Tutorial -feedback with Maria-

In the last Tutorial with Maria I was quite confused after the fact I need to change my proposal. I was explaning her about other project I had inmin d about the public toilets and the relation with how metaphorical are the sex separates and differents ways are organized. Finally I cleared my mind and I decided still with a proposal more close to the line thaht I had before.

She sent me that email:

To analyse gender behaviour through the performance of ordinary everyday life actions;
To such end you will be building a database assembling 4 or 5 examples of how to perform the actions of sitting, standing, walking and dancing;
That database will feed an interactive multimedia program allowing the audience [web audience?] to choose the more convincing/acceptable examples concerning the relation action/gender.

Here it gets a bit confusing.

You say a male and female model would be required, but a little below you affirm that actually the male/female model is the one and same drag king.

What if instead of that single one you had 4 models – a male as male, a female as female and a drag king plus a drag queen. Maybe you could even project the clips near by a wall-to-wall mirror, thus including the viewer, male or female, as the fifth model.

That would also indicate repetition/mimicry as the cultural mechanism for affirming or questioning the values and divides imposed as acceptable by mainstream society.

Centring on mimicry would also bring a kind of ambivalence to your approach, living open the questions for instance if drag would be a critique of or an imprisonment inside a stereotype, or if in drag an anarchic joy of being could be taken as the important statement, thus affirming life beyond the gender divide.

You can also play with the speed of your clips, and maybe you would be surprised by how many contradictory gender signs one can find built-in as constituting parts of ‘normal people’ gestures.

Anyhow, you got enough to start doing, thus allowing the making of the work to surprise you by talking back and taking your assumptions further beyond the certitudes of what you wanted to say at first.

Your first assuptions are the trigger for the work and yet they can and probably wil be outgrown by the making of the work and the new insights happening in the process.


I really like and her suggestion about how can manipulated the speed of the clips to increment problably a lot of detail thaht we can lost in a video with the standar speed.
But I wasn´t agree with the idea to get like a 4 types of different model, because will cange completely my discurse I´m not talking about a variety , I´m talking the multiplicity that one person can have.

Changes about my initial proposal

Finally I decided to change my proposal, because I had a lot of the troubles to managed and carry on with my initial idea. I saw myself basically involved in the most physical construction part to the whole idea, and at the same time the economic issue seemed quite complicate to be affordable for me.


Following with the same issues that I wanted express in my other proposal, I would like to explore the topic that both sexes (female/male) are analyzed through different performances by the way of ordinary actions that the persons uses in everyday life. I would like to divide in 4 to 5 examples, those will be the performance of sitting, standing, walking and dancing.

The project will consist of creating a multimedia program that shows to the audience a graphical/motion poll, they will be asked to decide which of the performances best represents the relative gender.
The making of the piece will require a male model and a female model;the model will in turn perform these actions. The user will choose one clip from a series of 3-4 per action.
The best will be project in the wall the image that users can watch by the computer, for best resolution and quality image.
I feel through this experiment I can show how the sex can adopt different possibilities that can be seen outside of the regular existence of male / female gender. We need to reconstruct the way our brains see and relate to gender to allow these possibilities to exist as part of a normal society.

I will make the audience think that are two models (female and male) but in actuality both roles will be performed by one woman, this model has already knowledge about such things as drag king performance and
we will work and practice the action to perform the male part to achieve believability.