Artists Statement:
My Idea for this project was to make a fun game toying with peoples minds and emotions to see how they react to a random sentence and what they would think, act and just, in general, react to what was written in the paper, the point of it was for them to write something down in that paper and pass it along in that amount of certain time, this also took a lot of inspiration from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. Also inspired by things that you see written on blogs, Reddit, etc… that are harmful words that affect this society and make it a worse place to live, and since people react harshly to those types of words I was wondering how they would react to what I wrote down in those papers both harmful and not harmful.
This project also represents in many ways social interaction, mostly on the part on how people react to different kinds of emotions being thrown their way, as right now in the current world we live in is mostly ruled over by the form of communication known as texting, this project shows how people react to words that have no emotions attached to them whatsoever and they can choose to take it and reply as is, without knowing if those words might have had a completely different meaning altogether.
This project serves to show also that voice communication is still one of the best ways to express emotions because you might say some type of words but through text, one might not know if you say it jokingly, sarcastically or even serious, through voice and your tone that can be determined way faster. I want this to inspire our generation and the generations that are more forward to us to talk face to face or at least by voice and not to solely rely on texting, notes, or even emails. As talking through voice is a way that can fix several problems that maybe even in the past they might have been taken out of context and maybe it was not even a problem in the beginning.
I hope that in the near future even if it is not through this project that our generation especially recognizes that fact and that it can go back to talking through voice, so that people avoid unnecessary problems, lose friendships cause of reasons that might have never even existed, all just because of a mistranslation of your tone of voice through text.
This project also took very hard inspiration from”The Happening” since what I did was play the part of the director in a scenario that I let unfold just by tossing some paper balls into the crowd and let them make the experience happen right before everyone’s eyes in a very limited amount of time.
Score:
Grab a piece of paper
Write anything
Crumple the paper up
Song is chosen
Throw the paper around
Each person that catches it opens it up and looks for a sentence in 5 seconds.
Look at their reaction
Then they chose to keep that sentence like that, change it, or add another sentence
Another person catches it and keeps it going until the song chosen ends
At the end open up the paper to be able to read what everyone wrote if they wrote anything
Rules:
To pass the paper around you have to throw it
Uncrumple the paper until you find a sentence.
You have the choice to keep it like that, change it or add another sentence close to it
Then crumple it again and throw it randomly around the room
Keep on throwing the paper until the song finishes
If you don’t find a sentence in 5 seconds then add something or crumple it up and throw it again
How It played out:
The game was played out during class with a very low time range as it was supposed to take 5 minutes or more but since the class was about to end I only had a minute, But in that meaning a lot happened, a lot of people wrote interesting things on the paper that many people had different types of impressions out of, and it turned out perfectly, and it showed me that many difrent people react diffrently to difrent words, so everything that I wanted it to show was shown and my point was made.
The second iteration turned out rather interesting since the group was compromised around 5 people I only gave them 1 minute with 2 papers and to be honest I have never seen anyone uncrumple a paper so fast to loo for a sentence and to be honest even with the smaller group and the smaller time frame it turned out very nicely and iteresting as everything still went to plan.
This is picture is the paper that was the result of the experiment.