I'll Stop the World and Melt With You

CalArts , Monte Vista Projects

When I was in third grade my class did a sort of living wax museum. The idea was we would dress up like an important person from history and remain frozen until someone came up and stood on a little green button in front of us. I chose to do my report on Walt Disney. Standing there with an eyebrow pencil mustache, I performed Walt Disney’s life on a loop for onlookers only to return to my frozen state with their departure.

Coming to CalArts, while my classes and education has very little to do with animation or Disney, I’ve felt the looming shadow of Walt’s legacy on campus. With rumors of him being cryogenically frozen at CalArts I began to wonder- well, what if it is true. So I started to poke my head around the campus and see what I could find out about cryonics and was stunned to discover how many of the original cryonics texts were readily available.

I just continued down the rabbit hole of research, reading about its gruesome origins and fanatical cult-like offshoots. I’ve spent the last 4 months delving into this process, creating work to try to wrap my head around the disappointment of it being a ruse and the horror of it, if it actually did work. What is the reality of cryonics and what does it mean for people to put their faith in a future technology and a future people that is so unknown. What conditions of someone’s current life would drive people to this sci-fi future and what stresses could potentially get me there as well.

Beyond Walt, I started to think about what legacies meant and what it could mean for me to try to simultaneously stop time and be placed out of the context of time. What it could meant to have creative control of my death and future life. I also thought about this within the creative process in terms of what I am seeking to preserve and wondering if it is it all just a delay of the inevitable.

My show is a start to understanding this phenomenon and what urges people to consider death as a way of time travel. Placing myself inside of this speculative fiction I am attempting to use sculpture, performance and a type of carney showmanship as a way of understanding this terrain not just from a sci-fi perspective, but emotionally and socially.