Exersational! is an ongoing performance artwork incorporating live-streaming video gaming, exercise, intellectual conversation, live trivia, art-making, (and more!) into a single action. As we perform our daily lives, we create rituals. Each ritual is a series of actions performed by the body. There are some performances of everyday rituals that are worth exploring for their larger cultural meanings. For instance, one question might be to ask the relationship between the body of the gamer and the violence they control in a video game. Or of the body of the gamer whose mind is enveloped by the virtual. Exersational recombines rituals of everyday life, virtual reality (our virtual realities, not the headsets), and the expression of our emotional reality (art) to create multitudes of intertextuality yielding a vastness of meanings that approaches the sublime. If this near-sublime performance appears comical, this is because humor is generated from the subversion of shared expectations between two texts. Humor utilizes the same form of recombinant formation of differing ideas (think airplanes and elephants) to generate a new sequence of meaning (Operation Dumbo Drop). The process is also found in the scientific lab, where Recombinant DNA molecules, aka DNA not found in the genome, are sequenced by combining separate genetic materials. Exersational is the legacy of Jackson Pollock, 642,000,000 Google results that say art is a reflection of society, sensationalism, self-exceptionalism, and the performance of an ego pulverized by social media. It is performed live, but breathes on the internet.
