1) The concept serves at least partially as a satire of overly-indulgent, conceptually weak performance art videos.
2) The performance itself (or lack thereof) consists of me standing with my arms folded in an elevator while being very overtly filmed by a friend of mine. Both components are meant to force passersby to fill out the holes in context mentally, which is an interesting juxtaposition our Crash TV-esque culture of internet videos where people do outlandish things in short bursts specifically for views. What is the guy with his arms folded doing for seven minutes to go viral?
3) The finished product is meant to do something similar for the viewer, but rather than ask themselves what the memetic hook of the video is, they're meant to see that it's performance art and ask themselves why, to look for a purpose that I intentionally did not include, turning the "performance art" tag into a sort of red herring. This was inspired by something said in class about performance art only requiring proper context to be considered such.
Additionally, it must be noted that the cameraman did not do the exact thing I asked him to do; he was supposed to keep the camera in a fixed position the entire time but instead frequently moved the focus around the elevator. This deviates slightly from the intention of the piece, but it could not be re-shot in the amount of time I had so this version is the final, though it is still functional in its current form.
Song is "iamsoproudofyou" by Thomas Stanley.
Great idea and well thought out premise.
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