Instruction Sets for Strangers - 09/01
I started to think about the “instruction sets of Strangers” in two directions: “strangers” and “interaction”.
As for interaction, an installation which I have seen just several days ago gave me a sort of inspiration.
It is a musical installation at the 33rd St Metro subway platform. When people tape on each infrared sensor, it will generate notes for a melody.
I participated in this interaction because I was curious about the melody from the speaker. Then I recognize someone was taping this well-disguised device.
From this point, I start to think about the medium. What kind of medium can create connections between participants and the space,
or even participants with participants, as they are strangers to the other. Sounds? Physical?
The in-class reference let me realized the other direction of “strangers”. How we defined “strangers”. What kind of relationships are worth discussing.
The Cut Piece from Yoko Ono and the Rhythm 0 from Marina Abramovic have defined the relationship between performer and audience.
The Somebody App creates a new relationship from others' motivations. I and Yii raised some general critical issues in order to narrow down to whatever idea we want to express. Like feminism, ecological issues…
About Leverage Point:
Every space can be analyzed as a system, every factor in this system can be intervened. But thinking about the present motivation in a systematic way is a bit too problem-solving-oriented. So we still want to find the topic we want to express.
Instruction Sets for Strangers - 09/06
We were struggling for finding a landing spot for our ideas. Also, as a team, we found that we did not have an intersection point through our individual preferences of ideas. So we decided to transferred our direction to location instead of expression. We chose Pier A Park, where we had visited several days before. It has a big lawn where various activities happened there, including picnicking, playing with the dog, snapping, etc. Also, there are a lot of Canadian geese. We saw the opportunities in this space via such amounts of factors. So we went into further research of this place.
Part 1: research, observation, and documentation due 09/08
We observed this location at different times, tried to figure out the regularity of those activities. From our observation, we came up with the idea of “Public-Private Space”.
This concept is how we described the different groups of strangers on the lawn: no interactions between groups. Every group of people has circled the invisible territories.
Is that possible to create some intersections between them?
In addition, the non-human factors also caught our attention. We are surprised that how people and geese living together without conflicts. This is another point we dived into.
About Questionnaire on Materialism:
I read the piece from T. J. Demos. His example of the exhibition of Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas give me further thought on interaction with non-human factors, like geese.
How we could recreate this human-nonhuman relation on the lawn?
Instruction Sets for Strangers - 09/11
The initial idea of this step is to create some patterns to visualize those “Public-Private Spaces”. We wanted to see if people would choose different patterns to follow, or if they would sit inside, or what patterns they prefer, or in what sizes of the pattern they would go in or not. Also, we wanted to bring geese into our interaction. So we tested what kind of food would attract geese.
Part 2: prototype 1 due 09/13
In this prototype, we realized that we were too greedy to have every factor and question into our project. That made our essential idea, or main strategy a little bit massive and chaotic. We decided to shrink down our prototype.
Instruction Sets for Strangers - 09/18
We finally decided on the material of nylon ropes and screw eyes to create our pattern. On Saturday night, we set up six white squires on the lawn, and hope to observe the interaction start from the next morning. However, on the morning of the second day, all squires are gone…It was an absolute failure!
Instruction Sets for Strangers - 09/25
We slightly shift our set up location and time. We put seven white squires in the woods beside the big lawn (also a place for a picnic) in the morning. What we didn't expect was that a marathon would be held here on this day. Although there was nobody picnic here, there are still many people would passing through or installations. A short documentary recorded the basic interaction of our project.
Part 3: prototype 2 due 09/27
In terms of the percentage of people interacting, our program should be a success. Also, many factors can be tested further, such as sizes, color, distance… I think that creating an influence on human behavior in space without breaking the two-dimensional, is a basic trick to divide space. And people can also recognize such instructions subconsciously.
Reflections
When I search for the title of this project on Youtube or Vimeo, I came across the projects which be done more than 10 years ago.
It made me reflect on how the projects we have done today, ten years later, are different from those we did a decade ago.
The critical issue of today is different from before, but I did not practice such kinds of differences in our project.
Also, I think I and Yii have simplified too many points to experiment with, like the non-human factors, the relationship between “Public-Private Spaces”.
And the final prototype did not achieve the most desirable interaction.
But on the positive side, we finished our first project at DT, I have also become more used to the pace of being a master's student, and we got to know each other's ideas better.
I hope we can offer more inspiration to each other in our future independent work.