Perform Now!
Lucas Murgida
Perform Now!
July 31, 2010
Last year I began a study of how to predict the future. My initial research yielded mixed results ranging from complete failures to almost interesting. Although I was able to anticipate in a general sense what people would do in different situations, I was unable to predict with exacting detail the specific and precise course of action that would arise at any particular moment. Through these examinations I found that we are all capable of predicting the future to some extent as each of us follows certain patterns that shape our future experiences in the world. However, life has a way of changing abruptly in ways that our patterns cannot anticipate, and when it does our predictive abilities disintegrate quickly. In the end we all want to know the specific details of the future.
For thousands of years, when our personal attempts to predict the future have failed many have sought the advice of a fortuneteller, profit, or oracle. In ancient Greece people traveled to see the oracle of Delphi. Fortune seekers would ask the oracle specific questions and would typically receive cryptic answers. Priests would take the oracles abstract words and form them into ordered poems. These poems were then given to the fortune seeker, but it was up the fortune seeker interpret and apply the metaphors to their dilemma’s. This movement of information seems like the childhood game of “telephone” where a message becomes more and more convoluted as it is whispered from one child’s ear to the next until all meaning of the original message is completely lost.
Though the oracle does not directly foretell the future, she does in fact influence the future as the fortune seeker looks for patterns in their life to match the words she foretold. However the fortune seeker still must fill in the blanks for themselves as they begin to shape their future in accordance to the predictions of the oracle. So, in many ways the words of the oracle are not about the future. Instead, they are about shaping the present to coincide with a potential series of events. It would appear that in the end that the fortune seekers become their own oracles as it is up to them to find the specific answers to their questions.
Fortune seekers attending Perform Now! will be given the chance to cut out all the middlemen and become their own oracle. One can ask anything and The Oracle reveals all.
Lucas Murgida
07/31/10
Installation
