Final Idea post- Eric U.

 Quote:” And your young shall see visions, and your old shall dream"

The quote means that both young and old people have the ability to imagine a better future. This quote struck out to me as it kind of reflects our views today. When I was a child, I was always told a vision, one of the ideal life the American dream, as i got older that vision that i once had and that passion got swept away as with each year things changed and that American dream goal is no longer obtainable, only a dream.

Quote: “Many activists and artists operate under this premise: that the biggest problem we face is that most people don’t understand The Problem. And, since most people don’t understand what’s wrong, it is our job to tell or to show them.”

This quote is really important for me as many people don't truly see or understand the problem. Its relatable even in our own society as many choose to not be involved into politics or understand what they are voting for. Meaning its up to the other “party” or the "consequences" to tell them or show them why this can be an issue. 

Final Idea (D\raft)

Instructions for performer:

1. Initial reflection:
   Look at yourself in the mirror. Do not pose. Just observe.

Let out a small sigh.

Say quietly: “I look tired.”

Pause. Let that sit.

2. Naming the weight (culture / expectations):
   Still looking at yourself, add: “I feel like I’m always supposed to keep functioning anyway.”

Slight shift in posture—shoulders slightly heavier.

Then: “But as a Hispanic, I'm too “young” to just shut down.”

3. Acknowledging outside projections:
   Stare a little longer, as if noticing judgments in the reflection.

Say: “Sometimes I feel like people only see what they expect from me.”

Pause. “Not me… just what they assume I am.”

4. The breaking point (honesty + vulnerability):
   Look away from the mirror for the first time.

Sigh softly: “It’s a lot to carry.”

Long pause. Breathing becomes noticeable.

5. Self-interruption:
   Look back at yourself, but more gently now.

Say: “But I’m still here.”

Then, slower: “I have work to do and family to support.”

6. Rebuilding self:
   Straighten slightly.

Say: “I am more than capable of handling both.”

Pause.

“More than what people expect of me.”

7. Final self-support (quiet motivation):
   Maintain eye contact with your reflection.

Say, firmly but softly: “I can keep going.”

Then: “Its not easy but I can keep going.”

8. Ending:
   Hold your gaze for a few seconds.

Sigh slowly: “Man… I need a coffee”

Final Reflection:

The whole script is inspired by Leonardo's self-portrait as the script is one in it of itself. A portrait of what my life is like as working is essentially my life and there's no time to rest as the world keeps getting harder. It's set as a way to remind myself of the words I use to get through the day, while also serving as a sort of self-awareness for my lack of rest. 

(edit): I will have to change some of the wording as my idea essentially is to create a comic and possibly dub it so that it can be posted onto social media to be shared as a sort of mental health awareness for men but may also be relatable to everyone. 

Performance Art - Post 7

The performance piece “The Mirror Within” draws clear inspiration from the work of Shawn Leonardo, particularly his focus on vulnerability, embodiment, and the physical expression of internal conflict. Like Leonardo’s performances, which often explore themes of identity, race, and emotional tension through the body, this piece centers on how invisible psychological pressures become visible through movement and interaction.

In this three-person performance, the division of roles—The Self, The Mirror, and The Voice—echoes Leonardo’s approach to externalizing inner struggles. The Self represents the individual navigating their sense of identity, while The Mirror functions as a distorted reflection, similar to how Leonardo uses gesture and repetition to embody anxiety and self-awareness. The Voice, meanwhile, acts as an external force, projecting judgment and expectation, much like the societal pressures often present in Leonardo’s work.

The physicality of the performance is especially significant. Rather than relying on elaborate dialogue or set design, the piece uses movement, tension, and proximity to communicate emotional states. This reflects Leonardo’s emphasis on the body as a primary storytelling tool—where hesitation, resistance, and collapse become forms of language. The gradual shift from calm synchronization to chaotic dissonance mirrors the psychological unraveling that occurs when external voices overpower internal stability.

Additionally, the minimalist staging reinforces the university of the theme. By stripping away excess, the audience is forced to focus on the performers’ bodies and interactions, much like in Leonardo’s performances, where the absence of distraction intensifies the emotional experience. The use of silence or sparse sound further amplifies this effect, allowing each movement and spoken word to carry weight.

Ultimately, “The Mirror Within” channels Shawn Leonardo’s artistic influence by transforming internal conflict into a shared, physical experience. It invites the audience to witness not just a narrative but a process—one in which identity is shaped, challenged, and, depending on the ending, either reclaimed or overtaken.

FINAL IDEA (short) POST_Komal Das

                                                             Quote 1 + Response

Quote:
“Utopias are not meant to be perfect blueprints for the future, but tools to help us imagine alternatives to the present.”

Response:
This quote stood out to me because it changes how I think about utopias. Instead of being unrealistic or impossible, they become a way to rethink the world we live in now. It shows that the purpose of a utopia is not perfection, but possibility. In activism, this is powerful because it encourages people to question existing systems and imagine new ways of living that are more fair and inclusive.

---

Quote 2 + Response

Quote:
“By making the impossible seem possible, utopian thinking opens space for real social change.”

Response:
I found this quote meaningful because it highlights the importance of imagination in creating change. When people begin to believe that something better is possible, they are more likely to take action. Utopian thinking creates hope and pushes individuals and communities to challenge limitations. It reminds me that even creative or symbolic actions can have a real impact on how people think and behave.

---

Final Intervention Idea

For my final intervention, I want to create a performance that reflects how the process of creating art is often ignored, while the final result gets all the attention. I plan to start painting or drawing in a public or visible space where people can see me, but at first, no one is really paying attention or stopping to watch.

As I continue working, the focus will remain on the act of creation itself - slow, detailed, and personal. Once the artwork is finished, people begin to gather, look, and appreciate the final piece. This contrast highlights how society often overlooks effort, time, and the creative process, and only values the end product.

Through this performance, I want the audience to reflect on why we tend to ignore the journey and only celebrate the result. Connecting to utopian thinking, my idea encourages a shift toward valuing the process, effort, and growth just as much as the final outcome.

April 15/26

 Chapter 8 

“If one way to stimulate public imagination is to realize utopia, only to then make it disappear, another tactic is to conjure up utopias so outlandish and absurd that they can never be realized at all.”

 So they are showing people the world that they can have, then take it away or create one that is impossible. They do this to make people realize what's missing in real life and hope that the things that they are shown or experience will make them want to change things for themselves. Both these things will grab people's attention and make them want to move towards the things that would make the world different in a way that is positive for them.

“If the issue is police violence, for instance, they might draw a picture of Black and Brown kids being stop-and-searched by police, or of a victim of police shooting lying on the ground while politicians look away—our own dystopian reality.”

The book is talking about how art can be used to bring attention to police violence and how they fail to respond when things happen in areas that they can just say it was gang-on-gang violence. Artists can show how police are when they only have the job because they are power hungry and not because they genuinely want to protect people. People in power also ignore police violence because they feel that if they ignore it, others won't notice, and they can live as if it's not a problem. 

I think I would like to do a performance on mental health or police brutality. 

Performance art: an introduction Helina Boatwright 3/25/26

 Performance art: an introduction by The Art Assignment and Dr. Virginia B. Spivey 

“Throughout the mid-20th century, performance has been closely tied to the search for alternatives to established art forms, which many artists felt had become fetishized as objects of economic and cultural value. Because performance art emphasized the artist’s action and the viewer’s experience in real space and time, it rarely yielded a final object to be sold, collected, or exhibited.” 

Performance art is controversial because it doesn't lead to something tangible that can be hung up in a gallery. So it's hard for some people to accept performance art as art because there is no physical object, and it seems like something anyone can create and doesn't really have to have any actual drawing talents. It's hard for some to realize that acting/performing is a talent just like art and that you're using your body in real time to create it. 

“Shifting attention from the art object to the artist’s action further suggested that art existed in real space and real time.” 

When doing that, it turns it from just being an art piece to a performance piece where people are allowed to interact and ask questions about what they are doing and why they choose to do it. It also lets us see the process of how the peach can be, instead of just being there. 

Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance | The New Yorker

“Not long before leaving Sarah Lawrence, Ono published in a campus newspaper a short story called 'Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park.” It’s about some young people trying to decide what to do with a grapefruit left over from a picnic. The allegory is a little mysterious, but it’s clear what the grapefruit represents. The grapefruit is a hybrid, and so is Yoko Ono.”

The grapefruit is used to inspire creativity and have the reader look at the world in new ways. I think she wants the reader to see the world how she does and understand that you don't have to do things the traditional way to get where you want to, because sometimes that way could just be a waste of time which is why she left school, because to her it just seemed to be making her do things that she felt she had no use for/ already knew.

“In 1960, Ono found a loft at 112 Chambers Street and rented it for fifty dollars and fifty cents a month. It was a fourth-floor walkup, without heat or electricity, and the windows were so coated with grime that little light got in, though there was a skylight. “She organized a series of concerts and performances.”

She bought this building that was run down and old, and instead of tearing it down and trying to rebuild, she cleaned it up and used it as it was to create an area for artists to perform their work. She let them use the loft for two nights each. This building, which most people would have seen as a project that was too much work to take on, was turned into a place that occasionally held two hundred people who came to see these art performances hosted by Onos. I think the repurposing of the building can be seen as art in itself because instead of discarding the building, it was given a new meaning and was able to stand longer because of the creativity that was allowed to happen within it. 

Text book 

“The United Farm Workers thought creatively about the relationship between labor tactics and their own unique material and cultural context and came up with something innovative, and most important, æective. As artistic activists, we need to do the same.”

We need to do more than just think about how we create something, and we need to see things through and plan how to change it from being a regular piece of art to something that will inspire others. We mostly create from inspiration and forget to try to add our own spin to things, and that leads to a mere copy of your inspiration. 

“They countered negative stereotypes, not by directly refuting them, but instead by appropriating “positive” symbols and associating these with their movement. Their march on the Capitol drew on symbols of white feminine purity and respectability and on Victorian middle-class ideals of “true womanhood.” 

Instead of screaming and fighting, which would have given the Capitol more ammo for their negative remarks about the movement. They represented themselves in a dignified way that automatically turned the negative attention the capital was throwing their way into positive attention. They were also able to make people see how the capital was in the wrong for their bashing of the movement with how delicately they handled the situation, and it became one of the most memorable spectacles staged in the country. It was written about in the New York Times, and it still takes place about 7 years later.

Final Idea Post - Madison Padilla

Quotes and Responses:

Chapter 9 UTOPIA, from The Art of Activism, Your All-Purpose Guide to Making the Impossible Possible by Steve Duncombe and Steve Lambert

"A goal that others—whether they are aware of, care about, or understand our specific problems or objectives—are likely to want to reach with us. Goals motivate movements."

I agree with this quote that finding a common ground is one of the most important ways to let people work together. To achieve success with a goal, it should motivate others to believe they can win as well through it. People feel they can resonate with the goal in a positive manner.

"One of the great powers of art is to shift our perspective: to get us to look at what we’ve looked at a hundred times over in a new way."

I interpreted this quote to mean that art can be viewed in multiple ways through different lenses. Rather than seeing the same thing every day, getting used to it, and forgetting its meaning, art makes people look at things from different angles to constantly curate different responses and emotions.

FINAL IDEA (short) POST

For my final idea, I have chosen to continue and expand on the idea I had from last week. My act, titled "Freeze and Leave," is based on public participation and finding what we usually don't notice in our daily lives. In my act, around 3-5 performers stand in the center of a space facing in different directions and doing different actions. No talking, no touching, and no eye contact. Performers freeze in "everyday" poses (ex., sitting in a chair, reading a book, writing in a notebook, or typing on their phones). They have the choice to choose any pose with any prop they may want. They remain frozen for 30 seconds in silence, then after the allotted time, they break the freeze and walk away normally, leaving a piece of them behind in the space. An example could be something on their person or a prop they were using. The main goal is for people to look at the habits and social rules we follow in our day-to-day lives and to see the details we might usually miss. Even when we aren't doing anything, like standing around in a crowd, we are still performing under a cultural script. Even when the performers are close to each other, they are isolated. They are physically together, but mentally apart, mimicking the real world with individual actions. By leaving pieces behind after the performance, the space feels like a remnant of an event come to pass.

Post 8_Faaria

QUOTES

“It is true that we need to be realistic, but our interest in utopia is far from naïve—it’s based in a serious, grounded, and realistic assessment of how power works and why change happens.”

Hoping for good things and a bright future is not childish, nor is it hoping for things that seem impossible or unrealistic. It comes from knowing our society's current state and how much we can improve it. Utopia is not about pretending problems do not exist; it is about realistically envisioning solutions and creating pathways toward them.

“Challenging oppressive laws and throwing unfit politicians out of power is absolutely necessary, but getting rid of the problems we face does not guarantee that we arrive at a better outcome.”

This quote feels like a continuation of the previous quote because we can imagine all the good things we need in society, and we can achieve them only if we act upon them carefully. Removing problems doesn’t necessarily mean our job is done. It simply means that we must also build something better to replace it. For example, if we break down patriarchy in the world, that would be awesome, but we must also arrive at a society built on equality, respect, and opportunity for everyone. Real change is not just about destroying harmful systems but also about creating new structures that support justice, inclusion, and long-term progress.

FINAL IDEA

For my final intervention project, I want to expand on my earlier performance piece “The Void” by transforming it into a public participatory thing, which basically is promoting utopia or just giving people some hope going about their day. I plan to create a large poster or board with a black circle in the center labeled The Void. Around the void, I will invite people to write words, hopes, dreams, or ideas about the kind of world they want to live in. This transforms the void (our current world 😓) from emptiness into a space of possibility and shared imagination. The final intervention will address themes of community, mental well-being, and the idea that a better world is something we build together.