This is Stepping Roll. I created the root of this form to simply walk long distances while living in Chicago. The skating depicted in this video is me pushing the boundaries of what I am capable of and not an everyday type of activity for me. I do want to get this style on tape and uploaded for the world to enjoy and hopefully adopt. So clik thru for the background info.
ABOVE: Street Performance Pittsburgh 2006 ( i think ) noone from the crowd is helping me off the ground because they just saw the big dance move before the collapse.
Following the "more" is an account of my experience I have written to share publicly a real world example of how the phenomena “Weight of Empathy” plays itself out in my real life. This story will also share how my act of labeling and defining the phenomena “Weight of Empathy” is empowering to me and helps me frame past experiences of it. Finally this story will also provide a context for my practice of sociological anthropology as a performance and language based conceptual art in which the defined and labeled phenomena is explored in realtime and space with the intention of discovering new territories of interaction with the public that subvert or circumvent the standard parameters of a given phenomena.
“Through Shannon Public Works*, I plan on reconciling the gap between what I feel is possible in experiencing street performances and what audiences up until this moment have been able to experience. The three interrelated projects making up Shannon Public Works are connected by the conceptual belief that a naturally-occurring street environment is imposed upon by an audience to the extent that a virtual proscenium is manifested and the performance is thereby isolated from the very environment it is meant to exist within. The efforts made in Shannon Public Works address this conceptual belief and are designed to allow an audience to watch a performance in the street while preserving the integrity of the landscape. In short, I wish for audiences to see as I see and walk as I walk but at the same time allow me space to share without being in the context of their gaze.”
This video shows my transient presence through the streets of manhattan on a skateboard with a suitcase full of cameras between my legs. Take note of my reflections in the vehicles I pass them with the rig. Bench is a work within the Shannon Public Works Trilogy. The trilogy consist of divergent attempts at bringing my street performance art, rhythmic and utilitarian skateboarding, streetdance, choreography and clown like rapport with randomn pedestrians to live ticketed audiences in an authentic manner. The key to authenticity, which all the works were designed around, was the preservation of the social fabric of the street and the pedestrian and vehicular trafffic patterns therein.