Please Don’t go

Commissioned by Indexical performance series and installed in Radius Gallery in Santa Cruz, CA, Please Don’t Go is a haunted waiting room created and built by Natacha Diels, Zach Moore, and Sam Scranton. Visitors enter a darkened, empty gallery, save for a light across the room emanating from the cracked door and ceiling panels of a small room built inside the gallery. The room is constructed from free-floating gallery walls, a door, and a decrepit drop ceiling with a fluorescent light. Inside the room are the contents of a sad waiting room: surveys with clipboards, institutional furniture, an odd LED screen that loops a video of medical appliances, landscape paintings, plants, and a magazine rack. A midi reconstruction of Chicago’s Baby Please Don’t Go plays through hidden speakers. When visitors enter the room, they trigger a sequence of events that animates the space. The lights briefly flicker to inject a quick sense of unease. After 10 seconds, the atmosphere changes dramatically; servo motors rattle plants in time with spoken text; a resynthesized and time-stretched version of Baby Please Don’t Go plays; DMX lights pulse to speech rhythms, the LED screen reads text drawn from the song and pulled from the internet. During performance, the artists wait in the room, fill out forms, and look at their phone. The sequence runs for 3 minutes ultimately returning the room to its initial state, signifying to visitors that the piece is over. With Please Don’t Go, we dramatize the familiar elements of a medical waiting room to explore the sensation of waiting, anticipation, and the micro-detail of slow time. Ideally, this piece holds familiar encounters with the world in a strangely altered light, offering the possibility of experiencing them anew.