#9

These are instructions for a hypothetical film; we also suggest you consider them as guidelines for a game about memory.

Our Volunteer

Selection of our volunteer will be carried out through an informal process, launched through ads placed on laundromat bulletin boards and online hiring sites. Small financial reward will be given to the person eventually accepted. The only requirements to apply as a volunteer are that the person must be willing to cede individual rights to any thought and information given while being recorded by our cameras (this being spelled out in a straight forward legal contract). The second requirement is that the volunteer must be over twenty years of age; anything after that is up to the discretion of those employees we place in charge of "casting."

Her Job

Our volunteer will be placed in a simple office, where she will give a simple presentation to a camera and a microphone (there will be exactly 12 hours for our volunteer to present her thoughts). The volunteer will be re2quiredto give a description, as thorough and accurate as possible, of a place, one that she has not visited for a period of at least one decade. She will be allowed to use or create visual aids in this presentation, with the specific understanding that no direct photographic representation of the place in question is to be allowed during the presentation, or even within the preparation for the presentation itself.

Our Next Steps

The recorded testimony from our volunteer will be given to two separate groups of participants, a documentary crew and a set of theatrical set-builders. Each will set out on the same task -- to recreate the location described by our volunteer (they will be working directly from the un-edited presentation of our volunteer as directed towards the camera and microphone set in the room with her). The documentary crew must travel to the location described; what ever changes have occurred in that location since our volunteer was last able to make observations must be dealt with according to the discretion of the crew. The group of set builders will try to match the description as best they can, avoiding unnecessary interpretation whenever possible; in this assignment they are to base their design and construction of the space with the goal of being as literal as possible regarding the words spoken by our volunteer.

(A SIDE NOTE)

While the direct goal of each team is to achieve a very specific piece of documentation -- for the documentary team an edited representation (on film) of the remembered site as it now stands, for the set builders constructed indoor set based on the volunteer's presentation -- there will be additional documentation of their moment to moment progress. This footage is to be considered something of a byproduct of the way the game is played -- a necessary step in "understanding" the process as it plays out, but not a specific end in and of itself.

Further Actions Within the Performance

The completed set, once fully documented, will be further outfitted with a large screen, onto which the footage shot and edited by the documentary crew is to be projected, in a continuously repeated loop. Then the volunteer will be invited to attend the results of our work, the documentation of which will constitute the real ends of the project.

(NOTE)

The dismantling of the completed stage will be documented and added to the archive as stands.

Presentation of the Game Results

While the filmed documentation of 3 major steps in this process will be considered the primary focus of any finished presentation of this activity (the steps are as follows -- 1)the initial presentation of the volunteer to the cameras, 2) documentation of the finished products crafted by the two teams working from the material generated in the first step, and 3) the final "presentation," in which our volunteer witnesses the direct results of the past step). While this film once pieced together, will be considered the definitive document of our procedures, we will nonetheless allow for use of the separate, documented aspects of the performance. We can easily imagine, for example, a complete installation regarding the complete procedures as unfolded start to finish, involving both the physical byproducts and the presentations of the full range of photographic documentation. The interested observer will no doubt imagine other presentational possibilities, which they will urged to create themselves.