Reality 1.1: Sara Kraft's 'HyperReal' provokes with little analysis
By Michelle Broder Van Dyke
The opening: a long-haired lady dressed in black - this is Sara Kraft - walks to the center of the stage and breathes. She breathes louder than one normally breathes, as if she’s attended an excess of yoga classes, and just huffs for several minutes. During this long introduction, Kraft has already bored me - and is beginning to annoy me. I could go to a yoga class if I wanted to hear this. The episode concludes as her arm slowly trembles upwards - rhythmically in step with her gasps.
In the next scene, I discovered Kraft’s voice to be as annoying as her breathing, sometimes more affected than other times, but always in a know-it-all tone that reveals the clearly scripted nature of the performance piece. The major motif of HyperReal - presented Oct. 10-12 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts - revolves around “a formative experience I experienced at 4,” as Kraft puts it: the first ocean image she witnessed was in one of the first movies she ever saw: Jaws.
From here she explains the confusion between the real real ocean and the ocean she learns about from Jaws, which includes terrorizing, man-eating sharks. Scenes, like the first two, with Kraft sitting or standing alone onstage, often speaking into a microphone, explaining experiences such as going to Universal Studios and encountering the mechanical Jaws shark or reading the dictionary definition of “reality,” were juxtaposed with scenes performed behind a thin curtain.
Images were simultaneously filmed and projected onto the thin curtain, allowing you to see the live action and the taped action concurrently. In these sections Kraft either offered some philosophical-sounding and/or unoriginal thought/question or moved her arms a bit while being projected onto a screen with blue ocean waves framing her figure or Ryan Eggensperger filmed himself making dating videos on his MacBook’s Webcam, much in the same vein as “I like long walks on the beach…” only far more humorous, as they were simultaneously projected onto the thin curtain with the dashboard and dock of the MacBook framing his YouTube clips.
Eggensperger retaped himself, over and over again, slightly changing his wording or his persona, as he struggled to define and explain himself to his YouTube viewers. This was funny at first, but after an hour of cuts to Eggensperger struggling with the same concept, and with little to no development, it inevitably seemed redundant.
HyperReal was called a work-in-progress, so perhaps it will fill some of these holes in its 2.0 version. But ultimately the piece felt greatly underdeveloped: full of interesting questions that were presented bluntly and without any original or insightful development. The ideas showcased - inspired largely by Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation - about the confusing notion of how to define reality as we traverse the physical world and cyberspace, are thought-provoking.
Kraft points to her own struggle to understand the difference between the concept of "ocean," or "shark," built around information gained from sources such as the movie Jaws and "real YouTube footage of real sharks," and what they really are (if that can even be defined). She then takes this concept and reverses it: Eggensperger’s role demonstrates how we construct our identity by developing our personas or ideal selves on the Internet via MySpace or YouTube.
The question "which came first, the egg or the chicken?" is obsolete. Baudrillard argued that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. Where Plato saw two types of reproduction - the faithful and te intentionally distorted (simulacrum) - Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality, (2) perversion of reality, (3) pretense of reality (where there is no model), and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatever.” Kraft takes these ideas and creates art out of them, clearly demonstrating the profound importance these concepts have had on her by placing them within the context of anecdotes that stem from her personal life. Nonetheless she fails to take them further.
Kraft uses video, live cameras and other types of multimedia to discuss her relationship with technology and how it affects our ability to determine or define the concept of the “real,” but she presents no analysis of these concepts. Ultimately, it was a piece that, at its worst, was longer than necessary and annoying in its pedagogical manner and, at its best, was underdeveloped with the seeds for something spectacular but without enough original or compelling material to make me hope that the final work will be any better.
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