aisyalam

When I arrived at the Faculty this morning, a little late as I had to pick up some cables at the Alamanda Putrajaya mall, the place was abuzz—at least in the area where my performance was scheduled to take place. Sau Bin’s “Creative Studies” students were building ornate, decorative, installations given the theme “East Greets West.” Lengthy batiks were hanging from the first floor to the ground, museum-like dioramas of songket weavings, local flora and fauna, and domestic settings were being constructed on site (I’ll post the documentation to our Flickr blog later). This I did not expect or anticipate at all, and to be honest I found the whole scene rather exciting and flattering. It was kind of odd—I’d spent many weeks preparing the materials for the gig and getting ready for the performance and found myself with little to do while all this other event-related activity was going on. In fact I couldn’t do much except watch the scene develop. It was nice to have the sense that something was really going on—everyone who passed through the building stopped to check the scene out, and was aware that something different was happening.

Then, about an hour before we were supposed to set up the sound and projection equipment it got really dark outside. Though it was a beautiful morning I knew that it would eventually rain because of surrounding clouds in the distance. But it didn’t just rain, it poured and poured and poured. We get rain almost every day, but usually for less than an hour, and usually not at this time. Today it rained for about four hours, two of which was extremely heavy. The adverse whether essentially transformed the performance space into a big, slick puddle and there was no way any electrical gear could be set up, so we ended up postponing the performance until tomorrow. Dr. Rafi, the Dean of the FCM, had warned me about this possibility when I proposed using this space for such purposes, and he was totally right. It was a bummer that it couldn’t happen, and though it didn’t stress me out too much I did get a bit of a headache for some reason. I was looking forward to doing the show in the environment that the students had labored to set up, and perhaps the headache was one of disappointment? Fortunately some of them are planning to come back tomorrow and put their work up again, so here’s hoping that the skies are clearer.

When it became obvious that the rain would not subside I did delve into some work in the office, making a prototype of the interface for the database project in .html which features flags of each Malaysian state. This part of the project is easy, but needs to be done of course. I received word from Keh Siong that he has built the applet and it works but that the file sizes are too large so it loads slowly, a problem that I should be able to fix without much trouble.