tsai.ra

For this intervention, I was originally considering something more political and protest-oriented, and I had some provocative ideas on how to piss Northeastern off, such as having a cutout of President Aoun and having people “decorate” him. I had trouble strategizing, though, as I was in fear of sending the wrong message or getting in trouble with Northeastern admin. I liked the idea of having people contribute to something anonymously without me overseeing them directly, but I didn’t want to put myself or other people in danger. So I decided to settle on an exquisite corpse activity where I set up a bulletin board in a public space and have people add a word to continue a sentence. I was inspired by performance art pieces from Yoko Ono, as well as the Dada collage pieces, and I wanted to incorporate that into a public setting, but anonymously.

I ran a playtest in Snell Library in the evening, with the hopes of getting people coming in and out of the door. It was midterms season, so there was a decent amount of foot traffic at the entrance. I debated whether I should have asked permission from a librarian to put it up, but I decided it would be more interesting if I did it without permission. My friends Dustin and Carlos were there to assist me. We grabbed a small table and placed it at the entrance gate near some other display items from the library itself. Once set up, we added some sticky notes, starting the sentence off with “Once upon a time” and then left the bulletin there for people to hopefully contribute.

Immediately after we set it up, I saw a woman approach behind me, and she snapped a photo. From glancing at her nametag, I saw she worked for the Library, and I noticed her walk back to the help desk, located just to the left of my setup. I was worried she knew I had set it up, but she never approached me. Relieved, I set up camp to keep a watchful eye on the piece from a spot far away.

The initial setup

The first 30 minutes pass, and only one person had actually added a sticky note to the piece, although some other people took notice. I noticed that the foot traffic was mostly directed to the left and right, where the stairs and the study tables were located, respectively. Most people wouldn’t even glance remotely in the direction of the piece, which bothered me. It was ironic because that’s where the library put their displays, which meant that they weren’t really good at catching people’s attention. So I decided to move the piece near the exit, where a lot of foot traffic was located. I waited until the lady wasn’t looking, and I moved the piece right next to the exit.

The new location of the piece near the exit. More people started noticing

Sure enough, lots more people started noticing and writing more sticky notes on the board. There were 5 responses immediately after I moved it. However, this didn’t last long, as the lady came back and started freaking out about the piece. After a period of deliberation, she told the students who worked for her to move the piece back to its original location, and to keep a watchful eye over it. She seemed confused on the legality of such a piece; on one hand, it wasn’t actively offending anybody, but at the same time, it wasn’t authorized to be there. It was really entertaining to listen to them from far away.

The final status of the piece. One complete sentence on the left and a half-formed sentence on the right

Ultimately, I think the piece could have used another iteration, because once the sentence was completed by someone, it didn’t continue onward. I think people want to add something that they think is meaningful, and if they can only add a word to the sentence like “the” or “and”, it really doesn’t feel worth the effort. If I were to continue this, I would definitely consider making a rule to keep the sentence going to avoid ending punctuation. And I think I would start with a more ridiculous prompt to hook people in from the get go. But this made me realize how important the aesthetics and the placement of an intervention piece is. Especially when you aren’t manning it, it sometimes takes extra effort to garner the same amount of attention.

Brainstorming

For this project, I was thinking about the algorithms around us that constantly influence our worldviews and waste our times. I can’t think of a specific art piece in particular, but I really enjoyed the cornerstone idea of Dada making fun of or tearing down the status of technology and media. George Grosz’ paintings and Marcel Duchamp’s concept of “readymades” were good examples of this – depicting/using a technology in a ridiculous purpose. Back then, they had radio, TV, and motors, but today we have social media, the Internet, and these other invisible “algorithms” that influence us greatly. I thought that if I somehow “appropriated” these predatory algorithms into a game, I could get people to think more actively about how the algorithms influence them. I had an idea to borrow the idea of a Wikipedia speedrun (where players race against each other to use Wikipedia hyperlinks to jump from one random topic to another) and apply that to a social media algorithm. It seemed fascinating to use social media to get to a target endpoint while constantly battling a recommendation algorithm trying to keep you in a rabbit hole.

I chose YouTube because I felt it was a good balance between user and algorithmic control over the feed. Initially, I wanted to use a scrolling platform like Instagram or TikTok, but it was tricky to figure out what a target could be, since there’s so many niches and no public data from these apps showing what the public enjoys watching the most. It also provides very little user agency over what they see – all they can do is scroll and watch for a certain amount of time to game the algorithm’s parameters. Instead, I chose YouTube – its recommendation algorithm allows users to click on different options, allowing them some agency over what they watch, but they are also limited in their choices since the algorithm decides what they see in their feed.

At first, I was discouraged because I found out that this idea is not entirely new. Youtube streamers have done “YouTube speedruns” where they try to get to a certain video from surfing through YouTube recommended videos. However, I realized that these YouTube speedruners only tried getting to a topic that the player set for themselves. This was a limitation because inherently knowing that topic meant that the player would’ve had to have been introduced to that topic already from YouTube. I wanted players to experience trying to break out of their own recommendation algorithms into somewhere they don’t normally traverse or know about. Very fortunately, here is public data over the top searched YouTube queries on Google Trends, which I conveniently “appropriated” as well for my targets. I decided on a Bingo format, so players can strategize which YouTube topics to hit.

Playtest 1

For an initial viability test, I tried simply seeing if a player can get from one search query to another in a reasonable amount of time. I took the top YouTube queries and picked 2 at random, and tried to see if 2 players could get from one to the other. I gave people the option to use their own algorithm or start fresh if they were not comfortable, but people surprisingly were willing to use their own algorithm. So from their own algorithm, I assigned them to move to a baseball player. Neither participant knew who it was, so I gave some clues / similar queries, like the clue that he’s from baseball and which team he was on. While the playtest wasn’t long, the players were able to get pretty far from their search algorithm.

Playtest 2

In the second playtest, I tested out placing the Top 25 YouTube search queries in a 5×5 Bingo card. There were some questionable queries like “Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2025” that I debated leaving off the card. I ended up keeping it on to leave the queries as untampered with as possible. Even if the player is uncomfortable with the search topic, they have the flexibility to choose different topics to hit because of the Bingo mechanic. I had 3  playtesters Nysha, Joel, and Kenny. Here were each of their screens:

Joel:

Kenny:

Nysha:

Photos from the playtest:

Below was Joel’s documentation on the different YouTube topics he was able to catch. N

Unfortunately, nobody got a bingo, but it was interesting to see how each person strategized to make the algorithm give them something that they wanted. Whether it be cutting the video short to not encourage too much watch time, or rapidly clicking on new videos to trigger the algorithm to force something new. The players said they had a lot of fun trying to get out of a rabbit hole, and were surprised at how suffocating it can be sometimes if you are craving an escape. Overall, a very interesting playtest that I think successfully got people to think about the algorithms in a critical way.

Score

This is a score that is designed to make people have fun with the space around them. I was inspired by John Cage’s “4’33”, where the performer is instructed to sit in silence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. I love that piece because it makes the audience pay attention to the little sounds around them, like the air conditioning running, or a cough, or the shuffling of seats.

I wanted to do something like that where people gain a new appreciation for the space around them, which is how I came up with the Room Game. The concept is to make a game out of any indoor space such as a classroom, living room, etc. so that people can gain a new appreciation for the spaces around them. I wanted people to imagine the objects around them as a pretend playground or jungle gym, and be able to play around with them creatively just like we all used to do as children.

For the playtest, I had players start in the corner of the room and roll dice – moving horizontally if it landed even and vertically if it landed odd. Immediately, I saw that there were some annoying loops where people couldn’t move in the direction that they desired. For example, if they wanted to slide vertically down a surface, they would have to wait until they rolled an odd, which often never happened when the player wanted. It meant that players didn’t feel much agency when choosing where to go. If players had more of a choice of where to go, and make up more of their own rules of how to move, I think it would’ve been a much more interesting experience for the players.

I added these fun and surrealistic characters to add a sense of playfulness to the game, but since the game wasn’t very dynamic, I don’t think it lent very much help to the game. If I were to do this project over, I would change the rules to be more open to interpretation – maybe choosing from a set of cards that revealed very abstract instructions that would make players think outside the box. I think that would’ve been more in spirit with the score and the Fluxus movement. However, I still like the aspect of opening up the room as a playground, I think that idea was strong and has potential to go further.