A time-based strategy for making things real

Describing his role in the coming-of-age classic Dead Poets Society, Ethan Hawke recalls how he initially wanted to play another character. He was a gregarious young man, yet the director, Peter Weir, cast him as the introvert and timid Todd Anderson.

This was not a mistake but a tactic: Use artifice to stage a believable transformation, so what begins as semblance resolves into the real. Peter Weir was not casting for the perfect fit throughout the film, but rather for making the character arc of Todd Anderson a believable experience of transformation from a shell into his true self, from the artificial to reality. In the bittersweet yet transformative moment of the movie, Todd Anderson sheds his timid childhood persona, literally standing up on his school desk in revolt and defiance of unjust authority.

Standing up for what and who he believes in, he becomes himself, just as Ethan Hawke does in that scene, no longer acting, but just being who he is. Peter Weir described it as “casting for the final color.” What he understood so brilliantly is that acting is always – even in the best of cases – an emulation, a copy or semblance, of the real. In the case of Dead Poets Society, it is not about method-acting, about disappearing into a role. It is not about becoming someone else. Instead, it is about becoming yourself through the arc of the story. By focusing on an audience-perceived transformation engineered by structure and time, Weir conveys a more authentic portrayal than one could achieve merely by acting.

Once you have first noticed this method, you start seeing it everywhere around you. Instead of attempting to eliminate artificiality altogether, artists are using it as a vehicle to transform the time-based experience of artificiality into life and reality.

When I saw Bob Wilson’s Edda eight years ago, I had a similar experience. The first 90 minutes of the play felt excruciatingly long because every hint at a dramatic arc or any other depth or forward movement was immediately deconstructed; we were spending time going nowhere. So much in fact, that the young man with a Thor’s hammer in a necklace around his neck had left an empty seat next to me when I returned from the break. I guess deconstructing Nordic mythology was too much for him to take. Yet he should have stayed: Part Two was entirely different. The short 30-minute second part brought all the actors, the music, and the scenography together in a single image of Ragnarok. Presented as an unavoidable reality, it was only in this image of destruction that meaning and narrative progress seemed possible. By exposing the audience to the lengthy and extreme deconstruction of meaning in part one, fatigue strips our interpretive defenses and makes us susceptible to experiencing the coming together of meaning and narrative progress as a genuine experience of reality.

Another example: If you listen to Arvo Pärt’s (who incidentally also wrote the music for Edda) Passio, you will experience what fellow composer Max Richter has described as a miracle. After 72 minutes of music in one go, it suddenly happens. Music turns into life. It cannot be described, accurately, and it won’t work if you only listen to the final minute. You have to do “the work” and listen to the full duration (which is extremely beautiful in its entirety, I might add).

Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramović is perhaps the most powerful example of this approach to working with time and transformation, transcending the artificial limitations of art. In the work Abramović stands still while the audience is invited to do to her whatever they wish, using one of 72 objects placed on a table next to her. The items were specifically chosen to represent objects of both pleasure and pain, for example: a rose, a feather, a knife, and a gun.

Instructions:
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance.
I am the object…
During this period I take full responsibility.
Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am).

Abramović describes how it began tame but increasingly became more violent. Still remaining a passive object, by the third hour, all her clothes have been stripped away, she is cut, rose thorns have been pushed into her stomach, and ultimately, a loaded gun is put to her head. Abramović notes that while the men are conducting the violence, it is the women in the audience who are cheering them on as the crowd is worked up into a frenzy over the duration of the 6 hours. One might say that Abramović has already succeeded in creating a spectacle, turning art into life. For me, however, it is the moment the artwork ends that it becomes transformative. Abramović recalls it:

After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.

In that moment where object becomes subject, where passivity transforms into agency, is revelatory. It is difficult not to see her, in that moment, rising as an angel of vengeance. The audience flees in all directions simply because she transcends her self-imposed objecthood and thereby exposes the malign nature of the audience’s actions.

In each case, the artist doesn’t erase artificiality: They sequence it. They design duration so that, at the final moment, semblance falls away and the work resolves into lived reality, the final color.

However, for this to work, you don’t need to be an extreme performance artist like Marina Abramović or create challenging works like those of Wilson or Pärt. I believe that this method of working with artificiality and transformation in time-based experiences can be just as easily applied in event design, talks, UX. Essentially, anywhere there are multiple steps and thus time involved. However, it requires that we view the touchpoints, artifacts, and events as durational experiences rather than things.