Coral Douglas

Artist Statement

I seem to only be able to make extremely literal metaphors. I make performance art because it offers a stage on which to simulate events in this literal way. In my piece FLOCK, silly-looking googly-eyed robots are added one by one until they overfill a table and inevitably fall, shattering on the floor. Sitting together in stillness, we continue to hear their motoric attempts to keep going. This is a metaphor that's easily felt in the body as it's happening. (No one usually knows beforehand that this is how the piece ends. But still, I think even knowing the outcome yields a different yet still relatable experience. Knowing you'll have to be okay with letting it happen.) I think it's important to have these kinds of experiences (that can mean something so dear and personal to someone) as live performances (Happenings) in these temporary audience communities that arise from the temporary safe spaces we make of performance sites. Despite my deadpan, playfulness is exactly the point of it all, or, at the very least, my most rigorously outlandish attempt.
This invocation of the meta-stage is important to me, and I feel that it's equally achievable in performance art as it is in program music/concert music settings. My concert music attempts this through a similarly Brutalist (as defined in the architectural tradition as undecorated and straightforward) approach to metaphor, gesture, and form. In my piece SLUG!, I use memes and low-budget-style animation to tell a story about surveillance culture, online identity-based echo chambers, and the attention economy. The piece is, at times, overstimulating, and at times, very empty and slow. Drastically changing registers in embodied feelings of time allows SLUG! to critique digital socialization on a very literal level (using its own embodied system of thought against itself). When the body listens to music, it operates as a predicting machine. Decoding takes place within the body and uses the body. When I write for score-reading musicians, I am always considering this necessarily embodied (yet subjective!) relation to musical expectation and form.