From Raw, Medium, Rare: Mama’s Midnight Spicy Pale Pumpkin and Other Seasonal Ghosts performed at Elysian Theater as a part of the “Tomorrow! with Ron Lynch”
Photographer: Ian Byers-Gamber
About Processessessessessessing
When I am developing work, I utilize performance as a vehicle to unpack the systemic values embedded in body, space, and social coding. Performance itself creates games that help me transgress behaviors that are not allowing integration, then empathize and reintegrate into the social and material world by allowing objects to channel the musical, metaphysical, and psychological shadow-talk that I learn along the way.
It is for this reason that I integrate performance into a multitude of contexts for interaction: games, playthings, paratheater, performance art, installations, immersive experiences, score based situations etc. I often seek to find the points of synthesis among these varied cultural spaces, and create cognitive and behavioral trapdoors between them as I build toward atmospheres where ambiguity is instrumental for accessing the unconscious.
The plaything is an instrument and a tool: it is a player, a composer, and an object.
I compose it—I design it—I sculpt it—I playtest it—I perform with it—and then it composes me, designs me, sculpts me, and playtests me, and I learn to find what it wants through the structure and anti-structure (cosmos and chaos) of personal and collective play.
In doing this, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which associations can be both learned and unlearned to create more elasticity in the deeper cognitive structures which reinforce the integration of rigid unconscious habits, inhibiting the possibility to learn and change. As a result, the themes and subject matter of my works are always responsive to the structures they are addressing, and always reflexive back onto the hidden dimensions of self and the social context in which they occur. Whether it be specific and microcosmic, such as architectural motifs on site, or more widespread immaterial architectures such as alphabets, numerical systems, pedagogies, and color associations, by pushing the behavior of ideas to perform differently than we expect, nuanced play with serious ideas acts for me as a way of interweaving material and cognitive elasticity to better inform the creation of my interactive works.
In designing interactive works, I organize events where objects can be explored by different communities and creative folks. These events take the form of immersive theatrical works, public sculptures, interactive performance objects, experimental pedagogy, and the development of games. I make work to foster and explore the creativity of other people, balancing my hand with collective experiences where my audience and collaborators change the outcome of each performance. Themes of immersion, fantasy, cosmology, interactivity, and the role of the individual in collective storytelling act to drive my explorations into object oriented learning, constructivism, and the splintering mythologies which guide the American psyche.
Based in Los Angeles (and currently also Santa Cruz while a Visiting Associate Professor for the year), I see myself predominantly as a trickster, fool, and facilitator of story-worlds, utilizing a wide myriad of mediums to develop the shifting ground of contemporary narrative form. I see my art in the context of a broad cultural milieux, one that seeks collaboration across not only artistic mediums but also the fields of game theory and development, design, education, public speaking, neuroscience, and social practice.