Moon Greeting
(2021)
telephone/mail-art
meditation through sound, text, and visual
This tele-art performance combines text, sound, and visuals that invite the participating audience to tune in with the revolving energy of moon phases. The project explores the intimacy in communication media through postal mail and voice-mail as a hybrid form of art: mail-art and tele(phone)-art. Each registered participant receives an individual booklet by mail. They comprise an instruction guide along with four sets of text and visuals that align with the four primary moon phases: New Moon, First Quarter, Full Moon, and Last Quarter (see below for images). On the evenings of the four-phase dates, the instruction guide invites the participants to meditate with the text and visuals as well as to make a phone call to the moon and receive a lunar signal.
In the creative process, the text was first created prior to the visual art and music composition. The energy in each moon phase is expressed in a mix of prompts and verses. The text guides to evoke awareness in the physical state as well as to awaken imagination about the connection between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Then, the creation of visual art and music composition independently emerged from each artist's interpretation of the text.
The music composition consists of four vignettes that embody four different phases of the moon. The recorded audio tracks were set up as voicemail greetings during the moon cycle in September 2021. The voicemail evolved from one track to another in correspondence with the moon cycle. The participants were invited to make "a phone call to the moon" on the evenings of four phases to receive the lunar signal from the moon for the sonic meditation experience.
The four audio tracks below were set up as voicemail greetings during the moon cycle in September 2021. Each week, the greeting changed to correspond with each phase. The participants experienced listening via calling the instructed phone number on the evenings of the four moon phases during the cycle.
Sophia Schwartz, the visual art collaborator, used the relief printing method for the project. For the four-phase images in color, the lino-cut (short for linoleum cut) technique was employed, while the front cover moon image used wood engraving.
