Patrick Michael Ballard

Fools Window

Fool’s Window is a one-player vision quest, open-world game set within a place, duration, and situation decided on by myself and the player who seeks the game.

Everyone is invited to play, but the game is not a game that is necessarily for everyone.
This is an open invitation, and yet, only through conversation can we determine if its the right game for you at this time.

What unfolds from there is an immersive game and series of psychomagical theatrical rituals staged specifically for the individuals invited to play.
It has been staged at Automata Theater in Los Angeles, at winter dawn on the top of Mt. Baldy, in the burn scar of Eaton Canyon, and in the Dark Lab at UCSC.

All players that choose Fool’s Window are invited to bring one totem object with them to navigate the playspace and orient themselves to their intentions. Below, in the play document created by Stephanie Mei-Huang, her tool of choice was roller skates. She used her roller skate totem object to perform a variety of autopoetic actions within the tableaux staged for her. Stephanie spent 5 hours executing choreographies which she created once in the space, each one revealing subtleties of meaning and concrete features of the objects. She brought three cameras with her, each one capturing a very different kind of footage, opening up the complexity with which she thinks about how media and point-of-view radically alter the way we project ourself into space as a viewer.

Brian Getnik, seen above and below, entered Fool’s Window with a very clear vision of focusing on being present to the objects through employing different forms of improvisation, movement, and mindfulness. Brian also offered a request for a face piece or mask of some kind. As his time approached, I requested a drawing, and then interpreted and extrapolated from that rendering the mask that Brian wears; now permanently apart of the pantheon of props within Fool’s Window. In approaching documentation of Brian’s time within the work, Automata’s webcams were set up purely for documentation of choreographic ideas: how affect, object, and atmosphere all reciprocally unfold through the locus of the body. Brian spoke about the objects as “symbolic resonators”, and said that he wanted to take time with each object to reveal the myriad possibilities, and thus, the time would focus more on his experience and ability to conjugate the objects in the live act of performance rather than the deliberate construction or framing them as vignettes for video. Finally, conversations leading up to his exploration in the space involved choreographing Patrick as an unseen viewer. The conversation was spurred by a curiosity around the theater’s capacity to act as symbolic receiver of intentions, and thus, Patrick would attempt transmissions of telepathic messages, attempting to indirectly communicate during a silent viewing. After the initial session of improvisation, there was a meeting, and together Patrick and Brian worked out the most intriguing approaches and gestures that emerged. Direction was given, and a second session ensued, informed by the push and pull of the first session against memory, and the the flow of ideas. The first iteration of Brian’s time in Fool’s Window stood as the first meeting of what has unfolded into a longer collaborative process.

Tim Tsang’s collaboration in Fool’s Window, shown through the screen grab below, thus far includes a livestream event wherein Tim facilitated dialog about the nature of the piece itself, pointing to its structure and Patrick’s presence as a facilitator within it. He brought his own 5-walls methodology to the act of play, allowing for dual improvisation. What resulted was a rambunctious series of fragmented stories and narratives about the work and the other collaborations that happened to date, interceded with prerecorded media, rectangles of darkness with self-aware monologues, and mis-en-abym structures folding in on themselves in the ether of the digital wilderness. Utilizing his interest in structures of conversation, indeterminacy, and free-improvisation Tim used his time in Fool’s Window to point to the frameworks we utilize to structure our experience. Tim and Patrick opened up an ongoing dialogue through Fool’s Window that will manifest further as the work continues to emerge.

Above are a selection of digital proofs taken by photographer Ian Byers-Gamber, who is collaborating within the context of Fool’s Window by constructing his own leaky archive of the objects in both digital as well as 9mm film. Each image is directed and staged by Ian to catalogue the objects which make up the pantheon of Fool’s Window, drawing out their relational and poetic potential within different contexts of his choosing. The above images were taken on location at FOREVERHOUSE, the name given to Patrick’s home and the genesis point of both Return to FOREVERHOUSE as well as Fool’s Window. It is a stone cabin on the edge of the Angeles National Forest where Patrick resides in a 19th century Ranger’s Station which was converted into a home in the 20th century.

In addition to creating space for other artists, with each iteration of Fool’s Window, I integrate what I learned from other artists into self-guided improvisations with the objects, yielding new compositions for performance, as well as new video works in post production. Above is a small test carried out after watching Brian Getnick interacting with both the pliability and the vibrational extension connected to the mask. Below is a video work that I produced while on set, looking for new possibilities for the objects and how I would stage them for the artists.

Above is a short work of video art created by Eli Klausner during his time in Fool’s Window. He brought a drum as his tool of choice for navigating the tableaux created for him. In his investigations of the acoustics of the space he began to also think about the constructs of montage and post production as a secondary site for producing work. From the space of post-production he created this stand-alone video work that utilizes shadow play and slow tension to insinuate the orchestrations of rhythm and structure we often take for granted when watching documents of props, objects, and instruments. Here the objects are cast into a situation where they instrumentalize a greater attention to these complex relationships among sound and image as well as the sites and objects of their production. Eli also assisted Melissa Achten in the production of scenes for her contributions,

Above, harpist Melissa Achten documented her time in Fool’s Window with videos of staged harp works. She utilized the props as tools and augmentation devices within the strings of her harp, playing the harp with objects to accomplish theatrically accented extended techniques. In some instances she literally pushed them through the strings of her harp to prepare it and mute the sounds of particular notes. Throughout all of her evocations with the objects, she constructed a series of video works intersecting the narrative dimensions of the playthings with the infrastructure of the harp’s theatrical potential. Over many hours she fluidly enacted a series of vignettes that wove the capacity of objects to tell stories together with their concrete properties in order to create a kaleidoscopic musical theater where the nature of instrument, set-piece, prop, character, performer, and stage all could be set in the flow of transformation and multiplicity.