that there is more of an unexpected component. This creation and its emphasis of the unexpected allows for more reliance on spontaneity.

Playing with the unexpected has always been one big thing that separates performance art from traditional theater. This activity is also similar to other things such as freestyle rap and improv acting.

I think the difference so far with our activity, in comparison to other similar improvised activities, is that we record each story we tell and consider it the actual piece. It has not been an activity that is practice for something else; all of the flaws and mishaps become what is the story. The reason I put it here is, of course, because I am exploring the relationship between documentation and the self (or the ephemeral quality of life).

We are also planning on finding places to do this live. Right now I am trying to talk to Ray At Night and will most likely be able to participate in Sound Walk once again with this activity.