#do it project

[designerattemptsdatavis]

Project #3 - Do It

I went on a walk today, and picked up a note. It’s telling me something. 

[designerattemptsdatavis]

#4 george maciunas and fluxus

Recall the Dadaist movement, where artists like Marcel Duchamp displayed public restroom urinals and proclaimed it to be art. Fluxus is a movement that is at once similar and dissimilar to Dadaism. Personally, I find myself much much more drawn to Fluxus. If Dadaists attempted to figure out what art was, Fluxus answers with the fact that it’s all art. 

I recently watched George: The Story of George Maciunas and Fluxus, a documentary on the founder of this movement. The documentary itself is artful, with transitions that are surreal in nature and seem to mirror the same sentiments as it movement itself. Beautifully composed frames of lightly confusing experiences and echoes of Maciunas’ voice played in transitions between topics. I like to think of the documentary as a visual stream of consciousness of someone remembering the past. 

I think the Fluxus movement heavily reminded me of a game series I’m in love with, Rusty Lake. With a screenshot of one image shown below, I think you can begin to connect the dots. It’s at once surreal and strange, and the way you interact with objects is sometimes completely like and unlike how you’d expect. Like the nature of Fluxus, the game can be humorous, yet it is unapologetically itself. 

George Maciunas was a man on a mission to create a movement, even coining the terminology himself, and could easily be viewed as unduly asserting himself into people’s lives when he recruited artists and audiences alike to the movement. 

However, if I were to speak about the movement itself, I have nothing but good things to say. I’ve participated in the Do It Project, without knowing that it was a sort of reprisal of Fluxus, and I found that the occasionally nonsensical prompts were something that I felt entirely comfortable doing. 

The energy of Fluxus is something that I entirely subscribe to.